The U.S. Public Interest Group (USPIRG) has a new report out on the effects of farm subsidies on obesity Apples to Twinkies: Comparing Federal Subsidies of Fresh Produce and Junk Food (September 2011)
Friday, September 30, 2011
Thursday, September 29, 2011
Polls Agree: Food 'System' Needs Fixing
By MARK BITTMAN September 28, 2011, 12:39 pm
With the Farm Bill fast approaching, and the congressional Super Committee taking a hard look at which farm programs to cut and which to preserve, this is a good moment for Americans to let their feelings on these things be known. The Environmental Working Group (EWG) has just released a compelling comparison of two brand new polls detailing Americans’ views of our current food system. One poll was commissioned by the conservation-minded David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the other by the U.S. Farmers and Ranchers Alliance, (USFRA) a well-funded group intent on advancing the interests and restoring the image of big agriculture.
While each poll skews slightly in the direction that you might expect, there’s a surprising alignment. Perhaps most notable in the USFRA poll is that 42 percent of respondents said the U.S. is “on the wrong track in the way we produce food,” as opposed to 39 percent who said it’s “heading in the right direction.” Acknowledging that we’re on the wrong track is the first step (and a crucial one). Getting political decision-makers to follow suit is next, and much more difficult.
With the Farm Bill fast approaching, and the congressional Super Committee taking a hard look at which farm programs to cut and which to preserve, this is a good moment for Americans to let their feelings on these things be known. The Environmental Working Group (EWG) has just released a compelling comparison of two brand new polls detailing Americans’ views of our current food system. One poll was commissioned by the conservation-minded David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the other by the U.S. Farmers and Ranchers Alliance, (USFRA) a well-funded group intent on advancing the interests and restoring the image of big agriculture.
While each poll skews slightly in the direction that you might expect, there’s a surprising alignment. Perhaps most notable in the USFRA poll is that 42 percent of respondents said the U.S. is “on the wrong track in the way we produce food,” as opposed to 39 percent who said it’s “heading in the right direction.” Acknowledging that we’re on the wrong track is the first step (and a crucial one). Getting political decision-makers to follow suit is next, and much more difficult.
Sunday, September 25, 2011
NYTimes: Is Junk Food Really Cheaper?
By Mark Bittman, NYT 9/24/11
THE “fact” that junk food is cheaper than real food has become a reflexive part of how we explain why so many Americans are overweight, particularly those with lower incomes. I frequently read confident statements like, “when a bag of chips is cheaper than a head of broccoli ...” or “it’s more affordable to feed a family of four at McDonald’s than to cook a healthy meal for them at home.”
This is just plain wrong. In fact it isn’t cheaper to eat highly processed food: a typical order for a family of four — for example, two Big Macs, a cheeseburger, six chicken McNuggets, two medium and two small fries, and two medium and two small sodas — costs, at the McDonald’s a hundred steps from where I write, about $28. (Judicious ordering of “Happy Meals” can reduce that to about $23 — and you get a few apple slices in addition to the fries!)
In general, despite extensive government subsidies, hyperprocessed food remains more expensive than food cooked at home. You can serve a roasted chicken with vegetables along with a simple salad and milk for about $14, and feed four or even six people. If that’s too much money, substitute a meal of rice and canned beans with bacon, green peppers and onions; it’s easily enough for four people and costs about $9. (Omitting the bacon, using dried beans, which are also lower in sodium, or substituting carrots for the peppers reduces the price further, of course.)
Another argument runs that junk food is cheaper when measured by the calorie, and that this makes fast food essential for the poor because they need cheap calories. But given that half of the people in this country (and a higher percentage of poor people) consume too many calories rather than too few, measuring food’s value by the calorie makes as much sense as measuring a drink’s value by its alcohol content. (Why not drink 95 percent neutral grain spirit, the cheapest way to get drunk?)
Besides, that argument, even if we all needed to gain weight, is not always true. A meal of real food cooked at home can easily contain more calories, most of them of the “healthy” variety. (Olive oil accounts for many of the calories in the roast chicken meal, for example.)In comparing prices of real food and junk food, I used supermarket ingredients, not the pricier organic or local food that many people would consider ideal. But food choices are not black and white; the alternative to fast food is not necessarily organic food, any more than the alternative to soda is Bordeaux.
The alternative to soda is water, and the alternative to junk food is not grass-fed beef and greens from a trendy farmers’ market, but anything other than junk food: rice, grains, pasta, beans, fresh vegetables, canned vegetables, frozen vegetables, meat, fish, poultry, dairy products, bread, peanut butter, a thousand other things cooked at home — in almost every case a far superior alternative.
“Anything that you do that’s not fast food is terrific; cooking once a week is far better than not cooking at all,” says Marion Nestle, professor of food studies at New York University and author of “What to Eat.” “It’s the same argument as exercise: more is better than less and some is a lot better than none.”
THE fact is that most people can afford real food. Even the nearly 50 million Americans who are enrolled in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (formerly known as food stamps) receive about $5 per person per day, which is far from ideal but enough to survive. So we have to assume that money alone doesn’t guide decisions about what to eat. There are, of course, the so-called food deserts, places where it’s hard to find food: the Department of Agriculture says that more than two million Americans in low-income rural areas live 10 miles or more from a supermarket, and more than five million households without access to cars live more than a half mile from a supermarket.
Still, 93 percent of those with limited access to supermarkets do have access to vehicles, though it takes them 20 more minutes to travel to the store than the national average. And after a long day of work at one or even two jobs, 20 extra minutes — plus cooking time — must seem like an eternity.
Taking the long route to putting food on the table may not be easy, but for almost all Americans it remains a choice, and if you can drive to McDonald’s you can drive to Safeway. It’s cooking that’s the real challenge. (The real challenge is not “I’m too busy to cook.” In 2010 the average American, regardless of weekly earnings, watched no less than an hour and a half of television per day. The time is there.)
The core problem is that cooking is defined as work, and fast food is both a pleasure and a crutch. “People really are stressed out with all that they have to do, and they don’t want to cook,” says Julie Guthman, associate professor of community studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and author of the forthcoming “Weighing In: Obesity, Food Justice and the Limits of Capitalism.” “Their reaction is, ‘Let me enjoy what I want to eat, and stop telling me what to do.’ And it’s one of the few things that less well-off people have: they don’t have to cook.”
It’s not just about choice, however, and rational arguments go only so far, because money and access and time and skill are not the only considerations. The ubiquity, convenience and habit-forming appeal of hyperprocessed foods have largely drowned out the alternatives: there are five fast-food restaurants for every supermarket in the United States; in recent decades the adjusted for inflation price of fresh produce has increased by 40 percent while the price of soda and processed food has decreased by as much as 30 percent; and nearly inconceivable resources go into encouraging consumption in restaurants: fast-food companies spent $4.2 billion on marketing in 2009.
Furthermore, the engineering behind hyperprocessed food makes it virtually addictive. A 2009 study by the Scripps Research Institute indicates that overconsumption of fast food “triggers addiction-like neuroaddictive responses” in the brain, making it harder to trigger the release of dopamine. In other words the more fast food we eat, the more we need to give us pleasure; thus the report suggests that the same mechanisms underlie drug addiction and obesity.
This addiction to processed food is the result of decades of vision and hard work by the industry. For 50 years, says David A. Kessler, former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration and author of “The End of Overeating,” companies strove to create food that was “energy-dense, highly stimulating, and went down easy. They put it on every street corner and made it mobile, and they made it socially acceptable to eat anytime and anyplace. They created a food carnival, and that’s where we live. And if you’re used to self-stimulation every 15 minutes, well, you can’t run into the kitchen to satisfy that urge.”
Real cultural changes are needed to turn this around. Somehow, no-nonsense cooking and eating — roasting a chicken, making a grilled cheese sandwich, scrambling an egg, tossing a salad — must become popular again, and valued not just by hipsters in Brooklyn or locavores in Berkeley. The smart campaign is not to get McDonald’s to serve better food but to get people to see cooking as a joy rather than a burden, or at least as part of a normal life.
As with any addictive behavior, this one is most easily countered by educating children about the better way. Children, after all, are born without bad habits. And yet it’s adults who must begin to tear down the food carnival.
