Saturday, February 19, 2011

Things They Should Invent: make healthy eating faster and cheaper

Why do people eat unhealthily? Because it's cheaper, because it's easier, and/or because of personal taste. We can't do anything about personal taste, but I have ideas for addressing the other two.

1. Make healthy convenience food cheap

Convenience food is generally considered a non-virtuous luxury, and is taxed accordingly. A pre-made salad is subject to sales tax, but a head of lettuce isn't.

But there's no good reason for this. It's an unquestioned residual protestant work ethic thing, which I'd counter with the economic stimulus argument. We shouldn't be focusing on whether people are jumping through all the hoops, we should be focusing on results. Really, if the goal is to get people to eat healthy, pre-made salads and other healthy convenience food should actually be subsidized. If no one ever has to think "That salad looks yummy, but I don't think I can justify spending $5 on just a salad.", and no one ever has to think "I'd really love a salad right now, but all the washing and chopping up is so much work!", then everyone who likes salad will eat salad.

2. Healthy-only supermarket check-out lines

All items in the grocery store that meet a certain threshold of healthiness get a green sticker, and a certain percentage of the check-out lines are for people who are only buying green-stickered food. If they want to be really hard-ass, they can make it so the healthy cash registers won't even ring in food without green stickers. So now, in addition to health and money factors, people impulse-purchasing potato chips have to ask themselves if it's worth the extra time waiting in line.

12 comments:

Anonymous said...

Ya know, it's funny, I had never noticed -or even known- that the packaged salad's had tax! I always buy the spring mix's or bagged salad's as washing and prepping lettuce/veggies takes the 'joy' out of having a salad for me. I guess the joke's been on me this whole time- taxes, grr!

CQ said...

The problem with every food healthiness program is that all companies then angle their products to meet the minimum requirements - as the CBC has reported on the Healthcheck logos and also those Made in Canada mis-labellings.
I say: Your cakehole, your grocery cart. And maybe there should be shared personal co-medical costs involved rather than a full free ride at the hospital.
Salad non-tax is a very good idea, however that would also get abused by food sellers who will invent less healthy salads.

The same goes for chronic smokers who get certain types of cancer. It's 2011 already, 40+ years of knowing better - so tough noogies for bemoaning of anyone's self-entitled personal health neglect".

laura k said...

Not taxing salad is a very good idea. But I think the supermarkets will still want to recoup their labour costs by charging more the convenience.

So many things in our world come down to time vs money - that is, if you can pay for someone else to do it, you can save yourself the time. I hate that so many families can't simply buy pre-prepared salads and pre-washed/cut veggies for their families! I'd hate not to have my pre-washed lettuce.

"With respect to" :) item 2, it's great, and I have one question about how you could improve it. We don't want to discourage people making small changes - we want to encourage the idea that small changes are worth doing.

So how do we work that in? You don't want to set the green-sticker threshold too low, and you don't want the system to be too complicated. Maybe a points card? A Green Points system where your small changes can literally add up, and can be redeemed for... healthy convenience food?

Lorraine said...

Here's something that requires no policymaking, and hopefully not much data entry. There's a 'nutrition information' panel on all packaged foods (they have that in Canada, I hope). Assuming this is stored in machine readable form somewhere it should be possible for a grocery's point-of-sale system to include in the receipt things like "Total calories in order," "Total fat grams in order," "total protein grams in order," "total fibre...

Shameless plug: My thoughts on this and similar subjects are at the pubwan wiki, which of course welcomes anyone's and everyone's participation.

impudent strumpet said...

@Anon: I'm not sure if the bagged salads are taxed or not. I was thinking the actual fully-made salads that come with plastic forks and things of dressing and you can just dig in. They're usually next to veggie trays in the area where produce meets deli. Those are taxed either like snacks or like restaurant meals, I forget which.

Although, now that I think about it, restaurant meals that are suitably healthy shouldn't be taxed either!

