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Junk foods free ride

I have to thank the provincial treasurer who proposed the tax harmonization for forcing me to think more deeply about junk food.

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The law of unintended consequences being the tricky little devil that it is, few have noticed that Ontario’s new consumer tax regime will become a long-term free-and-easy ride for food that isn’t really food.

By agreeing to harmonize provincial sales taxes with federal ones, the province is throwing away its present power to determine what gets dinged. And this forecloses options to use taxes as a tool to encourage healthy or enviro behaviours.

While the Liberals’ new move means prepared foods under $4 are now taxed, it is a non-discriminating kind of tariff. To use a tax as a social tool, it has to be specific, like eliminating taxes on restaurant salads and funding that by taxing takeout donuts, a digestible material merely masquerading as food.

Joining the feds’ scheme means Ontario is giving up a cost-neutral way to shift behaviour toward healthier choices and lower medical expenses.

The idea that food is essential to good health and therefore should not be taxed has a long and respected history. Taxes on edibles are deemed unfair and regressive, since people with low incomes spend a major part of their money on food. Such taxes are also counterproductive because they raise the cost of healthy behaviour. So far so good, for the feds, the province and me.

But the idea that junk foods can escape the tax category of entertainment products like cigarettes or booze has the unintended consequence of giving an unfair tax and price advantage to non-nutritious edibles over real food. Meaning they’re cheaper than healthier products that reduce government and personal expenditures on diabetes, heart disease, cancer and other chronic diseases.

Some may recall that this very same Liberal government actually proposed a tax on junk food in its first term of office but had to beat a hasty retreat thanks to a frenzy of attacks calling it a nanny state.

There’s a fair amount of tax money at stake in this unharmonious approach, since, according to Guelph University sociologist Tony Winson, “pseudo-foods” account for about 31 per cent of supermarket sales and occupy as much as 44 per cent of retail space in central aisles, with real foods like fruit, veggies, milk and meat in outer aisles.

To join the feds’ plan is to go in lockstep with a level of government that doesn’t have to pay the provincial hospital bills.

Such is the hegemony of the junk food industry – hegemony being the power to prevail automatically and invisibly – that we all pay our respects by attaching “food” to its name. It’s time to detach.

Michael Pollan, author of In Defense Of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, refers to “edible foodlike substances.” Pollan gives good haiku, and is best-known for his seven words of advice: “eat food, not too much, mostly plants.” Notably, the first is “eat food.”

I’ve come to believe that the debates around good and bad foods need to give way to distinctions between food and non-food. The remedy for obesity, for example, may be to eat more food, not less, and to cut back mainly on non-food.

Junk food is usually defined as high in salt, fat and empty carbs, low in nutrients. We can add some scientific precision to this, thanks to a November 2008 article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by A. Hope Jahren and Rebecca Kraft.

They did an autopsy on the isotopes of burgers, chicken bits and fries in junk establishments across the U.S. and found that the beef and chicken were almost entirely from animals exclusively fed corn raised with artificial fertilizer (not their natural diet of pasture) the fries were made from “emulsified potato meal” that cooks quicker in oil than real pieces of potato. In other words, the meals are food-free.

Sales are going up at the Golden Arches and its knock-offs thanks to the recession, adding a further health and health care burden to affected individuals as well as the public.

This confirms that price matters when it comes to choices between edibles and food. It’s a bad time for any government to give up its taxing power to nudge decisions in a healthier and more cost-effective direction.

news@nowtoronto.com

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