03/07/2026

While Parliament debates whether horses should be removed from the food chain, the global market for plant-based food is already writing a new story. Not because figures are, in themselves, an ethical argument — they are not — but because they show which direction society is moving in, and what growing numbers of citizens, especially younger ones, think and do.

The numbers

According to estimates from Fortune Business Insights, the global plant-based market is worth over $238 billion today and is projected to exceed $491 billion by 2034, representing 106% growth over eight years and an annual growth rate of 8.5%. This is not an expanding niche: it is a sector being reshaped by the eating habits of hundreds of millions of people worldwide.

Within this picture, Italy occupies a notable position that may surprise those accustomed to viewing the country solely through the lens — a self-interested one — of its meat-based culinary tradition. According to the GFI Europe 2025 report, Italy's plant-based sector generated revenue of €639 million over the course of the year, up 7.6% on the previous year. The consumer trust figure is even more telling: 57% of Italians say they trust plant-based products, an index that surpasses Germany and Spain, placing our country firmly among Europe's most receptive markets for this transition.

Over the same period, as documented by Ministry of Health data compiled by IHP, equid slaughter in Italy fell from over 70,000 head in 2012 to around 22,000 in 2024. The two phenomena are not directly correlated, but they belong to the same cultural trajectory.

Not a renunciation, but a choice

The most interesting data point here is not economic: it is anthropological. For years, those opposed to the consumption of animal meat — horses included — were portrayed by critics as carriers of a renunciatory ideology, an ethic of sacrifice incompatible with the pleasure of the table and with the reality of local traditions. That narrative is now being disproved by market facts even before it is disproved by ethical arguments.

The OraSì Observatory, analyzing consumption trends through a panel of experts, has identified the so-called "Joyner" as the protagonist of this new food culture: not a militant advocate of veganism, but a consumer — young or old, male or female — who chooses plant-based food because they enjoy it, because it satisfies them, because it fits a way of being in the world that combines taste, health and awareness. In this reading, plant-based eating is not giving up meat: it is something different and self-standing, one that doesn't need to define itself by subtraction.

"Plant-based is no longer a choice of renunciation, but of pure added value," summarizes Dr. Alfonso Presutto, biologist and nutritionist. Psychologist Deborah Disparti translates this paradigm shift into behavioral terms: dietary changes that last over time are those experienced as pleasurable and flexible, not those imposed as restrictions. The success of the flexitarian model — which today accounts for over 60% of the plant-based market — is the most concrete confirmation of this.

What does all this have to do with the law on horses?

Opponents of the bill argue, among other things, that banning the slaughter of equids would mean striking at a deep-rooted tradition and a vital economic sector. This argument needs to be placed in its actual context.

Italy's horsemeat supply chain is already in structural decline, for reasons that have nothing to do with any law: tastes are changing, values are changing, spending habits are changing. The market is already saying what Parliament struggles to put in writing. A law banning the slaughter of equids would therefore not destroy a thriving sector: it would accompany, with clear legal tools, a transformation already under way — exactly as happens with any legislation regulating structurally declining phenomena.

There is also a question of consistency that the plant-based figures make even more apparent. If almost six Italians in ten say they trust plant-based products, if the market is growing at rates no traditional segment of the animal supply chain can match, if even Florence has awarded a vegan street food vendor at the Forchettiere Awards, then the cultural argument against the law — "it goes against our tradition" — describes a country that no longer exists, or that at the very least now coexists alongside one radically different.

IHP is not asking Parliament to chase market trends. It is asking that the law recognize what society has already decided, and that it do so with the technical tools needed to make it effective — starting with the reform of the equine registry, which remains the precondition without which any ban risks staying on paper.