@CQ:I think it would still be helpful if foods were brought up to just minimum standards. As someone who's sensitive to sodium, my soup options would increase exponentially if they had an incentive to stay under, say, 20% RDI. Obviously even less sodium is still better, but even meeting a minimal threshold would be hugely helpful.

But why do you think making healthier food non-taxable would make it less healthy? It's marginally easier for me to buy it, it makes no difference to the seller, so why would they change the composition?

@laura: One thing I was thinking about when I wrote this post (but somehow utterly failed to mention in the post) is the idea of subsidizing healthier foods, perhaps at the expense of unhealthy foods. I was toying with the idea of subsidizing the labour costs involved in preparing healthy pre-made food, so the workers still get paid (obviously), but those costs aren't passed on to the consumer.

But I don't see how the green checkouts would discourage people from making small changes? If their changes aren't enough to get them into the green lane, they're no worse off than they were before. It might actually facilitate small changes, because it creates an incentive to maybe not buy any potato chips today. You don't have to give them up forever, you can always come back and get them later, but if the line is too long today then maybe you just give them a miss today.

@Lorraine We do have something similar, and I was thinking of that as the basis of calculating what's considered "healthy" and "unhealthy". They could use the ratio of nutrient percentage to calorie percentage, for example

CQ said...

"Deep-fried chocolate bar branded cookie crouton salad". Look at how ice cream and cereals have developed. Standards yes, meeting marketplace demands for low sodium yes, gov't 'good lifestyle' planning regulations not so much.

Lorraine said...

Yup, the something similar is identical except the spelling of fiber/fibre. To add to the 'things that they should invent;' a master database of the nutrition facts table, so you can stack 'em up and know how many calories are in your shopping cart, or in your fridge, or on your plate.

laura k said...

The subsidies are a great idea. It could be one huge step towards solving the "chips are cheaper than carrots" question.

Right now, unhealthy food is subsidized, through the enormous lobbying power of the sugar industry, corn industry, corporations like Coca Cola, etc. For unhealthy food to become more expensive, an entire system has to be dismantled. Which would be awesome and revolutionary.

laura k said...

Re the green line discouraging people from making small changes (or not doing so), some people might think, I'm doing this and this, but it's still not enough to get on the green line. Your thinking is more logical, but change is hard and people are irrational.

Maybe some stores can use a green line and others use green points that accumulate, and people can see which they like better, which system helps promote change more for them.

laura k said...

And maybe there should be shared personal co-medical costs involved rather than a full free ride at the hospital.

This assumes illness is always under our control, and it is not.

Everyone deserves a "full free ride" - i.e. their medical care covered - free from judgement of how they should live their own lives.

Josephine Michelle Draus said...

So true. It's not individual responsibility unless it comes from individual initiative. As for the communitarian responsibility to be as little as possible a burden on others, I trust the sense of honor of individuals. If that results in less-than-optimum efficiency, so what? Is it more inefficiency than can be afforded? Maybe, but is the panopticon of 'individual' responsibility a worthwhile price to pay?

impudent strumpet said...

@CQ: I wasn't saying that everything with the word "salad" in the name should get subsidized, I was saying everything that meets a certain degree of healthiness should get subsidized, regardless of whether it's groceries or convenience food. Salad is just the example I landed on because I buy a lot of them and they're kind of spendy.

Re: the question of whether an individual has responsibility to society to keep themselves healthy, if we do accept this premise, then society has the reciprocal responsibility to make easy for individuals to do this, rather than sternly lecturing people that they should be virtuous and do more difficult and time-consuming things.

If a parent wants their kids to clean the bathroom as part of their chore, the parent provides cleaners and rubber gloves and sponges and mops. They don't sit there and tell the kid they should make the effort to look up on the internet how to make their own bathroom cleaner and go to the store themselves to buy the ingredients.

If your employer wants you to write up TPS reports, they provide you with a computer and a word processor and a template for the report rather than leaving you to scrounge up a pen and paper for yourself and figure out WTF a TPS report even is.

As a representative of society, I insist that if society is going to demand a certain standard of virtue from individuals, then we should give them every possible tool to achieve that standard as easily as possible.