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My monthly (first Sunday) San Francisco Chronicle Food Matters column is on guess what?  This will be the last post on the new food icon for a while at least, I promise.

Food plate icon improvement of pyramid

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Q: What’s the big deal over the government’s new food icon? A plate? That seems really boring.

A: The Department of Agriculture’s plate may look banal, but it is a key part of first lady Michelle Obama’s healthy eating campaign and I see it as a big step forward. Unlike the 2005 MyPyramid, this one is mostly about food, is easy to understand, and does not require use of a computer.

The plate does a better job of reflecting current thinking about healthy diets than previous guides. Its four sectors are unequal. Vegetables get the most space, and dairy – a discretionary choice – is off to the side.

You are to pile half your plate with fruit and vegetables, and a quarter with grains (half of them whole grains). All these come from plants.

I’m less happy about the sector marked “protein.” Protein is not a food. It is a nutrient.

USDA must think everyone knows that “protein” means beans, poultry and fish, as well as meat. But grains and dairy, each with its own sector, are also important protein sources. The meat industry wants you to equate protein with meat. It should be happy with this guide.

What I like best are the messages that come with the plate. My favorite? “Enjoy your food, but eat less.”

At last! Enjoyment is part of dietary advice. High marks to USDA for this one.

Other messages are designed to help you eat less while eating better. Smaller portions keep calories under control. Making half your plate fruits and vegetables is a profound switch from the six to 11 calorie-rich grain servings you were supposed to eat daily under the old MyPyramid.

For people who drink milk (really, you don’t have to), switching to low-fat is an effective way to save on calories, and whole grains are better for health than refined, rapidly absorbable starches that behave like sugars in the body.

So far, so good. But next come the politically charged “foods to reduce.” Here, the USDA is leaning in the right direction, but still pulling punches. USDA tells you to reduce sodium from soup, bread and frozen meals, but says nothing about salty snacks or other sodium-laden processed foods. This is a glaring omission.

And the final principle – “drink water instead of sugary drinks” – puts naturally sweet fruit juices (fine in small amounts) in the same category as sugar-added juice drinks, sports drinks and sodas, which ought to be reserved for occasional treats.

Let’s give USDA credit for going as far as it could without directly confronting the processed-food and soft-drink industries.

Optimist that I am, I think the icon has plenty for everyone to work with. It emphasizes the positives – fruits, vegetables, whole grains – and leaves lots of room for enjoyment. You can pile whatever foods you like on that plate as long as they fit within their assigned sectors.

Best of all, you do not have to count numbers of servings. If you want to control the size of your servings, just use a smaller plate.

Consider the alternatives. From 1958 until 1979, the USDA’s uncontroversial Four Food Groups advised eating two or three servings a day from dairy, meat, fruits and vegetables, and breads and cereals – half the plate from animal-source foods.

In 1979, in an effort to help reduce dietary risks for chronic diseases, USDA stacked the groups with plant foods above animal foods, eliciting a furor that led USDA nutritionists to begin a 12-year project to research a new food guide.

USDA released a food guide Pyramid in 1991, withdrew it under protest from meat producers, and re-released it a year later. Meat and dairy producers did not like being at the “eat less” top of the Pyramid. Nutritionists thought it promoted too many servings of high-calorie grains.

In 2005, the USDA replaced that Pyramid with the unobjectionable, food-free MyPyramid. This was impossible to teach (you had to know what each color stood for), eliminated any sense that it is better to eat some foods than others, and required a computer to personalize your own diet.

USDA officials say they spent about $2 million to research and test the new plate logo, create its website, and publicize it. This is a lot or a little depending on your perspective, but a plate is not exactly a new concept. The American Diabetes Association, American Institute for Cancer Research and Canadian government have all used similar plant-focused plates for years. The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine has one with a similar design but 100 percent vegetarian.

We can argue over nutritional details, but I think USDA’s plate-plus-messages works better than anything it has done before. The plate works for health and for disease prevention. It took courage to make half of it fruit and vegetables. That’s real progress.

Now the challenge is to Congress: How about fixing agricultural policies so they support these recommendations?

 

 

It used to be that the “soda wars” referred to Coke vs. Pepsi.  No more.  Today’s soda wars are fought on the health front, as more and more evidence links sugary drinks to obesity and other health problems.

The current issue of the New Yorker has an article by John Seabrook (in which I am briefly quoted) about Pepsi’s attempt to “health up” its snacks and drinks.

Seabrook’s article, “Snacks for a fat planet,” describes the extraordinary amount of money and effort Pepsi is spending to try to tweak its products to make them seem healthier.  His article doesn’t exactly give Pepsi a pass (as some of my readers have complained), but it does not really come to grips with how sugary drinks and snacks affect health or how Pepsi is marketing its products in developing countries.

