Mark Bittman: “What Is Food?”
I don’t often read Mark Bittman’s food commentaries in the New York Times, but he’s absolutely on fire this week. His aptly titled “What is Food?” op-ed takes direct aim at the “nanny state” alarms being raised about Mayor Bloomberg’s proposed ban on greater-than-16-oz. soft drinks.
Let’s be clear: Sugar-sweetened beverages are nothing more than sugar delivery systems, and sugar is probably the most dangerous part of our current diet. People will argue forever about whether sugar-sweetened beverages lead directly to obesity, but Bloomberg’s ban should be framed first and foremost as an effort to reduce sugar consumption. Good.
Some have criticized the mayor’s step as weak. But his public health staff, led by the estimable health commissioner, Thomas A. Farley, has already tried to pass a tax on soda (unquestionably the most effective tool in our box to reduce the consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages) but were rebuffed by Albany. They’ve also tried to prohibit the use of food stamps through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, to buy soda, and been rebuffed — lamely — by the Department of Agriculture’s secretary, Tom Vilsack. (Food stamps are currently used to purchase $4 billion worth of soda a year, a nice subsidy for soda and commodity corn producers, as well as for makers of insulin.)
…We should be encouraging people to eat real food and discouraging the consumption of non-food. Pretending there’s no difference is siding with the merchants of death who would have us eat junk at the expense of food and spend half our lives earning enough money to deal with the health consequences.
Right now a tall 5-year-old with a dollar can approach a machine and buy a fizzy beverage equivalent to a cup of coffee with nine teaspoons of sugar in it. And that’s a mere 12 ounces. Holding the line at that seems to make some sense. Unless you somehow define harmful, non-food substances as something other than “bad.”
Read the whole thing. Good stuff.