The question is how? Efforts are everywhere. The People’s Grocery in Oakland secures affordable groceries for low-income people. Zoning laws in Los Angeles restrict the number of fast-food restaurants in high-obesity neighborhoods. There’s the Healthy Food Financing Initiative, a successful Pennsylvania program to build fresh food outlets in underserved areas, now being expanded nationally. FoodCorps and Cooking Matters teach young people how to farm and cook.
As Malik Yakini, executive director of the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network, says, “We’ve seen minor successes, but the food movement is still at the infant stage, and we need a massive social shift to convince people to consider healthier options.”
HOW do you change a culture? The answers, not surprisingly, are complex. “Once I look at what I’m eating,” says Dr. Kessler, “and realize it’s not food, and I ask ‘what am I doing here?’ that’s the start. It’s not about whether I think it’s good for me, it’s about changing how I feel. And we change how people feel by changing the environment.”
Obviously, in an atmosphere where any regulation is immediately labeled “nanny statism,” changing “the environment” is difficult. But we’ve done this before, with tobacco. The 1998 tobacco settlement limited cigarette marketing and forced manufacturers to finance anti-smoking campaigns — a negotiated change that led to an environmental one that in turn led to a cultural one, after which kids said to their parents, “I wish you didn’t smoke.” Smoking had to be converted from a cool habit into one practiced by pariahs.
A similar victory in the food world is symbolized by the stories parents tell me of their kids booing as they drive by McDonald’s.
To make changes like this more widespread we need action both cultural and political. The cultural lies in celebrating real food; raising our children in homes that don’t program them for fast-produced, eaten-on-the-run, high-calorie, low-nutrition junk; giving them the gift of appreciating the pleasures of nourishing one another and enjoying that nourishment together.
Political action would mean agitating to limit the marketing of junk; forcing its makers to pay the true costs of production; recognizing that advertising for fast food is not the exercise of free speech but behavior manipulation of addictive substances; and making certain that real food is affordable and available to everyone. The political challenge is the more difficult one, but it cannot be ignored.
What’s easier is to cook at every opportunity, to demonstrate to family and neighbors that the real way is the better way. And even the more fun way: kind of like a carnival.
THE “fact” that junk food is cheaper than real food has become a reflexive part of how we explain why so many Americans are overweight, particularly those with lower incomes. I frequently read confident statements like, “when a bag of chips is cheaper than a head of broccoli ...” or “it’s more affordable to feed a family of four at McDonald’s than to cook a healthy meal for them at home.”
This is just plain wrong. In fact it isn’t cheaper to eat highly processed food: a typical order for a family of four — for example, two Big Macs, a cheeseburger, six chicken McNuggets, two medium and two small fries, and two medium and two small sodas — costs, at the McDonald’s a hundred steps from where I write, about $28. (Judicious ordering of “Happy Meals” can reduce that to about $23 — and you get a few apple slices in addition to the fries!)
In general, despite extensive government subsidies, hyperprocessed food remains more expensive than food cooked at home. You can serve a roasted chicken with vegetables along with a simple salad and milk for about $14, and feed four or even six people. If that’s too much money, substitute a meal of rice and canned beans with bacon, green peppers and onions; it’s easily enough for four people and costs about $9. (Omitting the bacon, using dried beans, which are also lower in sodium, or substituting carrots for the peppers reduces the price further, of course.)
Another argument runs that junk food is cheaper when measured by the calorie, and that this makes fast food essential for the poor because they need cheap calories. But given that half of the people in this country (and a higher percentage of poor people) consume too many calories rather than too few, measuring food’s value by the calorie makes as much sense as measuring a drink’s value by its alcohol content. (Why not drink 95 percent neutral grain spirit, the cheapest way to get drunk?)
Besides, that argument, even if we all needed to gain weight, is not always true. A meal of real food cooked at home can easily contain more calories, most of them of the “healthy” variety. (Olive oil accounts for many of the calories in the roast chicken meal, for example.)In comparing prices of real food and junk food, I used supermarket ingredients, not the pricier organic or local food that many people would consider ideal. But food choices are not black and white; the alternative to fast food is not necessarily organic food, any more than the alternative to soda is Bordeaux.
The alternative to soda is water, and the alternative to junk food is not grass-fed beef and greens from a trendy farmers’ market, but anything other than junk food: rice, grains, pasta, beans, fresh vegetables, canned vegetables, frozen vegetables, meat, fish, poultry, dairy products, bread, peanut butter, a thousand other things cooked at home — in almost every case a far superior alternative.
“Anything that you do that’s not fast food is terrific; cooking once a week is far better than not cooking at all,” says Marion Nestle, professor of food studies at New York University and author of “What to Eat.” “It’s the same argument as exercise: more is better than less and some is a lot better than none.”
THE fact is that most people can afford real food. Even the nearly 50 million Americans who are enrolled in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (formerly known as food stamps) receive about $5 per person per day, which is far from ideal but enough to survive. So we have to assume that money alone doesn’t guide decisions about what to eat. There are, of course, the so-called food deserts, places where it’s hard to find food: the Department of Agriculture says that more than two million Americans in low-income rural areas live 10 miles or more from a supermarket, and more than five million households without access to cars live more than a half mile from a supermarket.
Still, 93 percent of those with limited access to supermarkets do have access to vehicles, though it takes them 20 more minutes to travel to the store than the national average. And after a long day of work at one or even two jobs, 20 extra minutes — plus cooking time — must seem like an eternity.
Taking the long route to putting food on the table may not be easy, but for almost all Americans it remains a choice, and if you can drive to McDonald’s you can drive to Safeway. It’s cooking that’s the real challenge. (The real challenge is not “I’m too busy to cook.” In 2010 the average American, regardless of weekly earnings, watched no less than an hour and a half of television per day. The time is there.)
The core problem is that cooking is defined as work, and fast food is both a pleasure and a crutch. “People really are stressed out with all that they have to do, and they don’t want to cook,” says Julie Guthman, associate professor of community studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and author of the forthcoming “Weighing In: Obesity, Food Justice and the Limits of Capitalism.” “Their reaction is, ‘Let me enjoy what I want to eat, and stop telling me what to do.’ And it’s one of the few things that less well-off people have: they don’t have to cook.”
It’s not just about choice, however, and rational arguments go only so far, because money and access and time and skill are not the only considerations. The ubiquity, convenience and habit-forming appeal of hyperprocessed foods have largely drowned out the alternatives: there are five fast-food restaurants for every supermarket in the United States; in recent decades the adjusted for inflation price of fresh produce has increased by 40 percent while the price of soda and processed food has decreased by as much as 30 percent; and nearly inconceivable resources go into encouraging consumption in restaurants: fast-food companies spent $4.2 billion on marketing in 2009.
Furthermore, the engineering behind hyperprocessed food makes it virtually addictive. A 2009 study by the Scripps Research Institute indicates that overconsumption of fast food “triggers addiction-like neuroaddictive responses” in the brain, making it harder to trigger the release of dopamine. In other words the more fast food we eat, the more we need to give us pleasure; thus the report suggests that the same mechanisms underlie drug addiction and obesity.
This addiction to processed food is the result of decades of vision and hard work by the industry. For 50 years, says David A. Kessler, former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration and author of “The End of Overeating,” companies strove to create food that was “energy-dense, highly stimulating, and went down easy. They put it on every street corner and made it mobile, and they made it socially acceptable to eat anytime and anyplace. They created a food carnival, and that’s where we live. And if you’re used to self-stimulation every 15 minutes, well, you can’t run into the kitchen to satisfy that urge.”
Real cultural changes are needed to turn this around. Somehow, no-nonsense cooking and eating — roasting a chicken, making a grilled cheese sandwich, scrambling an egg, tossing a salad — must become popular again, and valued not just by hipsters in Brooklyn or locavores in Berkeley. The smart campaign is not to get McDonald’s to serve better food but to get people to see cooking as a joy rather than a burden, or at least as part of a normal life.
As with any addictive behavior, this one is most easily countered by educating children about the better way. Children, after all, are born without bad habits. And yet it’s adults who must begin to tear down the food carnival.
