Benjamin Lorr.  The Secret Life of Groceries: the Dark Miracle of the American supermarket.  Avery/Penguin Random House, 2020.

I don’t know how I missed this one when it came out in mid-2020, but I did.*

I saw a reference to it and thought I ought to take a look, largely because I am gearing up to update my book, What to Eat, in a second edition for Picador/Farrar Straus Giroux.

My book, which first appeared in 2006, is about food issues, using supermarkets as an organizing device.

Lorr’s book, which I expected to be a superficial expose of supermarkets, is anything but.

It is a deep, detailed, personal, and utterly powerful indictment of the human rights violations perpetrated on workers in grocery supply chains: truckers, grocery store clerks, Thai workers on shrimp-catching boats.

The personal comes in because Lorr is an experiential immersion journalist.  He embedded himself with a trucker, the fish section of a Whole Foods market, and a Thai fishing boat, as well as spending several years doing interviews.  Using the personal stories, he has plenty to say about truly shameless exploitation of low-wage workers in order to keep food costs low.

If you want to understand what low-wage work—or the Great Resignation—is about, here’s an excellent place to start.

This is an important book about food labor issues, but also about how more general systems of exploitation are maintained.

The “more general” leads me to pick one bone with Lorr’s analysis.

For those of us, he says:

Who want to shake the world aware to the fact that we are literally sustaining ourselves on misery, who want to reform, I very much don’t want to dissuade you so much as I want you to consider that any solution with come from outside our food system, so far outside it that thinking about food is only a distraction from the real work to be done.

His book, I’d say, proves just the opposite.  Food is his entry point into this topic and would not be there without it.

*I shouldn’t have missed it.  It was reviewed in the New York Times.  And Charles Platkin, whose work I follow closely, interviewed Lorr when the book first came out.

Oreo Thins?  These have 35 calories per cookie instead of the original 50 or so.   The difference is hardly worth fussing about unless you eat a lot of them.

As for wine?  Sorry about this, but alcohol has calories—7 per gram, more than protein or carbohydrate (4 per gram) but less than fat (9 per gram).

Cookies and wine?  Sugars and alcohol?  Not my idea of a great partnership.

Thanks to Jennifer Pomeranz for sending this one.

Lobbying is legal; it is simply requests of legislators by interest groups for action in their own interests.  Everyone can do this, but corporations that donate to election campaigns have greater access to legislators and also deeper pockets to pay people to do this work.  And lobbyists are often former employees of government regulator agencies who now work for corporations—the “revolving door.”  The biggest problem for food advocacy groups: finding the funds to pay people to lobby for their issues.

Recent reports on lobbying and lobbyists:

I.  Food Research Collaboration: Examination of power, access, and influence of participants at the recent COP26 climate change negotiations in Glasgow.  Conclusions:

• The Brazilian delegation had the highest number of food industry representatives, including beef producers.
• Food industry members attended as part of groups officially considered Non-Governmental Organisations.
• Representatives of many food corporations and trade groups attended.

II.  Dive Wire: Where the dollars go: Lobbying a big business for large food and beverage CPGs.  Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, AB InBev and 27 other companies spend close to $40 million a year on issues including trade and taxes in an effort to make their voices heard by lawmakers and regulators.

III.  American Enterprise Institute: Political Influence Efforts in the U.S. Through Campaign Contributions and Lobbying Expenditures: An Index Approach

IV.  American Enterprise Institute.   Farm-Sector Spending on Federal Campaign Contributions snd Lobbying Expenditures: Evidence from 2003 to 2020.

Here’s why the farm sector lobbies:

The system is rigged: no group advocating for small and medium farms, “horticulture vs. commodities, conservation, sustainability, or regenerative agriculture can possibly compete with Big Food or Big Ag.

My former doctoral student and now colleague Lisa Young has been tracking the increase in portion sizes of junk foods for more than 20 years.  Our latest report has just come out in the American Journal of Public Health: Portion Sizes of Ultra-Processed Foods in the United States, 2002 to 2021.

