Matthew 0:00
Welcome to Feed a food systems podcast presented by Table. I'm Matthew Kessler.
If you're deep in the food world, which most of you listening probably are, you've likely seen the release of EAT Lancet 2.0 in October 2025. It's the updated Planetary Health Diet, a kind of global blueprint for healthy and sustainable eating, put together by independent scientists.
What really struck me with this 2.0 update is that it didn't only explore what we should eat, but it touched on how we actually get there, and that's something we've been talking a lot about lately. How does real change in the food system happen?
The report had a laser focus on getting food environments right. That’s the spaces, structures and choices that shape what we eat every day. As Sarah Lake from Tilt Collective told us in a recent episode, people don't just wake up one day with an increased willpower to change their diets. They change because the world around them makes it easier to eat differently.
In this episode, we’re going to talk about a way to get food environments right, and zoom in on a surprising policy instrument that doesn’t get a whole lot of attention - shifting the way that food is taxed.
Jorgen 1:27
My name is Jorgen Larsson, and I'm a researcher at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden.
Matthew 1:34
Jorgen’s a social scientist, mainly researching policy instruments that can improve climate and public health.
Jorgen 1:41
So that's my field, the potential policy instruments that could be implemented. Because without policies, we will not reach our goals just through good intentions among consumers and companies.
Matthew 1:59
Before turning his attention to food, Jorgen spent around 10 years researching the climate impact of aviation. At the time, there wasn’t a good grasp of its environmental impact. Jorgen and his colleagues quantified how many emissions came from air travel from Swedish citizens.
Jorgen 2:15
We found that they are on par with total emissions from car driving. And this was a big surprise to the general public and also policy makers.
Matthew 2:24
This finding helped fuel the debate on how to reduce aviation’s climate impact. Their research was cited as a motivation for implementing a consumption tax on air travel in Sweden.
Jorgen 2:36
We had a low air travel tax. It had a good effect, but it was recently removed by the current government.
Matthew 2:44
Is this one of the things you think about with your research? You first find a subject that needs attention and you want to learn more about and raise awareness. That's part one. And then part two is thinking about what is an intervention that can be researched to lead to some sort of desired outcome?
Jorgen 3:00
Yeah, in the case of air travel, it was very much so as you describe it. When it comes to food habits, we have very good research on what we should eat in order to be healthy and sustainable. So there I went directly to focus on potential policy instruments.
Matthew 3:24
Food and air travel are obviously different in a lot of ways. Food is cultural, it's identity, it's very personal. Air travel, the intervention seems to be quite technical. What do you see as the differences or similarities between the two?
Jorgen 3:41
Well, starting with the similarities, when it comes to eating habits and air travel, we have almost no effective policies in place. They account for a large portion of our climate footprint, but no policies compared to, for example, road transport, where we have very many pretty strong policies in place.
Matthew 4:05
In Sweden, there’s a 200% tax on diesel and petrol. And there’s a mandate to use biofuels. All the public buses I ride on in Uppsala are run on biogas.
Another surprising thing they have in common, is that they are both quite personal. What we choose to eat and whether we fly to go on trips and visit family - both of these inform our ideas about what a good life is.
Jorgen 4:30
So they're both sensitive areas in that sense that they really are part of people's identity and lifestyle.
Matthew 4:37
Yeah, they're both sensitive, and they both have the potential to cause backlash, which is something that we'll come back to later on.
I want to get into your theory of change. How do we shift diets?
Jorgen 4:54
Well, I mean diets shift all the time, following trends and changed price relations on the market. And company strategies, designing new products, marketing new products, so they change all the time.
Matthew 5:12
Take Sweden, for example. Fifty years ago, Swedes barely ate chicken. It was expensive. It was a special-occasion thing. Then industrial poultry production scaled up. Prices dropped. And suddenly chicken goes from a “holiday treat” to the thing most people eat every week without thinking twice about it.
