Search results: Michael Pollan

Last Friday, I received a phone call from Todd Kerr, the publisher of The Berkeley Times, a community newspaper in Berkeley, CA.  He was preparing a story on the Berkeley soda tax and could not find University of California (UC) faculty who were willing to speak with him.

They were, they told him, under a gag order from the president’s office not to talk to reporters about the soda tax.

I can understand his frustration.  I spoke or e-mailed about 10 people with knowledge of this issue and only two would allow me to quote them for attribution.

For starters, the idea of a gag order seems contrary to current practice.

• Michael Pollan, a Berkeley journalism professor, says he publicly endorses the tax, and so have other professors.
• Chancellor’s Professor Robert Reich wrote a column endorsing it, and UC Berkeley posted his comments on its website.
• UCSF has featured research on the health implications of a soda tax on its website.
• The 50th anniversary celebration of Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement (FSM) starts this week.

But the rumor is serious and deserves investigation.

I sent out queries to try to find out if the rumor could have any basis in fact.

Mr. Kerr kicked off the process by giving me the names of the three faculty members he said had refused to speak with him about the soda tax.

I was able to track them down.  Here is what they told me (not for direct quotation or attribution):

• Source #1: Mr. Kerr had asked scientific questions outside the respondent’s area of expertise.
• Source #2: Mr. Kerr stated that his paper does not take a stance on issues, so HE can’t write for or against the tax.  This respondent’s understanding is that Berkeley faculty members can state opinions on any voting matter as long as they do not claim to speak for the university.
• Source #3: University counsel advised this respondent that faculty can say what they want as private citizens, but not as UC employees.  This source’s understanding is that state employees are not permitted to work to alter the conduct or outcome of matters on which the public is voting.  And, if the food industry were to sue a faculty member for something said in the course of an election campaign, the university would not provide legal resources or defense.

Source #3’s comments especially demanded further inquiry.  I did some more consultation of UC faculty, legal staff, and professional staff.

UC policy on political speech is governed by state law

As one source explained, there is no gag order on faculty.  There are, however, state statutes that limit the University’s ability to take positions on ballot measures that are before the voters (be sure to look at the Webinar slide show).  These state in a Q and A:

May a University employee endorse a ballot measure in his/her private capacity and identify himself/herself by University title?

Yes. A University official may allow use of his/her name and title for identification purposes in the same manner as others who sign an endorsement. An express disclaimer of University endorsement is required only where the context might reasonably cause confusion as to whether the endorsement is made in an official or unofficial capacity.

My queries eventually landed in the Office of the President of the UC System.  Steve Montiel, Media Relations Director, one of only two people in all of this who was willing to be quoted by name, said:

All University of California employees, including faculty, have the right to express their personal opinions about any matter of civic importance, including ballot measures. Consistent with state law, however, longstanding University policy prohibits university resources from being used to oppose or support a ballot measure. Only the UC Board of Regents can take a public position on a ballot measure, and it has done so in the past.

I also consulted Michele Simon (the second quotable) about state policy.  She notes that this is standard policy for institutions receiving state funding.  UC is a state school and, therefore, is not allowed to use state funds to take political positions.

She reminded me that at Stanford, a private institution, Henry Miller of the conservative Hoover Institute violated Stanford’s no-position policy on ballot measures when he did a TV ad opposing Proposition 37, the GMO labeling initiative, using his Stanford affiliation.

When we learned of the ‘No on 37 ‘ commercial, we immediately asked to have it changed so it would be in compliance with Stanford policies,” said Debra Zumwalt, the university’s vice president and general counsel. “While everyone at Stanford is entitled to espouse whatever political view he or she may choose, we do not allow people affiliated with Stanford to take a political position in a way that could imply that it is Stanford’s position.”

In my own experience, UC’s policy also sounds like standard practice.  When the Sugar Association threatened me with a lawsuit (see documents under Controversies at the bottom of the Media pages), that’s pretty much what NYU lawyers told me.  If I said something libelous, I would be responsible for the legal consequences.  Luckily, the Sugar Association never sued.

So—how did this rumor get started?  

Here’s what I learned.

A group of faculty advocating for the soda tax asked to meet with university legal counsel for advice about how to protect themselves and the university against potential lawsuits filed by, for example, the American Beverage Association (ABA), which has been especially aggressive in fighting the tax.  The ABA’s actions reminded them of the cigarette industry’s fight with the UC system over the tobacco control archives now housed at UCSF.