The question is how? Efforts are everywhere. The People’s Grocery in Oakland secures affordable groceries for low-income people. Zoning laws in Los Angeles restrict the number of fast-food restaurants in high-obesity neighborhoods. There’s the Healthy Food Financing Initiative, a successful Pennsylvania program to build fresh food outlets in underserved areas, now being expanded nationally. FoodCorps and Cooking Matters teach young people how to farm and cook.
As Malik Yakini, executive director of the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network, says, “We’ve seen minor successes, but the food movement is still at the infant stage, and we need a massive social shift to convince people to consider healthier options.”
HOW do you change a culture? The answers, not surprisingly, are complex. “Once I look at what I’m eating,” says Dr. Kessler, “and realize it’s not food, and I ask ‘what am I doing here?’ that’s the start. It’s not about whether I think it’s good for me, it’s about changing how I feel. And we change how people feel by changing the environment.”
Obviously, in an atmosphere where any regulation is immediately labeled “nanny statism,” changing “the environment” is difficult. But we’ve done this before, with tobacco. The 1998 tobacco settlement limited cigarette marketing and forced manufacturers to finance anti-smoking campaigns — a negotiated change that led to an environmental one that in turn led to a cultural one, after which kids said to their parents, “I wish you didn’t smoke.” Smoking had to be converted from a cool habit into one practiced by pariahs.
A similar victory in the food world is symbolized by the stories parents tell me of their kids booing as they drive by McDonald’s.
To make changes like this more widespread we need action both cultural and political. The cultural lies in celebrating real food; raising our children in homes that don’t program them for fast-produced, eaten-on-the-run, high-calorie, low-nutrition junk; giving them the gift of appreciating the pleasures of nourishing one another and enjoying that nourishment together.
Political action would mean agitating to limit the marketing of junk; forcing its makers to pay the true costs of production; recognizing that advertising for fast food is not the exercise of free speech but behavior manipulation of addictive substances; and making certain that real food is affordable and available to everyone. The political challenge is the more difficult one, but it cannot be ignored.
What’s easier is to cook at every opportunity, to demonstrate to family and neighbors that the real way is the better way. And even the more fun way: kind of like a carnival.
Thursday, September 22, 2011
The Food Movement: Its Power and Possibilities
Frances Moore Lappé | September 14, 2011
For years I’ve been asked, “Since you wrote Diet for a Small Planet in 1971, have things gotten better or worse?” Hoping I don’t sound glib, my response is always the same: “Both.”
As food growers, sellers and eaters, we’re moving in two directions at once.
The number of hungry people has soared to nearly 1 billion, despite strong global harvests. And for even more people, sustenance has become a health hazard—with the US diet implicated in four out of our top ten deadly diseases. Power over soil, seeds and food sales is ever more tightly held, and farmland in the global South is being snatched away from indigenous people by speculators set to profit on climbing food prices.
Just four companies control at least three-quarters of international grain trade; and in the United States, by 2000, just ten corporations—with boards totaling only 138 people—had come to account for half of US food and beverage sales. Conditions for American farmworkers remain so horrific that seven Florida growers have been convicted of slavery involving more than 1,000 workers. Life expectancy of US farmworkers is forty-nine years.
That’s one current. It’s antidemocratic and deadly.
There is, however, another current, which is democratizing power and aligning farming with nature’s genius. Many call it simply “the global food movement.” In the United States it’s building on the courage of truth tellers from Upton Sinclair to Rachel Carson, and worldwide it has been gaining energy and breadth for at least four decades.
Some Americans see the food movement as “nice” but peripheral—a middle-class preoccupation with farmers’ markets, community gardens and healthy school lunches. But no, I’ll argue here. It is at heart revolutionary, with some of the world’s poorest people in the lead, from Florida farmworkers to Indian villagers. It has the potential to transform not just the way we eat but the way we understand our world, including ourselves. And that vast power is just beginning to erupt.
The Work
In a farmworker camp in Ohio, a young mother sat on her bed. She was dying of cancer, but with no bitterness she asked me a simple question: “We provide people food—why don’t they respect our work?” That was 1984. She had no protection from pesticides, or even the right to safe drinking water in the field.Twenty-five years later, in Immokalee, Florida, I walked through a grungy, sweltering 300-foot trailer, home to eight tomato pickers, but what struck me most was a sense of possibility in the workers themselves.
They are among the 4,000 mainly Latino, Mayan Indian and Haitian members of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, formed in 1993—more than two decades after Cesar Chavez’s United Farm Workers’ victorious five-year grape strike and national boycott. In the 1990s, CIW’s struggle over five years, including a 230-mile walk and hunger strike, achieved the first industrywide pay increase in twenty years. Still, it only brought real wages back to pre-1980 levels. So in 2001, CIW launched its Campaign for Fair Food. Dogged organizing forced four huge fast-food companies—McDonald’s, Taco Bell, Burger King and Subway—to agree to pay a penny more per pound and adhere to a code of conduct protecting workers. Four large food-service providers, including Sodexo, were also brought on board. Beginning this fall, CIW will start implementing these changes at 90 percent of Florida tomato farms—improving the lives of 30,000 tomato pickers. Now the campaign is focused on supermarkets such as Trader Joe’s, Stop & Shop and Giant.
The Land
In Brazil, almost 400,000 farmworker families have not only found their voices but gained access to land, joining the roughly half-billion small farms worldwide that produce 70 percent of the world’s food.Elsewhere, calls for more equitable access to land in recent decades have generally gone nowhere—despite evidence that smallholders are typically more productive and better resource guardians than big operators.
So what happened in Brazil?
With the end of dictatorship in 1984 came the birth of arguably the largest social movement in the hemisphere: the Landless Workers Movement, known by its Portuguese acronym MST. Less than 4 percent of Brazil’s landowners control about half the land, often gained illegally. MST’s goal is land reform, and in 1988 Brazil’s new Constitution gave the movement legal grounding: Article 5 states that “property shall fulfill its social function,” and Article 184 affirms the government’s power to “expropriate…for purposes of agrarian reform, rural property” that fails to meet this requirement. Well-organized occupations of unused land, under the cover of night, had been MST’s early tactic; after 1988 the same approach helped compel the government to uphold the Constitution.
Because of the courage of these landless workers, a million people are building new lives on roughly 35 million acres, creating several thousand farming communities with schools serving 150,000 kids, along with hundreds of cooperative and other enterprises.
Nevertheless, MST co-founder João Pedro Stédile said early this year that the global financial crisis has led “international capitalists” to try to “protect their funds” by investing in Brazilian “land and energy projects”—driving renewed land concentration.
And in the United States? The largest 9 percent of farms produce more than 60 percent of output. But small farmers still control more than half our farmland, and the growing market for healthy fresh food has helped smallholders grow: their numbers went up by 18,467 between 2002 and 2007. To support them, last winter the Community Food Security Coalition held community “listening sessions,” attended by 700 people, to sharpen citizen goals for the 2012 farm bill.
The Seed
Just as dramatic is the struggle for the seed. More than 1,000 independent seed companies were swallowed up by multinationals in the past four decades, so today just three—Monsanto, DuPont and Syngenta—control about half the proprietary seed market worldwide.Fueling the consolidation were three Supreme Court rulings since 1980—including one in 2002, with an opinion written by former Monsanto attorney Clarence Thomas—making it possible to patent life forms, including seeds. And in 1992 the Food and Drug Administration released its policy on genetically modified organisms, claiming that “the agency is not aware of any information showing that [GMO] foods…differ from other foods in any meaningful or uniform way.”
The government’s green light fueled the rapid spread of GMOs and monopolies—so now most US corn and soybeans are GMO, with genes patented largely by one company: Monsanto. The FDA position helped make GMOs’ spread so invisible that most Americans still don’t believe they’ve ever eaten them—even though the grocery industry says they could be in 75 percent of processed food.
Even fewer Americans are aware that in 1999 attorney Steven Druker reported that in 40,000 pages of FDA files secured via a lawsuit, he found “memorandum after memorandum contain[ing] warnings about the unique hazards of genetically engineered food,” including the possibility that they could contain “unexpected toxins, carcinogens or allergens.”
