Corporations go to a lot of trouble to neutralize potential critics. Recent examples: two co-optations (McDonald’s alliance with Weight Watchers and PepsiCo’s with the Yale School of Medicine) and one aggression (Disney’s forced expulsion of the Center for Commercial-Free Childhood from Harvard).
Co-optation is the winning over or neutralization of opponents by bringing them into the fold. It works well.
Let’s start with the new partnership between Weight Watchers and McDonald’s. OK. This is happening in New Zealand, not here, but it is still a good example. McDonald’s New Zealand makes three meals that meet criteria for 6 Weight Watchers’ points. Will Weight Watchers New Zealand suggest that its members cut down on fast food? Not likely.
Next, Yale. Yale Medical School proudly announces that PepsiCo has agreed to fund a new fellowship. This fellowship, which creates a new position in the MD-PhD program, is for doctoral work in nutrition science.
Dr. Robert Alpern, dean and the Ensign Professor at Yale School of Medicine, says of this gift:
PepsiCo’s commitment to improving health through proper nutrition is of great importance to the well-being of people in this country and throughout the world. We are delighted that they are expanding their research in this area and that they have chosen Yale as a partner for this endeavor.
You can’t satirize something like this, but why am I guessing that recipients of this fellowship are unlikely to study the effects of food marketing on obesity or the effects of fructose on metabolism or to advise their overweight patients to cut down on soft drinks? (Thanks to Michele Simon who commented on it on her newly restored blog, Sunday, March 7).
And then there is yesterday’s ugly story in the New York Timesabout Disney’s retaliation against the Center for Commercial-Free Childhood which had successfully gotten the company to back off on its advertising for Baby Einstein videos. By all reports, Disney pressured the Harvard unit that housed the Center to evict the Center under truly shameful circumstances.
The moral: if you want to do something to prevent childhood and adult obesity, you are working against the economic interests of corporations that profit from kids eating too much food or watching too much television. And you must take great care to hold on to your independence.
I got a comment this morning from Eric who asks whether I had seen the article in yesterday’s New York Times about Florida’s bailout of Big Sugar in the Everglades. I could hardly miss it. The story starts on the front page and continues over two full inside pages.
Titled “Deal to save Everglades may help sugar firm,” the article explains how Florida politicians engineered a taxpayer-supported buyout of United States Sugar for nearly $2 billion in 2008, ostensibly to restore a waterway through the Everglades. Now, it seems, the restoration projects have stopped for lack of money and U.S. Sugar gets to keep using the land.
U.S. Sugar is or was the largest sugar producer in Florida. Founded by Charles Stewart Mott in 1931, it owned mills and a railroad as well as land.
Sugar policy, as I explained in a post last September, is special. Alone among commodities, it is supported by an arcane system of quotas and tariffs designed to ensure that domestic sugar producers get prices for their crops that are higher than values on the world market. The result? Taxpayers pay more for sugar than they should.
I suppose I could argue that higher prices for sugar are a good thing. High prices discourage consumption. Fortunately or unfortunately (depending on how you look at it), sugar prices are not high enough to do that.
So chalk this one up to politics in action, replete with lobbyists, lawyers, and corporate heads with cozy ties to government officials. As is all too often the case, the corporation came out ahead. Whether the Everglades will ever benefit remains to be seen.
What is likely to be the effect of yesterday’s Supreme Court decision on food politics? Nothing good.
The decision to overturn limits on corporate campaign contributions will affect every aspect of society, food included. I have long argued that campaign contributions are one of two major sources of corruption in government (the other is the way Wall Street requires corporations to report growth every 90 days).
If we want our congressional representatives to make decisions in the public interest, their election campaigns must be publicly funded. When corporations fund campaigns, representatives make decisions in the corporate interest. It’s that simple.
Those of us who care about creating a good, clean, fair, and sustainable food system will have to work harder now. But I can’t think of any more important work to do to protect our democratic institutions.
