Michelle Obama's Moves

Brigget Huber, The Nation, October 10, 2012
 
This article was produced in collaboration with the nonprofit Food & Environment Reporting Network, an investigative reporting nonprofit focusing on food, agriculture and environmental health.
 
In March 2010, Michelle Obama stood on a stage in Washington and leveled a challenge at the food industry's biggest players. "We need you all to step it up," she told a meeting of the Grocery Manufacturers Association. Just a month earlier, she'd launched the Let's Move campaign, the Obama administration's flagship anti-obesity program, which is aimed at reversing the childhood obesity epidemic by 2030.

The first lady hit talking points that would make any children's health expert happy. She urged the manufacturers of products like Doritos, Froot Loops and SpaghettiOs to make them healthier, to cooperate with the government on new food labels, and to get serious about reining in junk food marketed to kids. 

"What does it mean when so many parents are finding that their best efforts are undermined by an avalanche of advertisements?" she asked. The speech was a thrilling display of Mrs. Obama's mettle and a watershed moment, raising expectations among health advocates. Marion Nestle, professor of nutrition, public health and food studies at New York University and a tough critic of Big Food, put it this way: "It was a knockout. An absolute knockout."

That spring seemed to be a season of promise that the blight of childhood obesity—which is on track to make today's kids the first generation of Americans to live shorter lives than their parents—might still be beaten back. Seedlings were pushing up through the soil in the White House kitchen garden, which was in its second season since the first lady had resurrected it; now she was using it as a focal point for a national conversation about food. A presidential task force was charting an ambitious action plan to meet the goals of Let's Move. And at the forefront of it all was the enormously popular mother in chief, who had surprised and impressed many when she chose to make the contentious issue of childhood obesity a focus of her White House tenure.

But three and a half years since the ground was broken on the White House garden, many of those who'd had high hopes say the first lady has logged only modest successes. Experts credit Mrs. Obama for her instrumental role in reforming school lunches, limiting TV watching and increasing healthy food at childcare centers—and, perhaps most important, using her bully pulpit to bring issues of food and nutrition to national attention. But, they say, reversing the childhood obesity epidemic in a generation requires more of the bold action that Mrs. Obama hinted at in her address to the Grocery Manufacturers Association.

From that inspiring moment in March 2010, the administration's strategy appears to have shifted. Or perhaps its resolve has eroded, for it remained mute during a bitter fight to limit junk-food marketing to kids. It has also forged controversial—some say compromising—partnerships with food manufacturers.

"Looking back on it, it's enough to make you weep. So little has been able to be achieved," said Nestle.

Observers put the blame less on a lack of goodwill than on the political realities of taking on the multibillion-dollar food industry, which has lots of lobbying money and friends in Congress and no qualms about fanning the fears of government overreach when it perceives a threat to its interests. "It's a real example of the power corporations have over American government and American life," Nestle said.

It also raises fundamental questions about whether the goals of public health and those of the food industry are at irreconcilable odds. Should those who seek to address the obesity crisis treat food companies as collaborators or as adversaries?

* * *
It's hard to imagine a better spokeswoman for the problem of childhood obesity than Michelle Obama. She's not just charismatic and glowingly fit, but whether dancing the Dougie with school kids or digging in a carrot patch, she puts forth a disarming everymom persona that doesn't wag a finger but says instead, "We're all in this together." She has couched the political in the personal by sharing her struggle to put healthy food on the table and keep her girls at a healthy weight. She even wrote about it in a gorgeous book published this year about the White House garden. It's all gone a long way to scrubbing off the elitist label that often tarnishes advocates who seek to change the food system and make the obesity issue a national concern. "In order to make progress on something like childhood obesity, you need the nation to care about it. She's been helpful in that respect," said Kelly Brownell, director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale University.

The proportion of obese or overweight kids has nearly tripled in the past thirty years—the figure is now one in three—and doctors have detected disturbing signs of heart disease and what was once known as adult-onset diabetes in young people. While there are indications that the epidemic is plateauing, it hasn't started to recede yet, though cities like New York and Philadelphia and states like Mississippi and California have recently reported modest declines in childhood obesity rates. But these are "tiny drops compared to the tidal wave of bad things," Brownell said.

Buoyed by her garden's success, in 2009 the first lady set her sights on school lunches, which hadn't been updated in a generation and, amazingly, had minimum calorie levels set but no maximum. This change could have a big impact on low-income kids, who eat most of their meals at school. Mrs. Obama and her staff worked behind the scenes to get a reform bill passed. There was no shortage of drama: Congress inserted itself into the debate to keep french fries on school lunch trays and to count the tomato paste on pizza as a vegetable. But school lunch reform, signed into law in December 2010 as the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, was ultimately a triumph for the first lady: it gave the Department of Agriculture, for the first time, the power to regulate foods sold in à la carte lines, vending machines and school stores. Margo Wootan, nutrition policy director at the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), said that Mrs. Obama and her staff were key: "I don't know that we could have passed the bill without their efforts."

As the first lady battled behind the scenes to push through school lunch reform, she also unveiled the Let's Move campaign in February 2010. It had a highly ambitious goal of rolling back the childhood obesity rate to 5 percent, the level it was in 1976, before the epidemic began. To get there, Let's Move would organize its work around five pillars: giving kids a healthy start in life; empowering parents and caregivers to make healthy choices for kids; improving school food; ensuring access to healthy food; and promoting physical activity.

