CK Friday Links--Friday November 29, 2013

Links from around the internet. As always, I welcome your thoughts.

PS: Follow me on Twitter!

*************************
Foie Gras is not unethical. (Serious Eats)

Nobody makes us stay on the couch or eat junk food--they just sell stuff we keep buying. (LinkedIn)

25 rules of disinformation. (Washington’s Blog) Many of these should sound familiar to CK readers.

What I did right--and wrong--on my path to early retirement. (Early Retirement Extreme)

How to get more, and bettter, sleep. (Nerd Fitness, via Ombailamos)

Another laughably cheap and hilariously easy recipe from Melissa: Chicken Chickpea Curry. (Alosha’s Kitchen)

Book recommendation: How to Survive Without a Salary by Charles Long. Laura and I just finished this book, and we both highly recommend it for readers seeking strategies and solutions either for achieving early retirement, or for reducing your dependence on traditional salary income. Obligatory warning to consumerist readers: this book will at best irritate you and at worst send you into spasms of rationalization and ego defense, and you’ll construct dozens of rigorous-sounding “reasons” why none of its ideas will work.


Got an interesting article or recipe to share? Want some extra traffic at your blog? Send me an email!



How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.

Ask CK: How Do I Find Good Books To Read?

A reader writes in:

You often recommend books to readers in your Friday Links posts, and I read with interest your Voracious Reading Trial post and your Three Books in Three Days post.

My question is: how do you go about finding good books to read?

You've come to the right place. I’ll share a few of my own ideas on how to find good books to read--and readers, if you have your own advice for this reader, share it below!

1) Ask the most intellectual and well-read people in your life what they’ve been reading, and shamelessly copy them. Or, go even further and just ask them to suggest several books to you. Sidenote: it’s rarely a good idea to depend on people dumber or less literate than you for book recommendations. :)

2) Use the books you’re reading already as sources for more reading. There are a few ways you can do this. For example, in the next non-fiction book you read, look through the author’s endnotes, footnotes and index--in other words, the source literature the author used. Read anything and everything that grabs you. Then, with those books, do the same thing. You’ll quickly build a reading list of dozens--or hundreds!--of books. I did this exercise recently with Jared Diamond’s landmark book Guns, Germs, and Steel and I’m set for reading for at least another year.

3) Look into the contemporaries and colleagues of the author you just read. For example, a book like Viktor Frankl’s Man's Search for Meaning might send to you to explore the works of other “Austrian school” psychiatrists like Adler or Freud. Reading Dan Gilbert’s excellent book Stumbling on Happiness might get you looking through some of the works of other cognitive psychologists like Martin Seligman, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky.

3a) You can do this with fiction too: If you liked the stories of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, consider contemporaneous authors like H.G. Wells, Thomas Hardy, or, I don’t know, Jules Verne (and even better, you can find most of these authors' works for free in the public domain). If you're a fan of Virginia Woolf, why not try her contemporaries Ford Madox Ford, Joseph Conrad, or the attractive-looking G.K. Chesterton?

4) Finally, if you just read a book and agreed with it, do something intellectually honest: read a book that argues the exact contra-thesis. This was why I read The Food Police right after I read Appetite For Profit. After all, you wouldn’t want to mindlessly reinforce your already-held opinions, would you?

Readers, what suggestions would you offer? How do you find good books to read?


Related Posts:
To Kill A Good Idea
Dispute This! Negative Self-Talk And Better Health
The 4-Hour Chef: An Extended Review of a Terrible Book
Review: Wheat Belly by William Davis
Book Review: The Mindful Carnivore
Ask A Mindful Carnivore: Books For Further Reading

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.

CK Friday Links--Friday November 22, 2013

Links from around the internet. As always, I welcome your thoughts.

PS: Follow me on Twitter!

