Anti-soda activists are out in force blaming the simple pleasures for Californians’ love handles and medical bills, despite little evidence that extracting more money from people’s pockets will slim them down. Indeed, a research team from Yale, Emory, and the University of Washington warned in a recent commentary that “evidence suggests caution in enacting sugar-sweetened beverage taxation legislation with a core purpose of obesity reduction.” Evidence shows that people faced with soda taxes don’t switch to water but instead get their tasty liquid in the form of equal-calorie off-brand sodas, milks, juices, and even beer in response. And it’s not like calorie consumption from soft drinks is surging: A Centers for Disease Control study released last week found that Americans are consuming roughly 40-70 fewer calories from soft drinks per day than ten years ago.

The bait-and-switch comes from promises that a “children’s health promotion fund” will guarantee that revenues will lead to increased healthcare and anti-obesity spending. Unfortunately for California consumers, the evidence from the state’s lottery—by law, profits are put in a fund for education—indicates that new fund contributions will replace, not supplement, general revenue contributions to those programs.

Politicians are able to hide the special interest pet-project games behind the veneer of the “fund,” even if they don’t openly raid it, which they might. Promises of a “health promotion fund” can be undone by a future legislature, and politicians in other jurisdictions have taken expansive views of what basic government services can be paid for by similar “funds.” The proposed tax now will be analyzed by state number-crunchers before being voted on and possibly receiving a vote in the full Senate. Supporters of beverage freedom should watch closely.

The bill’s supporters hope the tax will “eradicate” obesity, to quote one particularly enthusiastic San Franciscan blog headline. Science says it will do no such thing, however. A recent commentary in a scold-friendly policy journal published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned, “Evidence suggests caution in enacting sugar-sweetened beverage taxation legislation with a core purpose of obesity reduction.”

Instead of switching beverage choices to zero-calorie drink scold-approved water, scientific studies and lived experience indicate that people respond to soda taxes by fleeing jurisdictions to shop elsewhere or replacing soft drinks with equally caloric juices, milks, and even alcoholic drinks. Multiple studies confirm that these effects render any reduction in calorie consumption—and therefore obesity reduction—trivial at best.

Even if California (which just passed a massive tax increase last November) is strapped for cash, the tax has more problems than benefits. The tax falls on the poorest Californians with the most severity, which is why Kelly “Twinkie tax” Brownell’s colleagues are desperately seeking to “reframe” that particular issue. Combine that with a lack of health benefits, and you get a terrible proposal that eats the grocery budgets of the working classes to salve the consciences of the latte loophole crowd. (Paging C.S. Lewis.)

And a recently conducted Harris Poll shows that Americans are also livid with the suggestion that Yalies and billionaire mayors should dictate beverage choices. Respondents objected to the idea of a soda tax by a 2-to-1 margin. Over half also didn’t think that a soda tax would reduce obesity. (Evidence shows that they’re right.)

As our Senior Research Analyst told HealthDay News, “[P]eople prefer incentives to penalties.” Indeed, the general Bloomberg-style idea of food choice regulation proved even more unpopular than soda taxes in this most recent poll, with over two thirds of Americans actively opposed.

These results confirm a longstanding trend in the national conversation: Only a small group of self-appointed elites have any desire to regulate their fellow Americans’ food choices. (Not their own, of course, as the Rich-People’s-Big-Gulps-excluding latte loophole in Mayor Bloomberg’s invalidated soda prohibition shows.) An analysis of an Associated Press poll showed that Americans of all political stripes balk at the effort to seize control of our dinner plates.

To promote the new book, Pollan sat down with his comrade at The New York Times, Mark Bittman. Needless to say, Bittman raves about the work, praising it and the act of cooking as ways to stick it to “the corporations” supposedly ruining everything.

Pollan’s “solution” to the non-problem of people occasionally eating out is raising taxes on restaurant food, since in the Church of Foodieism not cooking is a sin. However, before Michael Bloomberg decides to mandate purchase of the book in advance of banning restaurants, there are a few problems with Pollan’s approach.

First, Bittman and Pollan simply deny that some people think cooking is a chore, not an enjoyable pursuit (especially after a hard day’s work). The Mark and Mike brigade’s approach to dealing with these problematic preferences is to pooh-pooh them, only stopping to ensure that both sexes labor equally. There’s nothing wrong with home cooking and quite a lot to be said for it, but ultimately it takes time and effort that some people simply don’t have or would rather spend on other things. Punishing restaurant eating would unfairly target low-income people who work physically demanding jobs over long hours.

