Currently browsing posts about: Food-industry

I was fascinated to read Michael Mudd’s piece in the New York Times on Sunday, “How to force ethics on the food industry.”  Noting that the court overturned Mayor Bloomberg’s 16-ounce soda ban, he said:

But governments should not be deterred by this and should step up their efforts to protect the public health by limiting the marketing tactics of food companies. Anyone who believes these interventions are uncalled-for doesn’t know the industry the way I do.

…The industry is guilty because it knew what the consequences of its actions might be. Large food processors employed a flock of Ph.D. nutritionists and food scientists. The connection between calorie consumption and weight gain was always as plain as the number on the bathroom scale. But instead of acknowledging this and taking corrective action to sell a better product more responsibly, food processors played innocent by blending in with the crowd of causes.

This sent me to dig through my files to search for what I’d saved about Mr. Mudd’s efforts at Kraft.  Here, for example, is the front page of USA Today, July 1, 2003.  Kraft chose USA Today to announce its new anti-obesity initiatives, and gave it an exclusive to do so.

The initiatives included, among a long list, elimination of all in-school marketing, setting nutritional criteria for marketing practices, and establishing meaningful criteria for health claims.

Even at the time, I was dubious:

They have to demonstrate what it is they’re actually doing before I can start turning cartwheels about this…Kraft has other credibility problems when it comes to marketing healthier products…Philip Morris Co., the tobacco giant now called Altria Group, owns 84 percent of Kraft [Altria sold off Kraft in 2007].

One year later, Kraft announced  that  it had begun to act on its promises.  After another six months, Kraft introduced its Sensible Solution  program  to label “better-for-you” products. leaving plenty to be dubious about.  By 2004, Michael Mudd was no longer with Kraft.

In 2007, I sent a couple of students out to see whether Kraft had kept its promises.  Not a chance, as we documented.

How come?  Food companies are not social service agencies.  Their job is to sell products.  And, as Michael Moss explains in Salt, Sugar, Fat, they must do whatever it takes to achieve that goal.

As Mr. Mudd now puts it,

It’s time to end the charade and mandate the needed changes that the industry has refused to make. 

Betsy McKay of The Wall Street Journal organized and moderated a debate on this question.  I was a participant along with Brian Wansink , the John S. Dyson professor of marketing at Cornell University and Michael D. Tanner, senior fellow at the Cato Institute.

The debate is lengthy—you can read all of it online—but here are my initial responses to the two questions asked of me.

WSJ: What role should government play in addressing the obesity epidemic?  

DR. NESTLE: The government is up to its ears in policies that promote obesity. To name only a handful: supporting production of food commodities, but not of fruits and vegetables; permitting food and beverage companies to deduct marketing expenses from taxes; permitting SNAP benefits [food stamps] to be used on any food, thereby encouraging food companies to market directly to low-income groups.

Research on the prevalence of obesity shows that after decades of remaining at the same level, it began to increase sharply in the early 1980s. Our sense of personal responsibility did not change then. What did change was the food environment, transformed by food industry imperatives to increase sales, to one that increasingly urged people to “eat more” by making it socially acceptable to eat anywhere, anytime, and in very large amounts. In this kind of food environment, all but the most mindful eaters overeat. Few of us are in that category.

The food, beverage and restaurant industries collectively spend roughly $16 billion a year to promote sales through advertising agencies, perhaps $2 billion of that targeted at children. Marketing to children is well established to encourage kids to want advertised products, pester their parents for them, and believe that those products are what they are supposed to be eating. The “I am responsible” argument does not work for children (I’m not aware of evidence that it works well for adults either). Because regular consumption of junk foods and sugary drinks is linked to obesity in children, marketing these products to them is overtly unethical.

To expect food and beverage companies, whose sole purpose is to increase sales and report growth in sales every quarter, to voluntarily stop marketing to children makes no sense. On ethical grounds alone, government intervention is essential.

Given the personal and economic costs of obesity—currently estimated at $190 billion a year—governments have many reasons to promote the health of their populations. Just ask the military.

WSJ: Let’s talk about some specific initiatives. Will Mayor Bloomberg’s cap on soda sizes reduce soda consumption? What about the proposed municipal tax of a penny an ounce on sugary drinks in Richmond, Calif.?

DR. NESTLE: If only education and personal responsibility worked to improve eating behavior. Brian Wansink’s research clearly shows that his own students, diligently educated to understand the effect of large food portions on eating behavior, will still eat more when given more food—and, more seriously, they will underestimate the amount they have eaten.

Education must be backed up by a supportive environment. So why not create a food environment that makes it easier for people to eat less? Mayor Bloomberg’s idea of capping soda sizes at 16 ounces is an interesting approach to doing just that. A 16-ounce soda is not exactly abstemious. It is two standard servings, 50 grams of sugar and 200 calories.

