Belgium has produced a new food guide “pyramid,” upside down. Its advice:
Nothing new here, really, except for making the advice so graphically clear.
As Quartz puts it, “the new food pyramid in Belgium sticks meat next to candy and pizza.”
USDA: take note.
Remember menu labeling? The idea started in New York City in 2008. Here is one of my early posts on it. My point in mentioning this: if you care about such things, menu labeling is useful, fun, and effective if you pay attention to it.
Despite a lot of research suggesting otherwise, menu labeling must work. How else to explain industry’s ferocious and unrelenting opposition to it?
The latest is a lawsuit filed by the Food Marketing Institute and the National Association of Convenience Stores against New York City, which announced that it plans to enforce the regulations it has had in effect for nine years—even though the FDA has delayed national implementation once again until 2018.
To get some idea of what fast-food places are upset about, it helps to check in with the American Pizza Community, the friendly-sounding, but actually highly aggressive trade association for fast-food pizza places.
Here, for example, is its congratulatory statement to the FDA for delaying compliance with the law for another year:
The American Pizza Community welcomes the important step by the Food and Drug Administration toward applying common sense to federal menu labeling regulations…The previous approach threatened to impose excessive burdens on thousands of small businesses without achieving meaningful improvements in educating consumers. The American Pizza Community commends the Administration’s decision to extend the compliance date to May 7, 2018 and its request to collect comments for reducing the regulatory burden and increasing flexibility in implementation methods. We support menu labeling and look forward to working with policy makers to implement a permanent solution that provides consumers with information and enables small business owners to comply with flexibility while continuing to thrive and create jobs.
By “support,” the pizza folks mean the “Common Sense Nutrition Disclosure Act of 2017.”
Instead of requiring calories to be posted next to the menu item, this bill would allow nutrition information to be available “solely by a remote-access menu (e.g., an Internet menu) for food establishments where the majority of orders are placed by customers who are off-premises.”
Also, “an establishment’s nutrient content disclosures may vary from actual nutrient content if the disclosures comply with current standards for reasonable basis.
The pizza industry has the Wall Street Journal on its side.
The Food and Drug Administration can’t possibly fulfill all of the responsibilities it claims to have, and here’s one way the Trump Administration can set better priorities: Direct the agency to end its effort to inform Americans that pizza contains calories.
I guess the hope is that if they delay long enough, menu labeling will quietly disappear.
CSPI, however, has other ideas. It filed a lawsuit to force the FDA to implement the regulations.
This lawsuit asserts that the delay of the menu labeling requirement—published without prior notice or an opportunity for comment, one day before the menu labeling rule was supposed to take effect—is illegal and must be vacated. Since the regulated industry was ready to comply before the delay, it can promptly comply with the menu labeling rule once reinstated and, thus, begin to provide this important health information to the public without delay, according to the complaint.
Recall that menu labeling was authorized by Congress as part of the Affordable Care Act in 2010. No wonder CSPI wants the rules implemented right away.
The ACA is still with us—so far.
This is one of Food Navigator’s collection of articles, videos, and podcasts on single topics, in this case “clean” labels, clearly a hot trend.
Special Edition: Where next for clean label?
How is the ‘clean-label’ trend evolving? Is it still about avoiding certain ‘artificial’ or ‘artificial-sounding’ ingredients, or is it now part of a broader conversation about GMOs, animal welfare, sustainability, and business ethics? What do consumers understand by ‘clean’ food? And how will they view innovations from monk fruit produced from microbes, to ‘meat’ and ‘milk’ made without raising animals?
To the casual observer, ‘cleaning up’ our food sounds like an eminently sensible thing to do. But where is the clean label trend going, and is ditching every ingredient you can’t pronounce really the key to fixing the ‘broken’ food system (as Panera implies in a recent ad) or improving the health of people and the planet? .. Read
I love USDA’s charts of food and agriculture statistics because they tell most of the story at a glance.
These are based on USDA’s compilations of foods produced in the U.S. plus imports, less exports, divided by the total population.
The most commonly consumed vegetable? Potatoes by a long shot (think: French fries). Next comes tomatoes (pizza). Variety anyone?
How about fruit? Oranges, apples, bananas. Really, can’t we be more adventurous?
It’s pretty depressing to watch what’s happening to the gains in food and nutrition policy so hard won in the last few years.
Nothing but bad news:
Menu labeling: The FDA is submitting interim final rules, a tactic to delay implementation of menu labeling, which was supposed to start on May 5. Why? The National Association of Convenience Stores and the National Grocers Association filed a petition asking for the delay. Pizza sellers have been lobbying like mad to avoid having to post calories.
Food labels (calories, added sugars): As the Washington Post puts it, the food industry is counting on the current administration to back off on anything that might help us all make better food choices. At least 17 food industry groups have asked for a delay in the compliance date for new food labels—for three years. Why? They are a burden to industry. The soon-to-be FDA Commissioner, Scott Gottlieb, said this about food labels:
As a general matter, I support providing clear, accurate, and understandable information to American consumers to help inform healthy dietary choices,” Gottlieb wrote, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post. “ … However, I am mindful of the unique challenges that developing and communicating such information can pose, particularly on small, independent businesses.”
Definition of dietary fiber: The American Bakers Association wants the FDA to take back its new, stricter definition of dietary fiber, (it excludes synthetic fiber) due to go into effect in July 2018.
School meals: The USDA says it is about to announce new school meal “flexibility” (translation: rollback of nutrition standards).
The score: Big business 4, public health 0
Happy May Day.
For further reading:
Addition: It gets worse. Politico reports that the congressional spending bill:
Contains a rider blocking funds from being used to work on “any regulations applicable to food manufacturers for population-wide sodium reduction actions or to develop, issue, promote or advance final guidance applicable to food manufacturers for long term population-wide sodium reduction actions until the date on which a dietary reference intake report with respect to sodium is completed.”
