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As transit advocates, we live and breathe the concept of induced demand: build more lanes, get more traffic. We know that infrastructure shapes behavior. We know that subsidies create dependencies. We know the limitations of technology to address a system designed to generate the problem.
There’s another system with the same dynamic. It shows up three times a day, on your plate.
The U.S. spends over $30 billion annually on agricultural subsidies. Most support corn and soy, crops that become livestock feed, not food for people. U.S. meat is artificially cheap, which has locked us into a high-emissions food system. It’s the highway funding of food: a policy choice that induces demand and reinforces path dependency.
Meat’s Climate Impact
Going car-free saves about 4.6 metric tons of CO2 every year. That’s significant. It’s also hard to do. You need to live near transit, accept longer trips, and organize your life around infrastructure that may not exist yet.
Consider food. Shifting from a typical U.S. diet to eating meat a few times a week saves 1.5 to 2 tons of CO2 per year. That’s half as impactful as ditching the car. You can start tomorrow. No capital campaign. No city council to persuade.
Growing 100 grams of protein from beef generates 50 kg of CO2. That same amount of beans is 0.4 kg. That is 125 times fewer emissions. Our global food system generates 30% of all GHG emissions, more than every mode of transportation combined. Industrial animal agriculture is the source of most agricultural emissions.
Using Frameworks We Know
I’ve been in coalition meetings with fellow advocates, people talking passionately about highway expansion. They understand that car dependence is harming the planet. They know that car dependence is a policy choice, not consumer preference.
Then, when lunch arrives, they order a burger without a second thought.
I see no hypocrisy here, just a perspective they haven’t considered. We reject the “we’ll just make cars more efficient” climate strategy. We insist that demand reduction is the strategy for the climate crisis. We dismiss tech fantasies like Musk’s Hyperloop.
In food, those fantasies look like feed additives to reduce cow methane or Tyson’s “climate-smart beef.” They’re distractions that avoid the actual issue: reducing consumption.
Livestock produces 32 percent of human-caused methane, 80 times more potent than CO2. We’ve built this system through public funding, much like we did with car dependency. Decades of policy choices that made meat cheap, the center of every meal. We built entire supply chains around it.
Like the car-free movement, meat reduction has become a political football in the so-called culture war, despite the meat industry’s harm to people, animals, and the planet.
A Geography of Harm
Transit advocates see how car dependence creates sacrifice zones: neighborhoods bisected by highways, communities choke on pollution, and people die of traffic violence.
Industrial animal agriculture follows the same pattern. Concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) are disproportionately located in low-income communities and communities of color.
In North Carolina, industrial hog operations concentrate near Black and Latino neighborhoods. These residents suffer from elevated respiratory illnesses. Slaughterhouse workers, nearly a third are foreign-born, many undocumented, face the highest rates of injury across all industries.
Rural communities lack access to clean water due to waste runoff. Ten billion animals are farmed in squalid, crowded, and cruel conditions. The system is working as designed.
Systemic Change Needs Visible Demand
Systemic change and individual behavior reinforce each other. You don’t wait for your city to create a bike grid before you start biking. You bike, you advocate, you push for safer infrastructure. Your presence shows the need for change.
Cutting out meat from 20 percent of your meals is like biking to work twice a week. It’s a small, achievable step. When you scale that to millions, it shifts both emissions and political will. Both show people are ready to move away from a subsidized, high-carbon default and choose a better way.
Take New York, for example: plant-based meal defaults in hospitals and schools are proof that individual choices and policy change can work hand-in-hand.
Food-Focused Policies That Deserve New Urbanist Support
End feed crop subsidies. Redirect billions toward crops for direct human consumption.
Zone for urban agriculture and food production. Allow community gardens, urban farms in residential zones.
Public procurement standards. New York City now serves plant-based-by-default meals in hospitals. LA County requires one plant-based meal option daily in city facilities. More cities should adopt these types of policies.
Food retail in transit-oriented development. Food deserts and transit deserts overlap, let’s fix both.
Support a just transition. Protect workers, support small farmers, invest in rural economies.
The bottom line is: your plate is political.
We know how systems shape behavior, how infrastructure shapes choices. We know that subsidies create dependencies. We’ve made this argument for years about transportation.
Apply that thinking to your lunch.
Every highway lane is a political choice. So is every subsidized bushel of feed corn. Billions in subsidies make that $2 burger possible.
The food system is infrastructure. Let’s treat it that way. Skip the burger once a week. Try a veggie option. Support organizations fighting for food policy reform.
The climate crisis doesn’t care if emissions come from a tailpipe or a feedlot. And neither should we.
