Money Talks?

 

YJDKIY heard a few minutes of a story on NBC last night about a new study from the journal of the Archives of Internal Medicine that suggests an 18% tax on soda and pizza would be enough to change adult eating habits such that they could lose 5 pounds a year. Thus, reducing the $147 billion per year obesity generates in health care costs. Costs sometimes, frequently, pushed into other taxes.

I certainly know the best way to motivate myself to exercise is to pay for a gym membership or training session, and I know that I couldn't bring myself to pay $5 for organic bacon that I rarely eat when the store brand was $.99.  I was also listening closely when Gary Hirshberg reminded me the most powerful means to fight the food industry is my consumer dollars, and each time I choose to buy from a socially responsible or organic company, I'm essentially voting against mass production, GMOs, HFCS and ridiculous carbon footprints.

Whether I support this particular tax proposal or not isn't the point. YJDKIY supports actions that intend to achieve better results, but I have an alternative to consider. Instead of limiting, taxing and banning these foods, ingredients from our diet, what if we do the opposite.

I've blogged about how expensive organic chicken is, how healthy ingredients cost more, how hard it is to find healthy, local products.  What if we stop subsidizing all the wrong things like corn and subsidized healthy foods ("thin subsidy")? What if we pumped the same amount of money into farmer's markets and removed taxes on healthy fruits, vegetables and meats all together? (Here is a great article on this.) After all, isn't this how Skinner's positive reinforcement theories (I had a persuasion course in college solely devoted to this!) teach us to train dogs and babies? Reward the good behavior, ignore the bad.

In fact, why not do both? Get the revenue from the sin tax, encourage producers to clean up their ingredients by the means that hits them hardest, AND make it easy to eat healthy, delicious, local food.

Perhaps I'm just on a soapbox because of my love affair with Stonyfield (a company trying to do this), or watching Food, Inc., or because I'm in the middle of Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.

Which do YOU think would work better?