Just three months after Let's Move was launched, the White House Task Force on Childhood Obesity released a report billed as the campaign's action plan. Among its seventy recommendations was one urging food companies to develop uniform voluntary standards for marketing food to kids that conform to federal dietary guidelines. Children's health advocates have long sought to restrict junk-food advertising to kids, which the Institute of Medicine says contributes to obesity. If these voluntary measures didn't work, the report said, federal agencies could step in and regulate. It also called, among other things, for the regulation of the foods sold in schools and clearer nutrition labels for packaged foods: hot-button issues for an industry resistant to such changes.

In a speech announcing the report, the first lady stressed the need to work together: "No one gets off the hook on this one—from governments to schools to corporations to nonprofits, all the way down to families sitting around their dinner table."

At the same time that the administration hinted at the possibility of new regulations, it also sought out partnerships with the food industry in what might be viewed as a carrot-and-stick approach. The question raised by this tactic was: Do voluntary partnerships actually work, or do they merely allow food companies to burnish their image, even as their Washington lobbyists battle real reform measures?

Brownell, of the Rudd Center, spelled out the divergent views in a commentary for the journal PLOS Medicine in July. On one side are those who believe that food manufacturers shouldn't be regulated in the same way as tobacco or alcohol companies. (Wootan at CSPI takes that position: "People don't need tobacco, and you want everyone to stop smoking." But with food, "the goal is to get those companies to shift their mix of healthy products.")

"The assumption is that this industry is somehow different than others, and that because people must eat, the industry is here to stay, and like it or not, working with them is the only solution," Brownell wrote.
But after thirty years' work on policy and public health, Brownell has concluded that this position is "a trap," writing: "I expect history will look back with dismay on the celebration of baby steps industry takes (such as public-private partnerships with health organizations, 'healthy eating' campaigns, and corporate social responsibility initiatives) while it fights viciously against meaningful change (such as limits on marketing, taxes on products such as sugared beverages and regulation of nutritional labeling)."

While Brownell concedes there are small victories to be gained by working with industry, he insists that the childhood obesity crisis won't be solved without forcing food companies to do the things they don't want to do. History is littered with unfulfilled industry promises to protect kids' health, he said in an interview. A recent example was the "Smart Choices" label, introduced in 2009 by fourteen major food companies, including Kraft, Kellogg, PepsiCo and Unilever. The program gave Fudgsicles, Lucky Charms and Kid Cuisine Magical Cheese Stuffed Crust Pizza a little green check mark designating them as "smart" choices. Nutrition experts argued they were anything but healthy.

Or as Brownell put it: "How many more times are we going to get sucker-punched by the industry?"

Mrs. Obama's remarks to the grocery manufacturers, though, implied an awareness of the historical tensions between the food industry and public health efforts. In her speech, she harked back to the early twentieth century, when adulterated foods—including the tubercular beef that Upton Sinclair described in The Jungle—led to the passage of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act and laid the groundwork for today's Food and Drug Administration. "Instead of opposing that law and instead of viewing it as a threat, many manufacturers decided to embrace it," Mrs. Obama said. Calling the obesity epidemic a "similar opportunity," she added, "They also realized that increasing public trust and improving products all across the industry as a whole would benefit each of them individually." It was both a subtle defense of regulation and a signal to food companies that their interests and that of the government weren't necessarily at odds.

In that spirit, Let's Move has taken a collaborative approach, forming a nonprofit group called the Partnership for a Healthier America to create and manage private sector alliances. "We don't want to be pushing people from the table; we want to be bringing people to the table," said Larry Soler, the group's CEO, a former executive with the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation. The problem of childhood obesity is so broad and complex that no single approach will solve it, Soler added: "Virtually everyone has a role to play in this fight. It's not just food companies; it's schools and families. There's a big problem here, and we're going to need everyone to play a part."

One of the advantages of the voluntary approach, Soler said, is that changes can be put in place quickly. Changing regulations or writing new ones is a slow process, though he noted that his group's voluntary agreements have not interfered with legislative or policy-making efforts. Observers have pointed out that a collaborative approach might also result in less blowback from Republicans and industry-friendly Democrats who have sought to shut down regulatory efforts in Congress, for example, by limiting appropriations.
While seeking cooperation, the organization has also taken steps to avoid the industry's "sucker punch." For starters, it signs partnerships only with companies it believes will have a real impact, and it seeks out the advice of nutrition experts to help make that call, like the CSPI's Wootan, who recently became an informal adviser. Many of the conversations between the group and would-be partners never result in an agreement, Soler said, because some companies find the organization's standards too strict. (The group is also funded by foundations with health-related missions—not industry money.)

For example, companies that partner with Soler's group must agree to an evaluation that determines whether the company followed through on its commitment; the results are made public. "The companies that make it through our process are very serious and are extremely committed," Soler said.

Partnerships like these aren't unique, even for public health advocates. "Partnerships with industry are essential to addressing nutrition and obesity issues," Wootan said. "You can't not talk to companies."
But there is concern about a group closely allied with the government collaborating with entities the government is supposed to oversee. "It normalizes this idea of voluntary partnerships [with] industry as a substitute for real policy-making," said Michele Simon, a public health lawyer and frequent food-industry critic.

* * *
The first corporate agreement the Partnership for a Healthier America announced came in 2010: it was with the Healthy Weight Commitment Foundation, a coalition that includes food giants PepsiCo, Nestlé and Coca-Cola and industry groups such as the Food Marketing Institute. The coalition, which has pledged to cut 1.5 trillion calories from its members' products by 2015, will undergo a multimillion-dollar evaluation by an independent team funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

While "1.5 trillion calories" makes for a good sound bite, it would, however, take us back only to 2007 levels, and it's not even close to the 69 trillion calories that would have to be removed from the food supply to take us back to 1970 levels, according to calculations by Hank Cardello, a former executive with Coca-Cola and other food companies who now directs the Hudson Institute's Obesity Initiative. It won't be difficult at all for the companies to meet their mark, said Barry Popkin, a professor of nutrition at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who is leading the evaluation. "It's easy. They can cut a little fat or take some fat out and add some sugar in. They could just cut a few calories out of their beverages and do it."
Popkin's evaluation will look at national health data to see whether the calorie cuts improve health. The hard part, he said, will be getting consumers to buy the healthier foods. (There is also the worry that tweaking processed foods to make them slightly less unhealthy might lead people to eat more packaged products rather than the whole foods health experts advocate.)

