The Food Police

by Jayson Lusk

  Despite the overwhelming evidence that Americans see obesity as a personal responsibility, the elites (yet again) think they know better than we do. The Center for Science in the Public Interest has argued, “Obesity is not merely a matter of individual responsibility. Such suggestions are naive and simplistic.” CSPI’s director of nutrition policy was quoted as saying, “We’ve got to move beyond personal responsibility.”23

  In regard to sugar intake, one medical university researcher recently asserted, “Everyone talks about personal responsibility, and that won’t work here … These are things that have to be done at a governmental level, and government has to get off its ass.”24

  So, if we’re not responsible for ourselves, who is? And who is responsible for the people who think they’re responsible for us? The elite’s motive for denying personal responsibility is self-evident. As Thomas Sowell put it, “To believe in personal responsibility would be to destroy the whole special role of the anointed, whose vision casts them in the role of rescuers of people treated unfairly by ‘society.’ ”25

  The most common retort to the personal responsibility argument is that medical costs, particularly Medicare and Medicaid spending, are spiraling out of control because of obesity. My health care costs rising because of other people’s obesity is a reflection more of problems with our health care system than of fatness. It is true that the obese have higher medical costs than normal-weight folk. But the evidence largely suggests that the overweight personally bear the costs of their obesity: they pay higher medical bills, they pay higher insurance rates, and they earn lower wages.26 That’s hardly the sign of hidden externalities. Moreover, if we are going to start counting as a public “cost” the increase in Medicare and Medicaid spending from obesity, we must also count as a public “benefit” the reduction in Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid spending that comes about from the obese dying sooner than normal-weight folk. If it sounds vulgar to count obesity-related deaths as a public “benefit,” one might want to rethink the same logic used to count obesity-related health care spending as a public “cost.”

  What if we can’t reform a health care system that has imprudently made private losses public? If we are stuck with our current health care system, perhaps we should enact government policies to fight the plague of obesity. After all, there are some who believe, perhaps out of a sense of fairness, that “society” should bear the costs of those unlucky souls who lost the genetic lottery to obesity. But even if the government is now in the business of deciding optimal waistlines, are the proposals that are on the table even going to work? You might see obesity as a greater public health threat than do I, but surely you wouldn’t want to pass costly policies that aren’t going to solve the problem.

  Let’s take a look at the correctives cooked up by the food police.

  One of the weapons the fat warriors have been yearning to wield is the ubiquitous fat tax. Writing in the New York Times, Mark Bittman calls for the government to “tax things like soda, French fries, doughnuts and hyperprocessed snacks.”27 In his book The World Is Fat, Barry Popkin says he wants to “change our eating pattern … through taxation.”28 For almost twenty years, Yale professor Kelly Brownell has promoted the so-called Twinkie tax.29

  Politicians have taken the bait. More than twenty-one states already have taxes that specifically target soda.30 The city of Chicago recently raised taxes on candies and sodas. Several cities have considered special taxes on fast-food restaurants. And in a sign of what might be coming to the United States, Denmark, despite having one of the lower rates of obesity in Europe, has just implemented a nationwide tax on saturated fat.

  With all the hubbub surrounding the various incarnations of the fat tax, one would think there must be a lot of evidence that it would work. Think again. Time after time, economists have shown that fat taxes will have trivial effects on weight. USDA economists estimate that “a small tax on salty snacks would have very small dietary impacts. Even a larger tax would not appreciably affect overall dietary quality of the average consumer.”31 A group of Berkeley economists concluded that “even a 10 percent … tax on … fat would reduce fat consumption by less than a percentage point.”32 A recent study in Health Economics reported that a whopping 20 percent tax on sugar-sweetened beverages would reduce weight by only a paltry two pounds. Reporting in that same journal, I calculate that people would have to be willing to pay an astounding $1,500 per pound of weight lost for this kind of tax to make sense.33 Another study analyzed obesity rates across locations with varied soda tax policies and found “existing taxes on soda … do not substantially affect overall levels of soda consumption or obesity rates.”34

  Fat taxes don’t work because food purchases are rather insensitive to price changes. We spend a relatively small portion of our income on food, and this means that food price changes, at least at current levels, don’t dent our budget enough to induce a change. That is, of course, unless you’re poor. Which is another reason fat taxes are a terrible idea. They are regressive—meaning the costs are disproportionately borne by the most disadvantaged. Food is a necessity, and it comprises a larger share of the poor’s budget. As a result, fat taxes penalize those who can least afford it.

