Search results: a life in food

In case you missed all the publicity about Coca-Cola’s new ad campaign positioning the company as a force for public health, take a look at its new two-minute TV ad.

The video—how much do these things cost?—argues that the company is producing lower-calorie products in smaller sizes and promoting community activity, that all calories count, and that it’s up to you to fit Coke into your healthy active lifestyle.

The ad is an astonishing act of chutzpah, explainable only as an act of desperation to do something about the company’s declining sales in the U.S. and elsewhere.

If Coke really wanted to help prevent obesity, it would STOP:

• Targeting its “drink more Coke” marketing to kids.
• Targeting marketing to low-income minorities.
• Lobbying and spending a fortune to defeat soda taxes and caps on soda sizes.
• Fighting attempts to remove vending machines from schools.
• Pricing drinks so the largest sizes are the best value.
• “Bribing” health professions organizations to shut up about research linking sugar-sweetened beverages to poor diets and weight gain.
• Pushing Coke sales in developing countries where rates of obesity and related conditions are skyrocketing.

Instead, it’s doing all these things, but not talking about them in videos.

The company is supposed to be releasing a second video tonight, explaining how to work off the “140 happy calories” in a soda by dog-walking, dancing, or laughing. If only.

I can’t wait.

Addition, January 18:  Someone who calls himself John Pemberton has gone to the trouble of presenting the 2-minute commercial with a somewhat different narrative—the real story about Coca-Cola and obesity.  If that link doesn’t work, try this one.

In response to my post a couple of days ago about Beyoncé’s Pepsi deal, a reader asks:

How do you think the White House should respond to this deal.? Beyoncé’s song is featured on White House website and a Let’s Move! t-shirt she designed is given to kids at official events.  Will kids make the connection?  Can all that dancing overcome the effects of eating too much?

Let me deal with these one at a time.  First, the problem this poses to Let’s Move!  People concerned about the role of sugary sodas in childhood obesity are appalled by Beyoncé’s deal with Pepsi, so much so that the Center for Science in the Public Interest has organized a campaign to call on her to reconsider.   Unless she does reconsider and withdraws from the deal, her continued involvement with Let’s Move! raises exactly the questions you ask.

Beyoncé has just put Let’s Move! in a painfully awkward conflict of interest.  On the one hand, Let’s Move! promotes healthy diet and activity patterns to reverse childhood obesity.  On the other, its celebrity spokesperson is now going to be pushing Pepsi.  Beyoncé’s image will now appear on Pepsi cans—I hope not wearing her Let’s Move! tee shirt.

What the Beyoncé deal points out is the hazard of partnerships and alliances between public health groups and food companies.

In April 2011, the Washington Post reported that “A White House spokesman said that the first lady and her team weren’t involved in the making of the clip but that Beyonce is “a great example of how people can get involved with ‘Let’s Move!’ and bring this message to more and more young people.”

But now this.  The White House has long maintained that food and beverage companies are not going away and that it is obliged to work with them.  Maybe, but on whose terms?  I see Beyoncé’s $50 million partnership with Pepsi as a slap in the face to Let’s Move!  It puts Let’s Move! in the position of promoting Pepsi or asking Beyoncé to withdraw from having anything to do with it.

As for how kids are going to figure this out:  All kids know is that Beyoncé is a gorgeous mega-star, one who is able to perform vigorous dance moves in astonishingly high heels, and that Pepsi helps her do so or at least doesn’t hurt.  Beyoncé is especially a role-model for African-American kids.  Pepsi targets its marketing to African-American kids.  This looks like a serious conflict of interest.

On the balance between diet and activity: How I wish that physical activity alone could reverse obesity.  Physical activity is terrific for health (I’m not sure about those stiletto heels) but it’s rarely enough to reverse obesity on its own.  To lose weight—and, these days, to maintain healthy weight—kids absolutely must eat less and eat better.