But even incremental change is worth celebrating, said Lawrence Cheskin, director of the Johns Hopkins Weight Management Center. "Everything that will lead us in the right direction should be applauded. Purists will argue this is just window-dressing, but it is a step in the right direction."

Even more controversial has been the first lady's alliance with Walmart. In January 2011, the chain said it had made an agreement with the Partnership for a Healthier America to cut prices on healthy foods, reduce the sodium and sugar in packaged foods, and open stores in "food deserts"—neighborhoods lacking fresh grocery retailers. "It's a victory for parents…it's a victory for families…and, most of all, it's a victory for our children," Michelle Obama said at the press conference.

When a giant like Walmart takes even a small step, it can affect millions, and public health experts have praised some of its efforts, including a stricter food labeling system. To some, the Walmart partnership was a sign that Mrs. Obama was putting politics aside in a pragmatic bid to make real change in the food system. The chain's plans to move into food deserts, however, were dismissed by some as an expansion strategy cloaked in social responsibility. The company had been looking to crack urban markets (particularly in progressive cities where it is unpopular) for years, and Mrs. Obama's endorsement was a public relations dream [see "Walmart's Fresh Food Makeover," October 3, 2011]. Putting Walmarts in food deserts, critics worried, could harm the infrastructure of urban farms, food co-ops and farmers' markets that have taken root in such places in recent years. Michel Nischan, the CEO of the nonprofit Wholesome Wave, which doubles the value of food stamps at farmers' markets in twenty-eight states, isn't too concerned. "There's plenty of need to go around," he said.

But the bitterest food fight of the Obama administration took place in 2011 over an effort to limit junk-food marketing to kids. In Mrs. Obama's 2010 speech to food manufacturers, she took the industry to task for marketing unhealthy foods to kids. "Parents are working hard to provide a healthy diet and to teach healthy habits," she said, "and we'd like to know that our efforts won't be undermined every time our children turn on the TV or see a flashy display in the store."

In 2009, Congress had ordered four federal agencies—the Federal Trade Commission, the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Department of Agriculture—to form what became known as the Interagency Working Group and develop a set of guidelines for marketing foods to kids. The standards were to be voluntary, but were nonetheless seen by health advocates as a significant improvement over the current practice, in which each company creates and follows its own marketing guidelines. Now, at least, there would be wider input and standardization.

The industry saw the guidelines as a precursor to regulation. After the first draft was released for public comment in April 2011, the industry released a report that said the guidelines would kill 75,000 jobs. The US Chamber of Commerce said the standards reflected "an unhealthy federal intention and impulse to ban free speech." Food companies began a lobbying and spending frenzy that convinced nearly a third of the Senate and 40 percent of the House to write letters to federal agencies criticizing the proposed rules, according to an analysis of congressional correspondence by the Sunlight Foundation. Food and media companies also pleaded their case at the White House: logs examined by Reuters showed that top executives from Nestlé, Kellogg, General Mills and the media companies Walt Disney, Time Warner and Viacom (which owns Nickelodeon) visited the White House together in July 2011. Two people present at the meeting told Reuters they were there to speak out against the standards. All three food companies are members of the Healthy Weight Commitment Foundation, the Let's Move partnership that agreed to cut calories from their products.

The guidelines' supporters assumed they had an ally in the Let's Move campaign. Public health groups widely supported the proposed rules, which also appeared popular with the public: the FTC received 28,000 public comments in favor and just 1,000 against. Health advocates hoped Mrs. Obama would deploy the quiet leadership that had helped pass the school nutrition bill in support of the guidelines. They were wrong. "On food marketing to kids, we haven't gotten any help from Let's Move," said Wootan, of the Center for Science in the Public Interest.

Wootan, who had originally come up with the idea of government-led voluntary standards, said she and other advocates called and visited the White House, including the first lady's office. They spoke to the agencies involved, and even suggested ways for the administration to rebut what she calls the industry's "bogus talking points."

"The White House was silent," she said, referring to both the West and East wings. Wootan says she never got a satisfactory answer from the Obama administration as to why they wouldn't support the proposed rules. Agencies and offices pointed fingers at one another, she said. White House officials, however, maintain that they supported the effort and blamed Congress for the lack of progress. "We were disappointed when Congress granted the food industry's requests and placed new demands on the working group," said Nick Papas, President Obama's assistant press secretary.

In December 2011, Congress passed a budget bill with a rider that blocked the FTC from working on the marketing standards until it completed a cost-benefit analysis. An administration official said in September that the rider in effect killed the standards, since there was no "credible way" to conduct a cost-benefit analysis on voluntary guidelines.

Eight months later, the first lady announced that Disney—one of the companies that had lobbied against the Interagency Working Group's voluntary standards—had agreed to end junk-food marketing to kids by 2015. But Disney's standards aren't as strict as the guidelines it opposed, and it's unclear how they will be evaluated. They are comparable instead to the voluntary rules adopted by the Better Business Bureau's Children's Food and Beverage Advertising Institute, which cover about 80 percent of foods advertised, including those of Kraft, PepsiCo and Kellogg, Wootan said. These are the kind of voluntary industry-led rules that child health advocates have found so wanting. At the announcement, Disney chief executive Bob Iger stood beside top regulators involved in the Interagency Working Group and told reporters that actions like Disney's could "create huge change without having the government step in to directly regulate or legislate our efforts," Reuters reported at the time. A Disney spokesman would not elaborate, saying only that the company had been working on childhood nutrition initiatives since 2006 and was strongly supportive of Let's Move.