Second, the essence of Pollan’s pro-local, anti-corporate ideology is based on a fallacy. Because of comparative advantage, it can be better for everyone—including the planet—to produce and ship foods from where it is most economical to grow them. Regardless, doing things Pollan’s way is much more expensive (even before any new taxes), which in a time of economic struggles is far from appealing.

Finally, Pollan’s default claim that cooking for yourself is healthier than going out to eat or taking advantage of a prepared ready-meal isn’t necessarily true. He could have found that out from Bittman, whose cheeseburger recipe in How to Cook Everything has more calories and fat than a Big Mac.

Cooking, like many other activities, is enjoyed by some and hated by others. Many of the people who enjoy it will buy Pollan’s book—those who don’t enjoy it can only hope they stick to their own kitchens and avoid the food policing instinct to mandate their preferences for everybody.

The bill initially required any the manufacturer of any consumer product that “significantly contributes to a public health epidemic” recognized by the Centers for Disease Control and costing the state at least $50 million per year to pay for developing a “public health impact report” (PHIR). Even worse, the state would have the authority to restrict or ban the sale of products if state health officials didn’t like the PHIR. If that remit wasn’t bloated enough, the latest round of amendments increased the costs that companies would face and extended the bureaucrats’ reach by enabling them to collect even more fees from companies to implement the PHIRs. If sucking consumers and companies dry for every drop of possible revenue were a “public health epidemic,” Sacramento would be quarantined.

If you stretch the meaning of the word, then just about anything can “contribute” to killing. The law could apply to almost any product that is labor-saving, recreational, or a foodstuff—footballs “contribute” to football injuries, foods “contribute” to overeating, and chairs “contribute” to sitting. The possible absurd regulations are endless and bounded only by the unaccountable will of capricious California bureaucrats. (And you thought New York was an “administrative Leviathan.”)

For California consumers, this proposal would lead to one of two effects: Either higher costs comparable in effect to highly regressive “fat taxes” that hurt low-income consumers’ wallets or private-sector prohibitions like those of some companies that do not ship products to California to avoid liability under the similarly over-broad Proposition 65 cancer-scare law. Another possibility is that this proposal exists to provide “cover” for the proposed soda tax (it’s the PETA to the tax’s HSUS). Either way, it can only serve to engorge state coffers and crib consumer choice.

But hold on, how is Big Government on my dinner plate if the point is to force “industry” to change? Simple — Mudd’s prescription for the nation’s ills isn’t a novel program at all, but rather the same old story. Mudd wants fat taxes — unlike Kelly Brownell, at least Mudd is honest and admits he’d levy against “snack foods, candy, [and] sweet baked goods” in addition to soft drinks — in addition to constitutionally questionable marketing regulations that probably won’t work (as experiences in Quebec and Sweden should indicate).

It’s rich (pardon the pun) for a former senior industry executive who happily cashed Kraft paychecks for years and years to demand that the nation — and not he — do penance for what he now thinks are his sins. And as we noted in our recent report on soda taxes and regulations, the food taxes Mudd endorses don’t fall on fat-cats: They fall on hardworking people feeding their families. Even Kelly Brownell’s colleagues at food tax central, the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity, concede as much.

As for personal responsibility, Mudd considers it not at all. Instead of noting as others have that improving the availability of healthy options can enable people to make better choices, he dismisses them as whitewashing. Thus the field for taking away choices is set. That sounds like a recipe for an unappetizing, carrot-juice house future, which only a secular Puritan like Michael Jacobson would love.

The fallacy of soda taxes as a false obesity control middle ground is comprehensively refuted in CCF’s new report released today, The Case Against Regulating or Taxing Soda. In it, we examine the evidence showing that soda taxes do not reduce calorie consumption — precisely because in their own way, soda taxes themselves are arbitrary and capricious. (Fruit juice has as many calories as soda.) We show that the scientific evidence independently linking soda consumption with obesity is weak, and we reveal that even the staunchest supporters of soda taxes acknowledge that soda taxes fall on the poor the hardest.

