Taxes are not the solution to our food problems

 Some people have occasionally asked me to comment on the Danish fat tax. I do have a background in economics, but I didn't comment at first because I don't live in Denmark and they won't let me live there even if I wanted to. Oh, and based on my time in Denmark, it seems like they are used to paying more for everything anyway and their consumption won't change much, except canola oil will be used in most commercial/institutional food, but that was already happening. Scandinavia taxes alcohol through the roof and makes it difficult to buy. When I studied abroad in Sweden I got an email from the UI Study Abroad office telling us that some American students in Italy were giving us a bad name by binge drinking. I laughed. There was no way I could out binge drink the Swedes. And alcohol there cost a pretty penny. 

But I was naive. Of course people are going to look at the fat tax in Denmark and consider whether or not such a tax would have an effect here. Marion Nestle has a letter in New Scientist:  "let us congratulate Denmark on what could be viewed as a revolutionary experiment. I can't wait to see the results."

Unfortunately it's not going to be a very enlightening experiment in regards to the fat tax because while the fat tax is getting a lot of press, it is part of a general tax reform program that is levying "sin taxes" on all sorts of things from sweets to tobacco.

I don't object to these taxes, sometimes portrayed as "sin taxes" or "pigouvian taxes", but I think they are usually quite disingenuous and do not do what they are supposed to do. As noted in Marion's letter, the powerful lobbies in Denmark (which have very little power compared to similar lobbies in the US) got their products exempted and it just so happens that these taxes encourage the consumption of canola, a crop that the government there has been promoting for years. 

And it prevents us from talking about the fact that it's not sugar or fat per se that's the issue, it's foods that people overeat and those are almost all processed foods. And the government has put together an institutional and regulatory structure that is an effective (and sometimes outright) subsidy on processed foods. From school purchasing to regulations requiring expensive high-capital equipment and facilities in order to sell food to the public, the whole system is rigged. And here is where I'm quite unlibertarian (or at least traditionally)- most of these industrial farms and processing facilities are allowed to destroy things they don't even own. If you don't own a river, you shouldn't have any right to destroy it. The EPA has some regulations that sort of say you can only dump so much toxic crap into various bodies of water, but they are anemic and poorly enforced. 

If you tax saturated fat, companies with large food-science departments aren't going to suffer. They are going to figure out how to get saturated fat low in their cookies while keeping other palatability markers high and people are going to continue to overeat them. Anyone ever try to eat the recommended serving size for Snackwells cookies or Skinny Cow popsicles? I certainly never could. 

I usually despise the use of the word privilege, since it's often used as a way to tell certain people their opinions aren't valid, but I think it's very much true that the companies that make industrial processed food are operating from a position of privilege. The regulatory structure is made for (and often by) them, they control political discourse through lobbyists, and they have contracts with the government to provide food to our schoolchildren and military, our jobs and lifestyles are often based around the assumption we will rely on processed foods. 

This fantastic post by Michael Ruhlman about Michael Pollan shows that Pollan is seeing this for what it is:

“They’ve drawn Michelle Obama into negotiations on improving the nutritional quality of processed foods,” he explained, “which is better than nothing, but her original, and to my mind, much more effective focus was simply on real food—fresh produce, cooking for your family etc. There is reason to doubt that ‘better for you’ processed foods will do us any good. Think about Snackwell’s—the same idea, during the low-fat campaign. It was ‘better for you’ yet we binged on better for you products and got fat on low-fat. The same thing could happen again.”
 

We can't fall into their trap, which is to reduce debate about food to "fat," "fructose," and other properties of food rather than to actually talk about the food itself. Food itself is more complicated and its constituents can act in unpredictable synergistic ways (like the economy).

I think we should recognize the immense privilege processed foods have in our society and acknowledge their negative impact, and consider how that can be dismantled, rather than taxing isolated properties of food. We should also end subsidies on processed foods, from agricultural subsidies to school food buying programs. I'm not hopeful about this being done on a national level myself though. I know it can be hard for people to let go of the idea that there is one right way to do something and we have to force everyone in the whole country to do it that way, but I think it would be better of more food policy issues were decided locally rather than federally.