Here’s another shift. Go back to 2010 — oat milk was basically a niche curiosity. Fast-forward to today, it's everywhere. It’s hard to find a café where oat milk isn’t the plant-based default, or even the default. That’s thanks in large part to the Swedish company Oatly.
But while diets change all the time, they don’t always move in a healthier or more sustainable direction.
Jorgen 6:00
If we as a society want to reach our goals, we need to take democratic decisions in parliaments on policy instruments that can balance these market forces.
Mathew 6:17
There’s of course several ways that governments can step in and do that.
Jorgen 6:20
We see many countries now that have, that are implementing regulation on marketing of unhealthy food toward children, and that is a promising policy pathway. Another pathway is to use taxes and subsidies to influence the prices. And that's my main focus on policy instruments there.
Matthew 6:45
And the thing that we're going to talk about is a cost neutral tax reform or a food tax shift. Make the case for me sell this as a winning policy idea. What is it and how does it work?
Jorgen 7:00
The idea about using subsidies and taxes is that we automatically adjust our behavior to prices when, when things become cheaper, we buy more of that, and we usually eat what we buy. And when the prices are going up for something, we buy less than eat less of that. So it's not a policy instrument that has to go through a person's head and have a clear intention and ability to transform this intention to a regular habit. That's very demanding, and that's needed in information policy instruments like labeling. Here, this goes more or less automatic.
Using taxes is an efficient way of changing behavior. But most people do not want higher taxes because it means higher food prices. So by balancing taxes with an equal amount of subsidies, then the average grocery bag does not become more expensive. And with using subsidies, you can also get additional benefits because then the healthy and the sustainable food categories can become cheaper. This is a policy option that can be designed so that it doesn't affect the consumers negatively and nor the state financially negative.
Matthew 8:42
So this sounds great on paper, but I could really see this getting mixed up in communication, confused in practice. If I'm in a grocery store and I'm going through the aisles, how is this kind of affecting my bill or affecting how I'm walking through and making my choices?
Jörgen 9:00
Well, we simulate the effects of price changes and exactly which food types that should be subsidized or taxed. That's a political decision, but we have designed this tax shift options to reach good outcomes in terms of health and climate. So the idea is that if we simulate the effect of removing VAT on healthy foods. In Sweden, we have a 12% value added tax for food.
So removing that for fruit and vegetables and legumes and also whole grain bread, whole grain pasta, etc, would increase the consumption of these healthy foods. And we also model higher taxes on sugar sweetened beverages and red meat, because we know that an over consumption of red and processed meat is negative for health, and we know that especially beef and lamb are especially problematic from a climate perspective. But for the tax increases we model, not a raised value added tax, but instead a levy, a levy per kilo of sugar sweetened beverages or per kilo of red meat. That has a better effect than a VAT increase.
Matthew 10:38
I find this to be a really interesting approach, and you have an integrated approach here between climate friendly, sustainable foods and health, and you're kind of putting them in the same bucket. There are other examples of just putting a tax on sugar-sweetened beverages. What made you look at the whole package?
Jorgen 10:54
In our research, we also analyzed a strict climate tax, and we found that there is a risk with that, that it has negative health consequences, because when meat consumption goes down, there is also risk that consumption of vegetables goes down, because you often eat these two in combination. And also we analyzed a strict health tax reform. It showed major health benefits, of course, but much less climate benefits compared to our integrated reform, where we balance the design to reach good climate outcomes and health outcomes.
Matthew 11:42
So how are you actually modeling this behavior? You're talking about how people go through the grocery store and they experience price fluctuations all the time, which changes their behavior. So how do you know that what you're modeling is reflecting real world results?
Jorgen 12:01
The method we apply is to estimate what we call price sensitivity or price elasticity, and our calculations of this is based on data that we have on weekly sales and weekly prices for 22,000 products in 31 stores for two and a half years. So based on the natural fluctuations of prices that occurred during these plus two years, we can calculate which effect price changes has on consumption. So here we identify the price sensitivity for 30 to 40 food categories, and then we use these elasticities or sensitivities to model the effect of a food tax shift.
