Vermont’s governor, Peter Shumlin, says he will sign Vermont’s GMO labeling bill.  The bill, (H112), which passed by a majority of 114 to 30:

• Requires food manufacturers to label GMO products sold in Vermont starting July 1, 2016 (Meat, dairy, liquor and prepared foods sold in restaurants are exempt).
• Will allow labels to say “partially produced with genetic engineering,” “may be produced with genetic engineering,” or “produced with genetic engineering.”
• Says foods containing GMO ingredients cannot be marketed as “natural.”
• Sets aside $1.5 million to pay for the inevitable lawsuits.

As always, the Grocery Manufacturers of America can be counted on to give the industry position.  H112

is critically flawed and not in the best interests of consumers.  It sets the nation on a costly and misguided path toward a 50-state patchwork of GMO labeling policies that will do nothing to advance the safety of consumer.

…The FDA, World Health Organization, American Medical Association and U.S. National Academy of Science have all found that foods and beverages that contain GM ingredients are safe and materially no different than conventionally produced products. Consumers who prefer to avoid GM ingredients have the option to choose from an array of products already in the marketplace labeled ‘certified organic.’

Translation: if GMO’s are safe, they are OK.  Never mind all the other reasons it would be good to label them.

GMOs are the best thing that ever happened to organics.

The lawsuits will, no doubt, invoke the First Amendment.  One attorney, Jonathan Emord, says the bill should be able to withstand the challenge.

Will Vermont’s action lead to a domino effect?  Nearly 30 other states are considering such bills.

Recall that the first company to produce GMO tomatoes intended to label them (I have copies of the label in my files).  But the biotechnology industry put an end to that idea in the early 1990s.

Now it’s paying the price for a bad decision 20 years ago.  I’m surprised this took so long.

More information from FoodNavigator-USA:

• Class action lawsuit v General Mills over all-natural claims and GMOs can proceed, says judge
• Global ID: ‘I wouldn’t say the writing is on the wall for GM crops, but big brands are listening to the signals in the marketplace’
• Pompeo bill would preempt state GMO labeling

You might think that the Supreme Court of the United States would have more important things to do than to weigh in on which of two beverage companies puts less misleading labels on its products, but apparently not.

The highest court in the land takes POM Wonderful’s accusation against Coca-Cola seriously.  Coke’s Minute Maid juice, POM says, is advertised in ways that mislead the public.

POM should know.   It’s been under fire from the Federal Trade Commission for equally absurd label claims.

Here’s the Coca-Cola product at issue.

And here’s what the label says, in case you can’t read it (with emphasis added):

Enhanced Juice/Minute Maid/100% Fruit Juice Blend

Omega-3/DHA/HELP NOURISH YOUR BRAIN

5 Nutrients to Support Brain and Body

Pomegranate  Blueberry Flavored Blend of 5 Juices

From concentrate with added ingredients and other natural flavors

Never mind the nutritional quality or the ridiculous structure/function claims on this particular product (here’s Fooducate’s analysis from 2009—it has 29 grams of sugars, among other things).

POM doesn’t want Coke getting away with selling cheap grape and apple juices as pomengranate juice and undercutting their prices.  Coke’s drink is 99% apple and grape juice; it contains less than 1% pomegranate or blueberry juice.  You would never know that from looking at the label.

Why is the court interested?  The Minute Maid label is legal by FDA standards.  Therefore, can the label be considered misleading?

Coca-Cola won in the lower court, but the Supreme Court seems sympathetic to POM (here’s the transcript of the hearing).

The New York Times account has the best quotes:

Kathleen M. Sullivan, a lawyer for Coca-Cola, said consumers were not misled.

“We don’t think that consumers are quite as unintelligent as Pom must think they are,” she said. “They know when something is a flavored blend of five juices and the nonpredominant juices are just a flavor.”

Justice Kennedy frowned. “Don’t make me feel bad,” he said, “because I thought that this was pomegranate juice.”

It also quotes from Justice Alito:

You don’t think there are a lot of people who buy pomegranate juice because they think it has health benefits, and they would be very surprised to find when they bring home this bottle that’s got a big picture of a pomegranate on it, and it says ‘pomegranate’ on it, that it is — what is it — less than one half of 1 percent pomegranate juice?”

Where is the FDA on all this?  Blame its inaction on the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994, which allowed ridiculous health claims on food labels and forced the FDA to keep hands off.

This outcome of this case, silly as it is, will be fun to watch.

JAMA Internal Medicine invited me to comment on an article about the lack of nutrition education in medical schools.  This was written by Nathanial Morris, a second-year medical student at Harvard, who complains about the paucity of nutrition instruction in his curriculum.