  Fat taxes are also impotent because, as consumers, we can shift consumption to untaxed ingredients that may not be as healthy. Taxes on sugared sodas are likely to increase consumption of alcoholic beverages and naturally sugar-filled fruit juices. Taxes on saturated fat will reduce intake of healthy items such as avocados, salmon, and cashews. And as I’ve shown in research published in the Journal of Health Economics, taxes on fast-food joints and restaurants may actually cause us to gain weight by increasing the consumption of fattening foods at home.35

  If we really wanted to curb fat through taxes, many economists would tell you, it would probably be more effective to tax fat people than fat food. Most fat-tax advocates are rightfully appalled by such a proposal, but I have yet to see a compelling reason why taxing fatty foods is any more righteous than taxing fatty folk. If obesity imposes an externality on others—as fat-tax advocates claim it does—then the only “fair” thing to do is to tax the source of the externality. The food police don’t want to tax fat people, because it shifts responsibility from the “toxic food environment” to the individual. It’s better to have an ominous-sounding enemy such as Big Food to blame than to look as if you’re discriminating against overweight people. But food prices are part of our environment. And so, too, is the price for being fat. Making someone who wants to eat Doritos pay 20 percent more (or switch to eating something that wasn’t chosen before the tax) is a real cost on the real people the fat taxers say are suffering. Fat-tax advocates would rather promote a less-efficient policy than fess up to the fact that they’re imposing big costs on the same people they claim to be helping. For the record, I’m against fat taxes—and that goes for the food and people varieties.

  Despite all the evidence against fat taxes, the food police are undeterred. Why? Because they know that taxes bring in revenue to grow the size of the government. As the Berkeley economists put it, “A fat tax is an effective means to raise revenue.”36 If anyone’s growing waistline should be carefully scrutinized, it is Uncle Sam’s. Yet the food police see fat taxes as an opportunity to fund their preferred plans. Bittman proposed that “[t]he resulting income should be earmarked for a program that encourages a sound diet for Americans by making healthy food more affordable and widely available.”37 Others say the tax proceeds should go toward government information campaigns. For example, one New York assemblyman pushing a statewide fat tax said it should go forward “as long as the revenue is directly targeted and used to address a healthy lifestyle, and not to fill a budget gap.”38

  The discussion reminds me of Al Gore’s Social Security lockbox. The trouble is that our Social Security funds are not locked in, and today’s taxpayers are funding yesterday’s workers. If we can’t earmark something as important as Social Security receipts, what
makes healthy-eating advocates think we could do the same for fat-tax revenues? Senators, defense contractors, and the underwater Post Office would be among the beneficiaries of extra government revenue that was dreamily presumed to fight Big Food. Remember, too, that only about 2 percent of the funds from the Tobacco Settlement, which were promised to fight smoking, actually went for that purpose. The states spent the rest to fix budget shortfalls.39

  Never mind whether we can lockbox fat-tax revenues, and set aside the issue of whether it is even a good idea to grow government revenues at all, where is the evidence that a government “program that encourages a sound diet” would even work? The elite’s favored information and education campaigns have been remarkably ineffective. If the billion-dollar weight-loss industry cannot, with all its marketing expertise, persuade people to lose more weight, what makes the government think it can? There are already many public-sector information initiatives against obesity, not to mention Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move! campaign, and it is unclear what effect yet another campaign would have.

