Coming soon to a supermarket near you: Sesame Street characters on packages of vegetables.

The Let’s Move! press release begins:

Washington, DC – As part of First Lady Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move! initiative, Mrs. Obama today joined Sesame Street’s Elmo and Rosita to announce that Sesame Workshop and the Produce Marketing Association (PMA) joined the Partnership for a Healthier America (PHA) in a two-year agreement to help promote fresh fruit and vegetable consumption to kids, making those healthy choices a little easier for busy parents and families to make.

The agreement allows PMA’s community of growers, suppliers and retailers to utilize the strength and influence of the Sesame Street brand without a licensing fee, using characters like Big Bird, Elmo, Rosita and Abby Cadabby to help deliver messages about fresh fruits and vegetables. Sesame Street characters may be on produce in stores as early as mid-2014.

This is big news.  Let’s Move! is attempting to level the marketing playing field and give fruits and vegetables a competitive edge.

I, of course, have mixed feelings.  I’ve long been on record as opposed to marketing anything to kids, whether good, bad, or indifferent.

Marketing is not education. Education is about imparting knowledge and promoting wisdom and critical thinking.

Marketing is about creating demand for a product.

Children are demonstrably unable to tell the difference or, for that matter, to distinguish marketing from entertainment.  That is why marketing to children crosses an ethical line.

But if the foods are healthy, don’t the ends justify the means?  Isn’t anything that gets kids to eat healthy foods worth doing?  After all, kids live in a marketing environment, so marketing might as well be used to do good rather than harm.

This is the rationale behind the marketing of baby carrots with “eat ’em like junk food” ads.  Reportedly, these ads increased sales of baby carrots.

But perhaps this campaign also reinforced the idea that kids are only supposed to eat foods that come with cartoons or toys?

I’d like to see the data on the long-term effects of the campaign on sales, whether sales dropped when the commercials stopped, and whether they affected kids’ attitudes toward eating vegetables in general.

In the meantime, this will be an interesting experiment.  I’m hoping researchers are ready to go, have their evaluation methods in place, and are already collecting baseline data.

Also in the meantime, ProPolitico writers Byran Tau and Helena Bottemiller Evich point out that “Michelle Obama policy initiatives are a big deal for big business.”   Their article begins:

The latest Let’s Move! event is brought to you by the letter K. As in K Street.”

It explains how:

corporate America’s biggest players…stand to benefit from exposure, public goodwill generated from being involved in a public health or charitable effort or the policy itself.  Big lobbying forces and major industry groups like the American Beverage Association, the International Bottled Water Association, the Food Marketing Institute, the Grocery Manufacturers Association, the National Restaurant Association, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and many others have all worked closely with the East Wing on those initiatives, both of which heavily focus on private sector contributions.

If kids eat more healthfully for the next couple of years as a result of this campaign, it will be hard to do anything but applaud it.

Although the questions raised by this campaign are uncomfortable, I’m going to try to keep an open mind and wish it the very best of success.

Addition, October 31: Obamafoodorama’s eyewitness account includes the First Lady’s press release.

If McDonald’s apparently generous support of Ronald McDonald House Charities leaves you with warm feelings about the company’s philanthropic efforts, it’s time to rethink those feelings.

Michele Simon’s latest report, Clowning Around with Charity, should destroy all illusions about McDonald’s charitable giving.

The report comes to some interesting conclusions.  McDonald’s, it finds:

• Promotes itself through Ronald McDonald House Charities but contributes only about 10% of the charity’s revenue.
• Takes credit for donations.
• Sells unhealthy children’s menu items by linking their sale to very modest charitable giving.
• Profits from marketing to children in schools under the guise of charity and education.
• Spends about a billion dollars a year on marketing, but only a small fraction of that amount on charitable causes.
• Donates a lower percentage of its profits to charities than many other corporations and private citizens.
• Explicitly created Ronald McDonald House for public relations purposes.

If you think about it, none of this is surprising, but it’s fascinating to have it all in one place.

Here’s today’s coverage so far:

• Michele Simon’s blog post 
• USA Today’s
• US News and World Report

I participated in the James Beard Foundation’s annual food conference, Paradox of Appetite: Hungering for Change, earlier this week in a panel with other recipients of the 2013 James Beard Leadership awards.