That, no doubt, is why Pepsi has sent out a press release to reports that enclosed the complete article and suggested that reporters might be “interested in the company’s focus on its innovative approach to:”

• Reduce salt, fat and sugar across the portfolio – the New Yorker feature explains PepsiCo’s effort to re-shape natural salt so that it has more surface area, and, in turn, is perceived as “saltier” on the tongue – meaning they can maintain all the salty flavor in Lay’s but reduce overall sodium content
• Scale more drinks and snacks made with whole grains, fruit, vegetables and dairy to new markets – e.g. bringing vegetable-based gazpacho (perhaps with an edible whole grain spoon) to the U.S.
• Test new ingredients brought back from “treks” around the world – e.g. using a state-of-the-art robot in PepsiCo’s new Hawthorne, NY research lab to test botanicals and other natural ingredients from near and far – e.g. even secluded villages in the far East – to determine their impact on taste and viability for use in PepsiCo snacks and drinks (Do they intensify sweetness? Can they be a substitute for sugar? Do they have a particular healthful function?)

Score this one as a win for Pepsi.

Along with such pledges, Pepsi is aggressively marketing sodas to teenagers.  The San Francisco Chronicle reports on Pepsi’s new “social marketing” vending machines.

At a trade show in Chicago this week, PepsiCo rolled out a prototype interactive soda machine that lets you send a drink as a gift to a friend or a random stranger.

“Our vision is to use innovative technology to empower consumers and create new ways for them to engage with our brands, their social networks and each other at the point of purchase,” Mikel Durham, PepsiCo Foodservice’s chief innovation officer, said in a press release.

“Social Vending extends our consumers’ social networks beyond the confines of their own devices and transforms a static, transaction-oriented experience into something fun and exciting they’ll want to return to, again and again.”

But these kinds of marketing pushes are not confined to Pepsi.   Advertising Age reports that Joe Tripodi, Coke’s chief marketing officer of Coca-Cola explains the company’s growth strategy: focus on teenagers:

The company sees huge opportunities to grow colas, and the business as a whole, around the world in the next decade. Teen recruitment will be particularly important, as the company follows demographic trends.

“There was a time [a decade ago] when we walked away from teen recruitment and probably lost a generation of drinkers,” Mr. Tripodi said. “Parts of the world lost confidence in cola as the engine of growth. We’ve gotten that back in a big way. …When you look at the massive opportunity in so many huge countries in the world, that’s what energizes us and why we believe cola is still at its very early stages.”

And then there are partnership strategies. The latest is Sonic drive-ins’ campaign for Limeades for Learning. The campaign encourages eaters to vote for school projects like those that support physical activity.  Sonic promises to fund the projects with the most votes. The Limeades, by the way, are 620 calories (for a medium) or 950 calories (for a large).

Finally, for now, the Boston Globe reports that most Massachusetts voters support a sales tax on sodas if the money is used for some useful purpose.  But:

The American Beverage Association has been aggressively fighting taxes on soda, as cities and states across the country look for new tools to counter an obesity epidemic and raise revenue amid squeezed budgets. It has spent millions fighting initiatives that impose product-specific excise taxes on sugar-sweetened beverages and has been successful in nearly every attempt.

Expect more such public relations efforts superimposed on fundamental marketing techniques aimed at kids and fighting back on taxes and other attempts to limit soda intake.

 

 

 

How does this comport with the spanking new advertising guidelines to children or any of the previous pledges? Is sending a soda to a friend an activity or marketing? Or both?

 

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/techchron/detail?entry_id=87904

 

 

 

My monthly Food Matters column for the San Francisco Chronicle:

Food is cheap at market, but costs a lot elsewhere

Q: I pay a lot for food, and more each day, but then people like you say our food is cheap because its real costs are “externalized.” Huh? What’s that supposed to mean?

A: Food prices are indeed going up, and I can hardly keep track of the possible causes: natural disasters, crop failures, commodity speculation, corn used for biofuels, lack of research in agriculture, the declining value of the U.S. dollar and just plain greed.

But we Americans still pay relatively less for food than anywhere else because so many of the costs of industrialized food production are “externalized.” We pay for them, but not at the grocery store.

Human costs

I was reminded of externalized food costs when reading about the remarkable efforts of a Salinas teacher to educate children of itinerant farmworkers. The kids are trying to learn under disrupted, impoverished, crowded living conditions. If their parents were paid and housed better, we would pay more for food.

