Search results: food strategy

Every now and then I answer questions from Eating Liberally’s Kerry Trueman (kat).  Today’s is about Walmart’s sustainability initiatives.

Let’s Ask Marion Nestle: Is Wal-Mart’s Sustainability Strategy For Real?

Submitted by KAT on Fri, 10/15/2010 – 12:20pm.

(With a click of her mouse, EatingLiberally’s Kerry Trueman corners Dr. Marion Nestle, NYU professor of nutrition and author of Pet Food Politics, What to Eat and Food Politics🙂

KT: Why do you think Wal-Mart has decided to throw its colossal weight behind sustainable agriculture, both domestically and globally, in such a seemingly significant way? Is it a strategic pr move, a better-for-the-bottom-line calculus, or a bit of both? Is it too good to be true?

Dr. Nestle: I, of course, am a skeptic. Of course Wal-Mart wants to get into the business of sustainably and locally grown food. Wal-Mart is the largest grocery chain in the world, the 800-pound gorilla in the industry. It can demand whatever it wants from its suppliers, and at the lowest possible cost.

With these new initiatives, Wal-Mart suppliers will have to figure out ways to produce foods sustainably–without increasing the cost to Wal-Mart. So this move costs Wal-Mart nothing. It gains plenty. This move should recruit supporters of sustainable and locally grown food and induce them to overlook the company’s retrogressive labor practices.

Will these initiatives help farmers? Maybe, but only if Wal-Mart pays them decently for what they produce. As for Wal-Mart employees? Ditto. But I want to wait and see how it all plays out before making a final judgment.

This is also posted on Huffington Post.

And the New York Times has a story on it.

OECD (the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development), a group of 33 countries “committed to democracy and the market economy,” has just released a major report on obesity.

Its main conclusion?  The United States population has the highest percentage of overweight and obesity in the democratic, market-economy world.

The report’s conclusion?

Individual interventions have a relatively limited impact; therefore, comprehensive strategies involving multiple interventions to address a range of determinants are required to reach a “critical mass” – one that can have a meaningful impact on the obesity epidemic by generating fundamental changes in social norms. The development of comprehensive prevention strategies against obesity needs to focus on how social norms are defined and how they change; on the influence of education and information on obesity but also on the potential for government regulation to affect behaviours; and on the role of individual choice and values. A sensible prevention strategy against obesity would combine population and individual (high-risk) approaches.

Buried in this paragraph are some important concepts: societies need to change social norms as well as individual behavior, and governments need to intervene to make the social environment more conducive to healthier practices.

Nancy Hellmich of USA Today attempted a translation of some of the recommendations for individuals:

• Individual lifestyle counseling by family doctors and dietitians may be the most effective to increase the life expectancy and quality of life for people who are obese or at risk of becoming so.
• Individual counseling should be supplemented with health-promotion campaigns, compulsory food labeling and cooperation between industry and government in the regulation of food advertising to kids.

The report breaks down data by country.  Here are ours.

The Berkeley Media Studies Group has just released a “Framing Brief” with “how-to” advice for breastfeeding advocates.  The Brief argues that babies’ health is not a sufficient reason to get moms to breastfeed.

Instead, advocates need to help create environments that support breastfeeding.

This  and a previous report on breastfeeding issues, “Talking about Breastfeeding,” were commissioned by the California WIC Association with support from The California Endowment.

That these reports come none too soon is evident from a recent commentary that the International Code of Marketing of Breastmilk Substitutes (“the Code”) has become ineffectual.

The Code is an international agreement about what infant formula companies can and cannot ethically do to promote their products, based on substantial research that infant formula marketing undermines breastfeeding.

According to the study in the Archives of Diseases of Children, the Code has become

mired by a series of alleged violations and boycotts, which are counter productive to the code’s goal….[These include an] unrelenting series of disputes, predominantly relating to alleged violations of the code, which have provoked high profile acrimonious exchanges, boycotts and legal proceedings…[leading] to an atmosphere of mistrust that has now become embedded between key agencies.

The author focuses on disputes between the non-governmental group Baby Milk Action and infant formula manufacturer Nestlé (no relation).  He recommends that an  “ombudsman” or some other independent body be given authority “to arbitrate and ensure that actions taken by respective parties are in keeping with the spirit of the code.”

This is not a bad idea—if the body is truly independent. Take a look at the Baby Milk Action website and judge for yourself whether you think the group makes a compelling case for Code violations.  Some of them seem pretty obvious to me.

As I recount in Food Politics, infant formula companies have a long pre-Code history of putting sales before infant health.  Almost everyone I know thinks the situation has improved post-Code, but not nearly enough.