Yet at the same time, public education campaigns have succeeded in confining almost 80 percent of GMO planting to just three countries: the United States, Brazil and Argentina. In more than two dozen countries and in the European Union they’ve helped pass mandatory GMO labeling. Even China requires it.
In Europe, the anti-GMO tipping point came in 1999. Jeffrey Smith, author of Seeds of Deception, expects that the same shift will happen here, as more Americans than ever actively oppose GMOs. This year the “non-GMO” label is the third-fastest-growing new health claim on food packaging. Smith is also encouraged that milk products produced with the genetically modified drug rBGH “have been kicked out of Wal-Mart, Starbucks, Yoplait, Dannon, and most American dairies.”
Around the world, millions are saying no to seed patenting as well. In homes and village seed banks, small farmers and gardeners are saving, sharing and protecting tens of thousands of seed varieties.
In the United States, the Seed Savers Exchange in Decorah, Iowa, estimates that since 1975 members have shared roughly a million samples of rare garden seeds.
In the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh—known as the pesticide capital of the world—a women-led village movement, the Deccan Development Society, puts seed-saving at the heart of its work. After the crushing failure of GMO cotton and ill health linked to pesticides, the movement has helped 125 villages convert to more nutritious, traditional crop mixes, feeding 50,000 people.
On a larger scale, Vandana Shiva’s organization, Navdanya, has helped to free 500,000 farmers from chemical dependency and to save indigenous seeds—the group’s learning and research center protects 3,000 varieties of rice, plus other crops.
Agri-Culture
In all these ways and more, the global food movement challenges a failing frame: one that defines successful agriculture and the solution to hunger as better technologies increasing yields of specific crops. This is typically called “industrial agriculture,” but a better description might be “productivist,” because it fixates on production, or “reductivist,” because it narrows our focus to a single element.
Its near obsession with the yield of a monoculture is anti-ecological. It not only pollutes, diminishes and disrupts nature; it misses ecology’s first lesson: relationships. Productivism isolates agriculture from its relational context—from its culture.In all these ways and more, the global food movement challenges a failing frame: one that defines successful agriculture and the solution to hunger as better technologies increasing yields of specific crops. This is typically called “industrial agriculture,” but a better description might be “productivist,” because it fixates on production, or “reductivist,” because it narrows our focus to a single element.
In 2008 a singular report helped crack the productivist frame. This report, “The International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development” (known simply as IAASTD), explained that solutions to poverty, hunger and the climate crisis require agriculture that promotes producers’ livelihoods, knowledge, resiliency, health and equitable gender relations, while enriching the natural environment and helping to balance the carbon cycle. Painstakingly developed over four years by 400 experts, the report has gained the support of more than fifty-nine governments, and even productivist strongholds like the World Bank.
IAASTD furthers an emerging understanding that agriculture can serve life only if it is regarded as a culture of healthy relationships, both in the field—among soil organisms, insects, animals, plants, water, sun—and in the human communities it supports: a vision lived by many indigenous people and captured in 1981 by Wendell Berry in The Gift of Good Land and twenty years later by Jules Pretty in Agri-Culture: Reconnecting People, Land and Nature.
Across cultures, the global food movement is furthering agri-culture by uniting diverse actors and fostering democratic relationships. A leader is La Via Campesina, founded in 1993 when small farmers and rural laborers gathered from four continents in Belgium. Its goal is “food sovereignty”—a term carefully chosen to situate “those who produce, distribute, and consume food at the heart of food systems and policies, rather than the demands of markets and corporations,” says the declaration closing the group’s 2007 global gathering in Nyeleni, Mali. La Via Campesina connects 150 local and national organizations, and 200 million small farmers, in seventy countries. In 2009 it was included among civil society players on the UN Committee on Food Security.
And in the urban North, how is the food movement enhancing agri-culture?
For sure, more and more Americans are getting their hands in the dirt—motivated increasingly by a desire to cut “food miles” and greenhouse gases. Roughly a third of American households (41 million) garden, up 14 percent in 2009 alone. As neighbors join neighbors, community gardens are blooming. From only a handful in 1970, there are 18,000 community gardens today. In Britain community gardens are in such demand—with 100,000 Brits on waiting lists for a plot—that the mayor of London promised 2,012 new ones by 2012.
And in 2009 the Slow Food movement, with 100,000 members in 153 countries, created 300 “eat-ins”—shared meals in public space—to launch its US “Time for Lunch” campaign, with a goal of delicious healthy school meals for the 31 million kids eating them every day.
An Economics of Agri-Culture
Agri-culture’s unity of healthy farming ecology and social ecology transforms the market itself: from the anonymous, amoral selling and buying within a market structured to concentrate power to a market shaped by shared human values structured to ensure fairness and co-responsibility.In 1965 British Oxfam created the first fair-trade organization, called Helping-by-Selling, in response to calls from poor countries for “trade, not aid.” Today more than 800 products are fair-trade certified, directly benefiting 6 million people. Last year the US fair-trade market passed $1.5 billion.
The Real Food Challenge, launched by young people in 2007, is working to jump-start a US swing to “real food”—defined as that respecting “human dignity and health, animal welfare, social justice and environmental sustainability.” Student teams are mobilizing to persuade campus decision-makers to commit themselves to making a minimum of 20 percent of their college or university food “real” by 2020. With more than 350 schools already on board, the Challenge founders have set an ambitious goal: to shift $1 billion to real food purchases in ten years.
Farmers’ markets, the direct exchange between farmer and eater, are also creating a fairer agri-culture. So rare before the mid-’90s that the USDA didn’t even bother to track them, more than 7,000 farmers’ markets dot the country in 2011, a more than fourfold increase in seventeen years.
Other democratic economic models are also gaining ground:
In 1985 an irrepressible Massachusetts farmer named Robyn Van En helped create the first US Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program, in which eaters are no longer just purchasers but partners, helping to shoulder the farmer’s risk by prepaying for a share of the harvest before the planting season. On weekends, “my” CSA—Waltham Fields, near Boston—is alive as families pick and chat, and kids learn how to spot the yummiest strawberries. Now there are 2,500 CSAs across the country, while more than 12,500 farms informally use this prepay, partnership approach.
The cooperative model is spreading too, replacing one dollar, one vote—the corporate form—with one person, one vote. In the 1970s, US food cooperatives took off. Today there are 160 nationwide, and co-op veteran Annie Hoy in Ashland, Oregon, sees a new upsurge. Thirty-nine have just opened, or are “on their way right now,” she told me.
Funky storefronts of the 1970s, famous for limp organic carrots, have morphed into mouthwatering community hubs. Beginning as a food-buying club of fifteen families in 1953, Seattle’s PCC Natural Markets has nine stores and almost 46,000 members, making it the largest US food cooperative. Its sales more than doubled in a decade.
Producer co-ops have also made huge gains. In 1988 a handful of worried farmers, watching profits flow to middlemen, not to them, launched the Organic Valley Family of Farms. Today Organic Valley’s more than 1,600 farmer owners span thirty-two states, generating sales of more than $500 million in 2008.
The Rules
The global food system reflects societies’ rules—often uncodified—that determine who eats and how our earth fares. In the United States, rules increasingly reflect our nation’s slide into “privately held government.” But in rule-setting, too, energy is hardly unidirectional.In 1999, on the streets of Seattle, 65,000 environmentalists, labor and other activists made history, blunting the antidemocratic agenda of the World Trade Organization. In 2008 more citizens than ever engaged in shaping the farm bill, resulting in rules encouraging organic production. The movement has also established 100 “food policy councils”—new local-to-state, multi-stakeholder coordinating bodies. And this year, eighty-three plaintiffs joined the Public Patent Foundation in suing Monsanto, challenging its GMO seeds’ “usefulness” (required for patenting) as well as the company’s right to patent seeds to begin with.
Even small changes in the rules can create huge possibilities. Consider, for example, the ripples from a 2009 Brazilian law requiring at least 30 percent of school meals to consist of food from local family farms.
