I am sure you know that every product produced in a factory has a master recipe. Each ingredient is represented as a ratio or %. Added sugar and corn syrup are easy to identify. I would imagine other ingredients could also be placed into that same category.
I may not understand your blender explanation but did you try to measure after everything was already mixed together?

I wonder about possibilities for numeric estimation of apparent sweetness, and if the artificial sweetener industry uses such a measure? A brix/apparent sweetness ratio might let consumers with a sweet tooth compare different products.

@Amy

Doesn’t the corn industry have a stake in our tariffs on foreign sugar sources, sugar cane, for example? Corn production has it’s own drawbacks.

@Dave

One of my kitchen experiments was a 3000 calorie cup of watery stuff (fat, sugar, water, emulsifier, heat, and a blender). One measure of sugar content is it’s ratio to complex carbs. That’s for naturally occurring sugar, obviously, the ratio is not useful for describing products with added sugar and quasi-complex carbs like maltodextrin.

Take away the subsidies (and keep out cheap foreign sugar), the sugar producers will be forced to raise prices to make up the difference. Not to mention it saves the taxpayers money as well. Let them replace the former “subsidy” with a higher price that only the ones who consume the product pay.

I am some what confused by your comment. Why would getting rid of the sugar subsidy make prices for sugar go up? It seems to me that it would be the other way around. Also, you should know that the government already plays a huge part in making sugar prices expensive as it is basically impossible to import. There is supposedly a sugar shortage on the way, as well as an increasing amount of corn being turned into biofuels. Maybe the problem will work itself out without any more government interaction

details:
http://www.fooducate.com/blog/2009/09/17/calorie-offsets-instead-of-soda-tax/

I suppose I’m being too much of a purist about this issue, but taxing high fructose corn syrup products while simultaneously subsidizing the corn that enables it just seems backwards.

This is already done with cigarettes, I don’t smoke, but my tax dollars goes toward tobacco subsidies and smokers pay again through taxes. People who don’t eat pork for religious reasons pay for its production through subsidies. People who don’t eat factory-produced meat for ethical or environmental reasons pay for its production though subsidies. People who don’t drink soda for health pay reasons pay for it through subsidies. Sure, there’s not guarantee that tax dollars will support everything you want, people without children still pay for public education, but the argument that these kinds of subsidies on consumables contribute to overall social good is tenuous.

It seems like this soda tax is going to make diet soda for children a more attractive option because no calorie artificial sweeteners are likely to get a free pass. Why wouldn’t they? There are no calories after all? Or there really enough data tot convict 0 calorie beverages as making people obese? If all soft drinks are taxed this raises the question: What is the real goal? To tax empty calories? Or to just tax soda because “we” don’t like it and it’s an easy cash grab for government? We aren’t willing to cut spending by taking on big farming companies who get subsidies and incentives, but the American consumer is an easy target to raise revenue.

Everyone knows subsidies are a problem, Michael Pollan calls attention to it as a health care issue (Big Food vs. Big Insurance), environmentalists site subsidies as promoting wasteful practices and pollution. Why does political discussion continue to dance around the subsidy issue?

Before we get into taxing calories or building local food movements by insisting on more subsidies and putting more layers on an already burdened system, it would be beneficial if food advocates with voices that can be heard would leave aside their pet campaigns for a moment and bring loud collective pressure on getting politicians to reform the current farm subsidies systems.

I would like them abolished personally, but perhaps there is actually a good reason for their continued existence, I have just never heard this argument presented because politicians don’t seem to want to touch the topic.