First, a program note: Today’s post, next Monday’s, and maybe even the offerings on the next two Wednesdays, will be relatively short and…well, not insubstantial, but perhaps a little less weighty than usual.

That’s because the News Guy has been and will be spending the time and effort weightiness requires on: (a) reporting some complicated and especially weighty stories planned for the next two Fridays; and (b) responding to a higher authority.

For today, though, let’s spend a few minutes pondering the Vermont localvore (sometimes spelled ‘locavore’) scene, which is clearly becoming more mainstream, almost by the day. (Though not so mainstream that the spell-check program of this relatively new computer recognizes the word spelled either way; we’ll have to speak sternly to it).

Just last week, the celebrated TV chef Emeril Lagasse came to the Northeast Kingdom to cook with the locally grown cheese, soy, and vegetables, taping it for his show, Emeril Green, On the Planet Green Network, affiliated with the Discovery Channel.

At least so said the report on WCAX-TV (Channel 3), than which one can get no more mainstream in Vermont. Channel 3’s report quoted Legasse saying, “The abundance of incredible products here is so exciting, people should be really, really proud about what’s happening around here because it’s really a serious movement.”

How “serious,” (which no longer means “serious,” but “significant” or “long-lasting”) remains to be seen. That it is a movement is no longer debatable. And if it began, as movements often do, inside a small subculture (the “granola-heads” to be both brief and offensively stereotypical), it isn’t any longer. Not only have First Lady Michelle Obama and Oprah Winfrey signed on, but there are increasing signs that getting into the localvore dodge seems to be good business.

Just check the “Green Mountain” section of Sunday’s Burlington Free-Press (as mainstream as Channel 3), devoted largely to the “eat local” movement. It isn’t just the articles, either. Some of the ads urge customers to buy from stores and restaurants that sell locally grown food.

Sounds like a way to make money. In America, that’s mainstream.

Needless to say, not everyone is on board. Led by the chain restaurant industry and agri-business, a counter-movement has sprung up, largely among those who insist that most Americans don’t care where their food comes from and prefer the sweet, the fried, and the fatty.

And the inexpensive. According to the skeptics, locally-grown food, especially if it’s also organically-grown food (often but not always part of the package) costs more than mass-produced food grown with the help of herbicides, pesticides, and petroleum-based fertilizer. They say all this “buy local” stuff will turn out to be a fad. The businesses that rely on it will go broke while the chain and fast-food restaurants thrive and customers continue to flock to the processed foods sections of the supermarkets.

There’s even an anti-localvore book: Just Food: Where Locavores Get It Wrong and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly, (Little, Brown) by James E. McWilliams.

Fortunately, we have an in-state experiment that may provide some hint of how this experiment will turn out. The pub on the first floor of the University of Vermont’s Davis Center, Brennan’s ,has transformed itself from a standard chain-food joint into a restaurant specializing in food grown organically, naturally, and locally.

The big attractions are probably still beer and (sometimes) live entertainment. But now instead of standardized fried chicken and Texas toast (whatever that may be) from World of Wings (WOW, but not to be confused with the homing pigeon association of the same name), a new Orleans-based franchise company, students can get, for instance, a breakfast of two cage-free eggs, organic scallions and sour cream, all produced in Vermont, and all for $5.75.

According to a front-page story in last week’s VermontCynic, the student newspaper, the impetus for the change came from the students. In response to an email, Pat Brown, the Director of Student Life, said, the “menu items and products now reflect  what  students asked for – a local sourcing of food products.”

As to the price, that $5.75 breakfast seems like a good bargain, but the Cynic story quoted one student who preferred last year’s “greasy college food,” and said this year’s fare “costs more.”

Brown said the menu was so “radically different” that comparing prices was difficult, but added that he thought, “the prices are in the same general range as last year  depending on  what one orders.”

But is the place making money? It seemed crowded enough one day last week, but Brown said it was “way too early to tell.” Like most UVM restaurants, Brennan’s is part of University Dining Services (UDS), which, Brown wrote, “provides food service to campus and is permitted by contract to  net a small amount, but the overall goal is to provide high  quality and reasonably priced food service to the campus.  The   traffic has seemed to reflect what we saw last year.”

But UDS is not autonomous. It is part of Sodexo, very much a profit-making corporation. As such, it isn’t likely to want to maintain an operation that doesn’t earn much. On the other hand, it doesn’t want the kind of bad publicity that would come from displeasing the student body. And Brown indicated that UDS, which he said “has been exceptional in working with local foods and many of the farms and orchards in the area,” appears to have a genuine commitment to buy as much Vermont product as possible.

Were it not for one little difficulty, we could end this post right here. Alas, UDS has decided to promote Brennan’s on its web site by proclaiming that the restaurant has “a new look with a sustainable menu that is literally ‘shaking’ up campus.”

Uh, folks, you work for a university. Meaning you really ought to speak English. An earthquake would “literally” “shake up” (or “’shake’ up”) campus. So might an artillery attack or a mortar barrage. Maybe even the entire student body jumping up and down at the same time.

But a menu? No, not “literally.”

Adam Smith

It’s the State Senate’s turn this week to try to raise money, and among other revenue sources, the senators have their eyes on soda pop and candy bars.

The money that would be raised from making those two items subject to the state sales tax would not be huge. But these days, every penny counts, and besides, in this case money isn’t the only object. This is a tax designed to change the way people behave.