As I explain in What to Eat, formula companies have a business-model problem: there are only so many infants born each year and they only use formula for a limited time.

The companies only have two choices for growth: recruit more babies onto formula or extend the period of formula feeding.  The first strategy was well documented pre-Code and continues to be documented.  The second is illustrated by the now withdrawn product, chocolate toddler formula Enfagrow (see previous posts).

Breastfeeding advocates: read the new reports and get busy!

Update, July 31: Patty Rundall of Baby Milk Action has written a rebuttal to the commentary.  Other ideas?  You can forward them to her at prundall@babymilkaction.org.

Today’s New York Times reports:

The Obama administration has replaced immigration raids at factories and farms with a quieter enforcement strategy: sending federal agents to scour companies’ records for illegal immigrant workers. ..the “silent raids,” as employers call the audits, usually result in the workers being fired, but in many cases they are not deported.

What does this have to do with food politics?

Employers say the Obama administration is leaving them short of labor for some low-wage work, conducting silent raids but offering no new legal immigrant laborers in occupations, like farm work, that Americans continue to shun despite the recession. Federal labor officials estimate that more than 60 percent of farm workers in the United States are illegal immigrants.

In my visit to Alaskan seafood processing plants this summer, I saw cannery workers imported from the Philippines or Eastern Europe to work 16 hours a day, 6 or 7 days a week, for the minimum wage or close to it.

Residents of one remote cannery town said they all worked in canneries as teenagers for good wages.  But when the large cannery moved into town, it reduced wages, increased hours, halved the amount paid to fishermen, and imported the Philippine workers.  The canneries, they said, made it clear that they did not want locals working in the plants.

The result: near-poverty life for community residents and near-slavery conditions for the imported workers.

Our immigration system needs a fix to allow workers to come and go without fear of random arrests, firings, or deportations.  Farm working conditions need a fix.  Reexamining the minimum wage might be a good starting point.

Your thoughts?

By analogy with cigarettes, taxes on sodas might discourage people—especially young people—from consuming sugary drinks.  This might help with weight issues.

According to a new analysis by USDA economists,

A tax-induced 20-percent price increase on caloric sweetened beverages could cause an average reduction of 37 calories per day, or 3.8 pounds of body weight over a year, for adults and an average of 43 calories per day, or 4.5 pounds over a year, for children. Given these reductions in calorie consumption, results show an estimated decline in adult overweight prevalence (66.9 to 62.4 percent) and obesity prevalence (33.4 to 30.4 percent), as well as the child at-risk-for-overweight prevalence (32.3 to 27.0 percent) and the overweight prevalence (16.6 to 13.7 percent).

Soft drink companies know this all too well.  Hence, intense industry lobbying.  In the case of New York State, the lobbying succeeded.  Soda taxes are history (for now).

New York Times 7-2-10

As the New York Times explains:

Final lobbyist filings are not yet in, but estimates of the amount spent…range from $2.5 million, by Mr. Finnegan’s count, to $5 million, by the beverage industry’s count. The American Beverage Association spent $9.4 million in the first four months of the year to oppose New York’s soda tax, according to a search of public lobbying records by the New York State Healthy Eating and Physical Activity Alliance. Most of the money was spent on advertising, media and strategy.

This is a setback, but probably temporary.  Sooner or later, soda taxes will come.  Bring on the research!

Addition, July 5: Harvard researchers have just published a paper in the American Journal of Public Health showing that raising the price of sodas in a hospital cafeteria does indeed discourage sales.

In April, the Institute of Medicine published a study concluding that salt poses so serious a health hazard that the FDA should start regulating it as a food additive.

Last week, Mitchell Moss produced a lengthy piece in the New York Times, “The hard sell on salt,” detailing the food industry’s resistance to salt reduction:

The industry is working overtly and behind the scenes to fend off these attacks, using a shifting set of tactics that have defeated similar efforts for 30 years, records and interviews show. Industry insiders call the strategy “delay and divert” and say companies have a powerful incentive to fight back: they crave salt as a low-cost way to create tastes and textures. Doing without it risks losing customers, and replacing it with more expensive ingredients risks losing profits.

Now we have Judith Shulevitz’s piece in The New Republic, “Is salt the new crack?”  She concludes:

We need to stop ingesting all these substances in ludicrous amounts…We need to be taught not just what’s in processed food, but how historically anomalous its manufacture and our consumption of it are. We need to understand the mechanisms that addict us to it. We need to relearn how to prepare real meals, and we need to start rethinking the social dynamics of that chore (it can’t just be up to wives and mothers anymore). It’s pretty hard to imagine the government conducting that education campaign, but, 20 years ago, it may have been just as hard to imagine the “truth campaign” that exposed the tobacco industry’s marketing techniques and the transformation of social norms that made it déclassé to smoke.

