The environmental concerns are rarely mentioned, and as it's described in our media (I'm not French), one goal of all the taxes on "bad food" worlwide is to induce the food multinationals to come up with healthier recipes on their market (there's very little hope they change their recipes worldwide unless they start losing market shares everywhere) or lose some of their competitive edge compared to the pricier, healthier alternatives to their products.

It's not an alternative to education and other measures (in fact many such fiscal projects purport to finance an increase of those by the new tax revenues), it's an addition to those measures. There's also the concern, and we have the example of the US for this too, that the results of education/awareness campaigns seem to have peaked a while ago, they've helped but it no longer progresses much and sometimes regresses, and new ways to approach the problem have to be considered.

The problems caused by the industrialized food industry (incl. the insane intakes of sodium, bad fats, sugar etc.) are still hitting America itself the worst, but everyone else is but a few decades behind at best, sometimes far less than that. We're looking at what it did to the US and what's ahead for us if we don't do more to avoid getting there: our public health systems couldn't possibly cope if the problems were to grow to the level they've reached in America - so we have to look at various measures to attempt to turns this around before it's too late. For example France, which but a few decades ago had a population with some of the best average food knowledge and skills worldwide has now entered the same vicious circle that has plagued the US and it deteriotated even faster than it did in America: people rely more and more on industrial products which with the arrival (late in France) of American-style supermarkets become more and more available, the small producers have problems to cope and disappear (nearly all traditional food jobs are in decline in France from bakery to cheese making to butchery, but industrial food isn't the sole issue involved), there's a sharp and fast decline of home cooking/traditional skills and food knowledge that force people to rely even more on the industrialized products, with the younger generations developing from it an habit for too salty, too fat, too sugary food. And we just have to look at the US to see what's coming next: grocery at Walmart, meals bought at gas stations etc. and average home cooking skills/food knowledge falling to be among the worst in the world (when they were no better no worse than everyone else by the 1930s/40s). Westerners in general also losing all their sense of how much food they need to eat.