Rules governing rights are the human community’s foundational guarantees to one another—and the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights gave access to food that status. Since then, nearly two dozen nations have planted the right to food in their constitutions. If you wonder whether it matters, note that when Brazil undertook a multifaceted “zero hunger” campaign, framing food as a right, the country slashed its infant death rate by about a third in seven years.
Food Power: Only Connect
This rising global food movement taps universal human sensibilities—expressed in Hindu farmers in India saving seeds, Muslim farmers in Niger turning back the desert and Christian farmers in the United States practicing biblically inspired Creation Care. In these movements lies the revolutionary power of the food movement: its capacity to upend a life-destroying belief system that has brought us power-concentrating corporatism.Corporatism, after all, depends on our belief in the fairy tale that market “magic” (Ronald Reagan’s unforgettable term) works on its own without us.
Food can break that spell. For the food movement’s power is that it can shift our sense of self: from passive, disconnected consumers in a magical market to active, richly connected co-producers in societies we are creating—as share owners in a CSA farm or purchasers of fair-trade products or actors in public life shaping the next farm bill.
The food movement’s power is connection itself. Corporatism distances us from one another, from the earth—and even from our own bodies, tricking them to crave that which destroys them—while the food movement celebrates our reconnection. Years ago in Madison, Wisconsin, CSA farmer Barb Perkins told me about her most rewarding moments: “Like in town yesterday,” she said, “I saw this little kid, wide-eyed, grab his mom’s arm and point at me. ‘Mommy,’ he said. ‘Look. There’s our farmer!’”
At its best, this movement encourages us to “think like an ecosystem,” enabling us to see a place for ourselves connected to all others, for in ecological systems “there are no parts, only participants,” German physicist Hans Peter Duerr reminds us. With an “eco-mind” we can see through the productivist fixation that inexorably concentrates power, generating scarcity for some, no matter how much we produce. We’re freed from the premise of lack and the fear it feeds. Aligning food and farming with nature’s genius, we realize there’s more than enough for all.
As the food movement stirs, as well as meets, deep human needs for connection, power and fairness, let’s shed any notion that it’s simply “nice” and seize its true potential to break the spell of our disempowerment.
Editor's Note: Frances Moore Lappé's essay below kicks off our forum on the food movement. Raj Patel [1], Vandana Shiva [2], Eric Schlosser [3], and Michael Pollan [4] have contributed replies. Contributors Reply:
Nation
Raj Patel, “Why Hunger Is Still With Us [1]”
Vandana Shiva, “Resisting the Corporate Theft of Seeds [2]”
Eric Schlosser, “It's Not Just About Food [3]”
Michael Pollan, “How Change Is Going to Come in the Food System [3]”
Raj Patel, “Why Hunger Is Still With Us [1]”
Vandana Shiva, “Resisting the Corporate Theft of Seeds [2]”
Eric Schlosser, “It's Not Just About Food [3]”
Michael Pollan, “How Change Is Going to Come in the Food System [3]”
Agriculture and Smarter Food Systems
Source: National Academy of Engineering
From The Bridge article:
"Agriculture 2.0," which implies decisive shifts in the ways and means of agricultural production, is becoming a term of art ... Because venture capital tends to flourish in environments that are experiencing market or business model disruptions, such investments should be watched closely.
The present article focuses predominantly on two related areas (see Figure 1) in which "smarter" systems enabled by physical-digital integration can have a positive and global impact: (1) track-and-trace technologies to support food safety and ultimately optimize food supply chains; and (2) increasing farm multifactor productivity by improving water logistics and application, optimizing machine/fleet maintenance, and improving farm operations/processes. Multifactor productivity includes agricultural business optimization as a result of the integration of these approaches with additional downstream business information.
[The Bridge, Fall 2011, 41(3), pp. 30-38]
+ View full article in HTML
+ Download full issue of The Bridge (PDF; 2.88 MB)
From The Bridge article:
"Agriculture 2.0," which implies decisive shifts in the ways and means of agricultural production, is becoming a term of art ... Because venture capital tends to flourish in environments that are experiencing market or business model disruptions, such investments should be watched closely.
The present article focuses predominantly on two related areas (see Figure 1) in which "smarter" systems enabled by physical-digital integration can have a positive and global impact: (1) track-and-trace technologies to support food safety and ultimately optimize food supply chains; and (2) increasing farm multifactor productivity by improving water logistics and application, optimizing machine/fleet maintenance, and improving farm operations/processes. Multifactor productivity includes agricultural business optimization as a result of the integration of these approaches with additional downstream business information.
[The Bridge, Fall 2011, 41(3), pp. 30-38]
+ View full article in HTML
+ Download full issue of The Bridge (PDF; 2.88 MB)
Tuesday, September 20, 2011
The farm bill course at NYU
Marion Nestle: “I’m teaching a graduate course on the farm bill at New York University this semester. The class has about 45 students from diverse fields—food studies, nutrition, public health, public policy, environmental studies, law—all closely related to the subjects under discussion.
Discussions, to say the least, have been lively.
I’ve had many requests for the course syllabus, which describes the goals and content, readings, assignments, and resources. It is posted along with the syllabi from other courses I’ve taught recently on my NYU faculty website. These are freely available for downloading.
Most of the readings are available online and you can find them easily if you search for them by title.”
Discussions, to say the least, have been lively.
I’ve had many requests for the course syllabus, which describes the goals and content, readings, assignments, and resources. It is posted along with the syllabi from other courses I’ve taught recently on my NYU faculty website. These are freely available for downloading.
Most of the readings are available online and you can find them easily if you search for them by title.”
Thursday, September 15, 2011
First Lady Michelle Obama Announces "Breakthrough" Health and Wellness Commitment in the Restaurant Industry
The White House
Office of the First Lady
For Immediate Release
September 15, 2011
World’s Largest Full-Service Restaurant Company – Darden Restaurants – to change both kids’ and full menus
HYATTSVILLE, MD – First Lady Michelle Obama joined Darden Restaurants and Partnership for a Healthier America today to announce a “breakthrough” health and wellness commitment in the restaurant industry. Darden, whose brands include Red Lobster, Olive Garden, LongHorn Steakhouse and Bahama Breeze, is the world’s largest full service restaurant company and owns and operates 1,900 restaurants in 49 states, serving over 400 million meals per year.
Darden is committing to reduce its calorie and sodium footprints, and to provide greater choice and variety to families through changes to its kids’ menus. Across the entire Darden portfolio of brands, the company is working toward a 10 percent reduction of calories and sodium over five years and a 20 percent reduction in calories and sodium over 10 years. On kids’ menus, fruits or vegetables will become the default side option and 1-percent milk will be the default beverage choice with free refills. Changes to the kids’ menus are starting now and will be fully implemented by next July.
“I’m here today because this is a breakthrough moment in the restaurant industry,” said First Lady Michelle Obama. “Darden is doing what no restaurant company has done before - they’re not just making their kids menus healthier so that parents have more choices and more control, they’re committing to make changes across the full menu at every single one of their restaurants. Darden is working to make the healthy choice the easy choice, and they’re making it the delicious and fun choice too. I’m confident that if companies like Darden continue to be creative and innovative and keep our kids’ best interests at heart then we will solve the challenge of childhood obesity and give all our kids the healthy futures they deserve.”
One of every two dollars spent on food is spent in restaurants, and over one-third of calories consumed in America are eaten at restaurants. The Childhood Obesity Task Force Report specifically calls on restaurants to, “consider their portion sizes, improve children’s menus, and make healthy options the default choice whenever possible.” Last September, the First Lady spoke to the National Restaurant Association, encouraging restaurants to rethink what they serve to kids and families. Since then, there has been positive movement in the industry with commitments from various restaurant leaders to provide healthier menu options.
Partnership for a Healthier America secured the following commitments and will be working with Darden to evaluate and monitor their progress with these efforts.
Kids’ Menus – changes starting now and to be fully implemented by July 2012
· Guarantee a fruit or vegetable will be the default side for every kids’ menu item at those restaurants offering a default side on the children’s menu: Bahama Breeze, LongHorn Steakhouse and Red Lobster.
· 1% milk will be the default beverage, provided automatically if no alternate beverage is requested. Milk will be prominently promoted on the menu and made available with free refills.