*************************
The number one tip for stress free entertaining (Stonesoup)

Interesting 12 minute profile of the woman who sued McDonald’s (and won!) after burning herself with their coffee. (Films for Action)

Ten gluten-free misconceptions... and ten inadvertent gluten exposures. (Eating Rules)

The extreme minimalist kitchen. (Early Retirement Extreme)

Four reasons we carry baggage. (Allison Vesterfelt)

How many days can you go without checking email or social media? (Steve Pavlina)

Four words that make you weak. (The Bulletproof Executive, via 50by25)

The quintessential fall dinner: Maple Mustard Roasted Chicken. (Cafe Johnsonia)

Curried Chickpea Stew with Rice Pilaf, and a bonus: learn to make your own Homemade Curry Powder! (Eats Well With Others)

Do you have an interesting article or recipe to share? Want some extra traffic at your blog? Send me an email!


How can I support Casual Kitchen?
For those readers interested in supporting Casual Kitchen, the easiest way is to do so is to do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site. You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.

A Two Book Giveaway! The Food Police and Appetite For Profit

Try Grammarly's plagiarism check for free! Because plagiarism isn't very original.
********************************************
Intellectual honesty. Lots of us talk about it, but pitifully few of us practice it.

We read the papers we always read, watch the news channels we always watch, we keep going back to the same information sources online, all the while ingesting the same slant and bias until... we start thinking we aren't slanted and biased at all.

What's really happening, of course, is this: as we become more and more immersed in sources that reinforce our views, we become like a fish in water. Meaning: since the fish always lived in water and never knew anything else, it doesn't actually know it's in water.

Likewise, thanks to the friends and peers we find ourselves with and the "information" that finds its way to us, we all too easily forget we're in passively-chosen social, political and intellectual glass tanks of our own.

We're all in water too.

So today's giveaway is unlike any other you've ever seen. It's a giveaway of two books that approach the food industry from exactly opposite ideological directions: one is pro-government intervention, one is pro-free market. One is liberal, one is libertarian. One is aggressively anti-business and anti-corporation, the other actively celebrates what business and corporations can do to meet consumers' needs.

I want my readers to read both. Why? Because no side has a monopoly on the truth. I firmly believe that if you don't make a practice of curiously and open-mindedly reading the oppositional view on everything you believe... you're the intellectual equivalent of a fish in water.

So here's the giveaway: I'm giving away a free copy of Jason Lusk's The Food Police AND a free copy of Michele Simon's Appetite For Profit.

If you want to see summaries of each book's content, just take a look at my brief write-ups on both in my Voracious Reading Trial post. Conveniently, they're books #1 and #2 on the list.

Now, to enter is the easiest thing ever. Just leave a comment below with a book you'd recommend to ME. That's it! Your book recommendation(s) can be any subject you like: food, investing, fiction, I don't care. I just care that a reader considers it worth recommending. Make sure you leave some way for me to reach you (email, or a link to your site) in your comment!

I'll select the winner at random on Sunday, November 24, 2013 at noon Eastern Time. Good luck and let's start seeing those book recs!





How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.

CK Friday Links--Friday November 15, 2013

Links from around the internet. As always, I welcome your thoughts.

PS: Follow me on Twitter!

*************************
College students! Here are some easy and cheap ideas for healthy food options. (Owlhaven)

A closer look at how calories can be either stored or burned, and how this affects your ability to lose fat. (Impruvism)

Heat a small room for just 15c a day with this unusually creative idea. (Natural Cures)

Don’t cosign a loan. Ever. (Aleph Blog)

"Ethanol is an ecological disaster." Read critically. (RealClearScience) Related: Ethanol Hurts the Poor.

“Actually, my real dream is to become a novelist. Which is a lousy dream to have right now.” (Terribleminds, via Monica Bhide)

A time-lapse map of every nuclear explosion, ever, on Earth. Striking. (Memolition)

Recipes to try:
Salty, sweet, smoky, spicy; this recipe is instant love: Chipotle Chicken Chili. (Alosha’s Kitchen)

I’ll be making these this month: Texas Roadhouse Rolls. (Eat Cake For Dinner)

Autumn bliss! Bosnian Poached Apples. (Bibberche)


Do you have an interesting article or recipe to share? Want some extra traffic at your blog? Send me an email!


