Offer incentives to food companies to provide healthier, affordable choices for food, beverages and snacks. Identify those companies that strive to provide consumers with healthier options and choices. Incentives could be in the form of tax breaks, public recognition or subsidies of some sort for a period of time. Provide public education to encourage healthier choices.
The problem I see with this, is that if this is a federal program instead of handled privately, it will eventually get lobbied until the incentives they’re offering have nothing to do with actual health. “Healthy” is just too subjective. To determine what’s actually healthy would require ridiculous amounts of data and probably machine learning, but I don’t think US citizens are ready to have the eating habits monitored to the extent we could properly collect that data for the population as a whole.
There would need to specific targets and guidelines. I used “healthy” as a discussion starter. The incentives should be temporary. Goals and targets should be revised and change routinely. The hopeful outcome is consumers would choose these products and the company could sustain the sells without incentives.
Perhaps boycotting the “bad” foods would be incentive enough. We could have a nation- wide healthy eating campaign in children’s social media outlets as well as TV programming and at school. A farmer in my community raises organic chickens to be sold to Chick fil a.