· Food illustrations on the menu will promote the healthy choices for meals and drinks.
· Healthier menu options will be more prominently displayed when possible.
· Carbonated beverages will not be displayed on children’s menus.
· Improve the nutritional content of one or more children’s menu items to provide equal or less than 600 calories, 30% of total calories from fat, 10% of total calories from saturated fat and 600 mg of sodium.
Calories/Sodium Footprint Reduction – changes to be implemented by 2016 and 2021
· By 2016, reduce calories by 10% and over a ten-year period by 20%.
· By 2016, reduce sodium by 10% and over a ten-year period by 20%
Office of the First Lady
For Immediate Release
September 15, 2011
World’s Largest Full-Service Restaurant Company – Darden Restaurants – to change both kids’ and full menus
HYATTSVILLE, MD – First Lady Michelle Obama joined Darden Restaurants and Partnership for a Healthier America today to announce a “breakthrough” health and wellness commitment in the restaurant industry. Darden, whose brands include Red Lobster, Olive Garden, LongHorn Steakhouse and Bahama Breeze, is the world’s largest full service restaurant company and owns and operates 1,900 restaurants in 49 states, serving over 400 million meals per year.
Darden is committing to reduce its calorie and sodium footprints, and to provide greater choice and variety to families through changes to its kids’ menus. Across the entire Darden portfolio of brands, the company is working toward a 10 percent reduction of calories and sodium over five years and a 20 percent reduction in calories and sodium over 10 years. On kids’ menus, fruits or vegetables will become the default side option and 1-percent milk will be the default beverage choice with free refills. Changes to the kids’ menus are starting now and will be fully implemented by next July.
“I’m here today because this is a breakthrough moment in the restaurant industry,” said First Lady Michelle Obama. “Darden is doing what no restaurant company has done before - they’re not just making their kids menus healthier so that parents have more choices and more control, they’re committing to make changes across the full menu at every single one of their restaurants. Darden is working to make the healthy choice the easy choice, and they’re making it the delicious and fun choice too. I’m confident that if companies like Darden continue to be creative and innovative and keep our kids’ best interests at heart then we will solve the challenge of childhood obesity and give all our kids the healthy futures they deserve.”
One of every two dollars spent on food is spent in restaurants, and over one-third of calories consumed in America are eaten at restaurants. The Childhood Obesity Task Force Report specifically calls on restaurants to, “consider their portion sizes, improve children’s menus, and make healthy options the default choice whenever possible.” Last September, the First Lady spoke to the National Restaurant Association, encouraging restaurants to rethink what they serve to kids and families. Since then, there has been positive movement in the industry with commitments from various restaurant leaders to provide healthier menu options.
Partnership for a Healthier America secured the following commitments and will be working with Darden to evaluate and monitor their progress with these efforts.
Kids’ Menus – changes starting now and to be fully implemented by July 2012
· Guarantee a fruit or vegetable will be the default side for every kids’ menu item at those restaurants offering a default side on the children’s menu: Bahama Breeze, LongHorn Steakhouse and Red Lobster.
· 1% milk will be the default beverage, provided automatically if no alternate beverage is requested. Milk will be prominently promoted on the menu and made available with free refills.
· Food illustrations on the menu will promote the healthy choices for meals and drinks.
· Healthier menu options will be more prominently displayed when possible.
· Carbonated beverages will not be displayed on children’s menus.
· Improve the nutritional content of one or more children’s menu items to provide equal or less than 600 calories, 30% of total calories from fat, 10% of total calories from saturated fat and 600 mg of sodium.
Calories/Sodium Footprint Reduction – changes to be implemented by 2016 and 2021
· By 2016, reduce calories by 10% and over a ten-year period by 20%.
· By 2016, reduce sodium by 10% and over a ten-year period by 20%
Tuesday, September 13, 2011
Energy and Commerce Members Express Concern Over IWG Food Marketing Principles
September 12, 2011
WASHINGTON, DC – Republican Members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee sent a letter today to key administration officials involved in the Interagency Working Group on Food Marketed to Children (IWG). Congress established the IWG in 2009, instructing the panel to conduct a study and provide policy recommendations on food marketing standards. To date, the IWG has still not provided Congress with the requested report and instead has issued its own set of proposed industry principles. The lawmakers are concerned the IWG’s overreaching recommendations would harm the economy and achieve little in the fight against childhood obesity.
Signing the letter were House Energy and Commerce Chairman Fred Upton (R-MI), Health Subcommittee Chairman Joseph Pitts (R-PA), Commerce, Manufacturing, and Trade Subcommittee Chairman Mary Bono Mack (R-CA), Environment and the Economy Subcommittee Chairman John Shimkus (R-IL), Lee Terry (R-NE), Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), Michael Burgess (R-TX), Mike Pompeo (R-KS), Pete Olson (R-TX), David McKinley (R-WV), Brett Guthrie (R-KY), Gregg Harper (R-MS), Leonard Lance (R-NJ), Phil Gingrey (R-GA), Bill Cassidy (R-LA), Bob Latta (R-OH), Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), Brian Bilbray (R-CA), Charles Bass (R-NH), Morgan Griffith (R-VA), Tim Murphy (R-PA), and Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA).
“The Nutrition Principles, having been produced without the benefit of the study that was to inform IWG’s recommendations, are little better than a shot in the dark. The IWG admits that if they were fully implemented as proposed, ‘a large percentage of food products currently in the marketplace’ would not comply,” wrote the members.
Members also expressed frustration over the IWG’s failure to present scientific evidence to justify its proposed regulatory standards.
“Significantly, the IWG offers no scientific support for the notion that restricting advertising will actually help reduce childhood obesity. In its most recent study, the Institute of Medicine found that ‘current evidence is not sufficient’ to demonstrate a causal relationship between television advertising and obesity. Other nations have tried food advertising bans in recent years without documented success. What has been documented from experiments elsewhere is an increase in prices for foods that are not allowed to be advertised. “
The letter instructs the IWG to withdraw its current recommendations and conduct a study as originally instructed.
“Under the circumstances, we believe that the IWG should withdraw the current proposal and start afresh. Conducting the study Congress asked for should be the first step in the process, not an afterthought or post hoc rationalization. The IWG should base its recommendations to Congress on sound science, and should explicitly evaluate the benefits and cost of different approaches Congress could take. The IWG should scrupulously avoid making recommendations in the form of a black and white quasi-regulation (like the proposed Nutrition Principles) that others can use to bludgeon companies into compliance.”
A full copy of the letter can be found here.
WASHINGTON, DC – Republican Members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee sent a letter today to key administration officials involved in the Interagency Working Group on Food Marketed to Children (IWG). Congress established the IWG in 2009, instructing the panel to conduct a study and provide policy recommendations on food marketing standards. To date, the IWG has still not provided Congress with the requested report and instead has issued its own set of proposed industry principles. The lawmakers are concerned the IWG’s overreaching recommendations would harm the economy and achieve little in the fight against childhood obesity.
Signing the letter were House Energy and Commerce Chairman Fred Upton (R-MI), Health Subcommittee Chairman Joseph Pitts (R-PA), Commerce, Manufacturing, and Trade Subcommittee Chairman Mary Bono Mack (R-CA), Environment and the Economy Subcommittee Chairman John Shimkus (R-IL), Lee Terry (R-NE), Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), Michael Burgess (R-TX), Mike Pompeo (R-KS), Pete Olson (R-TX), David McKinley (R-WV), Brett Guthrie (R-KY), Gregg Harper (R-MS), Leonard Lance (R-NJ), Phil Gingrey (R-GA), Bill Cassidy (R-LA), Bob Latta (R-OH), Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), Brian Bilbray (R-CA), Charles Bass (R-NH), Morgan Griffith (R-VA), Tim Murphy (R-PA), and Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA).
“The Nutrition Principles, having been produced without the benefit of the study that was to inform IWG’s recommendations, are little better than a shot in the dark. The IWG admits that if they were fully implemented as proposed, ‘a large percentage of food products currently in the marketplace’ would not comply,” wrote the members.
Members also expressed frustration over the IWG’s failure to present scientific evidence to justify its proposed regulatory standards.