Beyoncé has done Michelle Obama no favor by getting involved with Pepsi.  This is a mess, and not one that can be gracefully fixed.

Amanda Cohen and Ryan Dulavey. Dirt Candy: Flavor-Forward Food from the Upstart New York City Vegetarian Restaurant, Clarkson Potter, 2012.

This is a charming, utterly delightful, graphic novel about Amanda Cohen’s poignant and often hilarious trials and tribulations in opening and promoting (Iron Chef!) her restaurant Dirt Candy.  It’s hard to do justice to it without including illustrations but here’s a brief glimpse of the text:

But sometimes the problem isn’t the customer.  Sometimes the problem is me.  I was a good girl until I met my match in that plate of Roasted Cauliflower Pappardelle.  They all tried to warn me…but I wasn’t listening!  I was blind that winter because…I fell in love with the wrong dish.

It comes with recipes, right from the restaurant.

Book signing alert: Amanda will be signing books at the Union Square (New York) farmers’ market tomorrow, Saturday, at noon.

Andrea Curtis. What’s for Lunch?  How Schoolchildren Eat Around the World, Red Deer Press, 2012.

This is a short (40-page) picture book—drawings and photographs—to inspire anyone interested in school food to try some different foods for a change.

What kids eat for school lunch can also tell us a lot about the culture and history that make them and their country unique.  After all, what better way to get to know people than to share a meal with them?…Kids are gardening, cooking, and speaking out about their right to eat healthy lunches.  Their work is transforming schools and helping the planet too.

Andrew Weil and Sam Fox, with Michael Stebner.  True Food: Seasonal, Sustainable, Simple, Pure.  Little, Brown, 2012.

I blurbed this one:

Andrew Weil is a rare member of a special class of diet gurus: he appreciates good food.  This shows in his philosophy of healthy eating—if meals are delicious, people will eat them.  It also shows in every recipe in this book.  Weil and his colleagues encourage adventurous eating and some of the ingredients may be unfamiliar, but even the simplest recipe—tomato and watermelon salad, for example—will make mouths water.

Allison Adato.  Smart Chefs Stay Slim: Lessons in Eating and Living from America’s Best Chefs, New American Library, 2012.

I blurbed this one too:

Overeating may be an occupational hazard, but some chefs manage to maintain their weight.  Smart Chefs reveals their successful strategies for eating what they love—in moderation, of course.  Their “lessons” should work for anyone who adores food.  Fun to read and packed with good advice.

Stephanie V.W. Lucianovic.  Suffering Soccotash: A Picky Eater’s Quest to Understand Why We Hate the Foods We Hate, Perigee, 2012.

I’m not much of a picky eater, so I’m fascinated by people who are.  Lucianovic tells an entertaining story of her life in pickiness.  My favorite chapter: “The picky eater eats out.” This contains a section called “the picky eater’s guide to surviving a dinner party,” with some rather socially unacceptable suggestions about where to hide unwanted food.  But she learned to cook and got over it (sort of).  If pickiness makes you miserable, this might be just the cure.

Eleanor Boyle. High Steaks: Why and How to Eat Less Meat, New Society Publishers, 2012.

What’s wrong with livestock?  What’s wrong with meat?  In moderation, nothing—if you accept that humans have the moral right to use animals for food.  Most people accept this—ad I do—as long as we treat animals respectfully and maintain some reverence for taking their lives….But is it possible, as the evidence increasingly suggests, that we’re making and eating too much for the good of the planet and our personal and community well-being?

This book addresses those questions and suggests strategies for ensuring that meat is produced in a sustainable, ecologically responsible manner and for developing policies that discourage factory farming and encouraging responsible and healthful meat-eating practices.

My NYU Food Policy class meets tonight and we’ll be talking about the farm bill and Dan Imhoff’s most helpful book Food Fight: The Citizens’ Guide to the Next Food and Farm Bill.

