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I work at a bar, so I see how much the sugary drink tax affects consumers and business. We have to charge an extra $1 when people want a chaser for a shot. A cup of pineapple juice is $4 and a vodka redbull will be $9 (redbull on its own is $5!). Now, alcohol and drinking culture is not nearly exclusive to any demographic, but this is just a view of how the significant the price difference is because of the tax.<\/p>\n
A few other cities, including San Francisco, Oakland, Philadelphia and Chicago have implemented similar taxes, and there have been virtually no results. Chicago reversed their tax, and Mexico implemented a soda tax in 2014 but obesity rates have risen since. So why did the city allow this tax to be proposed?\u00a0 Clearly there is no relation to health and tax rate.<\/p>\n
The reason this has classist and racist roots is because typically lower income folks tend to buy more sugary foods. Those people tend to be people of color in this city. People in financially stressful situations are targeted to fund their own welfare, essentially.<\/p>\n
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I do not subscribe to Michael Pollan’s dense and dry solution to pay more in order to have healthier food. I do not think a half-hearted solution can solve this problem. Individual solutions for systemic problems only treat the wound but do not heal it. Spending more money on food means\u00a0 more time spent cooking, less time working and earning money for oneself.<\/p>\n
People are told this false narrative that cooking is easy, it’s cheaper and better. While home cooked whole foods are better than fast, processed foods, it’s a whole lot easier than traveling to the store to spend way more on perishable food that takes time to make. Also, considering places like Beacon Hill, not everyone even has a grocery store nearby and easily accessible to them. And guess which people mostly live in Beacon Hill?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I work at a bar, so I see how much the sugary drink tax affects consumers and business. We have to charge an extra $1 when people want a chaser for a shot. A cup of pineapple juice is $4 and a vodka redbull will be $9 (redbull on its own is $5!). Now, alcohol and drinking culture is… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":71,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,13,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-807","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-industrialized-food","category-public-health","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385s18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/807","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385s18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385s18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385s18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/71"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385s18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=807"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385s18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/807\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":819,"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385s18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/807\/revisions\/819"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385s18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=807"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385s18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=807"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385s18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=807"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}