Let them Drink Water!

-Daniel Engber

Summary

In Let Them Drink Water!" Daniel Engber examines the social and cultural biases behind well-meaning public initiatives to tax junk food, especially the ways in which these proposals will disproportionately affect the poor and create and "apartheid of pleasure."

In the winter of 1942, physiologist A.J. Carlson suggested that f fat person were taxed, e.g. $20 for each pound of overweight, it would cover the war cost and control fatness in the U.S. After sixty seven years, "fat tax" has come back on the table. Some people had demanded that fat person are supposed to pay more or extra tax and others want to impose a very heavy tax on soft drinks. The insurance industry will pressurize the legislative body to pass the "fat tax" bill soon. But some writers are against this bill.

People still have doubt about passing the fat tax bill. The penalties now are not enough to reduce the fat of anyone. But supporters of the fat tax say that one day it will be as effective to reduce overeating and diabetes as taxing cigarettes brought down the rates of smoking and death from lung cancer. To convince the voters and to get tax out of soda, we should prove that beverage is a drug. But drinking a coke as bad as smoking a cigarette?

In his best seller, The End of Overeating, David Kessler mentions that junk food changes the biological circuit of our brains. The chocolate covered biscuit, he says, activates the brain's pleasure system. It diverts our natural liking and makes us eat carelessly. Junk food is made in such a way that we eat it like a drug addict and become its slave. It is hyper palatable. We cannot stop ourselves from eating such food. Nature had made us feel two types of hunger:

·         One is when we feel very weak. We eat to stay alive.

·         The other is hedonic hunger. We feel this type of hunger even when we are full. It is our desire to eat for pleasure. This hunger is useful when the food is scarce because we can collect calories for hard times in the future. But this desire makes us fat if the food is easily available.

Junk food is designed in such a way that it exploits human being's sensual nature. Like cigarettes, addictive elements are added to junk food and they activate our desire to eat even when we don't need food. Soda's sweetness excites our pleasure and their bubble excites our facial nerves. It is very difficult to show the difference between drugs and the delicious food. Soda and candy are not the only foods that excite the brain, but coffee, video games, twitter, mediation and any pleasing or painful things activate the brains.

It is ironic that supporters of healthy eating are food lovers. They say that one can eat organic food a lot because it is natural and tasty. For centuries, cooks have been trying to satisfy our hedonic hunger. Fat tax affects the poor people directly. It discriminates the people who can afford expensive drinks from those who can buy only cheap drinks. The academic writings in the New England Journal of Medicine say that sugared drinks are not necessary for survival and that poor can drink water from the tap free of cost. These writers do not understand the problem of the poor.

Tax levied on the cigarettes and alcohol became burden for the poor people because they are the main consumers and they might get more advantage from this revenue. But it is not sure that fat tax benefits them. If the poor are given the water instead of soda, they will surely get pleasure.

There are a lot of laws against delightful and harmful drugs and behaviors. They are necessary to protect our health. There may be discrimination in controlling different kinds of drugs, but there should not be such injustice in the case of pleasure giving soft drinks.