To suggest that food laws will not change behavior makes little sense. For one thing, anti-obesity initiatives have scarcely been tried. For another, the history of anti-smoking interventions suggests quite the opposite. Attempts to get smokers to quit by invoking personal responsibility made little headway. Smokers quit when the government made smoking so inconvenient and expensive that it became easier to stop than to continue.

The intense response of soda companies to Mayor Bloomberg’s cap on soda size is testimony to the effectiveness of regulatory approaches. The companies would not be putting this kind of effort or spending millions to oppose an action they expected to fail.

Right now, the food industry employs roughly 12% of the U.S. work force.  This includes jobs in agriculture, food and beverage product manufacture, and food and beverage service.  Many of these jobs, of course, are minimum wage.

But reading Sunday’s New York Times makes me wonder how many of these and better jobs will be replaced by robots, and much sooner than I had imagined.

The falling costs and growing sophistication of robots have touched off a renewed debate among economists and technologists over how quickly jobs will be lost…the advent of low-cost automation foretells changes on the scale of the revolution in agricultural technology over the last century, when farming employment in the United States fell from 40 percent of the work force to about 2 percent today.

…And at Earthbound Farms in California, four newly installed robot arms with customized suction cups swiftly place clamshell containers of organic lettuce into shipping boxes. The robots move far faster than the people they replaced. Each robot replaces two to five workers at Earthbound, according to John Dulchinos, an engineer who is the chief executive at Adept Technology, a robot maker based in Pleasanton, Calif., that developed Earthbound’s system.

From the standpoint of industry, once the price of robots drops sufficiently their advantages far outweigh their stupidity.

Robots don’t call in sick, get pregnant, get into fights, have affairs with fellow workers, ask for raises, or threaten to go on strike.

What will it be like to live in a society in which vast segments of food production and service are replaced by robots?

Back to the farm, anyone?

Worried about the potential personal and economic costs of obesity?  Never mind.  It’s time to view obesity as a business opportunity.

As the press release for a new research report from Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Globesity—The Global Fight Against Obesity, points out:

Increasing efforts to tackle obesity over the coming decades will form an important new investment theme for fund managers…Global obesity is a mega-investment theme for the next 25 years and beyond…The report…identifies that efforts to reduce obesity is a “megatrend” with a shelf-life of 25 to 50 years…BofA Merrill Lynch analysts across several sectors have collaborated to identify the sectors and companies developing long-term solutions.

Given the worldwide increase in obesity, its high prospective costs, and the ever-present threat of government regulation, the report identifies more than 50 global stocks that provide investment opportunities for fighting “globesity.”  These fall into four categories:

• Pharmaceuticals and Health Care: companies taking advantage of the FDA’s increased support for obesity drug development; tackling related medical conditions and needs including diabetes, kidney failure, hip and knee implants; making equipment such as patient lifts, bigger beds and wider ambulance doors.
• Food: companies accessing the $663 billion “health and wellness” market and reformulating portfolios to respond to increasing pressure such as “fat taxes” to reduce sugar and fat levels.
• Commercial Weight Loss, Diet Management and Nutrition: companies pursuing dieting, nutrition and behavioral change—a $4 billion market in the U.S. and growing globally.
• Sports Apparel and Equipment: “This is the longer-term play, but we believe that promoting physical activity will become a key priority for more government health policies.”

Well, that’s one way to look at it.  Public health, anyone?  

I’ve been at meetings in London and Geneva on non-communicable (what we call chronic) diseases and how to prevent them. 

On the way to Europe, I did some catching up on reading past issues of The Lancet and ran across this letter from Sally Casswell of the School of Public Health at Massey University in Auckland. 

Professor Casswell was responding to an article arguing that a major priority in chronic disease prevention should be to strengthen the capacity of countries to deliver primary care services.

Yes, professor Casswell writes, primary care is important.  But it is even more important to focus prevention efforts on the environmental factors that influence the behavior of individuals and cause them to need primary care services in the first place.

Do we really want to continue to live in a world where the oversupply and marketing of tobacco, alcohol, unhealthy processed foods, and soft drinks is tolerated simply to allow continuing profits for the shareholders of the transnational corporations producing and distributing them, while the taxpayer funds the health services and pharmaceutical response to the ensuing disease and injury?

This is a refreshing way to look at this problem, and one well worth pondering.

The third part of the PLoS Medicine series on Big Food (which I co-edited with David Stuckler) is now out.  Happy Fourth of July!

