Mark Bittman, a journalist who writes about our food environment in Pollan-esque fashion, wrote an op-ed recently about taxing foods we might classify as nutritionally poor (like sodas or processed snacks). Throughout the article, Bittman does a good job highlighting how our food environment doesn’t support healthy eating and how food or soda taxes could improve it. Unfortunately, he barely touches on the controversy surrounding these kinds of policies (not many people, you might surmise, are big fans of government involvement in personal choice). And there’s a more important, broader context that neither he nor many others bring up when talking food: the historical use of policies to change our food environment.
And there is quite a history. Early in the 20th century, equally controversial policies were enacted to prop up agricultural markets that were prone to devastating fluctuation. The point was to expand production and create a consistent food supply. These policies actually made sense; at the time, we weren’t dealing with problems of overconsumption, like obesity and diabetes. Rather, we were dealing with issues of undernutrition: hunger, food insecurity, and nutrient deficiencies. So, the federal government worked to expand agricultural production and taught people to up their consumption to meet nutrient needs.
The US accomplished these goals in ways that could not have been imagined at the time. By the mid- to late-twentieth century, food had become plentiful and incredibly cheap. We began growing so much food that it made sense to innovate new food products through processing and other technological developments. Not surprisingly, we transitioned pretty quickly from dealing with problems of undernutrition to problems of overnutrition. People began eating too much of the wrong stuff.
And that brings us to the situation we find ourselves in today. We have a plentiful food supply, which is something to celebrate (we don’t suffer from famine or spend much time worrying about that unlikely prospect). However, we are faced with lots of cheap food, and we like to eat it. As such, we have serious and expensive problems with diet-related chronic diseases. Basically, we are still learning how to operate in a food environment with such abundance, and we aren’t doing a very good job so far.
Enter policy solutions such as food or beverage taxes as attempts to change the way people eat…and all the controversy that comes with them. The suggestion of manipulating food choice among consumers draws cries of nanny-state over-regulation, and making some foods more expensive can draw the ire of anti-hunger advocates (even when the foods in question generally only contribute to ill health). Even if taxation could be employed in smart ways from a public health perspective, many abhor the idea of this level of governmental manipulation.
I’d argue that this debate is a matter of context. In the last century, we made a major transition from an inconsistent food supply to one of overabundance using controversial, market-altering policies. Now we’re stuck in the middle of another transition. We have a food environment in which lots of food is available, but we haven’t developed many socially accepted rules to help us decide how much of that food and in what ways we should be eating. We need to transition from this situation (which is disease-inducing) to one in which social norms help us make healthy choices amidst lots of unhealthy temptations.
We know that nutrition education is necessary, but not really sufficient to change food behaviors for the better. So if we can’t just tell people what to do, maybe we have to use policies like taxation to change behaviors by altering the environment in which food choices are made. And it’s here that we should keep historical context in mind. I believe these policies ought to be used to help make this transition happen, just like policies have been used in the past to change our food environment. But this time, we can use policy to create social norms of better dietary choices. Once those norms take hold, we can relax or remove such environment-altering policies and hope more healthful behaviors remain.
Have you ever noticed when you buy meats in supermarkets, there is often small print saying something like, “20% solution added for increased flavor”? Perhaps you haven’t, but whenever I visit the supermarket, I tend to go through labels with a fine-toothed comb. Unfortunately, I often leave with more questions than answers, as well as new items and terms to research. That’s how this post got started.