Let’s Tax Widebodied Airline Passengers
Aug 20th, 2007 by Eats Wombats
The BBC’s correspondent in Brussels, Mark Mardell, recently had a gastronomic epiphany when on holiday in Turkey and wrote about food that actually tasted of something!
Strangely unmentioned in the hundreds of comments that followed, and which showed that he’d touched a public nerve, is that the time available to most people for shopping for and preparing food has gone down. Convenience, all too often in the form of microwaveable food, is a new priority.
As consumption of processed food has gone up, so has the national waistline expanded–to the point that there have been predictions that rising levels of obesity could bankrupt the national health system.
On our weekly shop we pay attention to the air miles flown by the food for sale and reject anything that could be grown in the UK. Nevertheless, the supermarket seems to sell ever more exotic things from the farthest reaches of world. Cod is now unaffordable, so alongside it at half the price there’s some Vietnamese freshwater fish. It’s hard to believe that this is sustainable.
There are a lot of Baltic and Eastern European beers newly on sale, and they’re probably selling well because they taste better than mass produced stuff like Heineken (however memorably advertised), and they will likely end up as the Heinekens of tomorrow–I can remember when Heineken used to taste of something.
Where will it all end? To save the planet, Jeremy Clarkson says we should eat a vegan, but even if this were legal they’d probably taste of tofu. Vegan anarchists are mocked again in the Sunday Times this weekend, with this amusing report of an infiltration of the climate change protest camp at Heathrow — these things attract the nut cutlet brigade.Why are they not campaigning for higher taxes on food imported by air?
As it is, the Plane Stupid mob sound like a bunch of killjoys who want to throw people out of work and deprive others of the pleasures of affordable travel, and they are willing to break the law in their “direct actions” in the belief that they are latterday eco-suffragettes.
Taxing air travelers by weight would provide a national incentive for fitness, reduce the cost of the national health service, and increase airline fuel economy!
That’s it. Penalize excess gluggage.
