An editorial in the Canadian Journal of Medicine is calling for a junk food tax. The idea is that foods with a high sodium or fat content would be subject to increased prices, and as a result people would be less willing to buy them and suddenly everyone would be slimmer and healthier. If obesity is becoming a problem in the country, it makes sense to find ways to encourage people to eat healthier. Making the less healthy food less obtainable is the inspiration behind this concept. It's an interesting idea, but I think it's a very simplistic solution.
The idea behind it has some basis in reality. I'll focus exclusively on drinks for this, in order to maintain consistency - it's easier to compare volume with a liquid. If one goes into the average grocery store to buy some variety of drink, the cheapest option will invariably be soda pop, often at two liters for a little over a dollar. You're often looking at double the price per volume if you want to look at something in the juice category, if not more. Even on a sale, fruit juice tends to hit two dollars for two liters at a minimum, and the better quality versions get more expensive than that. If you just want a flavored drink, prices increase as you get into healthier options.
While the overall inexpensive nature of junk food is the inspiration behind such a tax, it doesn't actually do much to help. Yes, it would increase the price of one product, but it would do little to decrease the price of the rest. One has to consider that, for groups without much in the way of money, sometimes junk food is purchased simply because it's the only food which people can afford. That's a problem when it comes to their health and the health care system, as they often have to be treated with obesity-related illness. That's also the reason why a junk food tax is much too simplistic a solution for any obesity problems.
Before one prices junk food off the market, they need to figure out how to get healthier food to become a replacement. Part of the solution is to figure out a way to get that food to become significantly cheaper. A cynic would suggest that healthier options are more expensive due to marketing reasons - you can charge more for things with more perceived benefits - but that's not the entire reason. A relative lack of shelf life also contributes, as the products themselves often go through less processing and contain fewer preservatives. They're also often made from generally more expensive ingredients overall.
The solution isn't to make some food more expensive, that simply will not get to the root of the problem, which is that other food is already more expensive. The solution is to find ways to get healthier options to be more price effective overall. The tricky part is how does one actually manage to achieve that goal? Part of the reason that the cheaper foods are cheaper is due to them being less expensive to make and distribute. Since it is in all companies' best interests to make their products cheap to produce and distribute, is it even possible?
That I cannot answer, but I know that a tax would do little help overall. It's an easy solution to a problem which actually does not have one. While encouraging people to eat healthier is a noble goal, one has to realize that there are factors at play which are being ignored in the proposal.