How can I support Casual Kitchen?
For those readers interested in supporting Casual Kitchen, the easiest way is to do so is to do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site. You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.

Notes From a Cross Country Road Trip

Readers, I spent the month of October in my car.

Well, sort of. I took a gigantic driving road trip from New Jersey to Texas and back. Here was my entire route if you’re curious. Why? Well, I love road trips. It’s a great way to see a country, it’s a great way to visit friends and family, and it can be a surprisingly inexpensive way to travel.

And on this road trip, I visited thirteen cities across twelve states, I caught up with a ton of family and friends across the Midwest and South (including a fellow food blogger and two long-time school friends who I hadn’t seen in over a decade), and I re-reminded myself of how lucky I am to live such a huge, diverse and amazing country. In total, I drove some 4,500 miles over three weeks.

Today’s post is just a light one where I’ll share some of the highlights of my trip.

Best meal: A tough choice, but I’m calling it a tie between Rolf and Daughters, a really good farm-to-table style foodie restaurant in downtown Nashville, and Pizzitola’s, an inexpensive old-school BBQ joint in central Houston. These two restaurants simply blew away the field and I highly recommend both.

Best deal: $3.99 for a one pound bag of ground cumin. This could be the best price I've ever paid for any spice, ever. At “Nuestra Familia” grocery store in Omaha, Nebraska. This is how you defeat the spice cabal!

Weirdest food: Deep Fried Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. At the Texas State Fair, in Dallas, Texas. It really messed with my mind to eat this “food” but in reality it was... good. I feel a post coming on just to try to process this indescribable culinary experience. Bonus: I was full for the rest of the day.

Apropos of nada, here’s what a half-eaten deep fried Oreo cookie looks like:


Cheapest gas: $2.89/gallon in Sioux City, IA. Hey, ethanol subsidies, man.

Best restaurant deal: Madras Restaurant, in Austin, Texas. Just $10 at lunchtime for all-you-can-eat vegetarian Indian food. Really, really good. They didn’t make any money on me that day, I can tell you that.

Best hipsters: Austin. Not even a question.

Worst traffic: Texas was the runaway winner here. The traffic in Houston and Dallas is worse than anything we’ve got here in the NJ/NYC metro area. PS: That state is booming.

New states checked off: OK, KS, NE, IA (now I’ve been to 40 states, leaving me yet to see AK, WA, OR, ID, MT, MN, WY, WI, SD, and ND ).

Least expected place where I had to speak Spanish: South Sioux City, Nebraska, in a tiny little restaurant called La Guadalupana. There was some confusion about my friend’s order, and since nobody in the restaurant spoke English, I had to step in and whip out my Spanish to help out.

Readers: Have you ever taken a road trip? Or would you like to? Where?

Related Posts:
Road Eats Secrets: How to Find the Best Local Food When You're On the Road
Why Do Products Go On Sale?
Knowing When Not to Be a Food Snob
Eight Myths About Vegetarians and Vegetarian Food

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.

Should I Be Paranoid About Grocery Store Loyalty Cards?

A reader writes in (slightly edited):

I'm wondering about your perspective on grocery store loyalty cards. One of the major grocery chains in my area switched to a loyalty card program. They send out a flyer with great looking prices, but unless you have "the card" no special prices for you.

I refuse to get a store loyalty card. I don't want a company to be able to track my purchases and link them back to me. Our health insurance recently launched a "healthy savings" program, where you scan your membership card with your purchase for trivial savings off selected processed "healthy" foods, things like crackers or yogurt of the week. I can only imagine what they would do with that data to drive up my health insurance rates. Moreover, most of our summer veggies are home grown or from our CSA, so we aren't even buying these healthy foods at the local megamart. Just curious about your two cents.


Even after all of the consumer empowerment articles I’ve written here, I’m embarrassed to say I’ve actually never once addressed the pros and cons of grocery store loyalty cards.

