If you made National Geographic collages of the basic four food groups — meat, dairy, grains and fruits and vegetables — in elementary school as I did, you have the federal government’s dietary guidelines to thank. Every five years, the government reviews these recommendations and releases new advice to eaters. The implications are huge: The guidelines direct billions of dollars in government food and nutrition programs, from school food to funding for the Women, Infants and Children program. What’s more, they inform how millions of Americans decide what is healthy for themselves and their families — influencing billions of dollars in food purchases.

Last year the government’s nonpartisan Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee made some unprecedented recommendations. Among other things, it suggested it was time to break from past guidelines and make clear that Americans should reduce consumption of red and processed meats and added sugars, especially sugar-sweetened beverages.

The committee also argued that the guidelines should take sustainability into account. Healthy eating, after all, means ensuring that we can feed ourselves and our children healthy food for decades to come. To that end, the committee wrote that “a diet higher in plant-based foods, such as vegetables, fruits, whole grains, legumes, nuts and seeds, and lower in calories and animal-based foods is more health promoting and is associated with less environmental impact than is the current U.S. diet.”

Unfortunately, the final guidelines, released last week, backpedaled on many of these common-sense recommendations. The reason is simple: The food industry — especially meat and beverage companies and trade groups — lobbied heavily against the committee’s recommendations. According to Bloomberg, four-fifths of the 60 groups that lobbied on the guidelines represented food corporations, industry groups or farmers. While Barack Obama’s administration presented the final guidelines as the best distillation of nutrition science, the reality is that they have been distorted by industry influence.

For instance, while the recommendation to reduce added sugars stuck, the emphasis on soda — one of the main sources of such sugars — was downplayed. Dr. Lawrence Gostin, the director of the World Health Organization (WHO) Collaborating Center on Public Health Law, said on Democracy Now that the biggest beverage companies “put a lot of pressure” on government officials to change the language.

The recommendation to reduce meat consumption was also distorted. The final guidelines suggested limiting such consumption only for teenage boys and men, and even this recommendation was buried in the final report. Noticeably absent from the guidelines was a strong recommendation for reducing red and processed meats, even though the science is clear about their links to serious illness.

As my colleague Kari Hamerschlag from Friends of the Earth said in a statement, “Despite clear evidence that high red meat consumption is linked to cancer and threatens future food security because of its huge resource demands, the 2015 guidelines failed to make a specific portion size recommendation for red meat,” as in the 2010 version. While the WHO recommends significantly limiting intake of processed meats because of the associated increased cancer risk, the guidelines are fuzzy on this message. In fact, buried in the guidelines is the suggestion that eating processed meat is fine as long as it is in quantities that fall below fat and salt limits. Nowhere is there a reference to the WHO’s findings linking processed meat consumption and certain cancers.

As for the sustainability language, that was taken off the table months ago when Department of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack declared it beyond the scope of the dietary guidelines. (Though the final recommendations include physical activity — decidedly not a dietary recommendation). Dr. David Katz, the director of Yale University’s Prevention Research Center, expressed his disappointment, saying in a statement, “If we ignore sustainability, it’s as if we are saying we don’t care whether what is good to eat and drink is still here as a choice for our children and grandchildren. What a deplorable, unconscionable position that is to take.”

The final language frustrated many observers. Groups such as My Plate, My Planet (which brought together environmental and health organizations and individuals in defense of the advisory committee’s recommendations), Friends of the Earth and the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future helped mobilize ordinary Americans, public health officials and doctors to express their support during the public comment period. An unprecedented 150,000 petitions and 29,000 public comments were submitted. In addition, more than 700 health professionals submitted a letter in support of the committee’s report and a resolution from the U.S. Conference of Mayors did so as well.

Despite this public expression of support, the U.S. food industry lobbied heavily to shape the finalized guidelines. The meat industry, for one, was “pleased with the fare served up in the [guidelines].”

This isn’t just industry playing politics with our plate; it’s industry being complicit in the loss of life and limb of millions of Americans. About half of Americans have one or more preventable chronic diseases relating to poor diet or physical inactivity, including hypertension, diabetes and diet-related cancers, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Today, thanks in large part to added sugars, especially in soda, 29 million Americans suffer from diabetes; one-third of African-Americans are predicted to be afflicted by the condition in their lifetime. In 2010, 73,000 Americans had a lower limb amputated as a result of diabetes.

