There has been many a gauntlet flung down in recent years during the current war on junk food. From exposing the calorie content of restaurant items to the banning of trans fats, positive progress has been made in the name of improved health, or at least health-related education. However, New York City health commissioner Thomas Friden has decided that it is high time to take this ongoing skirmish into darker, more painful recesses.
The force behind the Big Apple’s trans fat ban and the printing of calorie counts on menus, Friden has merged his agenda with the realm of financial punishment for the first time by proposing a penny-per-ounce sales tax on soda, which would raise the cost of your average 12 pack by almost $2.00. And based on the report he co-authored for the New England Journal of Medicine with Kelly Brownell, the director of Yale’s Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity, Friden has made it very clear that his endgame with the proposal is to not only use taxes as a conditioning agent toward the general populace to discourage buying so-called “sugared beverages,” but to also get them to essentially equate the long-term effects of soda with the dangers of other maligned goods such as smoking.
While Friden’s attempt to stigmatize soda is an obviously ambitious goal, taking the initial step toward vilification out on the public’s wallet is a misguided endeavor. Because soda is so inextricably linked with food, attempting to coldly justify a tax because of an organization’s aggressive paradigm-shifting agenda has great potential to come across as a mean-spirited imposition that pushes past the borders of personal responsibility, especially given the tumult found in the current economy. In the report itself, Friden admits that changing the public perception on soda is tantamount to the acceptance of the tax. Since this is the case, why not work on convincing people on the former before hitting them with the latter? Granted, trying to get the public to agree to the notion that soda should be even remotely near the same class as cigarettes is a Hurculean task. However, without seriously working toward this conviction first, the only thing the tax would create amongst the perception’s harshest skeptics – who would more than likely be the ones that would receive the biggest benefit from such a change – would be anger and mistrust, which could potentially derail future healthy causes.
If Friden’s ultimate hope is to make people think twice before grabbing a soda, his best bet is to go on an affront toward the soda manufactures, and not consumers. While it may seem almost impossible to fathom a radical change in perception amongst a majority of adults, it is much easier to see such a change being embraced by the next generations. Friden seems to touch on this in his report, stating that children are so impressionable and that the marketing machine behind the soda companies are so crafty, their minds are molded into being compelled to yearn for soft drinks. Based on that rationale, why not mount a campaign to stymie or at the very least harshly regulate the way soft drinks are marketed toward children? A combination of decreasing youth-centric marketing and increasing education about soda’s long term effects would go a long way in helping to stem the desire to have these sugared beverages, which in turn would make it much easier to alter the way soda is viewed. Adding a tax will do nothing to quench a child’s desire for soda any more than raising taxes on Disney toys will stop the child from wanting an action figure from that company’s latest animated feature.
And therein lay the fundamental problem with the tax: It does nothing to deglamourize soda. Removing the luster long associated with soft drinks is the absolute key in winning the battle; if Friden is serious about his quest to get the public to view soda on equal footing as cigarettes this absolutely needs to be his chief cause instead of punishing the public through taxes. If it is not, the message he is trying to convey through his proposal will be buried underneath a pile of dollar signs.
Do you think taxing soda does a good job or a poor job of addressing wellness concerns?"
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