Editor’s note: This op-ed is by Tena Starr, an editor and reporter for the Barton Chronicle. It first appeared in the pages of the Chronicle, a weekly newspaper that serves Orleans County.
I have two children. One is 31; the other is 11. When my daughter was small, women of generations that preceded mine would shake their heads and say, it’s hard to raise kids today. They say that still about my much younger son. I believe my mother said it when she was raising me.
It’s possible that it gets progressively harder to raise children, but frankly, in most ways, I don’t notice much difference from 20 years ago. My son is growing up on the same back road my daughter grew up on, with good neighbors and a good school. He bikes and walks and rides his horse in safety, as his sister did. Everyone knows who he is. He sleds down the road at night just as my daughter did 20 years ago, and there’s still not enough traffic to make it particularly dangerous.
However, there’s one enormous difference between then and now.
Food — food and how food is marketed to children.
Some years ago, we joined the modern world and got satellite TV with its hundreds of channels, about four of which we actually watch on occasion.
I was stunned. Primarily, television turned grocery shopping with a young child into a nightmare.
Twenty years ago my oldest child didn’t beg for Lunchables. Today, nearly all kids watch TV, and they are barraged from a very young age with advertisements for “food” that’s branded to cartoon characters. Until my son got old enough to grasp how he was being suckered, shopping for food was no fun.
I remember my daughter thinking she couldn’t live without a Cabbage Patch doll. I do not remember her begging for a Lunchable – a prepackaged “meal” with about as much nutritional value as a bale of straw, but with 400 times the calories, fat, sodium and preservatives. Nor were there 30 brands of breakfast cereal that included chocolate, sugar, marshmallows and the like – stuff you might give your kid for dessert on a day they were lucky, but certainly not for breakfast.
Twenty-five years ago, my daughter could turn on the television without being barraged with seductive marketing campaigns urging her to eat Sponge Bob snack crackers. In those days, occasional mac and cheese from a box was about as bad as it got. Once in a while, we had what was then called a TV dinner, even though we didn’t have much in the way of TV.
Today, nearly all kids watch TV, and they are barraged from a very young age with advertisements for “food” that’s branded to cartoon characters. Until my son got old enough to grasp how he was being suckered, shopping for food was no fun.
At the moment, the state is talking about taxing sugary drinks. Opponents say the state should not be in the business of taxing what it decides is unhealthy. Well, that’s a silly argument at this point. The state already heavily taxes what it views as unhealthy. If opponents truly believe that, they should be out there lobbying against the hefty taxes on cigarettes.
I’m no proponent of the state intervening to prevent us from harming ourselves. I was sympathetic to my grandmother who was highly disgusted with former Governor Madeleine Kunin solely because she managed to get a seatbelt law passed. My grandmother never wore a seatbelt in her life, not least because the governor told her she was supposed to.
But this is a road already traveled. We tax tobacco and alcohol, which are products only adults can buy. And presumably adults are in a better position to grasp the consequences of their actions.
Any eight-year-old can buy a soda or a bag of Doritos given proximity to a vending machine or a store. Any eight-year-old has also been subjected to years of marketing that encourages them to ingest all kinds of substances that barely qualify as food.
About a quarter of Vermonters are obese these days. Many children are. I’m sure there are all kinds of reasons for that, but one of them is that very sophisticated marketing strategies urge children to eat and drink a huge array of products that add little to their diet besides calories. And I know it takes a stubborn parent to constantly say no.
Taxing sugary drinks isn’t enough, as far as I’m concerned. Why not tax all junk food? A tax doesn’t prohibit people from buying a thing. It simply adds a bit to the cost and might provide a small disincentive.
What is wrong with that? We tax water pumps, washing machines, and woodstoves.
We can’t tax a Pepsi?
We’ve got it all backwards. Why tax what people need and not what they don’t?