Last summer I visited fish canneries at the far end of the Alaskan peninsula. The fish packers were women from the Philippines, working round the clock for months to send money home to their children and families.

The canneries used to hire Alaskan high school students at wages high enough to put them through college. But to keep prices competitive, the companies reduced wages and imported labor. That money disappeared from the community.

The CEO of a large U.S. meat company told me that if he raised wages by $3, he could hire locals and not have to deal with immigrant labor. But then he would have to raise the price of his meat by 3 cents per pound (I’m not kidding). That amount, he claimed, would price him out of competitiveness.

Environmental costs

Twenty billion dollars of our tax money goes to subsidies for industrial food production every year. Additional tax money is required to clean up the mess created by that system – polluted drinking water, infertile soil, ocean dead zones and overall misery in the surrounding areas.

While driving to give a talk at a college in rural Minnesota last year, I passed within a mile or so of an industrial pig farm. The overpowering smell – an externalized cost – was still on my clothes hours later.

Safety costs

Food safety is one casualty of a food system devoted to low cost. Companies save money by cutting corners on oversight and overlooking safety violations. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says food pathogens cause 48 million illnesses, 128,000 hospitalizations and 3,000 deaths each year.

Some experts say unsafe food costs Americans $152 billion annually – $1,850 for each case in health care and lost wages. Severe illnesses from E. coli O157:H7 can generate more than $1 million in health care costs alone, and ruin lives forever.

To these amounts must be added the costs to food producers of product recalls, continued loss of sales, lawsuits and ruined reputations. Sales of spinach, for example, are only now returning to levels reported before the huge E. coli outbreak in 2006.

Here again, the cost of prevention is minimal for large companies producing large volumes of food. Officials of one vegetable-packing company told me that the impressively comprehensive food safety system they instituted in the wake of recalls raised the cost of their products by only one penny a case (I’m not kidding about this, either).

Despite ample evidence from surveys that consumers are willing to pay more to guarantee safe food, large food producers perceive those few pennies as competitive barriers.

Health care costs

Let’s count obesity as another externalized result of a cheap food system. The cheapest foods are high in calories and low in nutritional value – “junk” foods. When food is cheap, people eat more of it.

Abundant cheap food leads companies to aggressively market their products to be eaten any time, any place and in very large amounts – all of which promote biologically irresistible overeating.

Current estimates of the costs of obesity and its consequent illnesses in health care and lost productivity approach $147 billion annually, almost the same as the cost of unsafe food.

Accurate or not, such numbers provide ample evidence for the need to bring agricultural policy in line with health policy.

To pick just one example: Dietary guidelines say to eat more fruits and vegetables, and cut down on sodas. But the indexed cost of fruits and vegetables has increased by about 40 percent since the early 1980s, whereas that of sodas has decreased by about 20 percent.

The high externalized cost of our present food system is a good reason to reconsider current policies when the Farm Bill comes up for renewal in 2012. Now is the time to start working toward food system policies that will better promote health, safety and human welfare.

Marion Nestle is the author of “Food Politics,” “Safe Food,” “What to Eat” and “Pet Food Politics,” and is a professor in the nutrition, food studies and public health department at New York University. E-mail her at food@sfchronicle.com, and read her previous columns at www.sfgate.com/food.

This article appeared on page H – 4 of the San Francisco Chronicle

The I assume ironically named Center for Consumer Freedom, ever on my case, posted a notice about my work on April 1, 2009. 

I found about about it only recently.  Someone who had read it on a Franchise Business Opportunities website wrote to ask if I would go into business with him. 

Enjoy!

Marion Nestle to Become Biggest New York McDonald’s Franchisee

Food and lifestyle critic Marion Nestle announced* this morning that she plans to invest in twelve Manhattan McDonald’s restaurants upon her retirement next month from New York University. The move will make the nutrition activist New York’s largest Golden Arches franchisee.

“It was a natural fit for me,” Nestle told The New York Times.* “After years of harping on the fast-food guys, I realized something shocking: People like affordable, tasty food. I’m certainly not going to get rich in my golden years by selling organic carrots and quinoa.” Former Times reporter Marion Burros returned from her own retirement to conduct the Marion-on-Marion interview.

A new special edition of Nestle’s book What to Eat is planned for the fall,* complete with a special cover designed by Hallmarks musical greeting-card department. Every time you open the book, Nestle’s own voice will be heard singing “Ba-da-bap-BAH-BAH! Im lovin it!”

Nestle added in a special Q&A for Mother Jones* that in her new role as a restaurateur, she would have to re-think practically everything she had written about food-industry marketing. “Momma’s got to make a living,” Nestle said. “I’ve promised the Socialist Scholars Conference that I’d co-sponsor next year’s event in Havana. So if I have to walk down Broadway dressed as Mayor McCheese to get butts in the seats, I’ll do it.”