From 1956 until 1992, the USDA dietary guidelines recommended that we eat from those basic four food groups. What those recommendations obfuscated was that there are ample sources of protein besides meat and ample alternate sources of calcium besides dairy. Yet those food groups stuck around for more than three decades because of pressure from the dairy and meat industries, not because of sound science.

We’ve finally done away with these false classifications. Today’s recommendations talk about dietary patterns instead, even introducing a vegetarian dietary pattern as a healthy choice. We’ve also enjoyed success in pushing for recommendations to reduce added sugars. Yes, the guidelines may be a poor representation of the sound recommendations of the dietary guidelines committee, but they are a step forward.

Originally published in Al Jazeera America

The post Lobbyists Distort Our Idea of a Healthy Diet appeared first on Real Food Media.

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

The post Don’t Be Fooled by the Food Industry’s Smart Labels appeared first on Real Food Media.

by Anna Lappé 

On a drizzly April day in Washington, D.C., 60 food workers and labor organizers from across the country gathered in an office building downtown. There was an African immigrant street vendor from New York City; a black apple picker from upstate New York; a white, 20-something former bartender from Cincinnati. There were Latino farmworkers from California’s Central Valley; Walmart workers from Oakland; a food-processing worker from Brooklyn. The diversity of the workers gathered for the fifth annual summit of the Food Chain Workers Alliance (FCWA) reflected the diversity of food workers nationwide.

The “food movement” is complex and often misunderstood. Read snarky Slate articles and you might be led to believe the movement is a white, elitist phenomenon whose poster child is a Lululemon-wearing, latte-sipping Whole Foods shopper and whose de facto guru is Michael Pollan. In other words: out of touch with working Americans.

But the people on the frontlines of the struggle to make healthy, sustainable, local food accessible to all Americans defy this stereotype. At its heart, the movement includes the workers who harvest the peppers, raise the chickens, process the pork, bus the dishes, take the orders, check out the groceries, truck the wares and more.

These food workers now have a unified voice through the growing FCWA. Started in 2009 by nine organizations to unite workers across the food sector, the FCWA has since expanded to 25 member groups, representing over 300,000 workers. “What is exciting is seeing all these groups come together to fight for a shared vision,” says Diana Robinson, the FCWA’s campaign and education coordinator.

The FCWA is based on the principle that a farmworker picking apples and a clerk stocking shelves at Walmart share many of the same struggles. The 20 million workers in the U.S. food sector are disproportionately poor. Food workers use food stamps at a rate more than 50 percent higher than the average American worker, according to FCWA research, and food workers suffer food insecurity at almost twice the national rate. Workers in this sector, encompassing production, processing, distribution, retail and food service, not only face low wages, but also hardships such as a lack of paid sick days. “In our national survey of food workers,” says FCWA Co-Director Joann Lo, “we found a full four out of five workers who harvest, process, distribute, sell or cook our food don’t have paid sick days or don’t know if they do, which most likely means they don’t.”

Building up the power of these workers is what inspired the founders of FCWA. The food industry has long understood the benefits of vertical integration — the wonky term for owning enterprises up and down the supply chain. In the chicken business, for example, vertical integration means control over not just the raising of chickens, but also the production of their feed and the processing needed to get them to market.

In 2008, food worker organizers started to have a conversation about what it would look like to have vertical integration in worker power: connections between the formerly disparate elements of worker organizing across the food chain. The FCWA was born a year later.

Since then, the group has contributed to big victories, including an increase in the minimum wage for tipped workers in New York State and paid sick days for workers in New York City. “One of our biggest victories,” Lo says, “is the leadership role we played in the development and adoption of the Good Food Purchasing Policy in Los Angeles and getting Mayor [Rahm] Emanuel to endorse the policy for Chicago.” The policy in L.A. is translating into over $130 million in annual municipal and school food purchases made with workers and sustainability in mind.

At the summit in Washington D.C., the FCWA was coming together to decide on joint campaigns and policy priorities for the coming year, and to join in solidarity rallies, such as a demonstration outside a Walmart store near Union Station.

I’d come with a recording team from StoryCorps to capture one-on-one worker conversations for Voices of the Food Chain, an initiative recently launched with the FCWA.