The Federal Trade Commission is the third agency dealing with food policies, this time advertising. As I’m fond of saying, the FTC is not exactly a consumer protection agency. Its main purpose is to make sure that businesses stay competitive. In 1978, under the leadership of Michael Pertschuk, the FTC made a valiant attempt to regulate food marketing to children. That disaster, which I have discussed in previous posts, kept the FTC from doing anything about marketing to kids – until recently.
On December 15, it is holding a forum on food marketing to children in Washington, DC. Here’s the agenda and information about registration. They will also do a webcast linked to that site.
But that’s not all the FTC is doing. It had so much fun trying to get information from food companies about their marketing-to-kids practices that it is trying the same thing with quick service and fast food restaurants. The FTC says it is seeking “Information from those companies concerning, among other things, their marketing activities and expenditures targeted to children and adolescents and nutritional information about the companies’ food and beverage products marketed to children and adolescents.” This sounds easy, if a bit confusing, but my guess is that the FTC will have to pull teeth to get it.
In the meantime, a few comments have already been filed in response to the notice. The ones from industry are predictable: too expensive! Too difficult! My guess is that they have this information readily available but are embarrassed to reveal it. Why? It undoubtedly will show that the companies spend the most money on the junkiest (and most profitable) products.
Michael Pertschuk, by the way, is still going strong. In June, he wrote an article on the FTC for The Nation. His article has much to say about the way the FTC is operating these days and is well worth a look. As he explains, the FTC was
created in 1914 during the Progressive Era, [and] was endowed with a potent authority for promoting competition and consumer protection that it has never fully used. This includes investigative authority over virtually all businesses, backed by subpoena power and the capacity to demand reports of data that corporations would rather withhold from public view…For the first time in decades, the Senate and House authorizing and oversight committees and the judiciary committees are pressing the agency to act more aggressively on the consumer-protection and competition fronts and are prepared, as needed, to strengthen its enforcement powers….But Congress needs to take action to unleash the FTC’s full potential. First, it remains a small agency with broad and complex responsibilities and cumbersome procedural burdens, especially in rule-making. Here, the FTC’s champions in Congress can make certain that Congress supplies more resources and streamlines the FTC’s authority. The agency also has a chronic problem of setting priorities: wherever it turns, there are corporate malefactors, large and small, deserving of prosecution.
But read the whole thing and see whether you think his optimism is justified. Better yet, go to the workshop on the 15th!
This page is somewhat disorganized in that I now put occasional print, audio, and video interviews, which used to be separated, together by year. The section at the very end is called Controversies; it is where I post letters from critics. Scroll down to find whatever you are looking for. Media interviews and reviews for specific books are on the pages for that book. For old podcasts and videos of presentations, look under Appearances and scroll down for Past Appearances; in recent years, I’ve been putting them in the chronological list here.
Interviews, media appearances, and lectures (the ones for which I have links)
Jan 17 Podcast interview with Kathlyn Carney, Connecting the Dots. Lisen on Spotify or Apple Podcast
Jan 16 LA Times guide to Japanese subscription snack boxes (Video Part I). Part II is Jan 23 (same clip?)
Jan 14 The Franklin Institute’s Ben Franklin Birthday celebration. My talk comes first. Others are from Eric Oberhalter and honoree Wendell Berry. Use passcode $H81iALu
Jan 15 Two short answers to questions at FAO’s Regional Office in Santiago, Chile. Video 1: on what governments can do about childhood obesity. Video 2: on food choices in an unhealthy food environment.
July 5 Goldberg R. Food Citizenship: Food System Advocates in an Era of Distrust. Oxford University Press. Chapter 1. Health and Nutrition: Interview with Marion Nestle:1-13. Video online
July Carter J. Interview with Marion Nestle. In: Food for Thought: Feeding the People, Protecting the Planet. Aspenia [Aspen Institute Italia] 2015;67:101-105.
July Carter J. Intervista a Marion Nestle. Come cambiano le politiche alimentary. In: Fame Zero: Rinascimento agricolo. Aspenia [Revista di Aspen Institute Italia] 2015;69:198-202.
January 10 Video interview on Star Talk, co-hosts Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Eugene Mirman, with Anthony Bourdain, about the science of cooking (sort of).