Some of the legal advice to faculty—if you speak at a soda tax rally, represent yourself as an individual,not a representative of the university, and do so on your own, not the university’s time—can be interpreted as restrictive even if it is not meant as such.

UC’s policy on academic freedom

Please note that UC, since the time of the Free Speech Movement, has developed a clear policy on academic freedom:

…academic freedom depends upon the quality of scholarship, which is to be assessed by the content of scholarship, not by the motivations that led to its production. The [policy]…does not distinguish between “interested” and “disinterested” scholarship; it differentiates instead between competent and incompetent scholarship. Although competent scholarship requires an open mind, this does not mean that faculty are unprofessional if they reach definite conclusions. It means rather that faculty must always stand ready to revise their conclusions in the light of new evidence or further discussion. Although competent scholarship requires the exercise of reason, this does not mean that faculty are unprofessional if they are committed to a definite point of view. It means rather that faculty must form their point of view by applying professional standards of inquiry rather than by succumbing to external and illegitimate incentives such as monetary gain or political coercion. Competent scholarship can and frequently does communicate salient viewpoints about important and controversial questions [my emphasis].

My translation: if faculty opinions about the soda tax are based on research—and plenty of research is available to back up the rationale for and potential efficacy of such a tax (see Rudd Center and Bridging the Gap)—faculty not only have the right but also have the responsibility to express opinions about them.

UC faculty: get out there and support the tax!

And wish the FSM a happy 50th anniversary.

 

By Jocelyn Zuckerman  (published originally by On Earth, republished by Civil Eats, and now here).

A year ago, when I was working as an editor at the magazine Whole Living, I oversaw a special issue on food featuring “Visionaries”—people making a real difference in the way this country thinks about eating. There was “The Motivated Mayor” (Michael Bloomberg); “The Integrator” (Harlem chef and restaurateur Marcus Samuelsson); and, among several others, there was “The Badass.”

That would be Marion Nestle. The author of a handful of books that examine the intersection of food and politics, Nestle is a public-health nutritionist and a professor at New York University. She is also one of the most outspoken advocates for a national food system that prioritizes health and the environment over corporate profits. (Michael Pollan ranks Nestle the second-most powerful foodie in America, after First Lady Michelle Obama.)

Recently she published her new book, Eat, Drink, Vote, an admirably approachable look at wide-ranging issues such as farm subsidies, obesity, genetically modified foods, and trans fats.

On the eve of its release, Nestle and I sat down over lunch to discuss, among other things, lunch. Ours was fine—Caesar salad for her, Niçoise for me—but the lunches that dominated the conversation weren’t the ones on our plates. Rather, we talked about the meals that our nation’s kids will be loading onto their trays in the new school year.

It’s an issue that Nestle cares deeply about, and for good reason. For starters, school lunches (and breakfasts) tend to represent the lion’s share of the nutrition that a low-income child will get in a day. (For the truly impoverished, they may be the only meals children get.) The food served sets an example to a “large, captive, impressionable audience,” as Nestle puts it in the book, making cafeterias key battlegrounds in the fight against obesity and poor nutrition.

And it’s certainly a fight. Throughout Eat, which features some 250 food-related cartoons by illustrators around the country, Nestle calls out the entrenched powers—namely, our Congressional representatives and the deep-pocketed food and beverage lobbies to whom they seem ever more beholden—working at cross-purposes to the folks fighting for a food policy focused on promoting our own well-being and that of our environment.

Just look at what happened in 2011, when the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) tried to rate tomato paste based on its true nutritional value. School pizza makers went running to their friends in Congress, who promptly blocked the USDA’s decision. So an eighth of a cup of tomato paste is still credited with as much nutritional value as a half a cup of vegetables. Nestle chose a cartoon that wittily depicts the you-must-be-kidding-me moment (by Pulitzer Prize-winner Mike Peters) for the cover of her book.

There’s no question that school meals are big business. In 2011, the USDA school breakfast program served nearly 12 million children, at a cost of nearly $3 billion, Nestle writes in Eat, while the lunch program served nearly 32 million children, at a cost of $11 billion. The companies involved in providing all that food have a serious interest in holding on to their share of that money, preferably while investing as few resources as possible.