Most of these workers were only just meeting each other at the summit, but all of them would come out of the small recording room with big smiles. “I had no idea,” Ruth Faircloth said to me, wiping away her tears, “that our struggle was the same.” Faircloth, a former farmworker from upstate New York who works with the Rural and Migrant Ministry, draped her arm around Velia Perez, a former farmworker and current food processing worker, and said, “This is my sister.”

Again and again, I would hear these workers express a sense of connection and an understanding of their shared fate. In these conversations, it was also clear that the workers were coming together not only to secure better wages and conditions for themselves, but also to promote greater sustainability, animal welfare and resilience across the food system for all of us. These workers were as passionate about fighting for humane, local, sustainable food as anyone with a dog-eared copy of “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” on their bookshelf.

As for the stereotypes of foodies? We hear they don’t care about workers like these; that they care more about the terroir of their turnips or the heritage of their turkey than the workers who harvest their vegetables or slaughter their livestock. But what I have seen on the frontlines of the food movement is a different story: The foodies I know care as deeply about protecting food workers as they do about the provenance of their vegetables or their meat. All across the country, I’ve been hearing a call for better wages and better food — from eaters and from workers. It’s getting harder and harder to write off foodies as uncaring fancy fennel lovers and food workers as only caring about their paycheck.

In this we’re-in-it-together spirit, there is real power. Uniting eaters with workers holds enormous potential to shift the food system toward what we all want to see: greater sustainability, animal welfare and better working conditions. Of course, it won’t happen overnight, but I’m thrilled to report the conversation has started.

Originally published in Al Jazeera America

The post The Faces of the New Food Revolution appeared first on Real Food Media.

It’s something of a truism to say that there are two Americas when it comes to food: the ample aisles of posh Whole Foods in wealthy neighborhoods and the corner stores brimming with Doritos and Coke in poorer communities. But there are also two nations of food when it comes to what the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and other advocates call “first food,” or breast milk. In one, women are supported to nurse — by their hospitals, workplaces and communities. In the other, it’s exceedingly hard for women to do so. But there doesn’t have to be such a divide.

The benefits of breastfeeding—and the risks of not doing so—are now well documented. According to the Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, “Breast milk is widely acknowledged as the most complete form of nutrition for infants, with a range of benefits for infants’ health, growth, immunity and development.” Breastfeeding also lowers the risk of breast cancer for mom, and provides a free source of nutritious food. As the World Health Organization states: “Exclusive breastfeeding reduces infant mortality due to common childhood illnesses such as diarrhea or pneumonia, and helps for a quicker recovery during illness.”

The WHO recommends exclusive breastfeeding until 6 months followed by continued breastfeeding “along with appropriate complementary foods up to two years of age or beyond.” That’s the ideal. But in the United States, that’s not the reality for most babies. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data show that last year, only 43 percent of infants were exclusively breastfed at three months, and just 22 percent exclusively through 6 months. The rates vary along race and class lines: Though the gap between black and white breastfeeding initiation rates has narrowed, it was still 16 percentage points in 2008.

Breastfeeding advocate Kimberly Seals Allers, whose forthcoming book “The Big Let Down” analyzes the social, economic and political influences of breastfeeding culture, focuses on the phenomenon of “first food deserts” — the idea, as she explained by email, “that place matters. There are many places across the country lacking access to the resources and the culture for babies to receive their most nutritional food: breast milk.” Passing policies to regulate baby feeding companies, promoting educational campaigns and changing workplace norms would help reduce the prevalence of these “first food deserts” and narrow the gap on breastfeeding rates along race and class lines.

Improving the rates for breastfeeding is particularly hampered because we still have no federal policy for maternity leave in the United States. No one should be shocked that it’s challenging for mothers to exclusively breastfeed their babies when 1 in 4 of them return to work within two weeks of childbirth, as an In These Times report by journalist Sharon Lerner found. Plus, many women return to workplaces hostile to breastfeeding: few or no breaks allowed for pumping, for instance, and no clean, comfortable place provided to do so. (Moms I know like to trade snapshots of the most ridiculous place they’ve pumped: Bathroom floors and janitor closets top the list.)