If you would like to hear my short remarks (and see the video prepared for the award), click below.

Thanks to the Beard Foundation for all of this.  Enjoy!

October 24 is Food Day, which its organizer, the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), calls “a nationwide celebration of healthy, affordable, and sustainably produced food and a grassroots campaign for better food policies.”

Food Day aims to help people Eat Real. That means cutting back on sugar drinks, overly salted packaged foods, and fatty, factory-farmed meats in favor of vegetables, fruits, whole grains, and sustainably raised protein. Food Day envisions shorter lines at fast-food drive-throughs—and bigger crowds at farmers markets.

Food Day is about taking personal responsibility for what you eat—what I like to call “voting with your fork.”

Join the Movement: The most important ingredient in Food Day is you! Use October 24 to start—or celebrate—eating a healthier diet and putting your family’s diet on track.

It is not, alas, about working to change policies that will make it easier for people to make healthier food choices.  For that, you must celebrate World Food Day on October 16 (and see post on that topic)—getting political and voting with your vote!

The food movement needs both (compromise on October 20?).

In honor of both, here’s this from Eat, Drink, Vote.

I was a member of this Pew Commission, which produced a landmark report in 2008: Putting Meat on the Table: Industrial Farm Animal Production in America.

Our report’s conclusion: The current system of raising farm animals poses unacceptable risks to public health, to communities near Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs), and to the environment.

Our key recommendations:

1. Ban the nontherapeutic use of antimicrobials in food animal production.
2. Define nontherapeutic use of antimicrobials as any use in food animals in the absence of microbial disease or documented microbial disease exposure.
3. Implement new systems to deal with farm waste.
4. Phase out gestation crates, restrictive veal crates, and battery cages.
5. Enforce the existing environmental and anti-trust laws applicable to food animal production.
6. Expand animal agriculture research.

Recently, the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future (CLF) did an in-depth analysis of what has happened with these recommendations.  Its dismal conclusion: The problems have only gotten worse.

Many hoped the release of the report, which occurred within a year of a change in the administration, would help trigger a sea change in the federal government’s approach to regulating the food animal production industry…Early administrative appointments to top regulatory posts held promise for meaningful changes.

CLF’s review of the policy-landscape changes in the five years since the release of the report paints a very different picture. Contrary to expectations, the Obama administration has not engaged on the recommendations outlined in the report in a meaningful way; in fact, regulatory agencies in the administration have acted regressively in their decision-making and policy-setting procedures.

In addition, the House of Representatives has stepped up the intensity of its attacks on avenues for reform and stricter enforcement of existing regulations, paving the way for industry avoidance of scrutiny and even deregulation, masked as protection of the inappropriately termed “family farmer.”

The assaults on reform have not been limited to blocking policies…Instead, the policy debate…has shifted to the implementation of policies such as “ag-gag”, agricultural certainty, and right-to-farm laws, all of which are designed to further shield unsavory industry practices from the eye of the public and the intervention of regulators.

This week, some of the Commission members answered questions from ProPolitico reporter Helena Bottemiller Evich.  Ralph Loglisci reports in Civil Eats on that meeting and his conversation with former Pew Commission director Robert Martin, who is now the Center for a Livable Future’s Director of Food System Policy:

I think issues are going to drive change at some point. You’ve got this big group of people who want to see change. The problems of antibiotic resistance are worsening–the problems of 500 million tons of (animal) waste we produce each year are worsening and the ground in many areas of the country is really saturated with phosphorous. You can’t transport the material, so you’ve got to disperse the animals. So, the problems are reaching really a crisis point. So that could really force action too.

Is there any hope?  It sounds like things will have to get worse before they get better.  But how much worse?

I wish there were better news.  Food safety, animal welfare, and environmental advocates: get together and get busy!

Politics of the Plate

Ed Behr.  50 Foods: The Essentials of Good Taste.  Penguin Press, 2013.

Just got my copy.  Here’s my blurb for 50 Foods:

Ed Behr’s 50 Foods extols the pleasures of his favorites from anchovies to walnuts, with plenty of handy advice about how to tell the difference between a great pear or cheese and one that’s not so great, and what wines make good foods taste even better.  He knows the ins and outs of delicious food, and you will too after reading this book.