“Any change in the standards means that the products that have been created specifically for school lunches [that pizza, for example] have to meet new standards,” Nestle pointed out over lunch. “And that pisses everybody off”—everybody who’s already making money off school meals, that is.

Which makes it all the more remarkable that those meals have, in fact, gotten better. In December 2010, Congress passed the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act. The legislation marked the first time in a generation that school lunch regulations had been updated. (One telling example of just how much our dietary landscape has changed over the decades: the previous laws featured minimum calorie levels but no maximums.) The new act gave USDA the power to establish nutrition standards for all of the food sold and served in schools.

In addition to lunches and breakfasts, this includes the so-called “competitive foods” available from vending machines and carts. There are now limits on the levels of saturated fat, trans fat, sodium, and calories, and the standards require that snacks be rich in whole grains and provide nutritional value. Drinks can contain no more than 40 calories per 8 fluid ounces, or 60 calories per 12 fluid ounces—numbers that rule out all regular sodas and Gatorades.

 

Healthier for kids also means healthier for the environment. (Another cartoon in the book, by Joel Pett, aptly illustrates the direct link between “soft-drink pushers” and damage to the natural landscape.) There’s a direct impact on the supply chain when school lunches are heavier on organically grown produce instead of (corn-fed) chicken coated in cornmeal and deep-fried in corn oil, for example.

Given the numbers involved, healthier school lunch standards should ultimately mean a shift in what is being grown and raised in this country. Fewer sodas in vending machines means less demand for high-fructose corn syrup and less acreage devoted to monocultures of corn. Fruit and vegetable salads replacing chicken fingers means less demand for antibiotic-laden factory-farm birds. In a logical world, greater demand for healthy crops to produce federal school lunch meals would translate into more support for them in the next Farm Bill.

There’s more to making school lunches better than just changing the rules, though, Nestle explained. The food has to taste good, too, and the kids have to actually eat it. “I have been in some of the best school lunch programs in the country,” she said, “and the kids weren’t eating.” They may avoid the meals for social reasons, she explained. “It may have a bad reputation. They may not like the way the cafeteria looks. They may not have time to eat.” (She blames the no-time-to-eat problem in part on an educational culture that’s fixated on testing and suggested that programs teaching kids about growing and cooking food can help overcome some of the other barriers.)

I asked Nestle about who’s getting it right, and she replied that the now-somewhat-famous program at the Calhoun School, located on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, represents “the Platonic ideal” of what a school lunch operation can be. It doesn’t come as a huge shock that children eat well at an educational institution that charges in the neighborhood of $40,000 a year per student, but the man behind the program, French Culinary Institute-trained “Chef Bobo,” doesn’t just cook for rich kids.

He is a frequent speaker at conferences around the country on school lunches and healthy eating, and he regularly brings in cooks from other schools to intern in his kitchen, which features produce and chickens sourced from local vendors and includes a vegan option every day (see one of his recipes to the left). Several of Bobo’s sous chefs have gone on to start similar lunch programs at other schools, including at a public charter school in the Bronx.

Nationwide, Nestle said, there are more farm-to-table programs linking students with local farmers than ever before. Schools in cities and in the countryside are sowing their own kitchen gardens, and the three-year-old Food Corps supports a network of volunteers who work in poor communities to teach kids about healthy food, build school gardens, and help bring better food into public-school cafeterias.

Sure, school lunches still need work—someday that tomato paste will be called out for what it really is—but the fact is, we’ve come a very long way. “Look back ten years!” Nestle said in regard to the overall shift in this country’s dietary landscape. “Healthy food has gone mainstream.” Despite the entrenched interests, she said,changes are happening, in large part because Americans better understand the importance of what they put in their mouths. With Eat, Drink, Vote, the badass lunch lady furthers the cause.

ABOUT THE WRITER

Jocelyn Zuckerman is the former articles editor at OnEarth, the former executive editor of Whole Living and deputy editor of Gourmet, where she won a James Beard Award for feature writing in 2002. She is also an adjunct professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and has written for the New York Times Magazine, Parade, and Plenty.

 

I used my August (monthly, first Sunday) column for the San Francisco Chronicle to reflect on the meaning of the Mayor’s Food Forum last month.

Q: I hear that you moderated a food forum for candidates for mayor of New York City and got them to say what they thought about hunger, nutrition and local agriculture. Did any of them say anything worth telling?

A: The forum was indeed amazing. But I’d go further.

