In 2014, when Berkeley, CA passed the nation's first soda tax, advocates and public health practitioners in San Francisco made a parallel effort to enact a similar tax on sugar sweetened beverages in their city. A testament to the beverage industry's massive funds, the measure failed in San Francisco in 2014. It would take another two years for the city to pass this measure successfully.
Janna Cordeiro from San Francisco's Wholesale Produce Market discusses her public health work on sugar sweetened beverages in San Francisco and the struggles of taking on the well-resourced soda industry. As the SFUSD parent representative to the San Francisco's Soda Tax Advisory Committee, Janna speaks to the ways soda taxes can be reinvested to advance health equity and reduce prevalence of preventable chronic diseases in working-class communities of color. She advocates for the use of soda tax revenues to support small business owners and to fund community organizations working on the ground to directly address the most urgent health issues of communities hardest hit by the beverage industry's exploitation. This episode of In Praxis is a part of Season 2: Sugar Sweetened Beverage Taxes.
The information, opinions, views, and conclusions proposed in this episode are those of our podcast guests.