Anna Lappé is a sustainable food advocate and a bestselling author of three books, including Diet for a Hot Planet, and a contributing author to fifteen more. An internationally recognized expert on food systems, Anna is the co-founder of the Small Planet Institute and Fund and currently directs Real Food Media. Anna also works with philanthropists nationwide to help fund the grassroots change we need to foster health, justice and sustainability across the food chain.

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How often do you really stop to think about chicken?

In this month’s Real Food Reads feature, award-winning journalist and critically-acclaimed author (Superbug; Beating Back the Devil) Maryn McKenna brings us the eye-opening story of this frequently overlooked food. In Big Chicken: The Incredible Story of How Antibiotics Created Modern Agriculture and Changed the Way the World Eats, McKenna chronicles how the use of antibiotics in industrial farming turned chicken into an industrial commodity—and a threat to public health—as she shows us the way to safer, healthier eating for ourselves and our children.

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In her latest column for The Washington Post, “The surprising truth about the ‘food movement‘,” Tamar Haspel argues that the number of people who really care about where their food comes from, how it is grown and its impact on our health and the environment is surprisingly small.

We think she’s wrong. As two people who talk to consumers, farmers and retailers every day about food buying choices, we can tell you that the level of awareness and concern for the food we are eating is higher than it has ever been — and shows in changing attitudes and in changing habits, too.

But don’t take our word for it. Listen to food industry analysts like Scott Mushkin, who said last year: “To me, the biggest change is what’s going on with eating trends in the U.S. It’s stunning how much food patterns have changed.” His firm’s research found that the No. 1 one message of women surveyed was that they want to buy more fresh fruits and vegetables.

Or look at indicators from the marketplace: Flagging profits at Walmart are a sign of the public’s changing attitudes toward food. The company was seen as a mortal threat to traditional food retailers when it entered the market, more than 15 years ago. Today, Walmart finds itself competing poorly with smaller stores offering fresh, local produce and even with other big-box stores, such as Costco, now the nation’s largest seller of organic food.

Meanwhile, sales of regular soda in the United States have declined a jaw-dropping 25 percent in the past two decades. This, despite Coca-Cola’s spending $3.5 billion on advertising in 2014 alone and dispensing millions in charitable donations to woo the public and deflect concern about its most profitable — and least healthful — products.

Those consumption trends are a reflection that Americans increasingly care about where their food comes from, how it is grown and the health and environmental implications of what they feed their families. Let’s be clear: These changes didn’t just happen. The shifts we are talking about are occurring as a result of the concerted work of dedicated advocates, activists and community-based organizations that are changing the marketplace and the food system. They are doing it not just through purchasing decisions but also by holding their elected officials accountable and demanding better food policy at local, state and national levels — all against the backdrop of billions in marketing by the processed-food and fast-food industries.

I don’t know about you, but that sounds like a food movement to us.

Yes, conventionally grown food still makes up the vast majority of what Americans buy on a daily basis. But that doesn’t reflect a lack of demand for organic food; it reflects a lack of supply. We’ve heard personally from the people who run large food companies that one of their biggest challenges is meeting the demand for organic fruits, vegetables, dairy and meat. And this brings up a very important point: The staggering gap between supply and demand reflects the regulations, policies, infrastructure — and even financial markets — that greatly favor conventional agriculture through billions of dollars’ worth of subsidies, generous insurance coverage, extensive research, technical help and even marketing assistance that make it difficult for farmers to transition to organic. The reality is the demand for organic is growing by leaps and bounds, limited only by the ability for supply to match it.

The demand for fresh, local and organic is seen clearly in the popularity of the nation’s farmers markets. Haspel argues that this popularity is waning, citing figures of plateauing sales. But other evidence points to a different story. Data from the USDA’s farmers market manager survey conducted last year found a bump in business: Among the more than 8,400 markets nationwide, 61 percent of those surveyed reported increased traffic; more than half reported increases in year-on-year sales. Because the USDA survey she looked at is done only once every five years, Haspel’s data was from 2007 to 2012, which, as you might remember, coincided with the country’s crippling recession, when the number of Americans struggling with hunger shot up by 12.8 million and consumers stopped spending. Sales of lots of things — homes, cars, refrigerators, even food — felt the effects of the economic downturn.

The change in the kind of food we buy isn’t happening just at grocery stores and farmers markets. Between 2006 and 2012, for example, there was a 430 percent increase in farm-to-school programs, reaching more than 4,000 school districts across the country with locally sourced food in school meals. The number of regional food hubs that connect farmers with wholesale, retail, institutional and individual buyers also grew by almost 300 percent during that time. That kind of growth doesn’t just happen. It takes organized, committed parents, teachers, food-service directors and administrators. It takes city planners, business, farmers, restaurateurs and retailers coming together.