I’d call it historic – a turning point in the food movement.

This had to be the first time that food advocacy organizations – an astonishing 88 of them – joined forces to induce candidates for city office to agree to respond to questions about issues of concern to every one of those groups.

Six candidates turned up. What they said hardly mattered (and at this point, the less said about the individual candidates, the better). What does matter is that they thought this audience important enough to come and state their positions on how food production and consumption affect public health, and how political leaders can use their authority to improve the food system.

Food issues have become prominent enough to make politicians and would-be politicians take notice.

The sold-out audience of nearly 1,000 filled the auditorium at the New School as well as two overflow rooms. Others watched the forum streamed live online. (http://new.livestream.com/TheNewSchool/nycfoodforum).

When I was invited to moderate, I could hardly believe what the organizers had accomplished. Twelve groups, each working separately for improvements in food assistance, food access, working conditions, local farming, food systems or health had formed a coalition to plan the forum and make it happen.

These groups met for a more than a year to identify the specific issues they most wanted candidates to think about. Judging from the length of the questions I was given, this cannot have been easy. The organizers must have been exceptionally patient – and persistent – to get 12 advocacy groups to agree on the key issues.

They also did a great deal of community organizing. They not only recruited 76 other food advocacy groups to support the forum, but also encouraged development of an additional forum for young people in low-income communities to get involved in the food issues most relevant to their lives.

Some of these kids were invited to ask questions of the candidates. One, from a Brooklyn teenager: “Where do you shop for food?” This may sound like a naive question, but it elicited a surprisingly thoughtful response that touched on sensitive issues of income and class.

The grown-up questions concerned issues vital to the host groups: How would the new mayor address hunger and food insecurity, inadequate access to healthy food, the low wages and inhumane treatment of restaurant and fast-food workers, the poor quality of school food, and the high rates of diet-related chronic disease among city residents.

Such problems are hardly unique to New York. Even the more city-centered questions – how to use the city’s purchasing power to support regional agriculture and the food economy, and to promote city land for urban farming – have plenty of relevance for other urban areas, including Bay Area cities.

The candidates made it clear that they had thought about the issues, and had come prepared to address them.

Here’s my inescapable conclusion: The food movement is strong enough to make candidates for office stand up, listen and take food issues seriously.

Last fall, writing about California’s Proposition 37 that sought to label genetically modified foods, Michael Pollan issued a challenge to food advocates.

The food movement, he said, needs to do more than work for agricultural reform and an increased market share for healthier food. Advocacy groups need to get together to create a real political movement – an organized force strong enough to propel food concerns onto the national agenda and force politicians to take action to improve food systems.

The forum was a first step in that direction. It proved that food coalitions can have political power.

I can’t think of a better time for food advocacy groups to join forces and work collectively toward common food system goals.

E-mail questions to: food@sfchronicle.com

Tamar Adler.  An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace.  Scribner 2011.

The book comes with a foreword by Alice Waters and a blurb from Michael Pollan: “Tamar Adler has written the best book on cooking with economy and grace that I have read since MFK Fisher.”  He ought to know (see below).

Ms. Adler cooked at Chez Panisse.  She says:

Cooking is best approached from wherever you find yourself when you are hungry, and should extend long past the end of the page.  There should be serving, and also eating, and storing away what’s left; there should be looking at meals’ remainders with interest and imagining all the good things they will become.

She begins with “how to boil water” and ends with “how to end.”  Very MFK Fisher indeed.

Michael Pollan.  Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation.  Penguin Press, 2013

A review of this book should seem superfluous as a mere look at Pollan’s website makes clear.   But I want to go on record as saying how much I enjoyed reading it.  He writes about the time he spends in the kitchen learning from experienced cooks how to barbecue (fire), make stews (water), breads (air), and cheese (earth).

The writing is so vivid and engaging that I had the strangest reaction to this book: I could smell what was cooking.

My monthly (first Sunday) column in the San Francisco Chronicle appeared today.

I used the May 1 publication of the tenth anniversary edition of Food Politics (Michael Pollan wrote the Foreword) to reflect on what ‘s happened since the book first appeared in 2002.

A decade later, the Chronicle’s headline writer put it this way: 

Plenty of positive change happening

The May issue of World Nutrition, the online journal of the World Public Health Nutrition Association, features commentary on–and excerpts from the tenth anniversary edition of Food Politics.

