Nick Freudenberg.  Fighting for New York: Activism for Health and Social Justice.  Columbia University Press, 2026.

I wrote a blurb for this book, happily:

A roadmap for health activists, Fighting for New York illustrates each step needed for successful advocacy through campaigns conducted by a wide range of city-based community organizations since the 1960s.  These stories should inspire any reader to join the movement to make health justice a reality.

It’s about groups in New York City that worked or are still working on campaigns to improve health or achieve other social objectives, what they did that worked and did not work, and why such campaigns are worth doing.  Some of the campaigns he discussed are about food, some not.  All have lessons to teach.

Some excerpts.

On why these campaigns are worth studying:

Campaigns such as Lunch for Learning’s win in making school lunches free for all public school students in New York or the Committee to End Sterilization Abuse’s successful advocacy for new rules to protect women from sterilization abuse in the city’s public hospitals, launched coordinated activities carried out over time with the goal of changing specific policies, programs, practices, or ideas that widened health inequities. By considering these campaigns as an appropriate subject of study — a useful unit of analysis, in the language of researchers — activists and scholars can define characteristics of more and less successful campaigns. (p. 37)

On getting kids fed in schools:

School food campaigns also strengthened democracy and civic engagement. Thousands of parents and children participated in rallies, signed petitions, and learned about city politics, with the added benefit of winning their goal of free lunches throughout the school system and showing that activism could make a difference. Lunch for Learning also taught a lesson in government accountability. When Mayor de Blasio hesitated to implement universal free lunches in 2017, activists widely distributed a video of de Blasio endorsing universal free lunches at a 2013 Mayoral forum on food policy organized by CFA and other food justice organizations. This message reminded the Mayor that his 2017 re-election campaign might benefit from support from parents of school children and activists supporting universal free lunches. (p. 162)

On strategies:

More broadly, urban health justice movements could bring together activist groups working across issues to identify the common beliefs that encourage or deter activism for health and to design coordinated multi-faced strategies to build support for more favorable attitudes. Right wing movements and their patrons in the United States have used this strategy successfully in recent decades. (pp. 288-9)

More on strategies:

How could urban health justice movements provide a framework for making wise strategic and tactical choices on aligning health, social justice, and democracy?  I suggest three ways to help activists answer these questions. First, activists should root their campaigns and messages in people’s daily lives. Lead poisoning, for example, is experienced as a health problem for children. It is also experienced as a social justice problem. The parents of lead poisoned children may have difficulty getting a landlord to follow the law that requires cleaning up the apartment or testing for lead to prevent poisoning in the first place. Other tenants in the building may resent landlords’ failure to clean up buildings where children have previously been poisoned or the city’s failure to enforce housing laws. Between 2017 and 2022, New York failed to collect $1.07 billion in fines from landlords for housing law violations and unpaid property taxes, a sum that could have repaired thousands of apartments to prevent poisoning.

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Pub date is September 8. Pre-orders through UC Press get a 30% discount. Use promo code UCPSAVE30.

I’ve been collecting items on microplastics, for which research is finding increasing evidence for harm to human and environmental health.  Here are some relatively recent examples of what’s out there on this topic.

NOTE:  Today and Tomorrow: NIH is holding a hybrid Workshop on Micro[nano]plastic Measurement for Population Studies: link to registration is here.

Should we be worried about microplastics?  

• How big a problem are microplastics? The first global study of its kind quantifies the problem in the food and drink industry… Read more
• Microplastics and plastic bottles: How worried should we be?  The issue of microplastics and nanoplastics are increasingly coming into consumer consciousness… Read more

How do microplastics get into food?

• Research: Ultra-processed foods are a key driver of the global plastics pollution crisis: Rob Ralston, Katherine Sievert, Kim Anastasiou, Joe Yates & Jennifer Clapp. Comment | 09 April 2026 Nature Food 7 | doi:10.1038/s43016-026-01341-0.
• Microplastics are ‘widespread’ in cheese: here’s how this happens: Cheese is ripe in microplastics, a groundbreaking study revealed… Read more
• BBC News: Study Identifies Microplastics in Majority of Commercial Pet Foods: Researchers at the universities of Sussex and Exeter found microplastics in 16 of 19 pet food brands, with higher exposure linked to feeding patterns. The findings highlight potential food system contamination and prompt calls for regulatory testing. Read More

What’s needed?

