Bad Food? Tax It, and Subsidize Vegetables

[alp227]

Mark Bittmann, NY Times food writer

WHAT will it take to get Americans to change our eating habits? The need is indisputable, since heart disease, diabetes and cancer are all in large part caused by the Standard American Diet. (Yes, it’s SAD.)

Though experts increasingly recommend a diet high in plants and low in animal products and processed foods, ours is quite the opposite, and there’s little disagreement that changing it could improve our health and save tens of millions of lives.

And — not inconsequential during the current struggle over deficits and spending — a sane diet could save tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars in health care costs.

Yet the food industry appears incapable of marketing healthier foods. And whether its leaders are confused or just stalling doesn’t matter, because the fixes are not really their problem. Their mission is not public health but profit, so they’ll continue to sell the health-damaging food that’s most profitable, until the market or another force skews things otherwise. That “other force” should be the federal government, fulfilling its role as an agent of the public good and establishing a bold national fix.

full: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/24/opinion/sunday/24bittman.html?pagewanted=all

[customerserviceguy]

1. There's one simple way of trying that

Go through all the foods in a supermarket, figure out which ones are really bad, and which ones are really good, leaving most things alone. Food stamps get you fifty cents on the dollar for the bad stuff, and a fifty cent bonus per dollar on the good stuff. Families who do their own cooking from raw ingredients will get a boost in nutrition, and those who buy crap will have a lot less of it to stick down their kids' throats.

[ProgressiveProfessor]

2. Using taxes for social engineering brought us the current Tax Code, you sure you want to

keep using that approach?