Here’s the entire PLoS collection of papers on this topic:

Editorial: PLoS Medicine Series on Big Food: The Food Industry Is Ripe for Scrutiny, The PLoS Medicine Editors, PLoS Medicine: Published 19 Jun 2012 | info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.1001246

Essay: Big Food, Food Systems, and Global Health, David Stuckler, Marion Nestle, PLoS Medicine: Published 19 Jun 2012 | info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.1001242

Essay: The Impact of Transnational “Big Food” Companies on the South: A View from Brazil, Carlos A. Monteiro, Geoffrey Cannon, PLoS Medicine: Published 03 Jul 2012 | info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.1001252

Perspective: Thinking Forward: The Quicksand of Appeasing the Food Industry, Kelly D. Brownell, PLoS Medicine: Published 03 Jul 2012 | info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.1001254

Policy Forum: Soda and Tobacco Industry Corporate Social Responsibility Campaigns: How Do They Compare?, Lori Dorfman, Andrew Cheyne, Lissy C. Friedman, Asiya Wadud, Mark Gottlieb, PLoS Medicine: Published 19 Jun 2012 | info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.1001241

Policy Forum: Manufacturing Epidemics: The Role of Global Producers in Increased Consumption of Unhealthy Commodities Including Processed Foods, Alcohol, and Tobacco, David Stuckler, Martin McKee, Shah Ebrahim, Sanjay Basu, PLoS Medicine: Published 26 Jun 2012 | info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.1001235

Policy Forum: “Big Food,” the Consumer Food Environment, Health, and the Policy Response in South Africa, Ehimario U. Igumbor, David Sanders, Thandi R. Puoane, Lungiswa Tsolekile, Cassandra Schwarz, Christopher Purdy, Rina Swart, Solange Durão, Corinna Hawkes, PLoS Medicine: Published 03 Jul 2012 | info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.1001253

The online, open-access journal Public Library of Science – Medicine, better known as PLoS Medicine, is doing a series of articles on Big Food.  I’m its co-editor, with David Stuckler in the U.K.

Here’s what’s online so far. 

Editorial: PLoS Medicine Series on Big Food: The Food Industry Is Ripe for Scrutiny, by the PLoS Medicine Editors, PLoS Medicine, 19 Jun 2012 | info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.1001246

Essay: Big Food, Food Systems, and Global Health, by David Stuckler, Marion Nestle, PLoS Medicine, 19 Jun 2012 | info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.1001242 

Essay: Food Sovereignty: Power, Gender, and the Right to Food, by Rajeev C. Patel, PLoS Medicine, 26 Jun 2012 | info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.1001223

Policy Forum: Soda and Tobacco Industry Corporate Social Responsibility Campaigns: How Do They Compare?, by Lori Dorfman, Andrew Cheyne, Lissy C. Friedman, Asiya Wadud, Mark Gottlieb, PLoS Medicine, 19 Jun 2012 | info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.1001241

Policy Forum: Manufacturing Epidemics: The Role of Global Producers in Increased Consumption of Unhealthy Commodities Including Processed Foods, Alcohol, and Tobacco, by David Stuckler, Martin McKee, Shah Ebrahim, Sanjay Basu, PLoS Medicine, 26 Jun 2012 |info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.1001235

Twitter chat: To follow the Twitter chat that took place on June 27, search for #plosmedbigfood.

More next week.  Stay tuned.

Yesterday was Occupy Your Food Supply Day, the latest food-related manifestation of the Occupy movement.  The day was organized by the Rainforest Action Network, which considers it a resounding success.

 The day included more than 100 events across the globe, united an unprecedented alliance of more than 60 Occupy groups and 30 environmental, food and corporate accountability organizations, and featured prominent voices including Indian environmentalist Vandana Shiva, music legend Willie Nelson, actor Woody Harrelson, authors Raj Patel, Anna Lappe, Gary Paul Nabhan, author Michael Ableman and Marion Nestle, among others.

It was a teaching day for me and I wasn’t able to do much except lend some moral support:

Marion Nestle, professor and author of What to Eat and Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health: “While the food industry digs in to fight public health regulations, the food movement will continue to attract support from those willing to promote a healthier and more sustainable food system. Watch for more young people going into farming and more farmers’ markets, farm-to-school programs, school meal initiatives, and grassroots community efforts to implement food programs and legislate local reforms. There is plenty of hope for the future in local efforts to improve school meals, reduce childhood obesity, and make healthier food more available and affordable for all.”

The day was designed to highlight some of the least democratic aspects of our current food system:

Never have so few corporations been responsible for more of our food chain. Of the 40,000 food items in a typical US grocery store, more than half are now brought to us by just 10 corporations. Today, three companies process more than 70 percent of all U.S. beef, Tyson, Cargill and JBS. More than ninety percent of soybean seeds and 80 percent of corn seeds used in the United States are sold by just one company: Monsanto. Four companies are responsible for up to 90 percent of the global trade in grain. And one in four food dollars is spent at Walmart.

The overwhelming support for Occupy our Food Supply underscores the unity between farmers, parents, health care professionals, human rights activists, food justice advocates and food lovers around the world who are increasingly viewing their concerns as different manifestations of the same underlying problem: a food system structured for short term profit instead of the long term health of people and the planet.

What to do about all this?  Get to work on the farm bill, for starters.