Matthew 12:57
So I live pretty close to a few different grocery stores, and if I see that tomatoes are expensive in one store, I might just walk to the other one and find a cheaper price there. Or, yeah, well, I'll say, Okay, I'll come back in a week and I'll cook something different. Is that something that you're able to account for in the way that many people shop?
Jorgen 13:12
No, that's one of the limitations that we have. We're not able to catch that effect of choosing food store based on price campaigns. Estimating price sensitivity is a tricky scientific endeavor, and our results are very much in line with previous research, but it's no exact science, so I mean the specific numbers in our publication must be seen as approximations.
Matthew 13:50
And you have a pretty robust data set. So I think we have a better sense now, what is this cost neutral tax reform, but you and your colleagues have researched this more broadly, and you've examined the public attitudes in Sweden towards food taxes. So what are the range of views you've seen in Sweden towards this idea of a cost neutral tax reform?
Jorgen 14:15
Well, we have analyzed the attitudes to this, not only in Sweden, but in seven European countries, and then the general view on taxing meat is negative.It's a big difference if you ask people about what they think about a tax on beef, for example, most people are negative. But when we ask what do you think of a tax on beef and that the equal amount would be used to subsidize fruit and vegetables, then the attitude changes dramatically. In Sweden, it's about as many that are positive that are negative. So this kind of earmarking of the revenues from a climate tax or health tax is crucial for getting acceptance.
We also asked people what they think about whether taxes should be higher or lower, because now it is - we have the value added tax in Sweden on food, and it's half of the standard value added tax. So now all Swedish food is subsidized. We model removing this subsidy for example, sweets and salty snacks, because it's illogical from a social welfare perspective to have this. But we ask people what they think about whether taxes on sugar, sweetened beverages and sweets should be higher, lower or the same, and that vast majority agree that they should be higher. And a vast majority agree that the taxes on healthy foods like fruit and vegetables and whole grain should be lower. So when you ask in that way, most people agree with the basic idea of a food tax shift. When it comes to meat, it's very sensitive to bring these issues up. It's a heavily debated issue in Sweden and abroad.
Matthew 16:37
Yeah, I find that the framing here is really interesting and the framing really matters. Are there other examples of surveys or research studies that looked at different framings around a meat tax that found similar amounts of acceptability?
Jorgen 16:54
Yes, there are other similar research with similar results, but also country differences can be found. For example, there is a German study which compared different motivations for a tax on meat. And there, the motive of animal welfare was the strongest, if I remember correctly, the strongest motivation, stronger than climate motivations and health motivations. So it depends much on the debate and the discussion in specific countries.
Matthew 17:32
One thing I was wondering about with this research was, would you be able to achieve, not the exact same results, but if you just got rid of the meat part. If you just led to the sugary sweetened beverages, given the sensitivity of it.
Jorgen 17:50
As I said, the decision on which food types to include in a food tax reform is a political decision, and if politicians and their voters think that taxing red meat is too sensitive, then that could be removed and only include the other taxes and subsidies. But the problem with that is that then would not get any climate or environmental benefits, but you would get equal, almost as high health benefits. So that's absolutely an option. And you can also view policies as something that continuously can evolve. So if a pretty basic reform would be implemented with only health benefits. Then that's great. That would be a big step forward. And then if, if there is a support for addressing climate issues in the future, then that could be done.
Matthew 19:01
You've made it quite clear that this is the research, and then this is what the politicians and the people's preferences are. But I think you're also in this kind of larger research project, thinking a lot about the communication of this idea. So what are some of the ways that you can try to avoid some of the pitfalls or the ways to communicate sensitive issues in a way that kind of invites people into the conversation.