* * *
In November 2011, speaking at a summit organized by the Partnership for a Healthier America, Mrs. Obama heaped praise on the food companies. She congratulated manufacturers for cutting sugar and salt, restaurants for overhauling kids' menus, and grocery stores for building in food deserts, and she also praised the efforts of parents and schools. Then she pivoted: "I want to talk about the crisis of inactivity that we see among our kids and what each of us can do to start solving that problem."

Eddie Gehman Kohan, founding editor of Obama Foodorama, a blog that has chronicled every food-related facet of the administration, called it "a fundamental shift." Nestle, Simon and others registered dismay at what they saw as a departure from the politically charged arena of food. Food companies like to talk about exercise because it shifts the emphasis from their products and reinforces the industry's insistence that any food can have a place in a healthy diet. It also shifts the conversation from one about systemic problems—such as food marketing—to individual lifestyle choices (i.e., "just exercise more!"). But studies show that exercise, while offering huge health benefits, cannot by itself address obesity or ward off the weight gain that arises from eating junk food.

Sam Kass, assistant chef and senior policy adviser for healthy-food initiatives at the White House, insists that reports of a "fundamental shift" are incorrect and that exercise was one of Let's Move's pillars from the beginning. "The notion that we were somehow moving away from nutrition was simply wrong," he said.

Gehman Kohan, writing in an e-mail, added: "It makes for an attention-grabbing headline to accuse the First Lady of 'caving' to greedy private interests that might donate to the Obama campaign during an election year, but that simply was not the case."

An examination of press releases from both Let's Move and the Partnership for a Healthier America put out since the first lady's speech in November 2011 shows that the number of food- and exercise-related announcements have been about even. Before Mrs. Obama's November speech, however, food announcements greatly outnumbered those related to exercise by more than two to one, which might explain why some perceived a shift. Soler said exercise partnerships have been in the works for some time but have taken longer to coalesce.

The trajectory of Let's Move has left many of those initially optimistic about the program feeling doubtful that it will accomplish much more: the best of intentions appear to be mired in the unhappy realities of American politics. "It's dead in the water," Nestle said. "They can get some little tweakings through, maybe, but the force of it is gone. It's compromised at this point."

Kass is much more enthusiastic: "We've made progress beyond anything we could have dreamed of two and a half years ago. We've seen this issue become front and center in the minds of millions."

That's due largely to Mrs. Obama's leadership and persuasion. But her sole authority is moral authority. While she's brought tremendous attention to obesity and healthy living, she doesn't have the power to make the regulatory changes that public health experts say are key. "It's not her fault," said Simon. "She's just in the wrong wing of the White House."

Brownell likewise said he doesn't blame the Obama administration and Let's Move for failing to accomplish broader change. "Citizens United didn't help, the fact that we're in an election year will slow things down, and regulatory agencies have been gun-shy," he said. Noting the campaign's substantial victories, such as school lunch reform and improved nutrition at daycare centers, he added: "Those are some pretty big changes, but not signs the food industry is changing its ways."

If leaders are to take the bold steps, such as soda taxes and marketing restrictions, that public health advocates urge, they'll need to be backed—and pushed—by a more vigorous movement. "What they need is a public that demands these things and that gives politicians cover to take these actions," Brownell said. Without that, Let's Move may well have done all the moving it can.

Why government needs a diet

George F. Will, The Washington Post,  August 22, 2012

 

Because the possibility of effectively supervising government varies inversely with government's size, so does government's lawfulness. This iron law of Leviathan is illustrated by a dispiriting story that begins with the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, a.k.a. the stimulus — that supposedly temporary response to an economic emergency.

Because nothing is as immortal as a temporary government program, Communities Putting Prevention to Work (CPPW), a creature of the stimulus, was folded into the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010, a.k.a. Obamacare. And the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), working through the CPPW, disbursed money to 25 states to fight, among other things, the scourge of soda pop.

In Cook County, Ill., according to an official report, recipients using some of a $16 million CDC grant "educated policymakers on link between SSBs [sugar-sweetened beverages] and obesity, economic impact of an SSB tax, and importance of investing revenue into prevention." According to a Philadelphia city Web site, a $15 million CDC grant funded efforts to "campaign" for a "two-cent per ounce excise tax" on SSBs. In California, an official report says that a $2.2 million CDC grant for obesity prevention funded "training for grantees on media advocacy" against SSBs. A New York report says that a $3 million grant was used to "educate leaders and decision-makers about, and promote the effective implementation of . . . a tax to substantially increase the price of beverages containing caloric sweetener." The Rhode Island Department of Health used a $3 million grant for "educating key decision-makers to serve as champions of specific . . . pricing and procurement strategies to reduce consumption of" SSBs. In government-speak, "educating" is synonymous with "lobbying." 

Clearly some of the $230 million in CDC/CPPW anti-obesity grants was spent in violation of the law, which prohibits the use of federal funds "to influence in any manner . . . an official of any government, to favor, adopt, or oppose, by vote or otherwise, any legislation, law, ratification, policy, or appropriation." But leaving legality aside, is such "nutrition activism" effective?