Politico also points out that the previous draft of the appropriation bill merely encouraged FDA to delay its salt reduction proposal until the reference intake report is updated (this, by the way, will take years).
More documents:
The New York Time published its annual food issue on Sunday, this one with the theme, “Can Big Food Change?”
In the circles in which I travel, Michael Pollan’s “Big food strikes back: Why did the Obamas fail to take on corporate agriculture?” caused the biggest stir. Here’s what set people off:
On “Outlobbied and Outgunned:” The word I’ve been using to describe food industry lobbying against Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move! campaign is ferocious.
I’ve always thought that Mrs. Obama must have picked the goal of Let’s Move!—“Ending childhood obesity in a generation“—as a safe, bipartisan issue that Republicans and Democrats could all get behind. Doesn’t everyone want kids to be healthy?
I can’t imagine that she could have predicted how controversial matters like healthy school lunches or nutrition standards for food advertising to kids would become.
Whatever. The food industry’s response to everything Let’s Move! tried to do was ferocious.
Despite all that, as I’ve said, Let’s Move! managed to accomplish some important gains: healthier school meals, more informative food and menu labels, the White House garden, and—most important—getting food issues on the national agenda.
On “the food movement barely exists:” I once taught a course on food as a social movement with Troy Duster, a sociologist then at NYU, who had much experience teaching about social movements.
He made one point repeatedly: those who are in the middle of a social movement cannot possibly judge its effectiveness. You can only know when a movement has succeeded or failed when it is over.
This one is not over yet.
This movement, fragmented in issues and groups as it most definitely is, may not have clout in Washington, DC, but it is having an enormous effect on supermarkets, food product manufacturers, fast food chains, the producers of meat, eggs, and poultry, and young people in this country.
How else to explain:
And my personal favorite,
As Troy Duster kept telling us, it’s not over until it’s over.
While waiting for enlightenment, let’s celebrate the proliferation of food organizations. They are all working on important issues and doing plenty of good.
And yes, let’s encourage all of them to move beyond the local, engage in national politics, and put some pressure on Washington to come up with better food policies.
Here are the other articles in the magazine, all of them well worth reading.
Wonder of wonders, the FDA at last has issued its Final Guidance on Menu Labeling to go into effect a year from now.
Why astonishment? New York City has had menu labeling since 2008. The national process started in 2010.
Here’s the chronology:
| YEAR | DATE | ACTION |
| 2010 | March 23 | President Obama signs the Affordable Care Act which includes a provision requiring chain retail food establishments with 20 or more locations to provide calorie information for standard menu items. |
| July 7 | FDA publishes Federal Register notice soliciting comments and suggestions | |
| Aug 25 | FDA requests comments on “Draft Guidance for Industry: Questions and Answers Regarding Implementation of the Menu Labeling.” | |
| 2011 | Jan 25 | FDA withdraws draft implementation guidance; announces intent to exercise enforcement discretion until rulemaking process is complete; requests comments. |
| April 6 | FDA issues proposed rule. | |
| May 24 | FDA issues document correcting errors in proposed rules; extends comment period. | |
| July 5 | FDA issues notice of proposed rulemaking. | |
| 2014 | Dec 1 | FDA issues final rule. |
| 2016 | April | FDA issues guidance for industry. |
Happily, the rules will cover:
bakeries, cafeterias, coffee shops, convenience stores, delicatessens, food service facilities and concession stands located within entertainment venues (such as amusement parks, bowling alleys, and movie theatres), food service vendors (such as ice cream shops and mall cookie counters), food takeout or delivery establishments (such as pizza takeout and delivery establishments), grocery stores, retail confectionary stores, superstores, quick service restaurants and table service restaurants.
Center for Science in the Public Interest has produced celebratory graphics:
It’s too bad we have to wait yet another year, but menu labels are worth the wait.
The FDA documents:
Helena Bottemiller Evich of Politico Morning Agriculture, has produced an alarming investigation of the Obama Administration’s failure to support its own food safety initiatives. Fortunately, Politico has released it from behind the paywall so it can be read by non-subscribers. Do read it. It’s a depressing slice of political reality.
The Obama administration and Congress have all but squandered an opportunity to give the anemic Food and Drug Administration, which is responsible for the safety of 80 percent of the nation’s food supply, a level of oversight the public long assumed it already had.
On paper…the Food Safety Modernization Act…mandated more inspections and much tougher anti-contamination standards for everything from peaches to imported pesto sauce, and it placed more emphasis on preventing outbreaks than on chasing them down after people become sick.
But almost five years later, not one of the sweeping new rules has been implemented and funding is more than $276 million behind where it needs to be. A law that could have been legacy-defining for President Barack Obama instead represents a startling example of a broad and bipartisan policy initiative stymied by politics and the neglect of some of its strongest proponents.
The result is shown in this chart.
She adds:
The White House has routinely put nutrition policy ahead of food safety, sat on key regulations for months and made only halfhearted attempts to fund the law…Congress, too, bears blame: With no real pressure from the White House or the public, Capitol Hill has given the FDA less than half of what the agency says it needs to actually enforce the new rules, once they take effect.
I’m not so sure about the “putting nutrition ahead” part of this. Critics have long complained that the White House could have done much more to promote healthier diets. They recall the lack of support for the Interagency Working Group’s recommendations for nutrition standards for marketing to children. Menu labeling has just been delayed a year (although advocates tell me that this compromise was necessary to keep labeling for pizza places and movie theaters—ultimately a victory).
This administration has about a year left to get its legacy in order. A full-court press in support of the FDA is just what is needed. Now!
