Are all food items necessities? I don't know, maybe? Are ice cream, trans fats, soda, candy, filet mignon, alcohol, etc. not luxuries?
I empathize with the position that any tax on a food item will disproportionally impact the poor. And I agree, everyone should have a baseline level of housing and food accessible to them regardless of their circumstances. But if a food item has huge negative externalities, surely we should do something to limit its appeal and consumption, right?
Yeah, this is what the environmentalists don't really get.
Cheap meat available to the masses isn't going away. Pandora's Box has been opened, we have to deal with that. The only thing accomplished with making meat prohibitively expensive is pissing meat-eaters off (thus them resenting any environmental reforms even more), and most importantly, making it accessible only to the wealthy.
It's fine to offer healthier alternatives, but don't expect to be moving mountains. Focus more money and effort on lab-grown meat.
I think that if this was done slowly with a tax that increases year by year(like the Australian tabaco tax) and with some of the money being invested in lab grown meat reasearch we'd get to the lab grown meat future much faster. I suppose I should have been clearer on the fact that I didn't meant a jump to 7x the price over night.
There are still health concerns around a diet heavy in red meats, but at least it would address the environmental issue.