The current American diet, consisting of a large percentage of processed foods and animal products, has been shown to be linked to obesity, heart disease, diabetes, and cancer. Many of these health problems would be reduced if we were to cut back on our unhealthy eating habits. By changing our current eating habits we would benefit by saving not only saving millions of lives but also billions in healthcare costs. In Bad Food? Tax It, and Subsidize Vegetables, Mark Bittman uses appeals to ethics, facts and statistics, and logic to support his proposal to fix America's dangerous eating habits.
Bittman appeals to ethics by portraying the fast food industry as motivated by greed. When describing the food industry, Bittman states that “[the food industry's] mission is not public health, but profit, so they’ll continue to sell the health-damaging food that’s most profitable, until the market or another force …show more content…
He opens his proposal by saying that “taxes would reduce consumption of unhealthful foods and generate billions of dollars annually”. Logically, taxes would discourage the purchase of unhealthy food. On top of that, Bittman addresses the argument that low income families wouldn’t be able to afford food by arguing “That money [from taxing unhealthy food] could be used to subsidize the purchase of staple foods like seasonal greens, vegetables, whole grains, dried legumes and fruit”. Bittman argues that by taxing unhealthy foods and redirecting the money from the tax to subsidize healthy foods, it would make the American diet much healthier, and in turn, solve the problem of unhealthy eating in America.
In Bad Food? Tax It, and Subsidize Vegetables, Mark Bittman proposes to put a tax on unhealthy foods and use the tax revenue to subsidize healthy foods instead. He uses appeals to ethics, facts and statistics, and logic to support his