The case for taxing Twinkies
OMG. It’s deja vu all over again. Karen Kaplan’s story in the Los Angeles Times cites a report from the Urban Institute that “sin” taxes are needed to ensure that “rising obesity rates don’t cause the average American life expectancy to fall for the first time in history.”
However, junk-food taxes must be steep and widespread to make a major dent in obesity rates, they say.
The fact is that “sin” taxes on cigarettes have proved to be the most effective weapon in the campaign to reduce smoking. Well, duh. If you’re a smoker and you have to rob a mini-mart to pay for a carton of Marlboros, you have only one realistic choice: Give it up.
It’s somewhat harder to give up eating. Particularly if the only food you can afford is sadly lacking in nutrition.
As a nation, we haven’t been very interested in nutrition and our food processors have succeeded in making sugar, fat and salt addicts of us all. Canned soups widely touted as nutritious-think Mm, Mm, Good-usually have more than a day’s worth of sodium in a single serving, which may be only half of one can.
Our mothers learned from their mothers that their most important job was feeding the family enough calories to keep them feeling full and looking “pleasantly plump.” They cooked meals that would “stick to your ribs.” Well, having survived the Great Depression, with long bread lines in the cities, this was understandable.
And most food was cooked at home from reasonably fresh ingredients. Meat and potatoes reigned supreme. Peas and carrots were the standard veggies long before America learned about chard, kale and asparagus.
Cakes were made from eggs, butter, milk, flour and baking powder. Only the flavorings changed, from chocolate to lemon to vanilla. Pie crusts contained only flour, shortening and a spritz of cold water, and were filled with fruit grown on trees in the backyard. Ah, those were the days.
Then young families moved away from the neighborhoods where they grew up. Grandma wasn’t around to teach real cooking. Mothers were on their own and, as soon as the youngest child entered school, went to work in offices. There was no more time to cook or shop.
American food processors stepped in to fill the need for quick, easy-to-fix meals. Any mother who couldn’t put dinner on the table in 15 minutes was considered a slacker.
Pot roast and meat loaf gave way to Mac and cheese from a box, Hamburger Helper, Tuna surprise, and salty soups as main dishes or sauces for casseroles made of leftovers. Then TV dinners moved meals to the family room, eating became snacking and real cooking went away as Grandma went to the old folks home.
Treasured family recipes were trashed as too much work, replaced by freezers full of Stouffers and Hungry Man. What was lost in nutrition was gained in girth. Men and women grabbed two donuts and a coffee on their way to work, then wondered why they were famished by ten. Fast-food restaurants sprang up everywhere offering drive-through delivery of cheap hamburgers and partially pre-cooked French fries. We ate in our cars and at our desks and nobody wondered why we gained weight without ever feeling satisfied, the way we did after a home-cooked meal.
A few decades back we started to see the results of too much cheap fast food. Diabetes, high blood pressure, soaring cholesterol levels began to drive healthcare costs beyond all reason. Governments great and small tried to put the brakes on by levying taxes on foods with excess sugar and fat, and virtually no nutrition.
But snack-food taxes, enacted by cities and states, have a checkered past. Maine’s 5.5 percent tax was repealed by the state legislature after 10 years, during which obesity rates in the state doubled. But the revenue generated by the tax was designed to close a budget gap and was not used for better education on nutrition.
California lawmakers proposed a snack-food tax a dozen years ago, starting a legislative free-for-all. By the time lobbyists for soda bottlers and chipmakers weighed in, Sacramento was in full retreat. Were we more inclined to gain Body Mass Index points from a 20 oz. Slurpee or two Ding Dongs?
Schools that had accepted vending machines for soda and candy as a way to help balance their budgets saw the results and fought back. They improved cafeteria offerings to include salads, fruit and low fat dishes at the same time they included nutrition education in the classrooms. That combination worked partly because schools have a captive audience. There’s even some evidence of children reeducating their parents.
But state-sponsored snack taxes may be doomed if the revenue is used to plug budget gaps rather than to pay for TV ads favoring good nutrition and explaining how to buy and prepare good food.
If the federal government were to get involved, it might start at the beginning. That would mean rewriting the farm bills that subsidize huge corn, soybean and cotton producers at the expense of small growers of fruits and vegetables. Putting a cap on retail prices for these foods, as suggested, to make them more affordable, would be a disaster.
How to hold food processors accountable for their part in this mess is a whole other problem.
Anyone for Twinkies?