  Existing government information policies have had only minimal effects—as if most of us didn’t already know that carrots were healthy and pizzas weren’t before Michelle Obama put healthy eating center stage. The USDA’s food pyramid, once familiar to all schoolchildren, did not stem the rising tide of obesity (and according to low-carb advocates, it actually contributed to it), and it is unclear that changing the pyramid to a plate, in its latest incarnation, will have any substantive effect on what we eat. Mandated nutritional labeling on food items in grocery stores has had very little, and in some cases a deleterious, effect on the healthfulness of food choices.40

  The new mandatory calorie labeling law for restaurants buried in Obama’s health care reform bill has been shown to have little effect on what people order, and sometimes leads to counterproductive choices. My own research shows that the labeling’s biggest effect may be to reduce the profitability of restaurant owners.41 As one group of researchers indicated in the pages of the New York Times, “To pin our hopes on calorie posting is bad lawmaking based on poor reading of science.”42 One Harvard economist called calorie labeling a “revenue-less tax.” A Berkeley economist concluded, “The causal-chain from mandatory information consumption to improved health outcomes is so weak that one wonders whether it is worth making people feel bad about themselves.”43

  Faced with the reality that fat taxes and information campaigns are unlikely to work the way they’re advertised, the food police have resorted to attacking one of our most cherished liberties: the freedom of speech. Here is Popkin in The World Is Fat: “If we still had the Fairness Doctrine, and if public health advocates successfully applied this to the billions of dollars that the food and beverage industries spend on advertising, a great deal of money would be available for counter-advertising, research, and other activities that promote healthier diets. But it’s twenty years since the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine.”44

  Yep, even the advocates of fat taxes know that such taxes won’t meaningfully reduce weight, but they pine for them anyway, so they can use the funds to create their own commercials. What is “fair” about a government that can forcefully take our money through taxation and then turn around and give it to some elite food preachers, all the while prohibiting food industries from spending money they’ve earned? The original Fairness Doctrine could at least claim some aura of legitimacy at a time when most broadcasting took place over public airwaves, but that logic is now gone. Moreover, when the FTC repealed the Fairness Doctrine in the late 1980s, it did so because of evidence that the law quieted dissension and controversial speech.

  The food police argue that there is a dire need to counteract the advertising of Big Food. But companies selling high-fat, high-sugar foods are already living in a media environment that undermines their goal to sell more. What adorns the covers of the magazines lining the checkout stands at the grocery store? Overly thin celebrities and supermodel waifs. Turn on the TV and who appears? Skinny news anchors and commercials featuring people with six-pack abs. The prevailing cultural and advertising message is clear: thin is cool, fat is not. So it’s apparently okay to make my wife feel guilty about her weight when she checks out at the supermarket but not okay for Kelloggs to encourage her to eat frosted shredded wheat?

  One has to wonder why a company as manipulative and powerful as McDonald’s would introduce such failures as the McLean Deluxe. The food nutritionist extraordinaire Marion Nestle is disturbed that Big Food is lurking in labs trying to conjure up recipes that taste good and then, shockingly, advertise to get us to try them. If McDonald’s isn’t in the business of trying to sell me things that taste good again and again at a price I’m willing to pay, I’m not sure why the company exists. What bothers me is that Nestle is so troubled that there is a company that serves this purpose.

  The food police seem to forget that Big Food competes not just on taste but on health, too. It was actually the removal of government bans on advertising health claims that led to product innovation and healthier offerings.45 If consumers care about health, then food manufacturers have an incentive to deliver what we want. Look around the next time you’re in the grocery store and you’ll see the shelves overflowing with low-sodium, low-carb, high-fiber products. McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Burger King, and the whole lot offer salads, grilled chicken sandwiches, and fruit to kids. So, yes, of course Big Food tries to get us to buy more of what they make, as does any other company. But as long as you care about healthfulness, so will they.

