We don’t. It’s not a good idea, but bear with me here.<\/p>\n
Michael Pollan<\/a> was on Colbert the other night, where he stated that he supports a soda tax. While I don’t think anyone should drink soda ever (it’s not people food), I’m not a fan of taxing food<\/strong>, for a few reasons.<\/p>\n First and foremost, I don’t think the government should have any influence over what we eat.<\/strong> They already do, and it’s a disaster. Farm subsidies are no one’s friend (save Cargill, PepsiCo, etc.), the USDA MyPlate recommendations are not based on science, and food laws have resulted in disgusting abuses of power<\/a>.<\/p>\n Second, if we tax soda, food that I like (think saturated fat<\/a>) is not far behind. We all know that in drafting legislation, money is power – corporate lobbyists wield the heaviest swords.<\/strong> In food, the powerful lobbies represent the wealthy companies, those who turn big profits with value-added food products. In short, we’d end up with taxes that favor processed foods.<\/strong><\/p>\n Saturated fat is an easy target because these companies can easily work it out of their products (think fat-free muffins), while real foods like meat and eggs are stuck with the tax.<\/strong> Bad news bears.<\/p>\n So, yea, taxing food is a bad idea.<\/strong> As a thought exercise, let’s try to come up with a food tax that we could get behind.<\/p>\n As so eloquently put by Sean Croxton<\/a> (I’m still jealous), the key to health is Just Eat Real Food, or JERF<\/a>. So let’s tax the fake food.<\/strong><\/p>\n As we’ve seen above, the makers of value-added food products are the ones with the power here, so a “processed-food tax” would never get passed.<\/em><\/p>\n If it did, it would be a great lesson to shoppers about what “real food” means. Also, it would be convenient for grocery stores – they could just have the aisles in the center of the store be the “Tax Zone”.<\/p>\n Again, I don’t want to tax food.<\/strong> Don’t go around saying I want to tax food. Just go around the outside of the grocery store and buy the real food.<\/strong> Warning: no value has been added to this real food.<\/em><\/p>\n