Another important factor is the lack of essential support. The CDC reports that without hospital support, 1 in 3 mothers stop breastfeeding. I know first-hand, because I’m one of those moms who needed help — a lot of it. When my first daughter was born, I came home from the hospital with naïve confidence in my breastfeeding capabilities, confidence that quickly turned into desperation. My daughter couldn’t get her latch right; to relieve the searing pain, I tried everything from frozen cabbage leaves to soaked tea bags, but nothing helped. Combined with sleep deprivation and a bout of mastitis, those first weeks were tough. Thankfully, I didn’t have to return to work right away and could afford to pay a private lactation consultant. Even with this support, it was hard; I almost gave up. But I persevered and after a few weeks, my daughter and I got the hang of it. For the next 12 months I had an easy, free source of healthy food.

Breastfeeding advocates such as Allers have been working to make this support more common, especially in the African-American community. “Black women have consistently the lowest rates of initiation and duration,” Allers said. As project director of The First Food Friendly Community Initiative, she works to improve community support and create a national standard and accreditation for breastfeeding-friendly communities.

She has also worked with WIC offices in many states. (WIC is the government program providing supplemental food, nutrition education and more for low-income pregnant women and at-risk infants and children). “WIC is a powerful influencer,” Allers said, in part because it is the largest purchaser of formula in the country and women on WIC can get government-subsidized formula. While WIC receives funding to provide breastfeeding education, the programs vary by state. Allers’ goal is to counter the influence of infant-formula marketing by developing multi-pronged, community-partnered interventions and creating new ways of communicating about breastfeeding in communities of color.

Addressing the pernicious influence of baby-formula companies is another key to improving rates of breastfeeding. Today, many hospitals in the U.S. still send women home with bags of free formula samples, something advocates like Allers is trying to change. “These companies continue to find ways to insinuate themselves into hospital culture,” Allers said. “That’s the part that needs to be cleaned up first: We know a mother’s first job is to feed her baby and that happens at the hospital. What we want is to have true choice, not the illusion of choice.”

Support for breastfeeding looks very different in other industrialized countries. Baby feeding companies are banned from giving out free formula samples or marketing in hospitals from Norway to Mexico, a move supported by advocates like Patti Rundall, policy director at Baby Milk Action. Her organization is part of a global network in 168 countries that’s working to stop misleading marketing by the baby-feeding industry. Advocacy groups in the U.S., such as Ban the Bags, are working to change hospital policies to prohibit the formula company practice of giving new moms free samples in the hospital. As Marsha Walker of Ban the Bags explains, making sure baby feeding companies are not reaching women in hospitals is key: “Exclusive breastfeeding at hospital discharge is predictive of continued exclusive breastfeeding when the mother is discharged,” she explains.

To date, three states—Rhode Island, Massachusetts and Delaware—have eliminated commercial formula bags in all their birthing hospitals thanks to strong advocates. “Hospitals should be marketing health and nothing else,” Walker says. “Distribution of the bags by trusted hospital sources imply that the use of the brand-name formula is recommended and supported by the hospital and the nursing staff that hand them out.”

I hold out hope that if my daughters have children and choose to breastfeed, they will have an easier time of it: that for this next generation maternity policies will have changed, that all hospitals will have banned marketing infant formula and that support for breastfeeding women will be more commonplace. These changes will help foster an environment in which mothers will be supported, not thwarted, in their efforts to nurse their young.

First published in Al Jazeera America

Photo by Bradley Gordon/Flickr

The post The Fight for the First Food appeared first on Real Food Media.

What is it about corporations trying to sound hip that so often hits the wrong note? It comes off like your mother ending a text with “LOL.” It doesn’t sound cool; it sounds out of touch. That’s just what I thought perusing the website of Mixify, a new marketing campaign by the American Beverage Association (ABA).

Launched earlier this year, Mixify promotes balance in what you “eat, drink and do.” Mixify, according to the site, is “like a balance wingman.” (Who knew balance needs a wingman?) “Balance” is defined as “crossing cats with dragons”; finding it will keep you “feeling snazzier than the emoji of the dancing lady in red.” Honestly, I’m not even sure exactly what that is supposed to mean, but you get the idea. It’s all about communicating that, dear (youthful) reader, we’re hip, we’re cool, we’re one of you — and we don’t want you to be worried about drinking our beverages.