Admittedly, the savings can be extraordinary. That’s the key reason we use our grocery store's loyalty card. Sure, it’s possible the store could use our purchasing information against us. But the only thing to come of it so far has been targeted coupons--some of which we actually use. However, you could also say that I've clearly learned nothing from all those years watching The X-Files.

So here’s the question: Is it reasonable to be paranoid about grocery store loyalty cards? When a store keeps data on what we buy, what stops The Man from using it against us?

For some answers, I sounded out friends and followers on Twitter and Facebook, and wound up with an intriguing range of responses. See what you think:

1) I am not quite sure how this logic works. How can a store use against you the fact that you bought bread, milk and eggs on Wednesday? Using this logic, people should get rid of credit cards because the bank knows when and where they spend their money.

2) I use loyalty cards if I get rewards. Do not mind my choices being tracked as long as I do not get spam mail! I guess I accept tracking as part of our modern, higher tech life.

3) It's a good idea for a dystopian novel, but the convenience and potential benefit of targeted coupons seems much higher to me.

4) They will use it against you in terms of knowing your habits. They’re learning how to sell you more stuff, or when to increase prices on must-have items.

5) They sell the data to (or share it with) other companies. Same thing with online marketers sharing their mailing lists. You end up getting junk mail from places you never signed up for. This is not paranoia. It is real.

6) When I worked for the world's largest market research company 5 years ago, the data they collected contained no personal information (e.g. name, address, etc.). It was simply code references, as in: this code bought this item. That may have changed now of course so I would say - "if there is personal data of course it can be used." Then it is simply a matter of whether or not you "choose" to be paranoid about it. If you "choose" to be paranoid then do not use the cards. If however, you "choose" to not be paranoid and have faith and confidence in the holder of your personal data then you may have a less stressful day thinking about it. Businesses of the 21st Century are beginning to understand the power of consumer relationships, it's not just a short term profit. Consumers can react very quickly and badly when this confidence is broken and I believe very few ethical companies would choose to break this consumer confidence as their business can depend on it.


Readers, now it's your turn. Do you use grocery store loyalty cards? Do you have privacy concerns about them? Why--or why not?


How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.

Cookbook Review: Mollie Katzen's The Heart of the Plate

“This is now your book, and soon these will become your recipes.”

Readers, today I’m going to tell you about an exceptional, foundational cookbook--one of the best I’ve seen in years: Mollie Katzen’s The Heart of the Plate.

Long-time readers here at Casual Kitchen know that we’re big Mollie Katzen fans. Groupies even. Why? Because her first work, the original Moosewood Cookbook, sent us down an entire path of culinary discovery. It showed us that the Standard American Diet--where meat was an obligatory centerpiece of every meal--didn’t have to be the default setting for how we ate.

This in turn brought me to an enormous economic insight: adding vegetarian recipes to your meal rotation actually makes your diet healthier and less expensive at the same time. It entirely changed how I cook... and I’ve never looked back.

But The Heart of the Plate differs significantly--and in a useful way--from Mollie's prior works. Sure, it’s still vegetarian, and anyone who knows her distinct artwork and writing tone will instantly recognize her here. But Mollie's cooking style has evolved: She’s become more spare, more flexible, more modular in her cooking. You won't find recipes with endless ingredient lists here. Instead, you'll find simple, elegant recipes with--as Mollie herself puts it--"aesthetic economy."

In other words, these are exactly the kinds of recipes that will resonate with Casual Kitchen readers: recipes that are interesting, different and laughably easy. This is the kind of cookbook that makes a modern cook grateful.

I said above that The Heart of the Plate was a “foundational” cookbook. What do I mean by this? Simply that this book contains all the tools you’ll need to master the realm of simplified, convenient cooking. There’s a complete culinary education in these pages: everything from clear instructions on how to stock a simple kitchen, to recommendations on which oils to use when, to which sweeteners work best with what ingredients. Mollie teaches you how to make soup stock, or, depending on your convenience needs, how to avoid making it. She teaches readers to “flip” the ratios of starches to veggies in recipes, making them healthier by reducing pasta, noodles or white rice in favor of fiber-rich, lower-starch vegetables. And she even includes 35 complete menus, built entirely from the book’s collection of some 400 recipes. You'll be able to host a lifetime of dinner parties from this book alone.