These changing attitudes toward food are reflected in public opinion. A poll conducted last fall by bipartisan team Lake Research Partners and Bellwether Strategies for the Plate of the Union campaign found that voters are overwhelmingly concerned that not all Americans have access to healthful, affordable food and want to see policymakers take bold action to remedy it.

The food movement we are part of is a movement made up of farmers and farmworkers, of teachers and public health officials, of policymakers and chefs, and of everyday Americans from all walks of life. Despite what opinion writers such as Haspel say, they care about labeling genetically modified organisms (GMOs), farmworker rights and the effects of chemicals used to grow their food.

Big change never comes easily, and it never happens quickly. Along the way there will always be those who doubt it’s happening at all. But we can see it happening across the country — in grocery stores, in school cafeterias, on family farms. And even in the halls of Congress.

Chellie Pingree is an organic farmer and a member of the House of Representatives (D) from Maine. Anna Lappé is a national bestselling author, co-founder of the Small Planet Institute and director of Real Food Media.

Originally published in The Washington Post

Photo by Melina Mara/The Washington Post

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American consumers are waking up to the fact that a lot remains hidden about what is in their food and how it is produced. As a result, they are increasingly demanding greater access to information about added sugar, potential allergens, irradiation, use of antibiotics and more. The food industry has fought all these demands. But perhaps no call for transparency has been more contentious than the demand for mandatory labeling of genetically engineered (GE) food.

For the past several years, voters and legislators in over 30 states have promoted mandatory GE food labeling policies, with three states — Vermont, Connecticut and Maine — passing laws. Vermont’s law, the first of its kind, is set to go into effect in July 2016, having survived a court challenge by the food industry. In response to these calls for greater transparency in the food supply chain, the food industry is working to block Vermont’s law in the halls of Congress, most recently by attaching a rider to the must-pass federal spending bill that would bar states from labeling GE foods.

This staunch antagonism toward transparency has led many consumers to question the motivations of the nation’s largest food companies. In a battle the industry appears to be losing, the Grocery Manufacturers Association, the largest food industry trade group, announced a plan to respond to consumer demand for transparency: Smart Labels. The concept, as the industry spins it, is a high-tech way to satisfy consumers. Using on-label quick response (QR) codes, similar to bar codes, consumers will be able to access important ingredient information with a scan of their smartphone.

While the Smart Label plan may seem like progress, it is really just the latest marketing ploy to defuse consumer demand for real transparency.

There are several inherent problems with the QR code plan. First and foremost, by relegating important information such as GE content to cyberspace, Smart Labels will keep key information off the package — and out of sight. This is of particular importance when you consider that fewer than two-thirds of consumers have smartphones, the technology Smart Labels depend on, with access disproportionately lacking in low-income, elderly and rural populations — exactly the populations most vulnerable to diseases linked to poor nutrition.

But it’s not just who can access this information; it’s also a question of what information consumers will be able to access. In the QR code plan, companies remain in control, deciding exactly what information to reveal and how it will be displayed. Early examples of the Smart Label websites bury content about GE on hard-to-find pages. While the policies consumers have been fighting for across the country would require GE labeling, the Smart Label plan asks only for voluntary disclosures. In addition, there are many unanswered questions about how companies will use the consumer information they could gather with these technologies, leading to serious concerns about consumer privacy. How the companies will track the information they could gather has not been disclosed. As with other apps, it may link to users’ profiles, gather their personal information and use data about what they are scanning for marketing purposes without customer knowledge or consent.

While presented as an olive branch in the wars for transparency, Smart Labels obscure the truth behind the food choices made by busy shoppers. Knowing what’s in your food shouldn’t require sleuthing around on your high-tech device; it should be clearly visible on food packages.

It’s not just consumer advocates who believe in the power of the label: A recent poll by the Mellman Group found that nearly 90 percent of those surveyed preferred on-package labels to bar-code-based ingredient information; only 16 percent of them had used a QR code to gather information in a grocery store. This likely isn’t news to food companies; it is exactly what they are banking on. While the companies behind Smart Labels are claiming a good faith effort to give consumers information, the reality is that few consumers will use this technology. The majority will remain in the dark about how their food is produced.

We’ll find out this week if the food industry is able to sneak its anti-labeling rider into the federal spending bill. If not now, the fight is sure to continue in the New Year. Numerous members of Congress, including Sen. Patrick Leahy and Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, Sen. Jeff Merkley of Oregon, Sen. Barbara Boxer of California and Sen. Jon Tester of Montana, all Democrats, have already voiced opposition to the rider; more are expected to do the same. But even if the rider is defeated in the short term, it’s clear the industry will keep on fighting against true transparency.

The Grocery Manufacturers Association has planned an elaborate rollout of its Smart Labels initiative. Consumers and consumer advocates shouldn’t get suckered. Smart Labels may be smart marketing, but it’s not the solution we need to achieve transparency about genetically engineered ingredients — or other key information we want to know about what we eat.

Originally published in Al Jazeera America

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