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| Creative Commons image by Jesse Thorstad |
NYT op-ed columnist Mark Bittman thinks there's a way to improve America's lousy eating habits: Tax bad food and subsidize healthy food. According to Bittman,
"[W]e should … tax things like soda, French fries, doughnuts and hyperprocessed snacks" and "The resulting income should be earmarked for a program that encourages a sound diet for Americans by making healthy food more affordable and widely available."
It's an interesting idea, and one that could potentially benefit our local farm sector—except there's a fatal flaw: Republicans hate taxes, and they (currently) control the House of Representatives.Though as much as they claim to oppose the "nanny state," Republicans seem strangely willing to bar poor people from buying soda with food stamps.
Then there's the fact that the whole reason junk food is so cheap to begin with is because of the massive subsidies the federal government pays to growers of corn, much of which is converted to high-fructose corn syrup, a ubiquitous ingredient in soft drinks and processed food products. It's well known that sugar in any form is "empty calories" and that consuming it promotes obesity and its myriad negative health effects: high blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes, cancer. What some experts now suspect is that refined sugar may in fact be toxic: Flooding the liver with quantities of sugar far higher than exist in the raw foods alters metabolism, causing the sugar to be converted to fat.
Somehow it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me to subsidize the raw product and then tax the finished product. Seems to me it'd be a lot simpler and more cost-effective to shift the corn subsidies to growers of fruits and vegetables. That is, if politicians actually cared more about public health than the campaign contributions they get from the corn lobby.
Oops, never mind.