That’s what I mean by foundational.

Dozens of recipes jumped out at me from The Heart of the Plate--and in the coming months I hope to feature some of them here at Casual Kitchen. See, for example, Lablabi--otherwise known as Tunisian Chickpea Soup (page 30), Sweet Potato Pear Soup (page 33), a hilariously easy Grated Carrot Salad (page 62), Green Rice with Grapes and Pecans (rice... with grapes? Seriously? page 114), and even a creative and fairly easy Kimchi Stew (page 158).

There’s a section called “cozy mashes” with easy recipes for mashed savory foods that can be either central to your dinner or a hearty side accompaniment. See for example Curried Mashed Carrots and Cashews (page 170-1) or Smoky Mashed Caramelized Eggplant and Onions (page 175). And the chapter on rice and grains features a fascinating recipe for Coconut Rice with Chilies, Ginger and Lime (page 196-7) and a wildly striking Blueberry Rice recipe (page 200).

And there’s much more, including a chapter on sauces/vinaigrettes and toppings and a chapter filled with a dozen delicious desserts. Might I suggest baking up a batch of delicious, buttery Pecan Shortbread Cookies (page 435)?

One final thought. Cookbooks (and for that matter, food blogs) these days increasingly seem filled with one-word sentences and hipsterish, photoshopped food photos. Form before function, I guess. Except that nobody wants to experience Snazzy Cookbook Syndrome(TM), which is the disappointment home cooks experience when they compare the phony, over-styled photo in the book with the actual appearance of their just-cooked meal.

The Heart of the Plate is, literally, the opposite of this. At more than 400 pages, it’s big and beautiful--but it’s also humble. The photos in Katzen’s book are refreshingly real, which means we cooks at home can produce meals that actually look like the pictures. And readers will find in this book the very same Mollie Katzen who earnestly penned the original Moosewood Cookbook. Her recipe style may have evolved and the diversity of her cuisine may have expanded, but it’s still her voice, her drawings, her artwork. It’s still her.

Once again, this isn’t just a cookbook. It’s a complete cook’s resource that will be a foundational cookbook in your kitchen. I can’t recommend it highly enough.





Related Posts:
Two People, Fifteen Days, Thirty Meals. Thirty-Five Bucks!
Consumer Empowerment: How To Self-Fund Your Consumer Products Purchases
The 4-Hour Chef: An Extended Review of a Terrible Book
Book Review: Wheat Belly by William Davis
Book Review: The Mindful Carnivore

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.

CK Friday Links--Friday November 8, 2013

.....aaaand I'm back with more links from around the internet. Thanks, readers, for your patience as I enjoyed a great cross-country road trip last month! As always, I welcome your thoughts.

PS: Follow me on Twitter!

*************************
With the shutting down of yet another wine magazine, a blogger asks: Can you really make money any more by writing? (1 Wine Dude) [ed: The problem with the economics of writing and blogging is that there are almost no barriers to entry]

Clean eating is a myth. (Impruvism)

Dear Paleo: I quit! (Health-Bent)

De-seed a pomegranate in 10 seconds flat. (Lifehacker)

This four minute video will make you rethink your social life--both online and off. (Elite Daily)

How awful science created a worse national diet... and did nothing to slow obesity trends. (Pacific Standard) Bonus post: Why do we still tip?

Delicious and laughably easy: Sweet Heat Buffalo Shrimp. (Food and Fire)

Low carb and gluten-free! Homemade Chocolate Peanut Butter Cups. (All Day Long I Dream About Food, via A Sweet Life)

Why did Popular Science nuke commenting? (Popular Science) [ed: Makes me grateful for the high caliber--and good focus--of the commenting here at CK!]


Do you have an interesting article or recipe to share? Want some extra traffic at your blog? Send me an email!


How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.