Yet the course spanned just 3 afternoons, for a total of 9 hours of instruction…The course directors told us it would be the only time for dedicated nutrition education during our 4 years as medical students. There were no examinations nor interactions with patients. The 1 lecture on obesity lasted 45 minutes…As a medical student, I cannot fathom why medical schools continue to neglect nutrition education.

When I read his article, I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.  I wrote almost identical articles in the 1980s based on my experience at UCSF (here’s one).

I asked a former UCSF colleague, Dr. Robert Baron, to co-author the commentary with me: Nutrition in Medical Education:  From Counting Hours to Measuring Competence.

Some help from Congress?

It is interesting in this context that various members of Congress are introducing bills to improve nutrition education for medical professionals, for example, the EAT for Health Act and the ENRICH Act.  Thanks to Jamie Berger for alerting me to this legislation and for sending some fact sheets about the bills: EAT for Health / ENRICH.

It’s been nearly 40 years since my involvement in this issue.  Ever optimistic, I’m happy to see some progress at last.

And this just in.

The current issue of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition has papers from a symposium on nutrition in medical education.  The first was in 1962, so the half-century saga continues.

• Title page, program participants, and TOC:  Am J Clin Nutr 2014;99 1145S-1149S
• Introduction to Nutrition Education in Training Medical and Other Health Care Professionals. Penny M Kris-Etherton, Charlotte A Pratt, Edward Saltzman, and Linda Van Horn. Am J Clin Nutr 2014;99 1151S-1152S
• The need to advance nutrition education in the training of health care professionals and recommended research to evaluate implementation and effectiveness. Penny M Kris-Etherton, Sharon R Akabas, Connie W Bales, Bruce Bistrian, Lynne Braun, Marilyn S Edwards, Celia Laur, Carine M Lenders, Matthew D Levy, Carole A Palmer, Charlotte A Pratt, Sumantra Ray, Cheryl L Rock, Edward Saltzman, Douglas L Seidner, and Linda Van Horn. Am J Clin Nutr 2014;99 1153S-1166S
• Nutrition education in medical school: a time of opportunity. Robert F Kushner, Linda Van Horn, Cheryl L Rock, Marilyn S Edwards, Connie W Bales, Martin Kohlmeier, and Sharon R Akabas. Am J Clin Nutr 2014;99 1167S-1173S
• Residency and specialties training in nutrition: a call for action. Carine M Lenders, Darwin D Deen, Bruce Bistrian, Marilyn S Edwards, Douglas L Seidner, M Molly McMahon, Martin Kohlmeier, and Nancy F Krebs. Am J Clin Nutr 2014;99 1174S-1183S 
• Challenges and opportunities for nutrition education and training in the health care professions: intraprofessional and interprofessional call to action. Rose Ann DiMaria-Ghalili, Jay M Mirtallo, Brian W Tobin, Lisa Hark, Linda Van Horn, and Carole A Palmer. Am J Clin Nutr 2014;99 1184S-1193S
• Policy approach to nutrition and physical activity education in health care professional training. Matthew D Levy, Lisel Loy, and Laura Y Zatz.  Am J Clin Nutr 2014;99 1194S-1201S.

The CDC has just issued its latest report on foodborne illness and food safety progress from 2006 to 2013.

It’s report has a couple of frowny faces—Campylobacter and Vibrio cases are up—and nothing else has changed.

Nothing to smile about.

Laboratory diagnoses of other foodborne microbial illnesses are also rising.

The food industry needs to do a better job of producing safe food.

Let’s hope the new food safety rules go into effect soon and get followed.

Hennessey quotes from a speech by Steven Parrish, of the Steve Parrish Consulting Group describing parallels between tobacco and food litigation.

From the first lawsuit filed against [tobacco] industry member in 1953 to mid-1990s, the industry never lost or settled a smoking and health product liability suit. In the mid ‘90s the eggs hit the fan because the industry for all those decades had smugly thought it had a legal problem. But over time, it came to realize it had a society problem. Litigation was a symptom of the disease, not the disease itself.

…When it came time to resolve the litigation, we couldn’t just sit in a room and say, ‘how much money do you want?…A lot had nothing to do with money. It had to do with reining the industry in…We spent so much time early on talking to ourselves about greedy trial lawyers, out-of-touch regulators, media-addicted elected officials and public health people who didn’t know how to run a business. At the end of the day, it didn’t matter. We would have been much better off recognizing these people had legitimate agendas.”

… Maybe there are some parallels, but I urge people not to succumb to the temptation to say, ‘cigarettes kill you, cigarettes are addictive. But mac and cheese, coffee, and Oscar Meyers wieners don’t. That may be true, but there are still risks for the industry.

There’s this idea, which has picked up steam in the media, that large food companies are manipulating ingredients to hook people on food. It hasn’t been manifest in litigation yet, but we’re seeing it with legislative initiatives, like Mayor Bloomberg in New York City saying sugar hooks people and causes diabetes. We’ve seen some with GMOs, though most of that legislation is about consumers’ right to know. But there’s this overarching concept that Big Food is somehow manipulating our food supply and as a result, giving us non-food.