Jorgen 19:29
One communication strategy is to talk health. Health and climate goes hand in hand often, and there is a stronger acceptance for health policies than climate policies. Another strategy is to talk about children, because our society now makes children sick from bad eating habits. The rates of overweight and obesity among Swedish children have doubled only in 20 years, and most of them, unfortunately, will stay with these problems throughout their lives. So talking about that and that we need to change society and markets and prices in order to support children from having a good start in life, I think that's a strong starting point. It's also important to have good labels, good names on policies, and “using taxes and subsidies for blah, blah, blah” is too long, so we need a short name. And then we thought much about what we should call it. And in Sweden, we have a name for a “green tax shift.” That's a common idea, also in many other countries, the idea of increasing, decreasing taxes. So we use that and call it a food tax shift in English or in Swedish - Matskatteväxling. So we added the food word to it so that in one short word summarizes what it is.
Matthew 21:10
And it has positive associations.
Jorgen 21:13
It does. It does. Another communication strategy is to try to increase knowledge about tax on red meat. We did a study where we analyzed media articles, opinion pieces on this and also asked the general public on these issues, and we found that many of the counter arguments that are most common are simply not correct. One is, for example, that a meat tax would increase meat import. And that's not true, because the tax would be the same for imported and Swedish produced meat. Another is that it would hit the low income groups harder, but a food tax shift, designed as we have analyzed, does not affect low income earners more than high income earners. So there are a range of misconceptions here that would be beneficial to counter somehow, although, I mean, you have to be realistic about how much time people spend to really dig into different policy proposals. So people don't do that at all. Well, mainly, but, opinion leaders can do so and talk about it in a correct way that would help a lot.
Matthew 22:49
Right, because, to be truthful, not everyone is entering the argument from good faith. Those are very clear misconceptions. But I think something that is real about this is that not everyone would win from this reform. So specifically, livestock farmers will be ones that will be hit. So if we're thinking of kind of a broader package of policy, how can you build wider acceptance among this with the people who will be most impacted?
Jorgen 23:23
I mean, since livestock farmers would be affected here, it's important to see, are there complementary decisions that could be taken. One potential is to increase the payments to farmers for keeping animals outside, for grazing. That would reduce, or stop the negative effects for biodiversity, for example. Also give more income to the farmers. That's one possibility. Another one is since about half of the meat we eat in Sweden is imported, which is a problem because the animal welfare and the environmental regulations for Swedish meat production is much higher than in many other countries, so it would be beneficial to increase the market share for Swedish produced meat. That could be supported with new policies. For example, we have a weak policy in place labeling of the origin of the meat, this policy could be strengthened and enhanced much through information campaigns, etc. Those are two examples of complementary policies that could reduce the negative effect for livestock farmers.
Matthew 24:47
It's easy to see why livestock farmers might take issue with the taxes on meat. And others too, as meat is central to many people’s diets. But Jorgen explains that identifying winners and losers of this tax shift isn't the end of the story.
There are measures that could be put in place to help those who lose out from this policy. And when you pull the camera back, and look at the whole system, the potential gains, for both the environment and public health, start to come into focus.
Jorgen 25:18
Our modeling shows very positive outcomes in terms of health. We estimate that about 700 fewer people would die a premature death due to food habits with this tax reform, that's about three times more than the total number of car deaths in Sweden. And also the climate benefits are substantial. The effect is about the same effect as if one car out of 10 on the streets would be removed and not driven anymore, so it's pretty dramatic effects.
Matthew 26:02
Thanks so much for speaking with us. Jorgen,
Jorgen 26:04
Thank you. Thank you.
Matthew 26:10
A big thanks for Jorgen and to you for listening. If you want to find out more about this project, visit foodtaxshift.com for more information on the research both in Swedish and English. Are you working on this topic in another country? The project team would be interested to connect and share each other’s experiences.
The Feed podcast is a product of TABLE. A collaboration between the University of Oxford, Wageningen University in the Netherlands, Swedish university of Agricultural Sciences, National Autonomous University of Mexico, and University of the Andes in Colombia. This was edited and produced by Matthew Kessler. Special thanks to reviewers Jack Thompson, Amanda Wood and Tara Garnett. Music by Blue Dot Sessions. Speak soon.