Why "Fat Taxes" Won’t Work

Try to set aside any strong emotional reactions you might have to the following bluntly-phrased quote, and instead, let’s see what useful insights might be embedded here:

If we really wanted to curb fat through taxes, many economists would tell you, it would probably be more effective to tax fat people than fat food. Most fat-tax advocates are rightfully appalled by such a proposal, but I have yet to see a compelling reason why taxing fatty foods is any more righteous than taxing fatty folk. If obesity imposes an externality on others--as fat-tax advocates claim it does--then the only "fair" thing to do is to tax the source of the externality. The food police don't want to tax fat people, because it shifts responsibility from the "toxic food environment" to the individual. It's better to have an ominous-sounding enemy such as Big Food to blame than to look as if you're discriminating against overweight people.
--Jayson Lusk, from The Food Police: A Well-Fed Manifesto About the Politics of Your Plate

Readers, what's your take on the idea of a "fat tax"? Here at Casual Kitchen, we’re more and more finding ourselves generally against the idea of fat, sugar and soda taxes. One factor is our deep disappointment with the fallacious logic and base appeals to emotion used by key proponents arguing for these taxes. We're also hesitant to embrace the idea because of one very likely unintended consequence: We’d be giving our incredibly competent political system[TM] the power to decide what foods get blessed as “healthy” (and thus are not taxed) and what foods are deemed “unhealthy” (and thus are taxed). That’s just a gigantic can of worms that I'd rather not open.

I’m a much bigger supporter of clear labeling regulations so consumers can have maximum information to make empowered food choices.

However, in the quote above from The Food Police, author Jayson Lusk bluntly tackles the subject of obesity and food taxes in a way I hadn’t really considered before.

Here’s what I mean: We know that obesity creates various societal costs. But so-called fat taxes transfer the costs of obesity to everyone, including people who are not obese. We can certainly have a debate on whether sharing these costs is societally appropriate or not, but it is undeniably an upside-down transfer of responsibility.

But worse, consuming junk food, sugary food or soda is not a necessary condition for being overweight! One can be overweight on a extremely wide range of diets. Thus many obese people won’t be impacted by a tax at all, either economically or in terms of incentives to select foods our authorities deem “healthy.”

But these reasons mewl pitifully at the feet of the most compelling reason fat, sugar and soda taxes are a bad idea.

Remember the Tobacco Settlement? In the late 1990s there was a gigantic legal settlement among the states of the USA enacting enormous taxes on cigarettes. And at the time, it was clearly understood that these tax proceeds were to be used towards tobacco education and smoking cessation programs. Note that this is exactly the same model fat tax advocates propose when they talk about using fat, sugar or soda tax proceeds to help fight obesity.

Except, as Lusk cites,

"...only about 2 percent of the funds from the Tobacco Settlement, which were promised to fight smoking, actually went for that purpose. The states spent the rest to fix budget shortfalls."

Just to make sure: Where does this shocking 2% figure from? Is it some phony statistic spun by someone with an agenda? Did Big Food dream it up as part of a secret plan to kill fat taxes and protect profits? Nope, not even close. It's from data supplied by the United States Government's own General Accounting Office in a 2004 report.

We're talking a grand total of $206 billion (billion!) in total Tobacco Settlement tax revenues over 25 years. All that money, and hardly any of it went where it was actually supposed to go.* To me, this is the proverbial elephant in the room when it comes to considering fat, sugar and soda taxes. No one seems to want to talk about it, yet it's still standing right there.

By now it should be clear. Fat, sugar and soda taxes transfer obesity costs away from the people who actually produce those costs. And unless you’re a wide-eyed optimist, it’s also pretty clear that these tax revenues won’t go toward what we’re being told they’ll go toward.

Readers, what do you think? I want to know.

* A quick but necessary tangent: You can arrive at an even more depressing conclusion here if you carefully think it through: a state that depends on tobacco tax revenues to plug budget gaps (or worse yet, issues bonds backed by tobacco taxes, as many states did), twists its incentives in a truly perverse way: they now have a macabre need for people to keep smoking. They need the money!

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.