• Food and Water Watch: 250+ Health Professionals Call on EPA to Monitor Microplastics in Drinking Water:  Over two hundred and fifty doctors, nurses and other health care and public health professionals and organizations sent a letter to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) urging the agency to add microplastics to the Sixth Unregulated Contaminant Monitoring Rule (UCMR 6) and monitor for these contaminants in our drinking water.
• IFT’s Food Technology Magazine:  Can Food Packaging Go Plastic-Free? The authors detail the environmental drivers, emerging materials, and research priorities shaping the transition from fossil-derived plastics to bio-based and circular solutions for food packaging. Read More
• Beverage Daily: 6 ways to keep microplastics out of food and drink: Microplastic contamination poses significant risks for consumers… Read more

And what is the EPA doing about this?  Nothing, alas.

• EPA Fails to Take Meaningful Action on Microplastics: Food & Water Watch condemns EPA for failing to include microplastics in proposed drinking water monitoring program. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has released a draft of the Sixth Unregulated Contaminant Monitoring Rule (UCMR 6), which sets forth which contaminants the agency will require monitoring for in drinking water. The draft rule shows that EPA does not plan to require monitoring for microplastics over the next five years.

An article in Food Business News caught my eye: The companies most exposed to consumer UPF concerns. 

The article is based on an analysis by BNP Paribus, which tracks the effects of the new dietary guidelines on the food industry.

It looked at the percent of 12 food companies’ products that are ultra-processed (Nova 4 classification).

I had to look up Flowers Foods; they make popular bread brands.

Food Business News reports sales data:

Nova 1 products

• Outsell Nova 4 by 7%.
• Sales up 15% in yogurt, 10% in frozen meals and vegetables, 2.5% in fruit snacks and candy, 2% in nut butters and cereal/granola.

Nova 4 products

• Sales up approximately 2% in yogurt and less than 1% in cereals/granola
• Sales down 2.5% in nut butters, 2% in frozen meals and vegetables, and less than 2% in fruit snacks and candy

Comment

This could indicate a trend toward healthier diets, depending on what else people are eating.

It’s hard to know whether these trends are due to the new Dietary Guidelines, which recommended limits on ultra-processed foods, to the effects of GLP-1 drugs, or to inflation.

Whatever the reason, major food companies making lots of ultra-processed foods seem to be vulnerable right now.

I’m guessing they will be reformulating their products as soon as they can.

My days of having small children are long past, but my heart breaks for families trying to decide what to feed infants who cannot be breastfed.

Powdered infant formula is the least expensive option.  Unfortunately—and tragically these days—it is not sterile.

Ordinary bacterial contaminants are not a problem.  Pathogens are.

In recent years, there have been all too many illnesses and deaths among infants unknowingly fed contaminated formula.

What got me started was an article in the Wall Street Journal: “The Baby Formula Probe Produced a Pile of Evidence. Then the DOJ Dropped the Case,”

The Justice Department spent years investigating Abbott Laboratories over how it managed a baby formula facility where potentially deadly bacteria was discovered and suspected of causing infant deaths, worsening a national shortage.

Some prosecutors believed they had evidence to criminally charge the company under a law they have used to pursue other businesses for allegedly selling contaminated foods, according to people familiar with the matter. Some supervisors also thought it was a good case, they said. Top decision makers instead closed the probe, the people said, opting for a lighter-touch option: clawing back money the company earned from selling formula through federally funded nutrition programs. The outcome, which hasn’t been previously reported, illustrates how the Justice Department under President Trump has moved away from strict approaches to corporate enforcement and raised the bar for punishing companies. Trump in an executive order last year called for minimizing the use of criminal sanctions, where civil penalties could be used instead.

And then, KFF Health News and USA Today co-published “A Mom Said Infant Formula Killed Her Baby. The Manufacturer Closed the File.”

When doctors, hospitals, parents, or others alert manufacturers that babies got sick or died while receiving infant formula, what happens next is left largely to manufacturers such as Abbott Laboratories and Mead Johnson Nutrition, giants of the industry…Under federal rules, if a complaint about an infant formula — such as a report of an adverse event — shows a possible health hazard, the company must investigate. But it doesn’t always have to inform the government agency that oversees the safety of infant formula. A company must complete an investigation and notify the Food and Drug Administration within 15 days only if it finds “a reasonable possibility of a causal relationship between the consumption of an infant formula and an infant’s death.” If that happened even once over more than a quarter century, the FDA could find no record of it, according to information obtained through public records requests.