Not according to Michael L. Marlow, economics professor at California Polytechnic State University, and Sherzod Abdukadirov of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. Writing in Regulation ("Can Behavioral Economics Combat Obesity?"), a quarterly publication of the libertarian Cato Institute, they powerfully question the assumptions underlying paternalistic policies such as using taxes to nudge individuals to make consumption choices that serve their real but unrecognized interests — e.g., drinking fewer SSBs. 

Paternalists wield two weapons: mandating the provision of more information (e.g., calorie counts for restaurant menu items); and increasing the cost of bad decisions, meaning those of which the paternalists disapprove.

Marlow and Abdukadirov respond: "Most obese individuals know they are heavy, and that many of the foods they eat are high-calorie. They also face the stigma often linked to obesity. They hardly need the government to give them additional incentives to lose weight. People aware of their mistakes also have strong incentives to correct them."

Research indicates that overweight individuals have "reasonably close" to accurate estimates of the increased health risks and decreased life expectancy associated with obesity. Hence the weakness of mandated information as a modifier of behavior. A study conducted after New York City mandated posting calorie counts in restaurant chains concluded that, while 28 percent of patrons said the information influenced their choices, researchers could not detect a change in calories purchased after the law.

Other research findings include: A study of nearly 20,000 students from kindergarten through eighth grade found that among those with easy access to high-calorie snacks in schools, 35.5 percent were overweight — compared with 34.8 percent of children in schools without such snacks. Nutrition policy is replicating a familiar pattern: Increased taxes on alcohol and tobacco mostly decrease consumption by light users, not the heavy users who are the social problem and whose demand is relatively inelastic.

The robust market in diet books, weight-loss centers, exercise equipment, athletic clubs, health foods — between 1987 and 2004, 35,272 new food products were labeled "no fat" or "low fat" — refutes the theory that there is some "market failure" government must correct. But as long as there are bureaucrats who consider themselves completely rational and informed, there will be policies to substitute government supervision of individuals for individuals' personal responsibility. 

As the soft paternalism of incentives fails, there will be increasing resort to the hard paternalism of mandates and proscriptions. Hence the increasing need to supervise our supervisors, the government.

Mark Bittman: Let's Make Him Do It

Mark Bittman, The New York Times, August 16, 2012

For positive change in the issues that affect our daily lives — not only food but also jobs, income, housing — we need active political leadership. But until President Obama is pushed more strongly by the left, the coming presidential election represents a choice between a full-fledged attack on government services and a continuing slide into the gloomy and depressing world of austerity economics. That’s a real choice, but it’s not a happy one.

When Obama has been pressured on issues, like gay rights, immigration and the Keystone XL pipeline, he’s responded positively. But he hasn’t been pushed on food, and as a result has not followed up on campaign promises like his vow to label foods containing genetically modified ingredients, nor has he used his bully pulpit to try to protect SNAP (food stamps) from the ravages of Congress. Since there isn’t a real food movement — yet! — progressives haven’t made Obama do much.

At least he won’t dismantle government, as Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan would. Ryan’s anti-stimulus plan is an unemployment-boosting scheme that would finance the military at a high level, the social safety net at the lowest possible level (Ryan is calling for a 17 percent cut in food stamps, enough to elicit criticisms from a pair of high-ranking Catholic bishops, for example) and just about nothing else. It benefits no one but the superrich and their representatives.

Not that that’s anything new. Most people — call them working class, middle class or the 99 percent — have less money than they did a generation ago; the superrich have scads more. A vast majority of Americans are on the losing side of the class war, as evidenced by lower pay scales, eviscerated unions, fewer benefits, later retirement, shortened or eliminated vacations, starved municipalities and of course the quality of our food and the impact it has on us and the environment.

Obama has seen more power and money arrayed against him than perhaps any Democrat ever. But his lack of a workable plan for economic recovery and his right-leaning stances on fiscal responsibility and debt reduction remind us that the basic problem is not one of “progressive” Democrats versus “conservative” Republicans.

This isn’t new either: in the last 40 years we’ve witnessed a long, steady move to the right, which Democrats occasionally whine about, protest and even fight, but in which they’ve been mostly complicit. Unless you reduce defense budgets — practically unheard of — whenever you cut taxes, you starve social programs and infrastructure, thus undermining the legitimate and beneficial role of government. (Even “progressive” Democrats are onboard with some cuts to food stamps in the as-yet-unpassed farm bill.) With government providing fewer services, it becomes easy to persuade people that it’s an albatross, so why not cut taxes further? Enter Paul Ryan.

Candidate Obama led us to believe that he was a different kind of Democrat, and he stirred new and even skeptical old voters. Yet he’s disappointed many supporters. You can argue that his hands have been tied: money is power — Citizens United has made this even more so — and until there’s meaningful electoral and campaign-finance reform, along with real limits on lobbying, there’s no chance for real progress.

President Obama didn’t create this system; he’s a product of it. A fundamental problem now is that the right has devised both a strategy and a movement, and the left has done neither. “All the bold answers are only from one side,” Van Jones, author of “Rebuild the Dream,” told me. “But we have to stop acting like there’s one person with agency in America, whose name is Obama. It’s not what he should do — it’s what we should do.”

That’s right. Only by building real movements around food and other important issues can we pressure Obama (or even Romney; just look at the inroads the right made with a Democrat in office) to act in the interests of the great majority. A strategy for this is neatly outlined in the just-published paper “Prosperity Economics” by Jacob Hacker and Nate Loewentheil, which counters the nonsense of austerity economics and lays out a credible plan for public investments and economic security, a plan that could help revive jobs and growth and ensure “that gains are broadly shared.” Their agenda improves on most economic plans by adding demands for dramatic political reform. “The best ideas are of little use without political movements, and those movements can only succeed in a political regime in which votes count more than money,” Hacker said to me.