“Significantly, the IWG offers no scientific support for the notion that restricting advertising will actually help reduce childhood obesity. In its most recent study, the Institute of Medicine found that ‘current evidence is not sufficient’ to demonstrate a causal relationship between television advertising and obesity. Other nations have tried food advertising bans in recent years without documented success. What has been documented from experiments elsewhere is an increase in prices for foods that are not allowed to be advertised. “
The letter instructs the IWG to withdraw its current recommendations and conduct a study as originally instructed.
“Under the circumstances, we believe that the IWG should withdraw the current proposal and start afresh. Conducting the study Congress asked for should be the first step in the process, not an afterthought or post hoc rationalization. The IWG should base its recommendations to Congress on sound science, and should explicitly evaluate the benefits and cost of different approaches Congress could take. The IWG should scrupulously avoid making recommendations in the form of a black and white quasi-regulation (like the proposed Nutrition Principles) that others can use to bludgeon companies into compliance.”
A full copy of the letter can be found here.
New nutrition facts label
FDA cooking up helpful new nutrition facts label
Updated 9/5/2011 11:22 AM, The Associated Press
LOS ANGELES – Uncle Sam wants you to know more about what you're eating.
The Food and Drug Administration wants to revise the nutrition facts label — that breakdown of fats, salts, sugars and nutrients on packaging — to give consumers more useful information and help fight the national obesity epidemic.
A proposal is in the works to change several parts of the label, including more accurate serving sizes, a greater emphasis on calories and a diminished role in the daily percent values for substances like fat, sodium and carbohydrates.
It's the latest attempt to improve the way Americans view food and make choices about what they eat, and comes in the wake of major advances in nutrition regulations by the Obama administration.
Calorie counts are popping up on menus of chain restaurants across the country and the longstanding food pyramid was toppled this year by the U.S. government in favor of a plate that gives a picture of what a healthy daily diet looks like.
The struggle to redesign the labels on every box, can and carton has been in the works since 2003, and some of the changes could be proposed as soon as this year.FDA Deputy Commissioner Michael Taylor cautions not to expect a grand overhaul, but the revamped label does mark a shift to create a more useful nutritional snapshot of foods millions of Americans consume every day.
"There's no question obesity is a central public health concern that the nutrition facts panel can play a role in. It's obviously not a magic wand but it can be an informative tool," said Taylor.
For two decades, the black and white label has offered a glance of nutritional information about what's inside each package, including calories and grams of fats, cholesterol, protein and carbohydrates. Critics have complained it's confusing and doesn't offer a simpler way to make a choice about whether it's good for them — a judgment the industry wants to leave to consumers.
The proposed label is likely to produce several changes, said Taylor.
For starters, portion sizes should better reflect reality. The 2.5 servings listed on a 20-ounce soda bottle are typically slurped up by an individual in one sitting rather than split between a couple and their child. The same goes for a can of soup, where one serving is often listed as two-fifths of a can.
The FDA is also likely to find a way to emphasize calories, which many people rely on for weight control. Other items likely to disappear or change because they haven't proven useful include calories from fat and the daily percent value numbers that show how much what an average diet should include.
Still, some wish the revisions would go further to list information about the amount of preservatives in a food and the degree of processing it has undergone. Health activists say such changes could help trim waistlines in America.
The food industry wouldn't like to see many major changes. The current label is easily recognizable and adaptable to food packages of different sizes because it's simple, said Regina Hildwine, director for science, policy, labeling and standards at the Grocery Manufacturers Association.
Hildwine says her Washington-based group, which represents 300 top food, beverage companies — including Nestle, General Mills Inc., and Coca-Cola Co. — has provided extensive feedback to the FDA in the run-up to their proposed rule.
"I personally talk with FDA on a regular basis to share views and get information and sometimes they call me," said Hildwine.
Advocates believe that the government and industry are too cozy, and that food companies are reluctant to overhaul food labels for fear of their profits being hurt.
"It's against the industry's interest to help the consumer make better choices because then they'll sell less food," said Kelly Brownell, director of Yale University's Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity. "If the population is going to lose weight, it's going to eat less food, so that means less business for them."
There's no shortage of ideas on how to improve the label. A recent contest by theUniversity of California, Berkeley and Good Magazine yielded 60 colorful new designs.
A familiar theme popped up: red, yellow and green colors of a traffic light to indicate whether a food is good or bad. Another offered thumbs up and thumbs down on nutrients, depending on how much.
Manufacturers don't think a stoplight system would work because most foods have a mix of nutrients and diets are not the same for everyone, Hildwine said.
"A color-coded scheme would not be as helpful to consumers as a fact-based approach," she said.
The winning design was created by Renee Walker, whose label is topped by a large blocks of color above the nutrient listing, with each block representing an ingredient. For example, a jar of peanut butter would typically have a big box for peanuts, a smaller box for sugar, and other blocks for other ingredients.
The FDA has long avoided putting qualitative judgments about food on labels in favor of a simple listing of macronutrients, said contest judge and Center for Science in the Public Interest executive director Michael Jacobson.
Before the FDA first introduced the nutrition facts label in 1992, choosy Americans puzzled over a tiny printed listing of ingredients on packages to help determine what to feed their families.
As a result, Americans often relied on gut feelings to choose their diets at a time when the obesity epidemic was taking root.
Dr. David Kessler served as FDA commissioner during what he called a "battle royale" over the first label.
"Every change is a battle with the food industry," said Kessler. "The food label that we implemented — did it harm the food industry in any way? No. In fact, I'm sure they profited from it."
Kessler, now a University of California, San Francisco professor and author, says the label is due for an update.
Like many experts, he'd like to see the new label address how much ingredients are processed.
A pie-chart could, for example, show how much of a jar of tomato sauce is from actual tomatoes, and how much is sugar, fats, sodium, water and whatever else may be in it.
Not that all food processing is bad. Skim milk and lean meat have been skimmed and trimmed of fat. Frozen vegetables are typically captured at peak ripeness without introduction of preservatives or sodium.
But many highly processed foods are stuffed with unpronounceable and nutritionally questionable substances. Add fat, sugar and salt, as processed foods so often do, Kessler said, and you have the perfect recipe for an American-style obesity epidemic.
"Twenty years ago, you would have maybe 20 to 30 chews per bite of food," said Kessler. "Today, food is so highly processed and so stimulating it goes down in a wash (of saliva), like we're eating adult baby food."
Updated 9/5/2011 11:22 AM, The Associated Press
LOS ANGELES – Uncle Sam wants you to know more about what you're eating.
The Food and Drug Administration wants to revise the nutrition facts label — that breakdown of fats, salts, sugars and nutrients on packaging — to give consumers more useful information and help fight the national obesity epidemic.
A proposal is in the works to change several parts of the label, including more accurate serving sizes, a greater emphasis on calories and a diminished role in the daily percent values for substances like fat, sodium and carbohydrates.
It's the latest attempt to improve the way Americans view food and make choices about what they eat, and comes in the wake of major advances in nutrition regulations by the Obama administration.
Calorie counts are popping up on menus of chain restaurants across the country and the longstanding food pyramid was toppled this year by the U.S. government in favor of a plate that gives a picture of what a healthy daily diet looks like.
The struggle to redesign the labels on every box, can and carton has been in the works since 2003, and some of the changes could be proposed as soon as this year.FDA Deputy Commissioner Michael Taylor cautions not to expect a grand overhaul, but the revamped label does mark a shift to create a more useful nutritional snapshot of foods millions of Americans consume every day.
"There's no question obesity is a central public health concern that the nutrition facts panel can play a role in. It's obviously not a magic wand but it can be an informative tool," said Taylor.
For two decades, the black and white label has offered a glance of nutritional information about what's inside each package, including calories and grams of fats, cholesterol, protein and carbohydrates. Critics have complained it's confusing and doesn't offer a simpler way to make a choice about whether it's good for them — a judgment the industry wants to leave to consumers.
The proposed label is likely to produce several changes, said Taylor.
For starters, portion sizes should better reflect reality. The 2.5 servings listed on a 20-ounce soda bottle are typically slurped up by an individual in one sitting rather than split between a couple and their child. The same goes for a can of soup, where one serving is often listed as two-fifths of a can.