I was curious to know what food safety lawyer Bill Marler, who represents victims of food poisonings, had to say about all this.  Plenty, starting with The Fox Has Been Guarding the Henhouse for Years: Infant Formula Makers Decide for Themselves Whether Baby Deaths Get Reported to the FDA.

The headline finding should stop every parent, pediatrician, and member of Congress in their tracks…Here is what KFF Health News found when it asked the FDA, through the Freedom of Information Act, for every such notification manufacturers had submitted since January 1, 2020: none. The reporters then asked the agency to search all the way back to January 1, 2000. Again: no responsive records.…This is not an academic problem for me. I currently represent families in two infant botulism outbreaks tied to powdered infant formula — the November 2025 ByHeart outbreak that sickened at least 48 infants across 17 states, and the spring 2026 Nara Organics outbreak that so far has sickened three. In those cases, we have dug deeply into the same regulatory framework KFF Health News just exposed…The adverse event reporting system for infant formula is not a system at all. It is an honor code — for an industry that litigation has shown may not deserve it.

On his Publisher’s Platform, Marler writes: Mr. Abbott, You Are Not Going to Jail After All

Four years ago, I wrote two posts with titles I meant: “Mr. Abbott, you are going to face criminal sanctions” and, a few weeks earlier, “Mr. Abbott, you are going to jail for manufacturing tainted infant formula.” I was wrong. Not about the facts — about the willingness of this Justice Department to do anything about them….A DOJ spokeswoman explained that this Justice Department “does not believe in regulation by prosecution”….There are two details in the Journal’s reporting that should make every parent’s stomach turn. First, even if DOJ had wanted to prosecute, the office that does this work — the Consumer Protection Branch — was being disbanded as a cost-cutting measure, the same branch that put away the executives behind the Peanut Corporation of America salmonella outbreak. Second, one of Abbott’s defense lawyers — a former deputy attorney general — reportedly urged the incoming administration to overhaul that very office and strip it of its ability to bring criminal cases at all. Read those two sentences together and ask yourself who is writing the rules now.

Why is this happening?  500,000 Reasons to Drop a Criminal Investigation

Here is why the families I represent — and every parent who lived through the 2022 [Abbott formula] shortage — should be furious.

Abbott gave $500,000 to President Trump’s inaugural fund. Public Citizen has documented that Abbott was one of 58 corporations facing federal investigations or enforcement that together poured some $50 million into the inauguration…And then there is the stock. As Common Dreams reported this week, the President’s own annual financial disclosure…shows that Trump began buying Abbott stock in late September of last year and picked up roughly $500,000 worth of Abbott shares over the course of 2025. The buying happened while his Justice Department was still sitting on a criminal case against the company.

$500,000 into the inauguration. $500,000 in stock in the President’s own portfolio.

As Marler is careful to say, “No court and no investigator has found that the donation or the stock purchases caused this case to be dropped. What is undisputed is the sequence: the money, and then the vanished prosecution. Whether one caused the other is a question no one in a position to answer has been willing to answer.”

I’d say it sures gives the appearance of conflicted interest if not bribery and corruption at the highest levels of government.

Excuse me, but we are talking about helpless newborn and very young infants here, utterly dependent on formula as their sole source of nourishment.

Cases of contaminated formula may be rare, but they have affected commercial, alternative, and organic brands, and their consequences are devastating (take a look at the case studies in Marler’s letter of support for the Infant Formula Safety Modernization Act of 2026).

Congress needs to pass this act, and right away.  And is needs vigorous enforcement.

Legal slaps on wrists will not stop food safety violations.

In the meantime, the safest formula is the liquid form, pasteurized to kill spores as well as living pathogens.   Otherwise, powdered formula is a risk, a small risk, but finite.  You do not want your infant to be one of the unlucky ones.

Let’s start this July 4 week with a bit of good news.  Santa Cruz gets to keep the tax it passed in 2024.

The Santa Cruz Sentinel: City of Santa Cruz wins court ruling on soda tax.

The Sacramento County Superior Court denied a petition challenging Santa Cruz’s sugar-sweetened beverage tax….The tax was approved by Santa Cruz voters as Measure Z in November 2024 and requires distributors of sugar-sweetened beverages to pay the city a tax of two cents per fluid ounce, which supports the city’s General Fund.

In May 2025, the tax was challenged by the American Beverage Association and a group of other grocers and retailers, including the California Chamber of Commerce and the California Grocers Association. The petitioners sought to halt the implementation of the tax, arguing that it violated the state constitution.