As the beverage industry trade association, the ABA spends tens of millions of dollars every year to promote its members’ interests, from fighting taxes on sugar-sweetened beverages to stopping initiatives to get soda out of schools to pushing marketing campaigns such as this one. (It spent $62.5 million in 2013 alone.) Mixify is just one tactic it is deploying to try to fix a core image problem.

As part of this massive campaign — including interactive social media accounts on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram — Mixify is hitting the road with free events for teens in more than half a dozen cities around the country this summer. So what’s the problem with a little summer fun, a little “silent disco” in D.C. or outdoor games at a football field in Philly?

The problem is that soda is not innocuous. Sugar-sweetened beverages are tied to the biggest public health epidemic of our time: rising rates of diet-related illnesses.

Public relations campaigns such as these are designed to deflect concerns from a culprit of ill health — drinking soda — by promoting balance. Lori Dorfman, the head of the Berkeley Media Studies Group, noted the parallels between this strategy and the alcohol industry’s promotion of designated drivers: “Those campaigns actually promoted drinking. Some people called them designated drinker programs because they gave people permission to drink to excess if they weren’t driving — as if drinking and driving were the only problems related to alcohol,” she said. “Many alcohol companies created their own campaigns to look like good guys, but all their slogans encouraged drinking and never suggested that a designated driver should have nothing to drink, with slogans like ‘Think when you drink’ and ‘Know when to say when.’”

The parallels between sugar-sweetened beverage marketing such as Mixify and Big Tobacco public relations are also striking, as Dorfman and others write in a recent paper in PLOS Medicine (PDF). Like the tobacco industry before it, the sugar-sweetened beverage industry is employing “elaborate, expensive, multinational corporate social responsibility campaigns,” they write. “These campaigns echo the tobacco industry’s use of [such campaigns] as a means to focus responsibility on consumers rather than on the corporation, bolster the companies’ and their products’ popularity and to prevent regulation.”

Mixify is troubling, too, in how the ABA uses it to tap young people to do the marketing for them. At each public event, Mixify engineers photo opportunities with Instagram and YouTube microcelebrities, turning “unsuspecting minors into unpaid conscripts,” said Jeff Cronin, the communications director at the Center for Science in the Public Interest. At the Washington, D.C., Mixify event Cronin attended — as at, one presumes, all of them — every participant was consenting, whether they realized it or not, to be part of this marketing. A crowd notice posted at the perimeter read, “By entering this area, you irrevocably consent to … recordings of you … for worldwide exploitation, in perpetuity in any and all media, whether now known or hereafter devised, for any purpose whatsoever.” Cronin said, “These kids are unwittingly giving the American Beverage Association the right to use their images and recordings, turning them into an army of drones spreading the industry’s PR garbage on social media.”

This is particularly worrying because soda companies market heavily to youth of color, through celebrity endorsements, websites, advertisements and more — both alarming and irresponsible given that communities of color, especially black and Latino youths, are being disproportionately affected by diet-related illnesses. “African-Americans are 50 percent more likely to be obese and over twice as likely to die from diabetes as whites,” write the authors of “Selfish Giving,” a 2013 report from the Center for Science in the Public Interest (PDF), about the soda industry’s use of philanthropy to serve its business interests.

But it’s not surprising. This demographic is a growth sector. The authors of “Selfish Giving” quote Coca-Cola’s chief marketing officer, Bea Perez, who said, “We know that 86 percent of the growth through 2020 for Coca-Cola’s youth-target market will come from multicultural consumers, especially Hispanic, and focusing on this segment is critical to the company’s future growth.” It’s no wonder, then, that according to the Rudd Center, in 2013 black children and teens saw more than twice as many ads on television for sugary drinks and energy drinks than their white peers. No matter the medium, the imbalance remains. The Rudd Center also found that in the U.S., black youths were 34 percent more likely to visit the website of a sugary or energy drink brand than the national youth average.

Mixify’s timing is curious. In July we learned that deaths in Mexico from diabetes, cancer and heart disease tied to sugary drink consumption far outnumber deaths from violent crime in that country, according to research from Tufts University. In the wake of the landslide win for a soda tax in Berkeley, California, there are murmurings of other U.S. cities exploring taxes on sugar-sweetened beverages. And the consumption of soda is way down. New data show a major reduction in Americans’ soda consumption. In 1998 the average American purchased 40 gallons of soda a year, according to data analyzed by the Center for Science in the Public Interest. By 2014 that figure dropped to 30 gallons. (Keep in mind that that’s still about 100 cups of sugar from soda per year.)

