I have read some of the earlier submissions to the committee, so I see that the idea of a fat tax or something like that has been bandied about in this group. I think the price tag of food is only one part of the packaging, and before you go down that path you should explore the other aspects of the package.
Certainly, from a low-income perspective, anything that makes food more expensive is a bad idea, if it's food those people need. From that perspective, I think there's no question--and I know others have spoken to you on this point--that to make the foods that low-income people purchase more expensive is only to exacerbate their food insecurity.
At a broader, population-wide level, the question about whether a fat tax would have an impact on diet...I would strongly urge you, before you go any further on that, to take cigarettes as the model--which clearly it is for this discussion of a negative tax--and remember that long before we started raising the price of cigarettes, we had warning labels on them. We don't have anything like that on food. You can buy cookies and crackers that advertise themselves as being trans free. You can get twizzlers that are fat free, as always. So there are a lot of mixed messages now with the current food labels. Way before you start to tinker with the price tag, I think a lot could be done with the rest of food packaging to start to send messages around what foods might be conducive to a healthy body weight and which ones really aren't.