  The proposals to restrict speech have gained significant traction in the Obama administration. A partnership of four federal agencies has formed something called the Interagency Working Group. The group has issued guidelines that would severely limit marketing of certain foods, especially ads aimed at children. The guidelines are so broad as to prohibit your local doughnut store from sponsoring Little League T-shirts. Two U.S. congressmen appalled at the group’s guidelines argued, “American favorites such as Honey Nut Cheerios, Cheez-It, Barnum’s Animal Crackers, peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches and even celery and bottled water couldn’t be marketed or advertised to children in any manner.”46 I don’t want my kids to be unhealthy, but I have a remote control and I know how to use it.

  Kicking Tony the Tiger off Dora the Explorer may not seem like such a big deal, but if you want your kids to have cartoons to watch, somebody has to pay for them. If Kraft and General Mills are no longer allowed to fund commercials for children’s shows, that means the shows will be less profitable and therefore more infrequent. You might think that’s a good thing—unless you work at Disney or Nickelodeon or even NBC. More important, a government that can tell companies what they may and may not say with their own money is treading on very dangerous territory. As an editorial in the Tampa Tribune noted, “They get rid of Snap, Crackle and Pop, would they next target the AFLAC duck and the GEICO gecko?”47 These kinds of rules promote the worst kind of crony capitalism, because they force businesses to spend more time attending to the bureaucrats than to their customers.

  Case in point: Michelle Obama recently appeared on the White House Lawn with the CEO of Darden Restaurants (owner of the Olive Garden and Red Lobster), whom she praised for promising to reduce calories and sodium by 20 percent over the next ten years. Why would a company such as Darden do something like this? Why wouldn’t it? When the Obama administration can selectively hand out waivers for their health care mandates and arbitrarily pick recipients of bailouts and green job grants, it’s pretty clear where the incentives lie. The do-gooders got to be seen doing good, while Darden got free publicity for something it could have done of its own accord. A 20 percent calorie reduction can be achieved with a 20 percent reduction in portion size, so Darden can cut costs and avoid looking cheap by appearing healthy. In the end, it’s all about the photo op. Besides, who ten years from now is going to check whether the company lived up to its promise?

  The food police not only want to res
trict food company speech, they also want the government to wage a propaganda war on its own citizens. Time and time again the food police cry for a antitobacco-like campaign against Big Food. Kelly Brownell has taken to equating Ronald McDonald with Joe Camel, and recommends that food activists “develop a militant attitude about the toxic food environment, like we have about tobacco.”48 Marion Nestle concurs with the analogy when writing, “Like cigarette companies, food companies … expand sales by marketing directly to children.”49

  There’s a big problem with this analogy: you don’t have to smoke but you do have to eat. A smoker can avoid cigarette taxes by becoming a nonsmoker, but a non-eater is a dead eater. Most nutritionists would admit that eating a few Twinkies or Doritos in the context of an overall healthy diet won’t do much harm, but who wouldn’t say having a few smokes a week is a bad idea? Thus has begun the language war. “Big Food” is meant to conjure Big Tobacco. Sodas are called liquid candy. Bittman repeatedly refers to “real food” as though some foods were fake—as if béarnaise sauce made in three-star restaurants isn’t also “hyperprocessed” food. And now there is a full-on attempt to prove that sugar and fat are addictive. (Somehow these so-called food experts are surprised to learn that the reward centers of our brain are activated when we eat something tasty.)

  Given all this, it is instructive to recall that “[i]n a June 1994 newspaper ad that criticized proposals to sharply raise tobacco taxes, R.J. Reynolds said, ‘Today it’s cigarettes. Will high-fat foods be next?’ Antismoking activists traditionally responded to this sort of slippery-slope argument by insisting that cigarettes were unique, ‘the only legal product that when used as intended causes death.’ To suggest that anti-smoking measures might pave the way for attacks on cheeseburgers and ice cream, they said, was just silly.”50 Looks like silly has officially arrived.