“The industry’s under siege,” said Cronin. “Consumers are fleeing from full-calorie carbonated soda, and public health officials are increasingly looking to drive consumption down further with taxes and other policies.”

According to the “deets” (yes, it reads “deets”) on the Mixify website, the tour heads next to Dallas, where kids can also be expected to be enlisted in this marketing campaign for a dying industry, with well-paid PR execs trying to hook the next generation on the sweet stuff.

Originally published in Al Jazeera America

The post The Soda Industry’s Creepy Youth Campaign appeared first on Real Food Media.

At the turn of the last century, the father of public relations, Edward Bernays, launched the Celiac Project, whose medical professionals recommended bananas to benefit celiac disease sufferers. Those pitched on the sweet fruit’s miraculous properties didn’t know the project was actually created for the United Fruit Co., the largest trader of bananas in the world.

The creation of front groups — independent-sounding but industry-backed organizations — as a public relations strategy dates at least as far back as Bernays’ day. But a new report by Kari Hamerschlag, a senior program manager at the environmental nonprofit Friends of the Earth; Stacy Malkan, a co-founder of the food industry watchdog US Right to Know; and me shows that such tactics are continuing with ever more scope and scale today.

The report, released today, exposes the growth of food-industry-sponsored front groups and other covert communication tactics in the past few years. While food industry spin is not new, we’re seeing an unprecedented level of spending and deployment of an ever wider array of PR tactics. We argue this rise of industrial food spin is a direct response to mounting public concerns about industrial agriculture as well as a growing interest in sustainable food and groundswell for organic products.

Increasingly, the American public is raising questions about toxic chemicals used in farming, routine antibiotics used in livestock production and genetic engineering in agriculture. The booming organic food business is one sign: Sales of organic food and products in the United States are projected to jump from $35 billion in 2013 to $170 billion in 2025 — a direct threat to the profits of the processed food, animal agriculture and chemical industries engaging in such spin. According to a recent Fortune article, since 2009 the 25 biggest food and beverage companies — selling nonorganic processed and junk food — lost an equivalent of $18 billion in market share. “I would think of them like melting icebergs,” the article quotes Credit Suisse analyst Robert Moskow as saying. “Every year they become a little less relevant.”

In the face of this threat, we argue that the industrial food sector — from the biotech behemoths to the animal agriculture industry — is working overtime to defuse these concerns with well-funded communication efforts and a rash of new front groups. From 2009 to 2013, just 14 of these front groups spent $126 million to shape the story of food while presenting the veneer of independence. There’s the Alliance to Feed the Future, which produces Common Core–vetted curricula on healthy food for public schools. Its members include the Frozen Pizza Institute and the Calorie Control Council, which promotes the benefits of Olestra and saccharin, among other artificial sweeteners and fats. You don’t need to be an expert in food security to be skeptical to take advice about feeding the world from the trade council for fake sugar and fat.

We detail groups such as the U.S. Farmers and Rancher’s Alliance (USFRA) — whose goal, it says, is “to enhance U.S. consumer trust in modern food production to ensure the abundance of affordable, safe food” and whose lead partners include animal pharmaceutical company Elanco, biotech giant Monsanto and chemical companies DuPont, Dow and Syngenta. Among the USFRA’s communication priorities since its launch in 2011 has been to combat growing public concern about the routine use of antibiotics in animal agriculture. Its Antibiotics Working Group has developed educational materials, hosted public conversations and trained media representatives to downplay the risks of antibiotics. But the group’s messages contradict well-documented evidence of the widespread misuse of routine antibiotics. Today 70 percent of medically important antibiotics sold in the United States are used not in humans, according to the Food and Drug Administration, but in livestock animal production to promote growth or prevent disease, leading to the threat of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

But it’s not just front groups. We describe a plethora of other communication tactics, many of them so under-the-radar that often people don’t realize the stories are being crafted behind the scenes. We describe how the industrial food sector targets female audiences and co-opts female bloggers, how industry groups pay for advertisements to look like editorial content and how the industry infiltrates social media. In one example, the Biotechnology Industry Organization hired PR firm Ketchum to develop GMOAnswers.com, populated with industry-approved answers about genetically modified organisms. The firm even won a prestigious advertising award for this campaign, particularly for its success in tracking negative tweets about GMOs and engaging users directly, urging them to visit the website.