It’s simple market economics. Make a product more expensive (by levying a tax) and fewer people will consume it. And at least according to many doctors and nutritionists, less consumption of snack foods and sodas means less obesity, less heart disease, less diabetes, and therefore lower health care costs all around.

It’s a win-win-win.

Except for those in the soda, candy, and other snack food business, of course. And except for those – which in this state is a lot of people – who bristle at the idea of government trying to meddle in peoples personal lives. If your house is your castle, isn’t your digestive system your inner courtyard, into which you may admit whatever you choose?

Whereupon we return to the discussion of last week (April 14, Doing What We Wanta) about just what the state should and should not do to influence what its citizens do and do not do.

It is a discussion in which (and in this it is hardly unique, or even unusual) partisans on both sides often descend into silliness, making exaggerated claims and proclaiming broad truths which turn out to be…well, neither broad nor truthful.

Consider, for instance, the claim of some economists that the only legitimate purpose of taxation is to raise government revenue. This is obviously nonsense. It is arguably the wisest policy that taxation only be used to finance the government. But a democracy may choose to use the tax system for any purpose it pleases, and this society has always used it to create incentives for what it deems socially desirable behavior.

The biggest of those incentives probably benefit everybody reading this. Those are the tax deduction for home mortgage interest and local property taxes. They were designed to encourage home ownership. They do. One reason so many Americans own their homes is that home ownership is subsidized.

These subsidies are not entirely equitable. More than 80 percent of the $160 billion in the revenues lost from these deductions goes to the richest 20 percent of the taxpayers. That means if your income is something like $60,000 or $70,000 you’re helping subsidize the home ownership of somebody earning $300,000 or so. And the mortgage interest deduction might have been one cause of the housing “bubble” partly responsible for the recession. Either way, it is tax policy with a social purpose.

But that’s still not the same as using tax policy to influence whether or not a person ingests a legal substance into his or her body. If the state is going to  follow that policy, is it not introducing a new intrusion into the realm of individual choice?

No. First of all, nobody is proposing actually to limit choice. Candies and colas would remain legal and available, just a few cents more expensive. Besides, Vermont already levies a tax on something many of its citizens regularly ingest, and one purpose of that tax is to minimize said ingestion. That’s the tax on alcoholic beverages. Most states tax beer, wine, and liquor both to raise revenue and limit consumption. But not all do.

Vermont is one of only ten states that levies a sales tax on neither soda nor candies. Many states tax both of them.

There is, of course, an inherent contradiction involved in levying a tax in hopes of reducing demand for the product being taxed. In theory, at least, the more successful the tax is at discouraging consumption, the less revenue the tax will bring in.

That is not what has happened with higher tobacco taxes. As cigarette taxes have gone up, smoking has gone down, especially among young people . But the tax revenue has increased. In Vermont, for instance (this is from an anti-smoking outfit, but based on government statistics) , since the cigarette tax went up 60 cents a pack in 2006, cigarette consumption is down by 14.6 percent  (from education and persuasion, as well as higher taxes) ,but revenue from the tax is up by 30 percent.

But tobacco taxes have gone up a lot. The tax bills before the Vermont Legislature (H.149 for sodas; H392 for sodas and snack foods; access to all bills here) would simply end the sales tax exemption for sodas and “snack foods” (potato and corn chips, cheese puffs, pork rinds, processed fruit snacks et al). That’s six cents on the dollar.

Still, if this is a matter of principle, the money would be irrelevant. If this is a question of the autonomy of the individual to make his or her own decisions in the free market, who among the champions of individual autonomy and the free market could approve of such taxation?

Uhhh, how about Adam Smith?  ”Sugar, rum, and tobacco,” wrote the first great champion of capitalism, “are commodities which are nowhere necessaries of life, which are become objects of almost universal consumption, and which are therefore extremely proper subjects of taxation.”

Prescient, wasn’t he?

The interesting question in this debate is just how individual these consumption decisions really are, and here is where both sides go to extremes. The anti-sugar campaigners (“food police,” or perhaps just “busybodies”) suggest that corporate villains are duping children into eating and drinking stuff that’s bad for them. The other side scoffs that no one is forced to eat or drink anything, and that people are responsible for their own decisions.

But why does this have to be an either/or situation? Obviously no one is prying open anyone’s throat and pouring colored corn syrup down his gullet, and everybody bears some responsibility for deciding what to eat or drink.

On the other hand, there is little doubt that the soda and candy industries target their marketing to children and young teenagers, who are not entirely responsible for their own decisions. As an article in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) pointed out, there is an “information asymmetry between the parties to a transaction. In the case of sugared beverages, marketers commonly make health claims (e.g., that such beverages provide energy or vitamins) and use techniques that exploit the cognitive vulnerabilities of young children, who often cannot distinguish a television program from an advertisement.”

Besides, it turns out that more people drink sodas because they’re actually cheaper than they used to be, and one reason they’re cheaper is government policy. It was Richard Nixon’s agricultural policy that inspired farmers to grown corn “fence row to fence row.” All that corn made high fructose corn syrup cheap. High fructose corn syrup, which in the view of some nutritionists is especially unhealthy (more unhealthy than getting the same number of calories from another product; see here) is the main sweetener used in sodas and many other sweets.

So government farm policy could be partially responsible for  what Kelly D. Brownell and Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, call the “obesity epidemic” in their NEJM article. Just how responsible is open to debate. So, perhaps, is the designation of the current obesity situation as an “epidemic.”  But some connection is hard to deny. When it comes to eating and drinking in this country, Perhaps all of us are not quite the autonommous individuals we like to think we are.