*April Fool!

So many readers have sent me the link to the Chicago Tribune story about efforts of packaged food producers to make their products look healthy that I thought I had best say something about it.

The article lists the large number of companies that are “healthifying” their products:

• PepsiCo: Combining Tropicana, Quaker Oats and dairy; low-sodium salt.
• Walmart: Cutting trans fat and sodium in its Great Value products; encouraging major brands to make healthier products.
• Kraft:  Adding fruit to Lunchables and more whole grain to Wheat Thins.
• Nestlé (no relation): Making small changes so consumers won’t feel deprived.
• Campbell’s:  Trying to reduce sodium in soup, promoting liquid vegetables through its V8 brand and whole grains with Pepperidge Farm.
• Starbucks: Offering sweets with 200 or fewer calories.

And Pepsi, says the Wall Street Journal, is converting most of its products—but not Doritos or Cheetos—to all-natural ingredients.  Doritos and Cheetos, in case you wondered, are:

harder to retool and are marketed to teens and other consumers who might be turned off if told the chips were all natural.  As well, going all natural risks highlighting the artificial ingredients that were in the chips before.

What’s going on here?  Processed food makers must be in trouble.  “Healthy” and “natural” are the only things selling these days.

But isn’t a “healthy” processed snack food an oxymoron?  They can tweak and tweak the contents, but these products will still be heavily processed.

Too much evidence now concludes that marketing a product as “healthy” or “natural” makes people think it has no calories.

And as I keep saying, just because a processed food is a little bit less bad than it used to be, doesn’t necessarily make it a good choice.

FoodNavigator-USA has collected several of its articles on higher food prices.  These, as I’ve mentioned previously, are due to a big range of causes: natural disasters (witness radioactivity in foods from Japan, crop failures, commodity trading, growing corn for biofuels, the declining value of the U.S. dollar, and how about just plain greed?

FoodNavigator is an industry newsletter, so its articles focus on the effects of higher prices on the food industry.

US food prices could surpass 2008 levels, says USDA: US food prices could surpass those seen during the 2008 food price crisis this year, as higher commodity and energy prices cause food makers to pass on costs, according to the US Department of Agriculture (USDA)…

USDA predicts rising food prices in 2011: The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) has said it expects the Consumer Price Index to rise by 2 to 3 percent in 2011, ending a period of near-stagnant food price inflation over the past two years…

Arab Revolt underlines the need for action to remedy high food prices: When Tunisian street vegetable vendor Mohamed Bouazizi chose to end his life in fiery suicide, no one could have foreseen the firestorm his death would unleash across the Arab world. But, two months later, as the Arab Revolt shows no sign of fading, the lessons to be drawn about food security are becoming abundantly clear…

Sara Lee to raise prices again on higher commodity costs: Sara Lee said it intends to raise the prices of its foods and beverages on the back of continuing commodity price pressure, as it reported nearly flat Q2 sales of $2.35bn…

Expected higher food prices could cause consumer caution in 2011: Consumers are set to manage their food budgets more carefully in 2011 as they brace for higher food prices this year, according to a new report from the NPD Group…

The role of agriculture in causing and becoming affected by climate change is, to say the least, of much current interest.  The Food and Agriculture Organization of the U.N. (FAO) has  a new report out on precisely this issue: “Climate-Smart” Agriculture: Policies, Practices and Financing for Food Security, Adaptation, and Mitigation.

The report focuses on agriculture in developing countries.  These must develop “climate-smart” approaches to cope with the challenge of feeding a warmer, more heavily populated world.

Climate change is expected to reduce agriculture productivity, stability and incomes in many areas that already experience high levels of food insecurity — yet world agriculture production will need to increase by 70 percent over the coming four decades in order to meet the food requirements of growing world population.

What needs to change?

• Agriculture: must produce more food, waste less, and make it easier for farmers to get their produce to consumers.
• Farming: must do a better job of managing natural resources like water, land and forests, soil nutrients and genetic resources to be more resilient to natural disasters.
• Insurers: must do a better job of helping farmers cope with climate-related problems.
• Agriculture: must find ways to reduce its environmental impacts — including lowering its own greenhouse gas emissions — without compromising food security and rural development.

This will take money, but from where?

The report gives examples of how farmers are already moving to tackle these issues and adopt new, climate-smart practices.

But how odd: how come FAO isn’t talking about agricultural practices in developed countries ?  Don’t we have some responsibility here?