Sounds like the message is getting across loud and clear.

Thoughts?

The Washington Post won a couple of Pulitzer Prizes yesterday, among them one for Eli Saslow’s remarkable series on what it’s really like to depend on food stamps. The Post’s understated announcement about this one is because its other prize was for its Snowdon coverage:

The Post’s Eli Saslow also won a Pulitzer — newspaper journalism’s highest award — for a series of stories about the challenges of people living on food stamps. Saslow, 31, was cited in the explanatory-journalism category by the 19-member Pulitzer board in an announcement at Columbia University in New York, which administers the prizes.

If you didn’t get to read the prize-winning articles, here’s your chance.

When Walmart announced last week that it would start carrying Wild Oats organic foods at prices at least 25% below those of national brand organics, I had some conflicted reactions.

Walmart’s rationale sounds terrific:

We know our customers are interested in purchasing organic products and, traditionally, those customers have had to pay more,” said Jack Sinclair, executive vice president of grocery at Walmart U.S. “We are changing that and creating a new price position for organic groceries that increases access. This is part of our ongoing effort to use our scale to deliver quality, affordable groceries to our customers.

But Reuters explains what this is really about:

Organic foods accounted for roughly 4 percent of total U.S. food sales in 2012, but growth in the category for years has outpaced the industry overall, buoyed by growing demand for simpler food made from natural ingredients.

Organic foods often cost more than their conventional rivals, and that has limited purchases by the legions of lower-income U.S. shoppers who are needed to propel a niche product into a national player.

Walmart caters to that audience…”If we can make that price premium disappear, we think it will grow much, much faster,” Jack Sinclair, executive vice president of grocery at Walmart U.S., said of the retailer’s small but faster-growing organic sales.

For Walmart watchers, the announcement raises many concerns.

Tom Philpott, writing in Mother Jones before the recent announcement did a brief investigation of Walmart’s organic and local offerings in Austin, Texas:

Of course, Walmart exists to generate profit, not social change. And that may explain the dearth of produce being trumpeted as local and organic in the Austin store I visited. The city teems with farmers markets, Whole Foods branches, and a successful food co-op. With so many options available, shoppers here are likely not heading to Walmart for their heirloom tomatoes. As Prevor [Jim Prevor, the Perishable Pundit] told me, the company tailors its offerings to each region. It will “essentially sell whatever its customers want, as long as there’s a profit to be made.” 

Forbes asks a tough question: Maybe Walmart has just killed the organic food market?

WalMart getting into organics in a big way [may not be] good news for the industry. Most especially when they say that they’re going to eliminate the price premium that organic has traditionally carried…I don’t think it’s revealing anything terribly new to state that those who preferentially buy organic are often those who would prefer not to be thought of as WalMart shoppers.

And Trillium Asset Management, a company that claims to be devoted to sustainable and responsible investing, wonders whether the Walmart plan means that organics have lost their soul:

Wal-Mart’s pledge…is making a whole lot of people very nervous. Wal-Mart’s modus operandi is to keep prices low by driving down costs in the production chain and keeping its own wages low; its competitors’ practices are variations of the same theme, if less cutthroat. Good ol’ American-style capitalism and its frequent bedfellow, inadequate regulation, now threaten to strip “organic” of everything it once stood for (and everything that has made it more expensive): small scale production, gentler treatment of animals, better treatment of farm workers, and the elimination of chemical aids to production.

My personal observations of Walmart stores also make me skeptical.  I haven’t seen some of the previous promises effectively translated into reality.

Walmart says it will roll out the lower priced organics to about half its 4000 stores by this summer.

I’m reserving judgment until I see how these particular promises are implemented in the stores.

This just in: USDA’s latest data on organic agriculture.

The writer Krissy Clark, in a collaboration between Marketplace and SLATE, has produced a remarkable series of articles (with audio and video) on business interests in SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program formerly known as food stamps.

Here are brief excerpts:

The secret life of a food stamp, April 1

Save money, live better, April 2

 Hungry for savings, April 3  

Like many anti-hunger advocates who receive donations from corporate retailers known for low wages, Elchert is in a tricky spot when it comes to addressing the paradoxes of the food stamp economy. His group gets financial support from Walmart and other food retailers. “When we’re talking a lot with corporations,” he says, “it’s one of those situations where, well, let’s talk about this in some way where we’re not offending them.”

I’ve talked about this issue in previous posts.  Here are some additional resources on the issue:

• The audio version of this series: listen to it here.
• Michele Simon’s report, Food Stamps:Follow the Money
• SNAP to Health policy report
• The Faces of Food Stamps, New York Times, March 31
• Who Uses Food Stamps? Millions of Children, NBC News March 17