Just been thinking about it. Promotes healthy eating, but it also seems regressive. Is healthy food subsidies the better option? How do you implement it? Maybe healthy food subsidies financed by junk food tax seem like the best option? Discuss
All sales based taxes are regressive. Junk food is often intentionally put in poor areas to give people health problems so they stay poor. (Think food deserts). Also people tend to buy it because they worked their ass off that day and want something cheap, fast, and filling.
Give people easy and affordable access to healthy foods and give them less exhausting jobs if you want them to be healthy.
Yeah, this is downstream of bigger issues. In an ideal society, junk food would exist but would be rare, because the amount of exploitation needed to have it all over the place for cheap wouldn't exist. Nobody wants to work at slaughter houses, McD, truck drivers, etc. Let people live good lives, and junk food will solve itself
Besides the accessibility problem, don't companies make junk food addictive on purpose? Wouldn't it be cruel to blame people for the actions of capitalists? They really want poor people malnourished because starving doesn't look cool anymore.
Yeah it's better than starving them because the libs will scream personal responsibility and how it's their fault for not eating healthier.
It's even more insulting because healthy food is cheaper, it's just kept inaccessible on purpose. Fucking libs.
Sin taxes don't really work and just make it more expensive to be poor.
Cutting subsidies that to towards unhealthier foods is a better way of going about it because it doesn't really put the impetus on person who is buying stuff.
Universal nutrition and cooking classes are even better options imo.
Nutrition and cooking classes strike me as regressive and condescending. A big reason people buy junk/fast food is because they don’t have the time or energy to cook while holding multiple jobs and caring for family. How are they going to have time to attend a class?
Some people don’t have kitchens, or cookware. Or, as others said, plenty of areas in the US are food deserts, at least seasonally. And if you do get fresh produce, you have to cook and eat it before it goes bad, so hopefully that doesn’t coincide with a 10-day work week.
I like what you say about cutting subsidies on the production end, though the remaining family farms that grow primarily field corn would not survive without them.
All of these policies would just be treating symptoms. We know what the actual problem is.
Nutrition and cooking classes would help if they're implemented in a way that coordinates with the elimination of food deserts. Of course living in a food desert you're fucked
With that said myself and a lot of other people I know had parents who both worked and didn't know how to cook and thought pop tarts were a fine breakfast. So it took me a decade of me working in the health field and learning shit online or in cooking classes to learn how to cook for myself. Giving everyone baseline cooking skills should be taught in high school and since everyone over high school age would miss out they should get the chance at it too.
Obviously these are only partial solutions short of a working class revolution. Even after revolution they'd be nice skills to know.
Maybe, but at the same time, if somebody is going to a public school why not incorporate it there?
I was a latch key kid, so I had to figure out how to cook on my own, would have been nice to have been allowed to burn things at school instead of on my parents' stove.
I’m not disagreeing that teaching cooking in public school has some merit. It will, however, mostly benefit those that can actually make time for cooking at home, and that have the time to make a meal plan beyond “oh shit I need to eat today before catching the bus to my night job.”
Weellll... think about it from the prospective of trying to incubate the idea that "being able to cook a meal at home" as a part of our culture.
Sure, "today" will see that only certain portions of society will be able to regularly cook meals at home for themselves or their family, but make it a normal thing that people might be inclined to think of as "normal" and maybe people will be more likely to fight for it "tomorrow."
Maybe in the interim too there could be a growth of mutual aid networks that donates and brings fresh produce from the area and preps it for workers who are too busy to cook, and on them up for lessons on how to prep the food themselves, getting hem involved in the process.
A city could just open smaller grocery stores on their own, work on a break even instead of a profit model. Might be a way to cover basics in food deserts.
How about tax credits for people who eat 15 or more healthy meals per week for 3 years in a disadvantaged neighborhood
Probably doesn't "promote healthy eating" unless the price of junk food spikes to something obscene.
Yes, very regressive. Lose your job or have to go long term without a home and guess what, cheap calories and processed foods that don't need to be cooked/specially stored suddenly are outside of your price range.
I have no sciency articles to back this thought up, but trying to fund something by taxing a thing you don't want people to do seems like a bad idea. If people stop eating the junk food too much, then the healthy food subsidy's funding dries up.
Just give everybody a debit card that gets recharged every week or two. Can be used at a store to buy whatever you want or maybe use what happens in the USA with the food stamp programs, products are flagged as "SNAP/WIC" or not in the Point of Sale systems. Does cause embarrassment when a customer can't figure out why their card wont pay for everything they were trying to buy though, so maybe just let people do their thing with dignity. Take it out of defense spending or tax the stonk market.