Contents: World Nutrition 2013, 4, 5, 271-295.

Geoffrey Cannon on “The heavy hitter,”  page 271

Michael Pollan on “The game changer,”  page 273

Excerpts from Marion Nestle’s Preface: “Standing up and speaking out,” page 275

Excerpts from Marion Nestle’s Afterword:

• Our children are not protected, page 279
• Let’s Move–Where?  page 280
• Obesity, page 281
• Marketing to children, page 282
• School meals, page 287
• Sugared soft drinks, page 290
• Dawn is breaking, 293

World Nutrition says: Readers may make use of the material in this column if acknowledgement is given to the book’s publisher. Please cite as: Nestle M. Food is a political issue. World Nutrition May 2013, 4,5, 270-295. Obtainable at www.wphna.org. 

Please welcome the Tenth Anniversary Edition of Food Politics.

It’s comes with an exceptionally gracious Foreword by Michael Pollan.  I wrote a new Preface and a lengthy Afterword to bring it all up to date.

Doing the Afterword gave me a chance to think about what’s happened in the food movement over the past ten (eleven, really, but who’s counting) years since Food Politics first appeared in 2002.

Indeed, a great deal has happened, and much of it good, thanks to everyone who is working to create a healthier and more sustainable food system.

Read and enjoy!

Eat, Drink, Vote: An Illustrated Guide to Food Politics (publication date: September 3, 2013)

Order from Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble,  Books-a-million,  IndieBound

See its Cartoonist Group website.  Cartoonist Group also has a Facebook page.

What’s wrong with the US food system? Why is half the world starving while the other half battles obesity? Who decides our food issues, and why can’t we do better with labeling, safety, or school food? These are complex questions that are hard to answer in an engaging way for a broad audience. But everybody eats, and food politics affects us all.

Marion Nestle, whom Michael Pollan ranked as the #2 most powerful foodie in America (after Michelle Obama) in Forbes, has always used cartoons in her public presentations to communicate how politics—shaped by government, corporate marketing, economics, and geography—influences food choice. Cartoons do more than entertain; the best get right to the core of complicated concepts and powerfully convey what might otherwise take pages to explain.

In Eat, Drink, Vote, Nestle teams up with The Cartoonist Group syndicate to present more than 250 of her favorite cartoons on issues ranging from dietary advice to genetic engineering to childhood obesity. Using the cartoons as illustration and commentary, she engagingly summarizes some of today’s most pressing issues in food politics. While encouraging readers to vote with their forks for healthier diets, this book insists that it’s also necessary to vote with votes to make it easier for everyone to make healthier dietary choices.

Reviews, Interviews, Media

December 12  FoodQualityNews runs excerpts of Eat, Drink, Vote in giveaway contest

November 26  ABC News ranks Eat, Drink, Vote among 2013’s Best Books to Get You Thinking About Food.

November 15 Comic Strip of the Day

November 3 Interview with Katy Kieffer on Heritage Radio

October 31  11 reasons to laugh at GMOs

October 29  Post on Eco-Watch

October 26  Video interview with Maria Rodale

October 26  Rodale News: The 19 biggest food problems in America (cartoons and text)

October 25  Blog post on the Brilliant Mind of Edison Lee

October 19  Joel Riddell interview, San Francisco (scroll down to 12:30)

Octsober 16 Interview with Warren Rojas at Roll Call

October 14 Squib in Philadelphia Inquirer

October 4  Interview with Jocelyn Zuckerman on Civil Eats: Marion Nestle speaks out on the business of school food.

October 3 Podcast interview with Green Diva Meg

October 1  Interview with Maria Rodale on the Huffington Post

September 30  Interview with Maria Rodale on Maria’s Farm Country Kitchen

September 25  Review of Eat, Drink, Vote in the Chicago Tribune

September 17 WGBH Boston on Eat, Drink, Vote (it comes after the gun control discussion)

September 17 Nathanael Johnson in Grist on Eat, Drink, Vote

September 13 GoGreen radio interview about Eat, Drink, Vote

September 5  Interview with Jocelyn Zuckerman, OnEarth Magazine, on Eat, Drink, Vote

September 4  Heritage radio interview with Mitchell Davis about Eat, Drink, Vote

August 31 Review in the San Francisco Chronicle

August 14 Interview with Kerry Trueman on Amazon.com

April 25 Five stars from MtBike40 (Spokane WA).