As I keep saying (see previous posts), the salt issue is one of personal choice.  If I want to eat less salt, I cannot eat processed foods or restaurant foods because that’s where 80% of the salt in American diets comes from.  As Moss explains, PepsiCo cannot make Cheetos without salt.  I can just say no to Cheetos, but eating out is a challenge.

No, salt is not the new crack, but I’m glad that changing food social norms is becoming part of the national conversation.

Food corporations are pushing corporate social responsibility (CSR) as hard as they can.  This seems like an oxymoron to me, but here’s what they say:

CSR #1: Nestlé (no relation) says it is creating shared value by “optimizing water use and productivity, Italy.”

In the Piacenza and Parma region of Italy, in recent years, water has become scarcer, especially during the summer. Nestlé Italia decided to engage more closely with its tomato suppliers, to secure its supply of tomatoes and significantly reduce the amount of fresh water used for irrigation.

The three-year project with Consorzio Interregionale Ortofrutticoli, a cooperative of tomato farmers, aims to maximise tomato production and optimise irrigation in 10 pilot farms with differing soil conditions, by using solar-powered CropSense Soil Moisture Monitoring technology. Data at root level is collected daily and used to provide the exact amount of water needed to optimise crop revenue and water use.

Data collection will continue into 2011, and additional farmers are already keen to join the project based on the initial results: yields have nearly doubled, the tomato quality (sugar content) increased by 15% and the water used to produce one tonne of tomatoes fell by 45%.

Watch Nestlé’s film: Optimising water use and productivity, Italy

Read more in Nestlé’s report, Creating Shared Value

Anti-CSR: For an antidote, try Corporate Accountability International’s campaign called “Think Outside the Bottle,” and watch the video of Annie Leonard’s Story of Bottled Water.

CSR #2: FoodNavigator has a new collection of commentaries on CSR:

Reports about what to do about obesity in adults and children are coming out one after another.

The HSC Foundation has produced Fighting Obesity: What Works, What’s Promising? (click on Fighting Obesity Report).  Based on interviews, it reviews model programs that are having some success, such as The Food Trust, a Philadelphia-based nonprofit organization; The Consortium to Lower Obesity in Chicago Children (CLOCC); and The Coordinated Approach to Child Health (CATCH) Program.  Its main conclusion: a focus on pregnant women and children will have the biggest payoff.

NIH has New Tools to Promote Healthy Habits, one of which is “We Can!  Ways to Enhance Children’s Activities and Nutrition.”  The online program tells families how to improve food choices, increase physical activity, and reduce screen time.  [Question: do online programs do any good at all?  I’d really like to know.]

Finally (for now), the Institute of Medicine and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation have produced Local Government Action to Prevent Childhood Obesity, with a mind-numbing 58 steps that governments could take to do some good .  They also published a brief summary. Fortunately, the authors select the 12 actions most likely to succeed:

1. Create incentive programs to attract supermarkets and grocery stores to underserved neighborhoods
2. Require menu labeling in chain restaurants to provide consumers with calorie information on in-store menus and menu boards
3. Mandate and implement strong nutrition standards for foods and beverages available in government-run or regulated after-school programs, recreation centers, parks, and child-care facilities, including limiting access to unhealthy foods and beverages
4. Adopt building codes to require access to, and maintenance of, fresh drinking water fountains (e.g. public restrooms)
5. Implement a tax strategy to discourage consumption of foods and beverages that have minimal nutritional value, such as sugar sweetened beverages
6. Develop media campaigns, utilizing multiple channels (print, radio, internet, television, social networking, and other promotional materials) to promote healthy eating (and active living) using consistent messages
7. Plan, build and maintain a network of sidewalks and street crossings that connects to schools, parks and other destinations and create a safe and comfortable walking environment
8. Adopt community policing strategies that improve safety and security of streets and park use, especially in higher-crime neighborhoods
9. Collaborate with schools to implement a Safe Routes to Schools program
10. Build and maintain parks and playgrounds that are safe and attractive for playing, and in close proximity to residential areas
11. Collaborate with school districts and other organizations to establish agreements that would allow playing fields, playgrounds, and recreation centers to be used by community residents when schools are closed (joint-use agreements)
12. Institute regulatory policies mandating minimum play space, physical equipment and duration of play in preschool, afterschool and child-care programs

A 12-step program for preventing childhood obesity!  These are good ideas.  What will it take to get them put into practice?