The New Taste Journal is all about recipes. If you have been following along for a while you know that I have no interest in posting my political thoughts or any other personal issues for that matter. The internet is overflowing with those sorts of websites. I just want to teach friends and family how to cook and eat healthy. But today I feel that I need to say something before my head explodes. All of my life I have worked with creative people on creative projects. When I saw an article this morning about the push for creating a tax on soda I just started to laugh. The people who come up with this stuff must just be a bunch of robots who only know one answer to all questions, raise taxes. I honestly would not have a problem paying more taxes for an idea that would work but as they stated in the article "the results would be marginal".
Here is the answer to the sugar problem: The amount of added sweetener in all recipes can be expressed as a ratio or percent. The technical name is "brix". This formula is very much like the way alcohol is represented by the formula for "proof". The first thing that we need to do is legislate that the brix, or let's just call it the "sugar proof" must be listed on each item that contains added sugar. This will allow people to look at a product and decide if they want to buy it. They can shop and compare as they do with other items. The next thing that we should do is to cap that sugar proof number at exactly where it is today. This will at least stop the problem from getting any worse, I hope! The next thing to do is to lower that number, slowly, over a number of years allowing the whole country to wean itself from the horrible addiction of sugar. Sugar is as addicting as cigarettes, alcohol or other drugs. You just can't expect people to go cold turkey and stop using it. Higher taxes would not work because sugar is in so many products. If it were only soda you could jack the price up high enough to get people off of it. But what about candy, desserts, ice cream, so called juices and so on. After time peoples taste buds will unwind and become sensitive to the taste of sugar and what tasted good today will taste just as good in a couple of years even though the % of sugar was adjusted down in the recipe. Smart manufacturers could quickly adjust the amount of sugar right away and advertise a 5 or 10% less added sugar product once the "Sugar Proof" program has started. The American people are not in the mood to embrace any new ideas that will raise taxes at the moment so we need to get creative to solve this problem.