At first introduction, most companies offered products in just 1 size; that size is smaller than or equal to the smallest size currently available. For example, the original size of a Coca-Cola bottle was 6.5 ounces; today it comes in 6 sizes marketed as single servings; these range from 7.5 ounces to 24 ounces, 4 of which have been introduced since 2002.

Since 2002, McDonald’s has reduced the sizes of its french fries and eliminated its “supersize” french fries and soda, but still offers quart-sized sodas and double burgers. While McDonald’s and Burger King decreased the size of their largest portion of french fries, they increased the sizes of their smallest portions. While Burger King reduced the sizes of it’s hamburger sandwiches, since 2002 they added a triple Whopper.

• Have more calories (if only this were intuitively obvious, but it is not)
• Encourage people to eat more
• Confuse people about how much they are eating

Our recommendations:

We think it is time to also consider caps and other legislatively mandated national policy options to require the food industry to make smaller food portions more available, convenient, and inexpensive:

•  offer consumers price incentives for smaller portions of ultra-processed foods,

•  discontinue the largest sizes of ultra-processed packaged foods and fast-food portions, and

•  restrict marketing of large portions of ultra-processed foods, especially those targeted to children and minorities.

Our article is accompanied by an editorial by Carlos Monteiro and Geoffrey Cannon, the inventors of the term, “ultra-processed”: Yes, Food Portion Sizes and People Have Become Bigger and Bigger. What Is to Be Done? 

Their point: reducing portion sizes is unlikely to work internationally.

In such countries, reduced portion sizes of ultra-processed foods would at best have limited effect, and most likely would be counterproductive if they were marketed to promote their consumption. Generally, the most rational guideline, for global as well as personal health and well-being, is to protect and promote minimally processed foods and freshly prepared meals and to discourage the consumption of ultra-processed foods altogether, together with statutory measures including fiscal policies and actions. These measures should make fresh and minimally processed foods cheaper and more available. Ultra-processed foods should be made more expensive and less available, if at all, especially in canteens and hospitals, other health settings, and in and near schools. Cosmetic additives should be banned or highly taxed.

We have much work to do.

I’m kind of a dairy agnostic.  If you like dairy foods, fine; if not, don’t eat them.

But the arguments about them are fierce, and the current Dietary Guidelines for Americans advise choosing low-fat alternatives.

So when I saw the title of this study, I wondered whether it had been funded by the dairy industry.  It was not, although some of the investigators have dairy industry ties.

The study: Whole-fat dairy products do not adversely affect adiposity or cardiometabolic risk factors in children in the Milky Way Study: a double-blind randomized controlled pilot study.  Analise Nicholl, Kane E Deering, Kate Evelegh, Philippa Lyons-Wall, David Lawrence, Trevor A Mori, Mario Kratz, Therese A O’Sullivan.  The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, Volume 114, Issue 6, December 2021, Pages 2025–2042, https://doi.org/10.1093/ajcn/nqab288

Conclusions: Our results suggest that although changing from whole-fat to reduced-fat dairy products does reduce dairy fat intake, it does not result in changes to markers of adiposity or cardiometabolic disease risk in healthy children.

Acknowledgments: …The Principal Investigator, TAOS, was awarded funding in 2011 for a previous study from the Dairy Health and Nutrition Consortium. MK has received honoraria and reimbursements for travel as well as a research grant from several dairy-related organizations, including National Dairy Council/Dairy Management Inc., Dairy Farmers of Canada, the Dutch Dairy Association (Nederlandse Zuivel Organisatie), Dairy Australia, and the French Interbranch Organization (CNIEL). All other authors report no conflicts of interest.

Notes: …No funding body played any role in the Milky Way Study design, implementation, analysis or interpretation of the data, or publication. The Milky Way Study received no funding from any dairy or food industry organization or affiliation toward study research, dairy product purchase or provision, child assessments, project personnel, or publication.