The Institute of Medicine (IOM) released its first Front-of-Package (FOP) labeling report this morning. Phase I is a tough, detailed examination of about 20 of the existing FOP schemes along with some recommendations about what such schemes ought to do.

FOP labels are those little spots, check marks, and tokens that are all over food packages these days and that are supposed to indicate that the product is especially healthy for you.  They may seem utterly trivial, but they are of desperate importance to food companies.  FOP labels sell food products.  Food marketers love them and need them.  The FDA worries that having so many of them confuses the public, and that the schemes are based on criteria that serve industry purposes more than to promote public health.

As the IOM press release explains:

A multitude of nutrition rating, or guidance, systems have been developed by food manufacturers, government agencies, nutrition groups, and others in recent years with the intent of helping consumers quickly compare products’ nutritional attributes and make healthier choices. Ratings are typically communicated to shoppers through symbols placed prominently on food packaging, usually on the front, or on retail shelf tags. Unlike the Nutrition Facts panel, these rating systems and symbols are unregulated, and different systems focus on different nutrients. The variation may confuse consumers, and questions have been raised about the systems’ underlying nutritional criteria.

The committee did a terrific analysis of current FOP schemes.  My favorite parts are its

• Clear, concise histories of nutrition and FOP labeling (students: take note!)
• Detailed evaluation of the strengths (few) and weaknesses (many) of the existing schemes
• Demonstration of the inconsistent results of applying the schemes to specific foods

The report gives examples of the inconsistent results of three scoring schemes: Guiding Stars, NRFI [Nutrient-Rich Foods Index], and Nu-Val

• Instant oatmeal received 3 Guiding Stars, and scores of 87 by NRFI and 39 by NuVal.
• Non-instant oatmeal received 2 Guiding Stars, and scores of 22 by NRFI and 57 by NuVal
• Toasted oat cereal received 2 Guiding Stars, and scores of 84 by NRFI and 37 by NuVal
• Fat free milk, 1% fat milk, and fat free plain yogurt received 3 Guiding Stars, but fat free milk was scored 56 by NRFI and 91 by NuVal; 1% fat milk was scored 30 by NRFI and 81 by NuVal, and fat free plain yogurt was scored 43 by NRFI and 96 by NuVal.

The committee’ key recommendation: FOP labels should deal with just four nutrients: calories, saturated fat, trans fat, and sodium.

These nutrients, says the committee, “are routinely overconsumed and associated most strongly with diet-related health problems affecting many Americans, including obesity, heart disease, high blood pressure, Type 2 diabetes, and certain types of cancer.”

Comment: Trans fat seems unnecessary here.  It is already out of most packaged foods.   Or maybe the committee thinks that leaving it off will give food companies permission to put hydrogenated oils back in?

The committee chose not to add sugars to this list:

The committee concurred that both added and naturally occurring sugars contribute to the caloric content of foods and beverages and overconsumption of high-calorie products can lead to obesity.  Highlighting calories per serving in nutrition rating systems would address this concern.

Comment: I think consumers want to know about added sugars in food products.  I certainly do.

Phase II comes next

It will examine designs and look at consumer understanding of the labels, and will discuss “the pros and cons of having a single, standardized front-label food guidance system that is regulated by the Food and Drug Administration.”

Presumably, Phase II will deal with questions that are not addressed in the Phase I report:

• Will this scheme supersede all of the other labeling systems currently on food packages?
• Will it be voluntary or mandatory?  For all food products, or just selected ones?
• If the scheme is voluntary, why would food companies choose to use it since it mostly highlights the negatives—the nutrients to be avoided?
• How will it affect the nutrient-content claims currently on food packages?  (Examples: “Contains 8 vitamins!”  “100% vitamin C!” “High fiber!”)
• How will it affect shelf-labeling schemes such as the Nu-Val system used at Price Chopper supermarkets and the ANDI system used by Whole Foods?

FOP labels are about marketing, not health

This scheme, like the many others developed by food companies singly or together, is designed to help the public decide whether one highly processed, packaged food product is nutritionally better than another.

As I have discussed many times on this site, this approach raises a philosophical question: Is a slightly “better for you” food product necessarily a good choice?

I hope the committee will ponder this and some of my other questions as it enters Phase II.

Addendum: I gather from what I’ve heard about the press conference this morning that some of my questions were answered.  The FOP proposal will not affect nutrient content claims on the front of packages.  Companies will still be able to proclaim the nutritional benefits of their products in words and banners.  They just won’t be able to use them in whatever symbol gets chosen.  So what difference will this report make?  Not much, alas, except to get rid of the silly symbols in use right now.

Update, October 14:  William Neuman’s account of this event in the New York Times starts with this: “Tell us how your products are bad for us.”