It’s worth voting for progressives, but it’s equally important to recognize that until there is real pressure from the left, the money and influence of the right will continue to pull any president in that direction.

Growing the food movement: lists of advocacy groups

Marion Nestle, Food Politics, August 1, 2012

Whenever I give a talk, someone in the audience invariably asks how to get involved in food advocacy. My suggestion is usually to go online and look for local groups working on issues of interest or, if lucky enough to have a nearby Edible magazine, read the ads.

These are still useful starting points and I list them and others in the FAQ section on this site (questions 3 and 4).

More recently, I’ve been asked a more complicated question: Why don’t all those organizations get together? If they did, they would form a major political force.

Vivian Wang, an undergraduate at NYU, asked that very question after one of my talks. She volunteered to start doing some preliminary work by attempting to identify local and national food advocacy groups.

It didn’t take her long to discover the enormity of that task.

Nevertheless, she created spreadsheet of the groups she was able to find. She organized her findings by the tabs at the bottom, which she named:

· Long Lists: These are groups with websites that provide information about resources including many other advocacy groups.

· NYC-based: Groups in New York City. These are also given on different spreadsheets in the other categories

· Advocacy

· Agriculture

· Education

· Hunger

· Local Food

· Organic Food

· Urban Farming

· NYU-based: food and nutrition clubs at New York University


See also - http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/foodpolicyinitiative/files/2012/06/CAREER-GUIDE-JUNE-2012-v4.pdf

How Our Habits Would Need to Change for a Soda Ban to Matter

Brian Fung, The Atlantic, July 24, 2012

Will people actually consume less soda just because they can't buy it in one giant cup?

Chatter is picking up again around New York's plan to ban sodas larger than 16 ounces as the city gathers for its first public hearing on the proposed measure. Today's debate will be followed by a vote on Sept. 13, which -- hooray! -- leaves us a whole extra month to bicker over the bill.

With any luck, at least some of that talk will be informed by new research appearing in the New England Journal of Medicine explaining exactly what conditions Mayor Bloomberg would need for a soda ban to work.

Critics of Bloomberg's proposal point out that the soda ban does almost nothing to prevent those who want large quantities of soda from getting large quantities of soda. Remember that the stricture prohibits "food service establishments" from selling sugary drinks in quantities larger than 16 ounces. Diet sodas, dairy-based products like milkshakes, and alcoholic beverages are exempt from the ban. Determined soda addicts can simply buy two 16-ounce Cokes to get 32 ounces.

True enough, but left to their own devices, humans tend to think inside the box. You wouldn't ask Pepsi to design, test, and field a whole new 26-ounce bottle every time you're in the convenience store trying to decide between a 20-ounce bottle and a one-liter bottle. You'll probably choose one or the other and go about your business. In much the same way, Bloomberg hopes that consumers will simply accept buying 16-ounce sodas as the new norm.

For every person who opts for a 16-ounce soda over a larger size, New York restaurants will theoretically see a slight drop in the number of calories their customers are getting from sugary drinks. To find out just how much of an effect the ban might have on calorie intake, researchers at NYU gathered fast-food receipts from four regional cities, along with data from two existing studies on fast-food habits. Next, they cross-referenced that data with nutritional information supplied by the fast-food companies themselves. That gave the scientists a chance to calculate precisely, down to the item, how many calories were contained in a given meal.

Then, armed with that big stack of actual purchasing decisions, the researchers ran simulations in which a percentage of those (anonymous) consumers were "given" smaller sodas instead of bigger ones. They set up hypothetical scenarios where 10 percent of customers bought the smaller size (16 ounces) and 90 percent bought the larger size (32 ounces), running the simulation 1,000 times. They repeated that process for different distributions, from 20 percent on up to 100 percent of customers opting for the 16-ounce sodas.

What they found was that calorie consumption as a function of soda intake begins to come down when about a third of customers adhere to the soda ban instead of circumventing it by buying two sodas of a smaller size. Naturally, the more people that play by the rule, the bigger the general decrease in caloric intake from soda.

Here's the takeaway for New Yorkers (and Cambridge-ians, too): we no longer have to make assumptions about whether a soda ban would work based on ideological cues about freedom and the role of government in mandating nutrition. There's actual data now pinpointing the exact threshold between success and failure. As long as more than 30 percent of city residents accept the options they're given at the checkout counter, the share of calories they get from sodas is likely to drop. While that may or may not actually affect the overall health of New Yorkers, it would be a quantifiable win for Michael Bloomberg.

A Fresh Look at What School Menus Can Be

Dan Frosch, The New York Times, July 17, 2012

DENVER — With the authority of a celebrity chef, Adam Fisher gestured toward the bushels of fresh basil, oregano and parsley sitting on the counter in front of him, as the crowd leaned forward.

“We almost want to treat fresh herbs like we treat fresh flowers,” he commanded, speaking into a microphone clipped to his apron. “You want to snip off the ends, and ideally you want to store them in some water.” 

Mr. Fisher may not be some fast-talking TV personality, but he is a chef, a food supervisor for the Denver Public Schools, and he was giving a demonstration on how to whip up cafeteria food — in this case, cucumber and pasta salads — from scratch. 

With new federal standards for school meals going into effect this month, and a renewed focus on the issue brought by the first lady, Michelle Obama, thousands of school chefs, food service workers and nutrition experts from around the country gathered in Denver this week at an annual conference put on by the School Nutrition Association, a nonprofit organization of school food professionals. 

As vendors hawked samples of every imaginable school fare — whole-grain rolls, turkey sandwiches, pizza squares — cooks and school food administrators traded tips on how to improve their schools’ cuisine, part of a nationwide push to make school food tastier and more healthful. 

