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When quitting bad, un-eco habits, I tend not to be a cold turkey kind of person. Smoking's a polluting habit that slowly died out after college. My job in a New York City high-rise didn't make for easy smoke breaks, and my move to smoker-unfriendly California snuffed out the cancer sticks for good.
Same too with soda. I drank my share of Coke as a kid, drank rum and Coke in my early 20s -- then slowly switched over entirely to wine as my liver gave out. Just kidding! I naturally weaned off the Coke habit as I developed taste buds, environmental awareness, and the heavy realization that the chemical-and-sugar concoction was simply bloating me up with extra calories.
Maybe I've been lucky, because soda apparently is not an easy habit to quit for most -- which is why many people are now considering a tax on the sugary drinks to deal with our obesity epidemic. In the New York Times, eco-foodie writer Mark Bittman writes that some public health advocates are "urging that soda be treated like tobacco: with taxes, warning labels and a massive public health marketing campaign, all to discourage consumption."
Bittman talks to doctors, policy experts, and of course, the soda industry spokespeople with their predictable anti-tax responses. But although Bittman clearly wants the government to take a more forceful role for public health, he doesn't seem to have a clear answer on whether or not soda should be taxed. After all, soda's not the only obesity-causing substance in America. "With all the junk food and U.F.O.s (unidentifiable food-like objects) out there, why soda?" asks Bittman. "Why a tax? And, most important, would it work?"
I'm no fan of soda. Beyond fattening people up, popular soft drinks are known for causing all sorts of environmental problems, from taking away water rights from disadvantaged people to creating groundwater pollution. But I'm not sure I'm a fan of the soda tax -- at least not yet -- mainly because the tax seems like a small, messy strategy that tackles only a small part of a much bigger problem.
That big problem is farm subsidies. The way farm subsidies are structured right now encourages farmers to grow way too much corn and soybeans. That cheap stuff then gets turned into high-fructose corn syrup and hydrogenated soy bean oil (a.k.a. trans fats), then gets turned into very cheap junk food. Right now, our taxes go towards making the unhealthiest food the cheapest -- which is why carrots that can be eaten simply after being pulled out of the ground are more expensive than Twinkies that require a whole mess of ingredients, a lot of processing, and individual packaging.
That's why our food keeps getting sweeter and more fattening, as it's cheaper for companies add in sweeteners and fat to low-quality fast food than to add in, say, real flavor from good, healthy ingredients. In Salon, Sara Breselor points out that our food's getting sweeter -- and interviews Brian Wansink, head of the Cornell University Food and Brand Lab, about the trend. "There's a reason why corn syrup is a substitute -- because it's cheaper," says Wansink, though he oddly argues that high -fructose corn syrup's necessary so poor people can eat sweet stuff -- never mind that in reality, the poor are actually at greatest risk for getting serious obesity-related diseases and dying from eating too much high-fructose corn syrup-sweetened food.
All that's to say that I want a solution that tackles not just soda, but Twinkies too. To me, it makes more sense to reform our farm subsidies so we no longer have to pay taxes that go towards creating cheap junk food. Then would-be Twinkie eaters and soda drinkers would actually pay the true cost of junk food -- and hopefully eat less of the stuff. Plus, we'd eliminate (or at least reallocate to a better use, like anti-obesity programs) some ill-used taxes! A soda tax, in contrast, would tax people twice (once to fund farm subsidies, then again to pay for the soda tax).
Of course, while farm subsidies doesn't come up for reform for another few years, the soda tax could be pushed through a lot quicker. Some states already have small soda taxes on the books, as Bittman points out. And while, thanks to Big Ag's lobby, the Farm Bill's been known to be notoriously difficult to reform, a soda tax