To review what’s up with the 2012 farm bill:

Congress updates farm bills every five years or so.  It passed the last one in 2008, with an expiration date at midnight on September 30, 2012.  This was the first time Congress ever set an expiration date to land in the midst of a presidential election.  This was asking for trouble.  Congress is paralyzed in election years.

That date has now come and gone.

But in June 2011, the Senate passed its version of the bill: The Agriculture Reform, Food and Jobs Act of 2012.

The House, however, was unable to come to agreement on its version: The Federal Agriculture Reform and Risk Management Act of 2012.

Why?  Election-year politics and disagreements about whether and by how much the SNAP (food stamps) budget should be cut.  More than 80% of farm bill spending goes to SNAP benefits—a whopping $72 billion last year–making it a prime target for budget cutting.

This situation puts us in farm bill limbo.

The significance of limbo is best explained by the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition (NSAC).

• Without a new farm bill, commodity (corn, soybean, etc) support programs revert to permanent law contained in the farm bills passed in 1938 and 1949.  Why?  Because unlike subsequent bills, these did not have expiration dates.
• The old laws reintroduce much higher support prices (through certain loans instead of payments), require much smaller crop production, and lead to much higher consumer prices.  They do not include  support for soybeans, other oilseeds, peanuts, or sugar, making them woefully out of date.
• Limbo has no effect on SNAP or crop insurance.  Congress covered SNAP with a resolution for continued funding through March 2013.  The Federal Crop Insurance Act effectively authorizes crop insurance permanently.
• Dairy programs are in turmoil.  Milk payments to farmers ended in September.  The dairy price support program ends on January 1.   Under the 1949 law, government-supported prices would be about four times higher than current law and about twice as high as current market prices.
• The Agricultural Appropriations Act extended some—but not all—conservation programs through 2014.
• The permanent law does not support the hard-won programs that encourage fruit and vegetable production: organic, farmers’ market, beginning farmer, socially disadvantaged farmer, or specialty crop programs.  These now have no funding.

This leaves Congress with three options between now and January:

• Finish the current process and pass a bill (unlikely since it only has a few weeks to do this)
• Vote to extend provisions through the 2013 crop year, or
• Start from scratch all over again in a much tighter budget environment—the infamous “fiscal cliff.”

As NSAC explains:

The farm bill is the nation’s major food and agricultural policy vehicle and is about much more than the big ticket items: food stamps, crop insurance, and commodity support.  The farm bill is also about conservation and environmental protection, rural economic and community development, food system reform and agricultural research.

With no new farm bill or extension, the programs that address rural and urban job creation, natural resource conservation, renewable energy, and improved production and access to healthy food are in big trouble.

This is a big mess, and a serious result of dysfunctional government.  It will be interesting spectator sport to see how Congress handles it.

Will Congress find a way to bring agricultural policy in line with health policy?

Or will Congress simply do whatever is most expedient, given the budgetary mess it has also created.

It’s too bad so much is at stake.

People who consume caffeinated energy drinks may be dying right and left (Because of the caffeine?  The drinks?  Hard to say) but that isn’t stopping food manufacturers from adding it to everything: Cracker Jacks, jelly beans, Gummi Bears, brownies, mints, and maple syrup.

The FDA has just released its data on problems reported among users of three caffeinated energy drinks.

According to the New York Times,

The three products involved in the release — Rockstar Energy, 5-Hour Energy and Monster Energy — are all marketed as dietary supplements. Other energy drinks like Red Bull, NOS and AMP are marketed by their producers as beverages. There is not a mandatory reporting requirement for beverages, though makers can do so voluntarily.

In releasing the filings, the F.D.A. said it thought that even with the mandatory reporting requirement for dietary supplements, “only a small fraction of adverse events associated with any product is reported.”

…The records related to Monster Energy and 5-hour Energy came to light because they were released by the F.D.A. under the Freedom of Information Act.

