yax-120 Tax the burger

December 1998

Tax the burger

A recent cover story of Newsweek highlighted the dangers and benefits of diet. Most of us know the general outline. Red meat is bad. Fresh vegetables is good.

Half an hour after putting down the magazine, I was in a foodcourt, to get some dinner. Having had your consciousness raised, so to speak, you realise, surveying the food options at the foodcourt, that it is not easy getting your quota of vegetables with catered meals. Look around the stalls and the striking thing is that while most dishes being sold have lots of complex starches -- i.e. rice or noodles (which are good) -- and a fair amount of meat (not good), they usually have but pathetic scraps of vegetables, if at all. To make things worse, they tend to be heavy on the gravy, which is generally salt-laden. If not gravy, then curry, which is worse, seeing how it contains coconut milk, rich in saturated fats.

If you don't want to eat at a foodcourt, you can still get an affordable meal at one of the many fastfood restaurants around. They are, as we only know too well, the burger, chicken or pizza joints, and other kinds of foreign invaders. At any point in time, there is always an attractive promotion going on somewhere which you can take advantage of. Right now a marketing war is being waged between McDonalds and KFC over their respective types of crispy chicken. However, as one letter-writer to the press said, it is absurd to make such a big deal about whose fried chicken is better, because they are both terribly unhealthy.

What vegetables do you get in these places? Think about it for a moment. In KFC, the only and third-rate option is the coleslaw. The milk in there cancels out any good it might otherwise have. In the burger places, you have to order the bigger burgers to get some lettuce and tomatoes. But then you would also have ordered over a hundred grams of ground beef (which is generally fatter than lean beef).

I read recently in some UK medical literature that the maximum daily intake of red meat should be 80 - 90 grams. In my personal view, that's too high as it is. I get by with no more than 2 or 3 small servings of red meat per week. And I know lots of friends who have the same rule.

Why don't the hawkers and the fastfood joints serve more greens? There are probably a whole host of reasons:

1.	There is market demand for it: Meat has more 'snob value', stupid though this may be. Rice and vegetables are associated with poverty, meat with 'having arrived'.
2.	Meat has more intensity of taste. Once you get used to meat, it is difficult to go back to vegetables. It's the fat in meat that carries much of the flavour; vegetables have no fat.
3.	Vegetables are bulky. For many hawkers working within tiny stalls, there simply isn't space to stock up on much.
4.	Vegetables don't keep well. You've got to get them fresh every day. Together with their bulkiness, this presents a logistical challenge to the hawker.
5.	The deadweight of American culture: The fastfood chains are almost all American. They bring with them a "proven" system, including their menu. They are reluctant to change anything, firstly because the system may then fall apart, and secondly it will contradict their marketing strategy to sell Americanness. Never mind if the American diet is well-known for being terrible (just look at the average American and you'll know what I mean). The chains don't pay the price for that. It's the consumers who do, but only after many years, so why bother.

Unfortunately, Singaporeans eat out a lot. It's rare to find housewives preparing dinner nowadays; the two-income family is, for better or worse, the norm. So they eat out, or they buy back ("take out" in American parlance). This is especially as it is so affordable, given the competitiveness of the catering industry. In 1997, there were 7,581 licensed hawkers in Singapore, according to the Department of Statistics. That's about 1 hawker for every 396 persons living here.

And don't forget to add the ubiquitous fastfood places.

If we go on like this, Singaporeans are going to have increasing rates of cardiovascular diseases and cancers. But because these are long-term effects, people aren't moved by the knowledge. The immediate gratification of a convenient, tasty meal overrides it. And without the market demanding it, there is no incentive for the hawkers and restauranteurs to change their menu.

Yet pay, we all will. Many of us will pay with our health. All of us, as taxpayers, will pay as our fellow-citizens make increasing demands on subsidised healthcare.

This situation is what economists call an externality. The behaviour (choosing meat over vegetables) has a detrimental effect, but the cost of that detrimental effect is not built into the price of the meal charged, so the price does not truly reflect the total cost of the behaviour (i.e. the cost of resources used, the cost of side-effects, the cost on the environment, etc). Since the price is lower than the true cost, the consumption is stimulated, but this only means the external detrimental effect is increased. Somebody, somewhere suffers for it. Quite often, innocent parties share in the eventual cost. For example, even vegetarians pay a price for their fellow-citizens consuming too much meat and too few greens. Vegetarians share in the tax burden which goes towards healthcare. Vegetarian citizens suffer as well as other citizens when society's productivity falls as a result of higher mortality rates.

So what to do? How to get people to eat more vegetables and less meat?

Education is one way. But this is Singapore, you know. We don't have that kind of patience; we don't have that much faith in the common man. We strongly believe that fines work.

Fortunately, economists have long had a simple solution along similar lines. Make sure that the price of the behaviour, the meaty meal in this case, reflects its true cost to society. If we don't know how to calculate precisely the future health costs, then at least make an estimate now, and levy it as a tax. The tax will skew consumption away from meat. Add that tax to the price of the burger, fried chicken, satay, beef noodles, etc., and people will behave accordingly.

If we can do that with tobacco, why not with meat? Am I serious?

Footnotes

None

Addenda

A few readers have suggested that I say a few things about vegetarian food in Singapore. The above article may be seen as encouraging readers to patronise stalls that say "Vegetarian".

Unfortunately, the Chinese vegetarian food available from our hawker stalls leaves much to be desired. There is way too much oil and I am quite concerned about the amount of salt too. Some stalls use monosodium glutamate -- not just vegetarian stalls, but many other stalls too. I suffer for hours after the slightest amount of monosodium glutamate, commonly called "MSG" here.

Indian vegetarian is not something I take often, so I can't be as specific. But I think they too are over-liberal with oil and salt. Indian cooking also tends to overcook their vegetables, which I'm sure degrades the nutritional value.

Furthermore, I find Indian food too heavy. A reader pointed out, "I look at my vegetarian Indian colleagues, and they can be at least as fat as a French big meat and cheese eater." This reader's French, but resident in Singapore. That explains the strange comparison.

He had this interesting tidbit: "Moreover, vegetables do not bring all the elements we need, or not in the correct form. To get all the necessary proteins that we get from meat, you need to combine at least three different types of vegetables. Also, we thought for a long time that artichoke or spinach were [good sources] of iron; unfortunately recent studies have shown that the iron present in large quantities in these vegetables is not assimilable by our body, and that the best source of iron for our needs is, unfortunately, the blood of other animals that we find in red meat."

One of the better things you could do at the foodcourts is to get fresh fruit, or fresh fruit juice. I stress fresh. Canned juice often has sugar and preservatives added.