Taxing fat does little but tax our intelligence

So it turns out that after all this time of thinking that soy products are good for us and having spent the last decade replacing the milk in our lattes with soy milk, each small sip was a step closer to a cancerous ending for us all.

When the New South Wales Cancer Council declared recently (Sydney Morning Herald, January 14, 2007) that soy products may actually increase the likelihood of developing cancer, the news was less instructive for latte-sipping city slickers - like myself - and more instructive to our beloved bureaucrats intent on guiding our diet choices through taxing so-called fattening foods.

It turns out, that even science doesn’t have the cancer-proof answer to our dieting questions to lay the stepping stones to a cancer-free healthy body and life. So why is it that politicians feel as though they do?

The interesting thing about the news released by the Cancer Institute is how forcefully it demonstrates our transient understanding of diet and nutrition, and how what’s good for you today, might be marked as fatal tomorrow. This is an instructive lesson for any government to stay out of mandating food choices by using fiscal remedies such as a fat tax.

By taxing supposedly fatty foods all the government does is indirectly legitimise certain food choices therein denying our own individual ability to make choices for ourselves.

It’s an absurdity that fails to realise that moderation is the answer to our food problems, not abolishing particular foods.

Any person, regardless of how vast their belt is, knows that eating particular foods to excess is unhealthy.

If Morgan Spurlock, the man who dared to “diet” merely on McDonalds meals (Super Size Me) taught us one thing - and I think that credits him far beyond what he deserves - it was that eating the same thing over and over is not only outrageously dumb, it’s boring and unhealthy.

If this is something we already know then, how will adding a tax discourage our unhealthy food choices? The answer is, it simply won’t, because we eat burgers, ice cream and hot chips because we like the taste, despite the fact that we know the next morning we’ll appear more rotund than yesterday. A tax won’t tell us anything we don’t, or shouldn’t already know.

But even if we were to entertain for a moment the idea of a fat tax, how effective would it be anyway?

If it were a tax slapped arbitrarily on, say, fast foods surely its effectiveness would be undercut by simply over-indulging on other fattening delicacies, such as fresh cream, or excessive amounts of bread or heaven forbid, cheese. Does it make sense at all that fast foods, such as, say, a McDonalds or KFC are smacked with a tax, yet an equally fattening, alternative, such as fresh cream, avoids the taxman’s ambit?

The problem with a fat tax is that it is only effective when the tax is applied to an unhealthy quantity of consumption, rather than individual foods per se. But a fat tax, would presumably apply equally to your first Big Mac - which might be OK within a balanced diet - as well as on your 10th - which we already know is bad for you.