But it was the new federal Department of Agriculture nutrition standards for school meals that seemed the main topic of conversation. 

The rules establish calorie and sodium limits for meals, require schools to serve larger portions of fruits and vegetables and mandate that all milk be 1 percent or nonfat. Requirements for the use of whole grains are also being phased in. 

With more schools cooking meals from scratch — which invariably means more fresh local fruits and vegetables in the kitchens rather than processed foods — districts have largely been able to keep pace with the new regulations, nutrition experts said. 

“School districts for the last 15 years have been working on ways to improve their menus,” said Julia Bauscher, the School Nutrition Association’s new vice president and school nutrition director for the Jefferson County Public Schools in Louisville, Ky. “The majority of the members that are here probably are already meeting some of the new standards.” 

Gone, at least in many places, are the days when lunch ladies served fried just-about-anything with a side of unrecognizable slop. These days, many school meals start with raw ingredients and take longer to prepare. School staples like chicken nuggets are typically baked, not tossed in the fryer, and hot dogs are more likely to be made of turkey. And even those longtime favorites are served in the cafeteria less frequently. 

“Ten or 15 years ago, you wouldn’t have seen a salad bar, a fresh fruit and veggie bar, homemade pasta salads,” said Theresa Hafner, executive director of the food services department for Denver Public Schools. “You probably wouldn’t have seen homemade biscuits, or homemade hamburger buns, made with a white whole-wheat flour.” 

In Denver, for example, 95 percent of the public school lunch menu and about half of the breakfast menu is now prepared from scratch, since the school district introduced cooking from scratch in the fall of 2010. 

The switch has not come without a cost. Since 2010, Ms. Hafner has hired more than 100 additional food service workers, as scratch cooking is more labor intensive. And her food expenses have gone up 20 percent, since fresh produce must be bought for the schools’ fruit and salad bars. 

Adam Simmons, the child nutrition director for the public school system in Fayetteville, Ark., said that while the new rules were well intentioned, he worried that sodium limits and expanded servings of fruits and vegetables could result in more food being left on the tray.

“You’re increasing serving sizes on fruits and vegetables so much, I think you’re really going to just increase trash,” said Mr. Simmons, who spearheaded a switch to 70 percent scratch cooking in his school district. 

Ultimately, though, he and other nutrition experts viewed the new regulations as positive, as long as the school chefs still make the food taste good. 

“Putting things on a plate doesn’t make it a nutritious meal. The students have to consume it,” he said. “And if they do, it will open them to more fresh fruits and vegetables. In the long run, this can do great things.”

Vast F.D.A. Effort Tracked E-Mails of Its Scientists

Eric Lichtblau and Scott Shane, The New York Times, July 14, 2012

WASHINGTON — A wide-ranging surveillance operation by the Food and Drug Administration against a group of its own scientists used an enemies list of sorts as it secretly captured thousands of e-mails that the disgruntled scientists sent privately to members of Congress, lawyers, labor officials, journalists and even President Obama, previously undisclosed records show.

What began as a narrow investigation into the possible leaking of confidential agency information by five scientists quickly grew in mid-2010 into a much broader campaign to counter outside critics of the agency’s medical review process, according to the cache of more than 80,000 pages of computer documents generated by the surveillance effort. 

Moving to quell what one memorandum called the “collaboration” of the F.D.A.’s opponents, the surveillance operation identified 21 agency employees, Congressional officials, outside medical researchers and journalists thought to be working together to put out negative and “defamatory” information about the agency. 

F.D.A. officials defended the surveillance operation, saying that the computer monitoring was limited to the five scientists suspected of leaking confidential information about the safety and design of medical devices. 

While they acknowledged that the surveillance tracked the communications that the scientists had with Congressional officials, journalists and others, they said it was never intended to impede those communications, but only to determine whether information was being improperly shared.

The agency, using so-called spy software designed to help employers monitor workers, captured screen images from the government laptops of the five scientists as they were being used at work or at home. The software tracked their keystrokes, intercepted their personal e-mails, copied the documents on their personal thumb drives and even followed their messages line by line as they were being drafted, the documents show.

The extraordinary surveillance effort grew out of a bitter dispute lasting years between the scientists and their bosses at the F.D.A. over the scientists’ claims that faulty review procedures at the agency had led to the approval of medical imaging devices for mammograms and colonoscopies that exposed patients to dangerous levels of radiation.

A confidential government review in May by the Office of Special Counsel, which deals with the grievances of government workers, found that the scientists’ medical claims were valid enough to warrant a full investigation into what it termed “a substantial and specific danger to public safety.”

The documents captured in the surveillance effort — including confidential letters to at least a half-dozen Congressional offices and oversight committees, drafts of legal filings and grievances, and personal e-mails — were posted on a public Web site, apparently by mistake, by a private document-handling contractor that works for the F.D.A. The New York Times reviewed the records and their day-by-day, sometimes hour-by-hour accounting of the scientists’ communications.

With the documents from the surveillance cataloged in 66 huge directories, many Congressional staff members regarded as sympathetic to the scientists each got their own files containing all their e-mails to or from the whistle-blowers. Drafts and final copies of letters the scientists sent to Mr. Obama about their safety concerns were also included.

Last year, the scientists found that a few dozen of their e-mails had been intercepted by the agency. They filed a lawsuit over the issue in September, after four of the scientists had been let go, and The Washington Post first disclosed the monitoring in January. But the wide scope of the F.D.A. surveillance operation, its broad range of targets across Washington, and the huge volume of computer information that it generated were not previously known, even to some of the targets.

