When Did Soda Pop Become Food?



A good bottle of wine,
which this is, qualifies as food and
may even a health benefit.



After the election of 2010 my hope that we would not hear any more outrageous political nonsense. Now it is the soda pop people complaining about a potential tax on their products. Most of what they manufacture and sell is harmful in one way or another and it does not seem too outrageous to me to have these items taxed.

That soda pop is harmful is not something I learned just the other day. No, a study just published showing that diet soda can lead to heart attacks and stroke did not open my eyes to the ill effect of carbonated drinks. When a boy in junior high school my dentist told me to stay away from soft drinks. He told me they could rot away my teeth. While my teeth did not rot out of my head, having them drilled and filled by the dentist seemed to have a correlation.

My question, after watching television ads with a woman in grocery store whining about the threat to the cost of groceries and her right to purchase anything she wanted without having to pay a tax of some sort, is, "When did soda pop become food?" I know you can buy that stuff at a grocery store, but it can also be purchased from machines, a gas stations, bar, and who knows where else. Beer and wine are taxed. They qualify more as food than soda pops. In fact, there is some health benefit in consuming, in moderation of course, these products. Beer and wine and other alcoholic products are taxed to discourage their purchase; in fact, these "food stuffs" are highly regulated. Further, in the television commercial the woman is also lumping in "fruit" drinks. I do not think this includes bone fide orange juice but something the so called "punch" drinks that are mostly water and corn syrup with maybe a fruit flavor added.

A tax on soda pops or sodies, as a person I once knew called them, could be used to help pay dental bills, hospital bills for stroke and heart attack victims, or pay for the funerals of the obese. Maybe a tax on these sodies could be used to help unemployed find work picking up the plastic bottles and cans littered about the highways and streets.

Whether carbonated drinks, so called "fruit" drinks, and bottled water with dubious fruit flavors are taxed or not is not the problem. The problem is thinking of them as food.