The advocacy group, ChangeLab Solutions, says of this ruling,

This decision affirms that state law does not preempt home rule authority of California charter cities to enact sugary drink taxes that support community well-being. It is also a significant blow to corporate beverage industry tactics that seek to strip power away from local communities.

“The ruling in California Grocers Association v. Santa Cruz affirms what we know to be true — that local residents are best positioned to make policy choices about the health and well-being of their own communities,” said Sabrina Adler, vice president of law at ChangeLab Solutions.

ChangeLab explained what the California law was about in 2024.

ChangeLab Solutions and the American Heart Association supported a successful 2020 lawsuit that challenged the deceptively named 2018 Keep Groceries Affordable Act, a California law that was heavily backed by beverage industry operatives and passed using shady political tactics. The Keep Groceries Affordable Act tried to prevent cities from voting on new sugary drink taxes. The penalty provision of that 2018 law was declared unconstitutional by an appeals court in 2023. This court decision paved the way for voters in cities like Santa Cruz to once again exercise their democratic right to vote on sugary drink taxes for their community.

This explains the emailed message I received from Steven Maviglio of Forza Communications:

The following statement can be attributed to me as spokesperson for the American Beverage Association: “The court appears to have ignored the law and the legislature’s intent and instead decided to create its own interpretation of the tax. The Keep Groceries Affordable Act was passed by significant majorities in the legislature and could not be more straightforward in its goal to prevent new local taxes on grocery items. We will not relent in our defense of a law that continues to receive overwhelming support from Californians because it has helped hold down costs on groceries at a time of record high prices.”

I will be following the appeal with great interest.  In the meantime, let’s enjoy the win.  We could use one.

I am on the advisory council to the National Food Museum, an online project created by Michael Jacobson, the now-retired founder and president of the Center for Science in the Public Interest.

It currently hosts three exhibits.

(1) Food Impact Meter: This tells you how specific foods affect health and the environment.

(2) Video Vault: A collection of videos on food topics, some of them famous (the scene from When Harry Met Sally), some not but still interesting.

(3) Selling Candy to Kids: Here are commercials you may have seen (or not), pushing sugary foods to kids or explaining how the marketing works.

Enjoy!

The USDA published occasional “charts of note.”  I thought this one was especially useful.

The chart gives an estimate of total spending on food in the U.S.—an astonishing $2.51 trillion in 2025.

• $1.4 trillion goes for food away from home.
• $1.1 trillion goes for food at home.

The data are from USDA’s Food Expenditure Series, June 2026.

Despite everything that is cutting into food sales—concerns about ultra-processed foods, GLP-1 drugs, inflation—spending on food has risen steadily since 1997, except during the COVID-19 pandemic.

So has the proportion spent on food prepared outside the home.   Home cooking holds steady, but isn’t keeping up.

“Eat real food” means it has to be cooked, and it’s likely to be a lot healthier if cooked at home.

I learned to cook in 8th grade home economics.  We could use some of that now.

I am not a litigious person, so I rarely pay attention to lawsuits, but this notice caught my eye:

Chobani sued by Danone over high-protein yogurt claims:  The Oikos maker said its rival is engaging in “unfair competition and consumer deception” to make its product more appealing to shoppers.

Danone says Chobani is inflating the amount of protein in its yogurt.

The food giant said on Monday that Chobani is manipulating the serving size on its 32-ounce containers of Chobani 20G Protein to inflate the protein content. Danone alleges that in order to claim 20 grams of protein per serving, Chobani sets its serving size at 6.7 ounces instead of the industry standard of 5.3 ounces…If Chobani followed the FDA’s serving-size rules for its 32-ounce containers, the lawsuit said, it would be able to claim only 18 grams of protein per serving — below the key 20-gram threshold for high-protein yogurts.

This may seem absurd, but wait!  This may be the fourth lawsuit between these companies.

What I find particular silly about all this is that it is about protein, a nutrient that has never been a problem in American diets and still is not.  Most people get way more than they need.

But protein is what sells food products these days, so companies care about it a lot.

The context for all this is that our food supply provides roughly twice the calories needed by our population, thereby making the food industry hugely competitive, especially at a time when GLP-1 drugs, inflation, and concerns about ultra-processed foods are cutting into food sales.

Danone must think that protecting its market share is worth the legal challenge and expenditure.