I’m happy to report that my advance copy of Eat, Drink, Vote: An Illustrated Guide to Food Politics arrived yesterday afternoon. This book is my summary of the current state of food politics, illustrated with about 250 cartoons from 40 terrific cartoonists.
It’s really fun (if I must say so myself).
Read about it on its own page here. Bookstores are taking orders.
It comes out the first week in September.
I was in South Pasadena last week to visit my son and we stopped at a station to get gas. The station’s FoodMart came with palm trees, real and trompe l’oeil.
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The UK is introducing a uniform system of front-of-package food labeling—voluntary of course.
The food industry hates it. It’s got traffic-light colors, and we already know what that means in practice. People tend not to buy red-labeled products.
That’s why trade associations are complaining that this system is too simplistic, misleading, and unscientific.
Worst of all, it will confuse consumers into not buying products that fit just fine into healthful diets.
Tch, tch.
Australia is introducing a star system to rate products. Food companies don’t like that one either.
In the meantime, we’ve heard nothing about front-of-package labeling from our very own FDA since the Institute of Medicine released its recommendations in October 2011, and it looked like the FDA had given up on the idea in February 2012.
Front-of-package labels were on the early agenda for Let’s Move!
Maybe the European labeling initiatives will encourage the FDA to do so?
Yesterday, the House rejected H.R. 1947, the Federal Agriculture Reform and Risk Management Act of 2013, by a vote of 234 to 195.
Voting against the bill were:
Unless Congress gets its act together, support for SNAP and agriculture revert to the provisions of the 2008 bill [Oops. The 1949 bill]. Congress will have to deal with some of trauma that results from this.
My favorite comment on this situation comes from Joel Berg, Executive Director of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger:
We celebrate the failure of this horrific federal Farm Bill which would have slashed SNAP nutrition benefits by over $20 billion. Not only would this Farm Bill have taken food off the table of low-income children, veterans, working parents, and people with disabilities, it would have actually expanded corporate welfare for agri-businesses…It’s time to go back to the drawing board, and for both houses of Congress…to pass a Farm Bill that puts the interests of hungry Americans, consumers, family farmers, the environment, and taxpayers above those of corporate welfare.
Is any of this news? Not page 1, apparently. I’m in Los Angeles where the New York Times put the story on page 12.
Other comments worth reading:
A reader, Leah Pressman, left this Feedback message this morning:
She sends a link to the story in the New York Times.
The world food prize foundation awarded [this year’s prize] to several scientists on the teams working for Monsanto who figured out how to make genetically modified crops.
I am stunned by this and eagerly await your comments. The Times eventually mentions (see continuation) that “the foundation that administers the prize has received[…]a 5 million dollar contribution from Monsanto” among other corporations.
The World Food Prize is about agricultural productivity and has always favored industrial methods. Monsanto produces by industrial methods.
As I keep saying, when it comes to food politics, you can’t make this stuff up.
Policy wonk types: try this one!
This is an academic’s analysis of the social causes of obesity, especially among the urban poor, and what to do about it. Although the book is aimed at social workers, it works for public health as well. Delgado calls for community-based participatory health promotion principles and interventions. These are clearly needed.
If only they weren’t so hard to do…
The House of Representatives Rules Committee is dealing with the Farm Bill. The Committee has posted the relevant documents on its website, so you can judge for yourself how our political system works these days.
It’s hard to know what to make of the amendments—all 227 of them—or which ones are worth attention. Many deal with SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which the House wants cut to pieces.
The Rules Committee will decide this afternoon what to do about the amendments. Discuss? Invoke cloture and cut off discussion? We will see.
In the meantime, here are some examples.
You get the idea. Think: lobbying.
The main issue is SNAP. House Republicans don’t like it much (too expensive, too wasteful, too inducing of dependency and fraud).
You don’t believe this? Here’s what the chair of the House Agriculture Committee, Frank Lucas, R-Okla., produced to convince House members to vote for a farm bill with $20 billion cut from SNAP over the next 10 years.
Addition: The White House says it will veto the farm bill if the $20 billion SNAP cut remains.
I’m on the road this week and getting caught up on reading. I”m not usually interested in diet books but this one is more about healthy eating than losing weight.
I first heard of Darya Pino Rose in connection with her guide to getting through supermarkets. She’s a neurobiologist who confesses to chronic dieting. Once she figured out the science, she figured the rest would be easy.
Focusing on real food instead of those specialty, highly processed diet foods is the secret to making healthy food enjoyable. My recipe for how to make cauliflower taste as good as french fries (p. 237) has convinced hundreds of skeptics that vegetables aren’t just palatable, but can be insanely delicious.
Her advice for handling restaurants and friends and family is eminently sensible and worth trying for those who have trouble with such things (and who does not?).
I’m speaking at the Aspen Ideas Festival: Health. I’ll be interviewed by Helena Bottemiller Evich of FoodFix from 9:00 to 9:50 a.m.. Topic: “Making sense of nutrition science.”