The trade groups for the industrial food sector also reach into their deep pockets to shape how the media report on our food system. In our analysis, we found that just four major trade associations for the chemical, biotech and animal agriculture sectors had expenses totaling half a billion dollars from 2009 to 2013, including communications and marketing campaigns.

These are just some of the tactics we describe. While it is far from a comprehensive documentation of every front group or tactic, we hope the report inspires everyday Americans, public officials and journalists to be critical consumers of the stories we hear about food and farming. Particularly at a time when mainstream media outlets are hemorrhaging, cutting back on the resources available for the investigative pieces essential to accurate reporting on and exposing industry malfeasance, it’s increasingly important that we know where our food information comes from and who is behind it. There’s new indication of the importance of this every day. Consider how the food industry is already busy pushing back in the media against the sound recommendations from the scientific advisory committee for the government’s Dietary Guidelines for Americans, set to be finalized later this year.

We must ensure these PR strategies don’t leave us in the dark about the real story of our food. Because as we debate one of the biggest questions of our time — how to feed ourselves safely and sustainably — it’s essential we base critical policy decisions and consumer choices on substance, not spin.

Originally published in Al Jazeera America

The post The Billion-Dollar Business to Sell Us Crappy Food appeared first on Real Food Media.

by Anna Lappé

Last month, Chicago hosted two seemingly unrelated meetings. At the National Restaurant Association’s annual trade show you could check out workshops such as “Pickle Your Fancy” and “You Bacon Me Crazy,” while mingling with some of the other 63,000 attendees. Though the annual trade show is the NRA’s most public moment, the group works year-round behind the scenes, influencing politicians and legislation to shape what we eat, how we eat it and how restaurant workers — including those employed by McDonald’s — are treated.

As trade show participants, including those from some of the biggest restaurant chains in the country, were closing up their display cases, McDonald’s annual shareholder meeting was just getting started. It would appear to be no coincidence that the trade association’s meeting was timed to coincide with the Golden Arches confab of shareholders — McDonald’s is one of the trade association’s generous corporate sponsors.

But in recent years, McDonald’s annual meeting has become a venue not just for corporate officials opining on official sales reports, but also for public-interest advocates taking the fast-food chain to task for contradictions between what the company says it values and what it does in practice.

McDonald’s NRA membership makes its recent professed concern for its workers ring hollow. The trade group has actively lobbied for years against improving conditions for restaurant workers, including better worker wages and benefits. As one of the NRA’s largest dues-paying members, McDonald’s supports such lobbying and benefits from its success.

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, the NRA lobbies on “virtually every issue affecting the restaurant industry.” In 2013 alone, the NRA, a tax-exempt, non-profit organization, spent a total of $71 million, including on lobbying and campaign contributions.

In 2014, it spent $3.9 million on contributions to candidates and lobbying 89 separate bills, according to its disclosures. Some of these efforts included longstanding lobbying against health care reform and increases in the minimum wage. The NRA specifically lobbied against policy proposals such as the “Forty Hours is Full-Time Act,” which would give those who work 30 hours a week the same benefits as those who work 40 — especially important today as business owners reduce hours per week to minimize their responsibilities for providing benefits such as health care. (Michele Simon documented more of these lobbying efforts in an Al Jazeera America column last year.)

A prominent member of the NRA, McDonald’s has been working with the trade group on many of these policy fights. Advocates at its meeting, including those from the Food Chain Workers Alliance and the Restaurants Opportunities Center, pointed out how the company is undermining worker welfare. The corporation’s “Standards of Business Conduct” report pledges to treat its employees with “fairness, respect and dignity”(PDF) and to “pay fair, competitive wages.” But as a member of the NRA, McDonald’s has helped to fund one of the biggest lobbying efforts to obstruct a national minimum wage increase in decades. Through the International Franchise Association, it’s also suing the city of Seattle for moving to increase the minimum wage to $15 there, claiming franchises, such as McDonald’s operations, are unfairly classified as “large” employers when they should be considered “small” businesses.