Comment: No funding body needed to be involved in this study to raise questions of conflicted interests; two of the authors report financial ties to dairy companies.  At the very least, these ties give the appearance of conflict of interest.  Are dairy foods good, bad, or indifferent for health?  My guess is that like pretty much everything else in the diet, it depends on everything else you are eating (unless you are lactose or dairy protein intolerant, in which case you know to avoid dairy foods).  The underlying purpose of this study is to encourage sales of full-fat dairy products to children.   Is that a good idea?  You decide.

Reference: For a summary of research on the “funding effect”—the observation that research sponsored by food companies almost invariably produces results favorable to the sponsor’s interests, but that recipients of industry funding typically do not recognize its influence—see my book, Unsavory Truth: How Food Companies Skew the Science of What We Eat.

Sarah Vogel.  The Farmer’s Lawyer: The North Dakota Nine and the Fight to Save the Family Farm.  Bloomsbury, 2021.

This book comes with an impressive collection of blurbs from the likes of Willie Nelson, Dan Barber, Ricardo Salvador, and Fred Kirschenmann, and, fittingly, with one from John Grisham on the cover because much of the book reads like something out of one of his thrillers.

The book tells two stories, both amazing.

The first is how Vogel, as a young lawyer, filed a class-action suit representing small farmers who had been treated terribly by a USDA agency, the Farmers Home Administration.  This agency started during the Great Depression as a way to help small farmers survive from year to year through loans and other measures.

But early in the Reagan years, the agency switched to treating farmers harshly, quickly foreclosing on unrepaid loans, garnishing bank funds, and forcing the farmers off their land—in violation of the agency’s own rules.  Most of the book is about how Vogel took on these cases, pursued them carefully, and, incredibly, won.

The second story is about the personal cost of this case to Vogel, who worked without pay during the years this litigation was in the works.  Without a salary, she couldn’t keep up her own mortgages, lost two houses, and lived hand to mouth.

It’s hard to believe anyone would take on a case like this at such risk, but the book is also about her dedication to a cause she deemed too important to abandon.

The book is packed with legal details but so well written and is so compelling that I could hardly put it down.

And the good guys won!

For that alone, the book is inspirational.  And I love the way she ends it.

The North Dakota Nine had small to midde-sized farms.  In the 1980s, their lives were very difficult.  In today’s economy, they wouldn’t have a prayer.  But farmers like them are exactly the kind of farmers we need today: farmers who will love their land, grow crops as well as communities, plant trees, care for their animals, and leave the earth better than when they found it.  In the big picture, farmers like them can help solve global warming, revitalize the countryside, and provide abundant, healthy food…We can save farmers, protect the environment, solve the hunge crisis, and rebuild rural and urban economies from the ground up…if we act soon.

Yes!

Jerry Hagstrom did a review of this book a couple of weeks ago on his Hagstrom Report.  Here’s his list of resources:

 Sarah Vogel
 — “The Farmer’s Lawyer”
 Prairie Public Newsroom – Sarah Vogel: “The Farmer’s Lawyer”
 – Author Sarah Vogel reads from “The Farmer’s Lawyer”
 AgWeek – Thankful for new FFA chapter, affordable food, ag lawyer Sarah Vogel
 Capital Journal – Attorney worked to stop foreclosures during ’80s farm crisis
 The Christian Science Monitor – ‘The Farmer’s Lawyer’ tells a David and Goliath legal story

What with all the pressure to make foods healthier, food manufacturers have been tweaking their products to reduce less healthful ingredients, especially salt and sugar.

Reformulated ultra-processed foods are still ultra-processed.

They raise the question: is a slightly healthier ultra-processed food a good choice?

These articles come from FoodNavigator-Asia.com, which tracks the food industry in that part of the world.