May 21 Print interview with Revital Federbush for an Israeli women’s magazine, mostly about dairy foods I’m told (it’s in Hebrew, which I cannot read, alas).
November 19 Interview with Al Jazeera for a Fault Line program on “Fast food, fat profits: obesity in America (my 10 seconds starts at about minute 15).
September 16 Speech at Columbia University conference on Global Food Systems: Their Impact on Nutrition and Health for All on panel on Advanced Technologies, Food Safety and the Role of Local and Organic Food Production (video)
November 12 Panel discussion on the farm bill, Wagner School of Public Service, Puck Building (Lafayette at Houston), 2nd floor. Here is Wild Green Yonder’s take on it.
February 6, 2008 Biologique Foods radio, two podcast interviews with TJ Harrington in Bloomington, MN, one on food politics and the other on what’s in your food.
Interview with Laura Flinders (and Arun Gupta and Peter Hoffman), Grit TV. It’s on how to eat well without going broke, and starts with a Monty Python clip on Spam 11/26/08
September 5, 2007 Scientific American Podcast with Steve Mirsky. Because I am a Paulette Goddard professor at NYU, he sends along an article he wrote about Einstein’s experience with the gorgeous movie star.
NPR Science Friday, panel on the farm bill with Michael Pollan and Sandor Ellix Katz 8/10/07
Are you responsible for your own weight? Balko R. Pro: Absolutely. Government has no business interfering with what you eat. Brownell K, Nestle M. Con: Not if Blaming the Victim Is Just an Excuse to Let Industry off the Hook. Time June 7, 2004:113.
Bottled water is the target of environmental campaigns in the U.K as well as the U.S. My namesake, the Nestlé Corporation, appears to be under particular attack. Acording to the British government, tap water “requires 300 times less energy than bottled water and does not create bottled packaging waste.” I wonder how the company plans to rebut that argument.
The conference had a laser-like focus on ending hunger and hunger inequities. Although there was much talk of diet-related diseases, it was not at all about preventing obesity and its chronic disease consequences in the general population. Instead, its aim was to make sure that poor people, especially those of color, have access to healthy, culturally appropriate diets at a price they can afford.
Common themes
Bipartisan: Ending hunger has to be a united effort (Republicans were barely represented, but not for lack of trying)
Diet-related disease: none of us ever expected to hear that phrase from high elected officials, let alone POTUS
Lived experience: Many of the panels included people who had grown up on foods stamps, and President Biden was introduced by Jimmieaka Mills of Houston, TX (her name was not listed in the program; I found it on Twitter) who spoke eloquently of how much food assistance meant to her life.
Food at the center: it must stop being an afterthought.
Food as Medicine: This refers to the health care system’s use of food prescriptions or distributions. Alhough his idea is sometimes perceived as paternalistic—food should really be about pleasure and culture (see ConscienHealth)—it plays well politically.
Impressions
Almost everything related to the conference is on the website. My reactions.
How it felt: It was a joy to see old friends and colleagues who care deeply about food and preventing hunger. We hadn’t seen each other since before the pandemic. Hugs all around.
The tone: This was a packed auditorium with a standing room audience, happy to be there, appreciative, and enthusiastic.
The love: Almost everyone thanked Congressman Jim McGovern who has tried to get this conference held for years. He got—and deserved—standing ovations.
The speeches
The President: Biden mostly reiterated the main points of the National Strategy, but insisted on the value of the Child Tax Credit (see my previous post on this). This got a standing ovation (along with a couple of others). Ending food insecurity, he said, is a way to treat each other with decency.
Jim McGovern: When he worked with George McGovern (no relation, a Democrat) and Republican Bob Dole on food issues, ending hunger was a bipartisan goal. Now, 35 million Americans needi food assistance; hunger should be illegal.
Cory Booker: Americans are in the midst of a storm of diet-related disease. Congress will hold hearings on Food as Medicine. We need to put the F back in FDA (ovation).