The FDA is also likely to find a way to emphasize calories, which many people rely on for weight control. Other items likely to disappear or change because they haven't proven useful include calories from fat and the daily percent value numbers that show how much what an average diet should include.
Still, some wish the revisions would go further to list information about the amount of preservatives in a food and the degree of processing it has undergone. Health activists say such changes could help trim waistlines in America.
The food industry wouldn't like to see many major changes. The current label is easily recognizable and adaptable to food packages of different sizes because it's simple, said Regina Hildwine, director for science, policy, labeling and standards at the Grocery Manufacturers Association.
Hildwine says her Washington-based group, which represents 300 top food, beverage companies — including Nestle, General Mills Inc., and Coca-Cola Co. — has provided extensive feedback to the FDA in the run-up to their proposed rule.
"I personally talk with FDA on a regular basis to share views and get information and sometimes they call me," said Hildwine.
Advocates believe that the government and industry are too cozy, and that food companies are reluctant to overhaul food labels for fear of their profits being hurt.
"It's against the industry's interest to help the consumer make better choices because then they'll sell less food," said Kelly Brownell, director of Yale University's Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity. "If the population is going to lose weight, it's going to eat less food, so that means less business for them."
There's no shortage of ideas on how to improve the label. A recent contest by theUniversity of California, Berkeley and Good Magazine yielded 60 colorful new designs.
A familiar theme popped up: red, yellow and green colors of a traffic light to indicate whether a food is good or bad. Another offered thumbs up and thumbs down on nutrients, depending on how much.
Manufacturers don't think a stoplight system would work because most foods have a mix of nutrients and diets are not the same for everyone, Hildwine said.
"A color-coded scheme would not be as helpful to consumers as a fact-based approach," she said.
The winning design was created by Renee Walker, whose label is topped by a large blocks of color above the nutrient listing, with each block representing an ingredient. For example, a jar of peanut butter would typically have a big box for peanuts, a smaller box for sugar, and other blocks for other ingredients.
The FDA has long avoided putting qualitative judgments about food on labels in favor of a simple listing of macronutrients, said contest judge and Center for Science in the Public Interest executive director Michael Jacobson.
Before the FDA first introduced the nutrition facts label in 1992, choosy Americans puzzled over a tiny printed listing of ingredients on packages to help determine what to feed their families.
As a result, Americans often relied on gut feelings to choose their diets at a time when the obesity epidemic was taking root.
Dr. David Kessler served as FDA commissioner during what he called a "battle royale" over the first label.
"Every change is a battle with the food industry," said Kessler. "The food label that we implemented — did it harm the food industry in any way? No. In fact, I'm sure they profited from it."
Kessler, now a University of California, San Francisco professor and author, says the label is due for an update.
Like many experts, he'd like to see the new label address how much ingredients are processed.
A pie-chart could, for example, show how much of a jar of tomato sauce is from actual tomatoes, and how much is sugar, fats, sodium, water and whatever else may be in it.
Not that all food processing is bad. Skim milk and lean meat have been skimmed and trimmed of fat. Frozen vegetables are typically captured at peak ripeness without introduction of preservatives or sodium.
But many highly processed foods are stuffed with unpronounceable and nutritionally questionable substances. Add fat, sugar and salt, as processed foods so often do, Kessler said, and you have the perfect recipe for an American-style obesity epidemic.
"Twenty years ago, you would have maybe 20 to 30 chews per bite of food," said Kessler. "Today, food is so highly processed and so stimulating it goes down in a wash (of saliva), like we're eating adult baby food."
Wednesday, September 7, 2011
Legal Scholars Fight the Food Industry's Marketing to Children
By Marion Nestle
On Tuesday morning, three dozen legal scholars weighed in on the food industry's fight against proposed nutrition standards
I just received a message from Samantha Graff, the director of legal research at Public Health Law & Policy, an advocacy group in Oakland, California.
Tuesday morning, she writes, 36 legal scholars -- including several experts on the First Amendment -- weighed in on the food industry's fight against proposed nutrition standards for foods and beverages marketed directly to children. This is the very issue I wrote about in this past weekend's San Francisco Chronicle column and have discussed in previous posts.
In a letter sent yesterday to federal agencies, the legal scholars point out that because food and beverage companies are free to ignore the nutrition recommendations, the draft principles "do not restrain or compel anyone's speech. They are not, in fact, government regulations at all."
A key industry strategy has been to recruit lawyers to write white papers charging that the proposed nutrition standards violate First Amendment rights to free speech.
Recall that Congress asked the FTC to join with the FDA, CDC, and USDA to recommend standards for food products marketed to kids. These agencies, collectively known as the Interagency Working Group on Food Marketed to Children (IWG), issued Preliminary Proposed Nutrition Principles to Guide Industry Self-Regulatory Efforts. This report outlines proposed voluntary standards that have been open for public comment.
My initial reaction: the standards were much too generous. But that's not how the food industry sees them. Food companies realized that the standards exclude large proportions of the junk foods they currently market to kids.
They created a new lobbying group, "Sensible Food Policy Coalition" (shades of George Orwell's 1984). This group is doing everything it can to block the proposed standards. Its website links to white papers opposing the recommendations on First Amendment grounds.
David Vladeck, director of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection, responded to some of these claims in a recent blog post in which he emphasizes the voluntary nature of the proposals.
I've said it before and repeat: I am not a legal scholar, but intention seems to matter in legal decisions. The intent of the First Amendment was to protect political and religious speech. I cannot believe that the intent of the First Amendment was to protect the right of food companies to market junk foods to kids.
Marketing to children is unethical. It should be stopped. And it's the government's responsibility to do it.
Image: Creative Commons.
TEMPLATEFoodPolitics02.jpg
This post also appears on Food Politics.
This article available online at:
http://www.theatlantic.com/life/archive/2011/09/legal-scholars-fight-the-food-industrys-marketing-to-children/244630/
On Tuesday morning, three dozen legal scholars weighed in on the food industry's fight against proposed nutrition standards
I just received a message from Samantha Graff, the director of legal research at Public Health Law & Policy, an advocacy group in Oakland, California.
Tuesday morning, she writes, 36 legal scholars -- including several experts on the First Amendment -- weighed in on the food industry's fight against proposed nutrition standards for foods and beverages marketed directly to children. This is the very issue I wrote about in this past weekend's San Francisco Chronicle column and have discussed in previous posts.
In a letter sent yesterday to federal agencies, the legal scholars point out that because food and beverage companies are free to ignore the nutrition recommendations, the draft principles "do not restrain or compel anyone's speech. They are not, in fact, government regulations at all."
A key industry strategy has been to recruit lawyers to write white papers charging that the proposed nutrition standards violate First Amendment rights to free speech.
Recall that Congress asked the FTC to join with the FDA, CDC, and USDA to recommend standards for food products marketed to kids. These agencies, collectively known as the Interagency Working Group on Food Marketed to Children (IWG), issued Preliminary Proposed Nutrition Principles to Guide Industry Self-Regulatory Efforts. This report outlines proposed voluntary standards that have been open for public comment.
My initial reaction: the standards were much too generous. But that's not how the food industry sees them. Food companies realized that the standards exclude large proportions of the junk foods they currently market to kids.
They created a new lobbying group, "Sensible Food Policy Coalition" (shades of George Orwell's 1984). This group is doing everything it can to block the proposed standards. Its website links to white papers opposing the recommendations on First Amendment grounds.
David Vladeck, director of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection, responded to some of these claims in a recent blog post in which he emphasizes the voluntary nature of the proposals.
I've said it before and repeat: I am not a legal scholar, but intention seems to matter in legal decisions. The intent of the First Amendment was to protect political and religious speech. I cannot believe that the intent of the First Amendment was to protect the right of food companies to market junk foods to kids.
Marketing to children is unethical. It should be stopped. And it's the government's responsibility to do it.
Image: Creative Commons.
TEMPLATEFoodPolitics02.jpg
This post also appears on Food Politics.
This article available online at:
http://www.theatlantic.com/life/archive/2011/09/legal-scholars-fight-the-food-industrys-marketing-to-children/244630/
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