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The food industry will go to great lengths (and spend a fortune) to lobby policymakers, confuse the public and politicize scientific findings. You can see the results in the UK's of a ban on junk food advertisers targeting children, or the orchestrated backlash to that recommended cutting red meat consumption and embracing more plant-based diets.

It's a well-worn playbook. When scientific evidence indicates the need to phase down environmentally harmful or unhealthy products, the responsible industry pushes back.

Motivating this resistance, my colleagues and I believe, is something rarely discussed in the context of food systems: . These are investments that lose value or stop generating revenue earlier than their owners and investors anticipated, due to changes in market conditions, technology or—of particular interest here—policy and regulation.

This concept has been central to debates in the energy transition. For example, have shown that keeping global warming below 2 °C will require leaving fossil fuels in the ground and shutting down power plants before they've generated a return on investment, wiping off (£736 billion) in value for companies, financial institutions and investors.

The same dynamic applies to the task of feeding everyone well and without substantial environmental harm. What we produce must change, as well as how we produce it.

Producing animal-sourced protein, especially beef and dairy, has environmental impacts that dwarf those of plant-based protein. Some new technologies may reduce these impacts, particularly to reduce methane emissions from cattle. But the negative impacts go far beyond cow burps to include deforestation, biodiversity loss, water scarcity and pollution.

Beef in particular, even when produced using intensive systems like feedlots in the US, requires substantially more land to make than any other source (excluding lamb, which is produced in much lower quantities).

As the global population increases and constraints on land use intensify, as much nourishing food as possible will need to be produced on as little land as possible. This will entail slashing the amount of land used for animal-sourced foods.

However, companies consistently invest in the assets that produce, process, transport and store the foods we consume. These range from slaughterhouses to the grain silos and transport equipment for single-crop supply chains, to manufacturing plants and the research and development of ultra-processed foods.

In order to curtail certain foods, as part of a global shift towards sustainable and healthy diets, these assets cannot generate the revenue they do now. This means writing off some of the capital that has been sunk into them, and any anticipated revenue.

Our research identified £217 billion that has been invested in meatpacking plants, for example. A portion of this will be lost in service of a shift to more plant-based sustenance.

Whether or not policymakers and researchers are aware of the stranded assets problem, food companies certainly are.

Polluter pays or pay the polluter?

We outline three things that need to happen.

First, while it is laudable that companies set targets to cut emissions or deforestation, how they invest their money is not always consistent with these goals. Companies need to disclose to investors and the public which of their assets are incompatible with a sustainable future, and how they plan to phase them out.

Second, lenders (typically banks) and investors (asset managers and their clients) must work with the companies they fund to manage these transitions rather than simply revoke financing or divest. Shutting down a meatpacking plant and building up a plant-based protein business is costly, and firms will need support.

Divestment can play an important role symbolically, signaling an ethical and moral stance against certain activities. But unless it is done by all investors at once, assets like shares go to other buyers with little or no interest in sustainability.

Third, and perhaps the thorniest problem: who pays for stranded assets? The money has already been spent. The investments have been made, the meatpacking plants and infrastructure already built, the anticipated revenue and maximized profit margins already embedded in the value of these companies.

There is the cost of shutting down assets early as well as the opportunity cost of not making money that was expected from capital that has already been sunk. Who bears those costs?

Many assume the answer is straightforward: the polluter should pay. This is certainly possible to achieve. Take the , which determined that private companies can be held liable for their share in causing climate damage.

But implementing this principle requires unusually strong political leadership and sustained public support. Both of these things are difficult to secure, particularly in food systems where industry lobbying is intense, livelihoods are at stake, public attention is fragmented and diets are highly personal and easily politicized.

Even when policies designed to improve public health or sustainability are passed, they can . Which brings us to an uncomfortable alternative: paying the polluter.

This approach already exists in other sectors. Since 2020, Germany has paid coal plants to . The same has been done in , parts of and several other countries. In the Netherlands, the government paid farmers to reduce dairy herds in certain areas in order .

Paying off food companies to phase out harmful assets sounds like a bailout and feels unfair, since a clean and thriving environment is a human right. Such an approach could only work if it allowed stronger regulation that ensured such pollution wouldn't occur in the future. This is how abolitionists contributed to .

If we're stuck between endless policy whiplash and slow-motion climate and health crises, paying the polluter may be worth considering. It's politically fraught and emotionally frustrating, but when it comes to stopping pollution sooner rather than later, it is perhaps more tractable than waiting for political will, corporate courage and public consensus to converge.

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