• Reformulating for the region: Coca-Cola, Nissin, Kirin and Hoow Foods weigh in on sugar, salt and fat reduction in APAC: Major brands across the region are continuing to double down on their reformulation efforts across sugar, salt and fat reduction after COVID-19 led to a rapid increase in consumer awareness and demand for healthier products. Read more
• Not so sweet situation: More than half of packaged beverages sold in Singapore contain high levels of sugar: Sixty per cent of packaged non-alcoholic beverages (NABs) sold on the Singapore market contain high amounts of sugar and would be assigned under Grade C or D in the soon-to-be-implemented Nutri-Grade system. Read more
• High pressure: Aussie retailers urged to prioritise sodium reformulation for private label products: Retailers in Australia should prioritise the sodium reformulation of private label products, which could help prevent over 500 deaths annually, according to a modelling study. Read more
• Encouraging reformulation: South Korea tightens food labelling standards for products with reduced sodium and sugar: South Korea has announced new, tighter standards for food firms looking to label their products as being reduced or lower in sodium or sugar, starting with the nation’s most-consumed food product, ramen. Read more

Healthy food? What’s that?

The FDA is working on a definition of “healthy” on food labels.

Blame KIND bars for all this.

The chronology of this saga.

2015: KIND puts the word “Healthy” on the labels of its whole-food bars.  FDA issues warning letter to KIND because its labels do not meet the requirements to make health claims.

2016: FDA reconsiders, says KIND can use “healthy.”   FDA issues request for information and comments on Guidance for Industry: Use of the Term “Healthy” in the Labeling of Human Food Products.

2017: FDA says it will reevaluate use of the term; holds public meeting on how to redefine the term “healthy” as a nutrient content claim.

2018: FDA’s Nutrition Innovation Strategy includes defining the term.

Healthy” is one claim that the FDA believes is ready for change, and we have already signaled our intention to update the criteria for this claim. The Agency is considering how to depict “healthy” on the package so that consumers can easily find it. Similarly, the FDA has also received requests for clarity on the use of “natural” in labeling. Just like other claims made on products regulated by FDA, we believe the “natural” claim must be true and based in science.

2019: The FDA proposes, and OMB approves, focus group review of a “healthy” icon on food packages.

As one of the methods for achieving this step of the Action Plan, the FDA is exploring the development of a graphic symbol to help consumers identify packaged food products that would meet an FDA definition for “healthy.” The symbol would be voluntary, allowing packaged food companies to place it on their products if the products meet the FDA definition of “healthy.”

2021: FDA again sends proposal to redefine “healthy to OMB, and announces further research on developing a ‘healthy” icon.

Nutrient Content Claims, Definition of Term: Healthy: The proposed rule would update the definition for the implied nutrient content claim “healthy,” and would revise the requirements for when the claim “healthy” can be voluntarily used in the labeling of human food products. In a separate but related action, on 7 May 2021 the FDA issued a notice in the Federal Register announcing that it is conducting preliminary quantitative consumer research on symbols that could be used in the future to convey the “healthy” claim on packaged foods.

The FDA has not said what definition it is considering.  I can think of three possible options:

• Nutrient-based: Below some level of sugar, salt, calories, or whatever
• Food-based: Must contain a fruit, vegetable, or whole grain
• Process-based: Must be unprocessed, processed, or minimally processed; cannot be ultra-processed

Anything other than process-based is too easy for food companies to game.

Center for Science in the Public Interest has plenty of concerns.

Allowing some products to carry a ‘healthy’ claim because they contain a minimal amount of a fruit, vegetable, or other recommended food would just make it easier for veggie chips and ‘fruit’ snacks to compete with fresh fruits and vegetables…No matter how FDA defines the term, consumers should realize that manufacturers will mostly be interested in using ‘healthy’ for marketing purposes—to sell you more processed food that you may not need.

The voluntary nature of the “healthy” symbol also raises questions.  If a food label does not use the symbol, how will anyone know if it’s not there because the product does not meet the definition of “healthy” or if its maker just chose not to use the symbol?

On “healthy,” whether word or symbol: stay tuned.