The choice of labeling these products as foods or supplements deserves scrutiny.  By an act of Congress, dietary supplements do not have to meet the same standards for content and health claims as foods, and the FDA cannot do much to regulate them unless the products are demonstrably harmful.

Even though people died after drinking these products does not necessarily mean that the products caused the deaths.  Even this number of deaths could be a coincidence.

But earlier, the Times reported that

Since 2009, 5-Hour Energy has been mentioned in some 90 filings with the F.D.A., including more than 30 that involved serious or life-threatening injuries like heart attacks, convulsions and, in one case, a spontaneous abortion….

Some lawmakers are calling on the F.D.A. to increase its regulation of the products and the New York State attorney general is investigating the practices of several producers.

I looked up the Supplement Facts label for 5-Hour Energy.

According to statements given to Beverage Daily, 5-Hour Energy says there isn’t any evidence that its products cause deaths.  Its shots contain no more caffeine than a cup of coffee, and do not contain herbal ingredients.

But the product label does not list caffeine content.  The FDA does not require companies to disclose caffeine levels.

It allows them to market the products as drinks or as dietary supplements. Monster Energy contains 240 mg caffeine in 24 ounces.  It has been associated with the deaths of five people so far.

The Times points out that healthy adults can consume large amounts of caffeine with no evidence of harm but that caffeine can be risky for people with underlying conditions like heart disorders.  How much is risky?  It’s hard to say.

Most adults know how much caffeine they can handle without getting shaky or sleep-deprived.  But kids don’t, necessarily.

Consumer Reports tested products and found that some energy drinks contained more than 240 mg per serving, but notes that packages sometimes contain more than one serving.

The FDA considers caffeine to be safe.  But in an opinion last updated in 2011, FDA’s Select Committee on GRAS Substances found that “it is inappropriate to include caffeine among the substances generally recognized as safe (GRAS). At current levels of consumption of cola-type beverages, the dose of caffeine can approximate that known to induce such pharmacological effects as central nervous system stimulation.”

The Times notes that sales of energy drinks in the U.S. are booming, growing by about 16% last year and bringing in nearly $9 billion.

What to do?  A lawyer for the parent of one of the teenagers who died after drinking Monster Energy is urging the FDA to ban the drinks to minors.

The FDA should investigate the cases, for sure.

And how about adding amounts of caffeine to labels.  That seems like a no brainer while the investigations are in progress.

Former Senator (D-SD) George McGovern died yesterday at age 90.

His accomplishments as a Senator and statesmen were legion, many of them strongly connected to food politics.

As I mentioned in 2009 when I gave the state department’s annual George McGovern lecture in Rome, he chaired the Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs from 1968-1977.   This committee greatly expanded food assistance programs and then developed the first federal guidelines for chronic disease prevention: Dietary Goals for the U.S.

In Food Politics, I described the work of this strongly bipartisan committee (Bob Dole was its lead Republican member) and how it did so much to improve the lives of women and children living in poverty in the United States, and of poor people throughout the world.

The committee also broke new ground in shifting nutrition education from a focus on eating more of a variety of foods to eating less of foods that increased risks for chronic disease.

What’s shown here is the February 1977 version of this landmark report.  As the result of outraged protests by food producers affected by the “eat less” messages, the committee was forced to tone down its recommendations.  The committee issued a revised report in December that year.

That was the committee’s final act.  Congress disbanded it and McGovern lost his bid for reelection.

McGovern leaves an extraordinary legacy, one unimaginable in this era of partisan politics.

He was far ahead of his time, as this 1977 photo shows.  It is a fitting tribute.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which is responsible for regulating advertising, has just revised its “Green Guide” to eco-labeling.

The FTC warns that

• Explanations of specific attributes, even when true and substantiated, will not adequately qualify general environmental marketing claims if an advertisement’s context implies other deceptive claims.
• Marketers [are] not to imply that any specific benefit is significant if it is, in fact, negligible.
• If a qualified general claim conveys that a product is more environmentally beneficial overall because of the particular touted benefit, marketers should analyze trade-offs resulting from the benefit to substantiate this claim.