And given those three crippling problems, it’s no surprise that soda taxes are woefully unpopular. Without promises — because you can always trust politicians’ promises on taxes — they attract 60 percent opposition nationally and have gone down by similar margins in usually tax-friendly liberal jurisdictions like Washington State and two California cities.

In the end, the problems with singling out soda, whether for regulation or punitive taxation, should leave no viable conclusion other than this:

The complexity of the obesity problem demands proven and comprehensive policy solutions, not dubious and discriminatory ones. Legislators owe their constituents policies that do not put constituents’ money, jobs, and businesses on the line.

For others, though, what you eat is their business: They look down their noses at what we put on our plate and criticize our food for not being “local,” “organic” or “humane” enough. If they were the chefs, a three-course meal might go like this: Uber-pricey appetizers because of so-called “fat taxes,” dressings-down for ordering steak or even chicken and a skull-and-crossbones on your “toxic” dessert.

We aren’t the only ones concerned by an increase in vitriolic rhetoric about food. A recent commentary in Scientific American took Robert “No Soda Under 18” Lustig, Kelly “Tasty Food is Basically Crack” Brownell, and The New York Times’ keyboard epidemiologist Mark “I Can Afford Ultra-Organic, So Everybody Must Eat It” Bittman for their aggressive attacks.

But it’s not just those three who are out to make dinner into the debt ceiling. Our Senior Research Analyst can think of a couple more:

The pre-dinner fondue comes under attack from activists who characterize foods as “good” or “bad” and want to tax the latter. Cheese and butter had too much saturated fat for the European food police, who, until recently, taxed both in Denmark. [...]

For the main course: Animal-liberation activists serve repulsive name-calling as a side with steak (or chicken, cheese or fish). This is best exemplified by the Humane Society of the United States’ food-policy director, who previously led People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals’ campaign comparing farming with the Holocaust.

However, these radicals don’t speak for the majority. “Food police” and snobbish commentators fail to reckon with national polls showing that opposition to their signature policies—New York’s portion-size prohibition and soda taxes—widely exceeds support. And European courts have ruled that comparing farming to crimes against humanity is so offensive and potentially harmful to the social order that the nation of Germany is within its rights to forbid these dehumanizing displays. The dinner date can still go on, for now.

Apparently the public wasn’t supposed to know about what the Rudd Center and its pals talked about, since the link to the documents’ source is now dead. We have, however, preserved the document for posterity. And since its co-author, the Rudd Center’s Roberta Friedman, has recently testified in support of Vermont’s misguided soda tax, we prepared a highlight reel of things in the messaging guide. We found that activists:

• Advocate earmarking revenue to feel-good projects, but see the opportunity to lure in special interest supporters by not actually earmarking;
• Know that the weak economy means the revenue might “be used to fill budget deficits”;
• Promote more popular policies like subsidies for healthy food to “soften the ground” for taxes;
• Seek ever-increasing grants to come up with new tactics to hoodwink the public; and
• Admit that soda taxes disproportionately hurt the poor, forcing a “re-framing.”

You can read the entire document for yourself here or the key snippets here.

First up, from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s in-house journal Preventing Chronic Disease — last seen publishing an activist wish-list of alcohol control-inspired food regulations — researchers from Yale, Emory, and the University of Washington are pouring cold water on claims that soda taxes will reduce obesity rates. Commenting on the present state of scientific research, they write, “Evidence suggests caution in enacting sugar-sweetened beverage taxation legislation with a core purpose of obesity reduction.” The researchers note that consumers’ typical response to soda taxes is to substitute other caloric beverages, and while they hope that substitutes will be healthier, we would note that research from Cornell University has suggested that alcoholic drinks can be the substitute too.

And from the school of public health bearing the name of New York’s nanny-mayor (Michael Bloomberg), researchers are fretting about people’s responses to activists’ arguments. In short, nobody’s buying them. The researchers found that of nine possible justifications for a soda tax, precisely zero received majority agreement. On the other hand, 60 percent of respondents agreed that soda taxes are arbitrary (understandable when soft drinks provide only seven percent of our daily calories) and nearly that many saw them as a government cash-grab.

These findings tell us that soda taxes don’t work and that people know it. So it is no surprise that soda taxes are persistently unpopular, and not just with anti-tax conservatives. Unfortunately, they are still popular with revenue-addicted politicians. We hope that even more research confirming what we’ve long known convinces legislators to find another path.