The plenary panel
Debbie Stabenow, who heads the Senate Ag Committee; “We will not cut SNAP.”
Rosa de Lauro, who heads the House appropriations committee: “I like holding the gavel. We will fund what we need to.”
Eric Adams, mayor of New York City: “We are making healthy eating the default.”
The major speech
José Andrés: This was the major political speech of the conference: the problem, the moral imperative, and the policies needed (ovation). My favorite line: “We must stop giving breadcrumbs and start building bakeries.”
My assessment
The conference put hunger on the agenda of Susan Rice, who heads Biden’s Domestic Policy Council (and who stayed throughout the entire meeting), and on that of the President himself.
It gave high visibility to the issue.
It highlighted the fabulous work of individuals and organizations who are working to help bring people out of poverty.
It called for—and got—commitments from organizations and corporations to take real action to address food insecurity and its consequences.
It generated excitement and hope among people working on these issues.
Will it lead to real change? Will it improve the current situation? Will it lead to reduced hunger?
Not without public pressure, I’m guessing.
A note on the organizational chaos: last-minute invitations (mine arrived Sunday night after 9:00 p.m. and Eric Adams’ staff, who attended, never did get theirs; no advance schedule until a couple of days before, when it was still quite vague; a 6:00 a.m. announcement to be there at 7:30 to register because security lines would be long; badge printers that didn’t work; no printed program; no clear listing of speakers and times; auditorium too small for audience (most were in overflow room); a mystery as to who was in charge—a committee of the Domestic Policy Council, apparently. Still, it all worked!
A note on the meals and swag: The James Beard Foundation arranged the lunch—vegan, bison, or chicken. These were packed in heavy plastic lunch trays, later washed and packed along with cutlery into Oxo bags given to participants. The only real souvenir is the name badge, to be treasured.
A note on Biden’s blooper: He called out Jackie Walorsky— “Where’s Jackie?” — which got gasps from people who knew she had died in a traffic accident in August. Later, a video tribute to her brought people to tears.
Spur transition to regenerative practices across land that is equivalent to its entire agricultural footprint, approximately seven million acres.
Reduce reliance on chemical inputs (but does not rule out their use).
Secure the future of farming communities and farmer incomes.
Support farmers by helping them with high fuel and fertilizer costs.
Support rural communities – and female farmers in particular.
Transition towards more than 70% of the company’s global electricity needs in direct operations are met by renewables.
Reach net zero emissions by 2040.
Improved operational water-use efficiency by 18% in high water-risk areas.
Use 100% rPET by the end of this year, contributing to 87% of PepsiCo-owned drinks portfolio in the European Union being made using 100% recycled or renewable plastic.
Eliminate virgin fossil-based plastic in all crisp and chip bags..
And then there are Pepsi’s nutrition objectives [recall: Pepsi makes snack brands like Walkers and Dorito alongside its line-up of fizzy drinks].
Use more chickpeas, plant-based proteins and wholegrains.
Expand nuts and seeds category.
In Europe, cut added sugars in its soft drinks by 50% .
Improve the nutritional quality of snack products.
My questions:
Is this real or greenwashing and healthwashing?
Who is holding Pepsi accountable for achieving these objectives?
The larger question is whether Pepsi’s portfolio of snack foods and sugary drinks can ever be sustainable?
As part of PepsiCo’s commitment to being “the good company,” the corporation wants to play a leading role in public-health issues, and particularly in the battle against obesity. Some people think this is ludicrous. Marion Nestle, the author of “Food Politics” and a professor of food studies at N.Y.U., told me, “The best thing Pepsi could do for worldwide obesity would be to go out of business.”
I probably wouldn’t use the word ludicrous (and I’m not sure I did then), but the effort was certainly unrealistic.
Like all publicly traded corporations, PepsiCo is heavily constrained by shareholder profit objectives.
A decade ago, its shareholders objected to a focus on public health when sales of Pepsi declined.
This is a talk with Laura Shapiro on the new book, Slow Cooked: An Unexpected Life in Food Politics. It will be held at the Greene Space, 44 Charlton, 7:00-8:15.