The FTC did this, according to the New York Times, to reduce the confusion caused by the proliferation of eco-labels.

In surveying consumers, the F.T.C. found that products that were promoted as “environmentally friendly” were perceived by consumers to have “specific and far-reaching” benefits, which, the government says, they often did not have.

“Very few products, if any, have all the attributes consumers seem to perceive from such claims, making these claims nearly impossible to substantiate,” the commission said.

No wonder the public is confused.  The Consumer Reports Greener Choices index of eco-labels goes on for pages, and the international EcoLabel index currently lists 432 icons and programs.

But the FTC guide says nothing about claims that a product is natural, organic, or sustainable.

“Natural” still has no regulatory definition.  Of Natural, the FDA says:

From a food science perspective, it is difficult to define a food product that is ‘natural’ because the food has probably been processed and is no longer the product of the earth. That said, FDA has not developed a definition for use of the term natural or its derivatives. However, the agency has not objected to the use of the term if the food does not contain added color, artificial flavors, or synthetic substances.

“Organic” is defined by the USDA through its National Organic Program.

“Sustainable” has no regulatory definition.

Will the FTC’s guide help alleviate confusion?  Perhaps, if companies follow it.

I participated last week in a New York Times blog debate on this question:

Is organic food worth the expense?

A recent study by scientists at Stanford University found that fruits and vegetable labeled organic are, on average, no healthier than less expensive conventional produce, although they have lower levels of pesticide residue.

Are there other benefits that outweigh the cost of organic food? Is there a place for organic farming in a world with severe food shortages and rising food prices?

My answer: Buying organic is a personal choice.

Marion Nestle, the Paulette Goddard professor in the Department of Nutrition, Food Studies and Public Health at New York University, is the author of “Why Calories Count: From Science to Politics.” She blogs at FoodPolitics.com and is on Twitter.

Questions about organic food raise three issues: productivity, benefits and costs. Productivity is easy. Since the early 1980s, careful productivity studies conclude that organic yields are only slightly lower than conventional yields, and organic production leaves soils in much better shape — boding well for future productivity. The yield difference is too small to have much of an effect on world food supplies.

Next, benefits. If crops are grown without pesticides, they won’t contaminate soil and water, foods will contain fewer pesticides, and people who eat organic foods will have lower levels in their bodies. The Stanford study and others confirm all this. Critics of organics say: “So what. Pesticides are safe.” They point out that nobody has ever died from eating industrially produced broccoli. Although science does not presently demonstrate long-term harm from eating pesticide-treated vegetables, pesticides are demonstrably harmful to farm workers and to “nontarget” wildlife, and they accumulate in soils for ages. If pesticides were all that benign, the government wouldn’t need to regulate them, but it does.

The Stanford study made a big deal about nutrients, but nutrients are not the point. The point of organic production is its effects on the health of people and the planet. The investigators did not examine the overall health impact of organics, no doubt because such studies are difficult to conduct and interpret. For one thing, people who buy organics tend to be better educated and wealthier — characteristics that track with good health anyway.

That leaves the cost question. Organics cost more because they require greater amounts of hand labor. Are they worth it? Personally, I prefer not to be a guinea pig in a long-term pesticide experiment. I’m also fortunate to have the choice.

We should be doing all we can to give everyone else the same choice.

Here are the other debaters

• The Ecological Case Against Organics

  Christie Wilcox, blogger, Scientific American

• Focus on the Right Kind of Organic Farming

  Raj Patel, Institute for Food and Development Policy

• Food for the Wealthy, Not for the Poor

  Bjorn Lomborg, Copenhagen Consensus Center

• Lessons From the Farm

  Tom Philpott, Maverick Farms