Bloomberg's proposed soda ban for New York City is ridiculous, but not for the reasons given. All the liberal hand-wringing (and I say that as a liberal myself) over soda ignores two basic facts:
1. It's not all full of soda!
This point is so patently obvious to any soda-drinker, but clearly lost on the non-soda-drinking hippies who want to ban sodas over 20 ounces. If you don't drink soda, you can be forgiven for not realizing how much of that cup is FULL OF ICE, NOT SODA.
Take a 32 ounce cup at McDonald's. I grant you, the cup holds 32 ounces. But it will be served to you at least 3/4ths full of ice, leaving a mere eight ounces of actual soda.
Mother Jones asks "How did our sodas get so huge?" I'll tell you how: because consumers want to drink a certain amount of beverage, but the war of escalation between consumer and corporate provider means that you have to order increasingly large cups in order to keep getting the same amount of beverage.
Even if you leave out any tongue-in-cheek exaggeration, at the very least there is some percentage of the cup in which soda is displaced by ice. All of the arguments overlook this fact. Isn't it time we inject some facts into the debate? If Bloomberg thinks that more than 20 ounces of soda is wrong and bad and should be illegal, then he needs to ban any cup over, say, 24 ounces at least.
2. What about diet soda?
These soda bans all assume that you, the ignorant consumer, will be purchasing Coke or Dr. Pepper or orange Fanta. It's like putting a loaded gun to your head! But what about Diet Coke? What about Diet Dr. Pepper? Banning large cups means that people who choose diet sodas are being punished, too.
Of course, this isn't about calories or sugar content. It's about enforcing a perceived morality. A certain stripe of health food hippie thinks that you should not be drinking soda of any form. They start by decrying the evils of HFCS, but if you mention Coke Zero they will eagerly switch to the (unproven, entirely anecdotal) evils of Aspartame and Splenda.
2.5. What about water, then?
Yep, that too. I don't know why no one is talking about this. I guess if you don't bring your tap water from home in your aluminum (BPA-free) water bottle, and prefer instead to buy it on the spot, then you are a bad person.