F.D.A. officials said that in monitoring the communication of the five scientists, their e-mails “were collected without regard to the identity of the individuals with whom the user may have been corresponding.” While the F.D.A. memo described the Congressional officials and other “actors” as collaborating in the scientists’ effort to attract negative publicity, the F.D.A. said that those outside the agency were never targets of the surveillance operation, but were suspected of receiving confidential information.

While federal agencies have broad discretion to monitor their employees’ computer use, the F.D.A. program may have crossed legal lines by grabbing and analyzing confidential information that is specifically protected under the law, including attorney-client communications, whistle-blower complaints to Congress and workplace grievances filed with the government.

Other administration officials were so concerned to learn of the F.D.A. operation that the White House Office of Management and Budget sent a governmentwide memo last month emphasizing that while the internal monitoring of employee communications was allowed, it could not be used under the law to intimidate whistle-blowers. Any monitoring must be done in ways that “do not interfere with or chill employees’ use of appropriate channels to disclose wrongdoing,” the memo said.

Although some senior F.D.A. officials appear to have been made aware of aspects of the surveillance, which went on for months, the documents do not make clear who at the agency authorized the program or whether it is still in operation.

But Stephen Kohn, a lawyer who represents six scientists who are suing the agency, said he planned to go to federal court this month seeking an injunction to stop any surveillance that may be continuing against the two medical researchers among the group who are still employed there.

The scientists who have been let go say in a lawsuit that their treatment was retaliation for reporting their claims of mismanagement and safety abuses in the F.D.A.’s medical reviews.

Members of Congress from both parties were irate to learn that correspondence between the scientists and their own staff had been gathered and analyzed.

Representative Chris Van Hollen, a Maryland Democrat who has examined the agency’s medical review procedures, was listed as No. 14 on the surveillance operation’s list of targets — an “ancillary actor” in the efforts to put out negative information on the agency. (An aide to Mr. Van Hollen was No. 13.)

Mr. Van Hollen said on Friday after learning of his status on the list that “it is absolutely unacceptable for the F.D.A. to be spying on employees who reach out to members of Congress to expose abuses or wrongdoing in government agencies.”

Senator Charles E. Grassley, an Iowa Republican whose former staff member’s e-mails were cataloged in the surveillance database, said that “the F.D.A. is discouraging whistle-blowers.” He added that agency officials “have absolutely no business reading the private e-mails of their employees. They think they can be the Gestapo and do anything they want.”

While national security agencies have become more aggressive in monitoring employee communications, such tactics are unusual at domestic agencies that do not handle classified information.

Much of the material the F.D.A. was eager to protect centered on trade secrets submitted by drug and medical device manufacturers seeking approval for products. Particular issues were raised by a March 2010 article in The New York Times that examined the safety concerns about imaging devices and quoted two agency scientists who would come under surveillance, Dr. Robert C. Smith and Dr. Julian Nicholas.

Agency officials saw Dr. Smith as the ringleader, or “point man” as one memo from the agency put it, for the complaining scientists, and the surveillance documents included hundreds of e-mails that he wrote on ways to make their concerns heard. (Dr. Smith and the other scientists would not comment for this article because of their pending litigation.)

Lawyers for GE Healthcare charged that the 2010 article in The Times — written by Gardiner Harris, who would be placed first on the surveillance program’s list of “media outlet actors” — included proprietary information about their imaging devices that may have been improperly leaked by F.D.A. employees.

F.D.A. officials went to the inspector general at the Department of Health and Human Services to seek a criminal investigation into the possible leak, but they were turned down. The inspector general found that there was no evidence of a crime, noting that “matters of public safety” can legally be released to the news media.

Undeterred, agency officials began the electronic monitoring operation on their own.

The software used to track the F.D.A. scientists, sold by SpectorSoft of Vero Beach, Fla., costs as little as $99.95 for individual use, or $2,875 to place the program on 25 computers. It is marketed mainly to employers to monitor their workers and to parents to keep tabs on their children’s computer activities.

“Monitor everything they do,” says SpectorSoft’s Web site. “Catch them red-handed by receiving instant alerts when keywords or phrases are typed or are contained in an e-mail, chat, instant message or Web site.”

The F.D.A. program did all of that and more, as its operators analyzed the results from their early e-mail interceptions and used them to search for new “actors,” develop new keywords to search and map out future areas of concern.

The intercepted e-mails revealed, for instance, that a few of the scientists under surveillance were drafting a complaint in 2010 that they planned to take to the Office of Special Counsel. A short time later, before the complaint was filed, Dr. Smith and another complaining scientist were let go and a third was suspended.

In another case, the intercepted e-mails indicated that Paul T. Hardy, another of the dissident employees, had reapplied for an F.D.A. job “and is being considered for a position.” (He did not get it.)

F.D.A. officials were eager to track future media stories too. When they learned from Mr. Hardy’s e-mails that he was considering talking to PBS’s “Frontline” for a documentary, they ordered a search for anything else on the same topic.

While the surveillance was intended to protect trade secrets for companies like G.E., it may have done just the opposite. The data posted publicly by the F.D.A. contractor — and taken down late Friday after inquiries by The Times — includes hundreds of confidential documents on the design of imaging devices and other detailed, proprietary information.

The posting of the documents was discovered inadvertently by one of the researchers whose e-mails were monitored. The researcher did Google searches for scientists involved in the case to check for negative publicity that might hinder chances of finding work. Within a few minutes, the researcher stumbled upon the database.

“I couldn’t believe what I was seeing,” said the researcher, who did not want to be identified because of pending job applications. “I thought: ‘Oh my God, everything is out there. It’s all about us.’ It was just outrageous.”