Not to be outdone by their insane liberal brethren, vegetarians are on the warpath to introduce you to a new tax. Enter… The Meat Tax.
I can see it now… thoughts of tofu turkey getting carved during the Thanksgiving holiday… ice cream made with.. I don’t know… what? Who knows… it’s weird and they’re weird.
You probably shouldn’t fret, however… this will never come to pass.
Farm Animal Investment Risk and Return (FAIRR), a vegetarian group put out a report that in part says:
“Could taxation of meat products be a way to mitigate these global challenges? The pathway to taxation typically starts when there is a global consensus that an activity or product harms society. This leads to an assessment of their financial costs to the public, which in turn results in support for some form of additional taxation. Taxes on tobacco, carbon and sugar have followed this playbook.”
FAIRR’s head of investor engagement, Rosie Wardle said:
“Meat consumption is also one sector where both the issues of environment and health overlap. We feel that everyone should have the right to a healthy and nutritious diet, and ideally, that should help promote a shift towards eating more plant proteins, which is healthier and better for the planet.”
Vegetarians really need to get over themselves. They are not the rulers of the land and as most anthropologists will tell you, human intelligence was aided by the discovery of cooking meat.
Wherever humans have gone in the world, they have carried with them two things, language and fire. As they traveled through tropical forests they hoarded the precious embers of old fires and sheltered them from downpours. When they settled the barren Arctic, they took with them the memory of fire, and recreated it in stoneware vessels filled with animal fat. Darwin himself considered these the two most significant achievements of humanity.
It is, of course, impossible to imagine a human society that does not have language, but—given the right climate and an adequacy of raw wild food—could there be a primitive tribe that survives without cooking? In fact, no such people have ever been found. Nor will they be, according to a provocative theory by Harvard biologist Richard Wrangham, who believes that fire is needed to fuel the organ that makes possible all the other products of culture, language included: the human brain.