Advocates at the meeting pointed to this lobbying activity and to McDonald’s own shortfalls in improving worker wages and benefits. While the corporation was proud to announce a wage hike earlier this year for its workers, only a fraction actually received it: The hike covered just company-owned restaurants, where only about 10 percent of all U.S.-based employees work; the rest work for franchisees. (A projected 1,300 cooks and cashiers at McDonald’s and other major fast-food companies are convening this weekend in Detroit to strategize about such lackluster moves.)

Chicago Teachers Union vice president Jesse Sharkey also spoke of “the growing concerns from people across the globe regarding the devastating impact McDonald’s is having on workers, our food system and the health of our children.” And representatives from Corporate Accountability International, with whom I work, spoke out against the practices and lobbying efforts, especially with the NRA, that undermine the very values the corporation says it holds dear.

The Standards of Business Conduct report, subtitled “the Promise of the Golden Arches,” quotes McDonald’s founder Ray Kroc describing the company as “ethical, truthful and dependable” and committed to its “people.” But with its longstanding relationship with the NRA ensuring it has been a key force in limiting the compensation for low-wage workers — very much its people — it doesn’t appear that McDonald’s is going to make good on those promises any time soon.

Originally published in Al Jazeera America

Photo by Fibonacci Blue/Flickr

The post McDonald’s Two-Faced Talk appeared first on Real Food Media.

You know organic food has gone mainstream when Men’s Health waxes poetic about an organic diet in between shout-outs to a “hot new sex app” and pictures of actress Chelsea Peretti in stilettos. And you know the business of organic is moving out of the margins when CNBC’s ornery “Mad Money” host, Jim Cramer, describes organic as “one of the most lucrative trends of our era.” Sounding more like a permaculture geek than a money manager, Cramer recently said:

Many people will probably tell you that organic food is really just for rich people, that it’s not an economical way to approach agriculture, that it can’t feed the world. Well, guess what? None of that’s true.

For years, the organic food industry boasted that it was experiencing double-digit growth year to year. That’s not so impressive when your products are less than 1 percent of the total market. But that’s all changing.

While chemical agriculture defenders like to say that organic food is still marginal, that’s becoming less and less true. Today organic food sales are 5 percent of the total — but even that figure hides the true heft of the industry. Most of American farmland is dedicated to industrial crops — commodities such as corn and soybeans — that are mainly used in animal feeds, sweeteners or ethanol production rather than eaten by people directly. If you consider the organic percentage of food we eat, the figures grow: 12 percent of fruit and vegetable sales and 7 percent of dairy are organic. For certain crops, the figures jump. “Organic carrots make up 23 percent of the market. Organic kale is 50 percent of the total,” said Laura Batcha, the executive director of the Organic Trade Association.

Choosing organic produce and grains means eschewing foods that were irradiated (treated with radiation, often to slow the sprouting or ripening process or to increase shelf life), made with genetically engineered seeds or fertilized with sewage sludge. Choosing organic-certified meat or poultry means reaching for products raised without artificial growth hormones, antibiotics and a bevy of other drugs, including arsenic-based ones. Those are just a few reasons consumers are choosing organic-certified foods in the marketplace. The benefits of doing so — from personal health to environmental sustainability — are becoming increasingly clear to American consumers.

Companies are catching on. Last month, Chipotle became the first major fast-casual chain to declare it would be breaking up with genetically engineered ingredients, for the most part. (Unless it drops soda and shifts entirely to organic-certified sources for meat and dairy, it is still selling foods that have been made with genetically engineered ingredients.) While a partial shift, this very public move is evidence that companies are feeling the consumer demand for healthier and more ecological food.

From my conversations with consumers across the country, there is a tsunami of demand for these products. National polls reflect the sentiment I’ve been hearing on the ground. In a 2015 survey (PDF) conducted by Wolfe Research, 55 percent of female respondents ranked natural and organic as extremely important or very important in their purchasing decisions, up from 43 percent in 2013.

All of this has companies with big investments in chemical agriculture — from animal pharmaceutical giants (Elanco) to chemical companies (Bayer) and biotech behemoths (Monsanto) — doubling down on their public relations campaigns to tamp down consumer demand for organic.

These companies and their trade groups, such as the Biotechnology Industry Organization and CropLife America (the gussied-up version of the National Association of Chemical Manufacturers), are spending hundreds of millions of dollars every year to combat popular concerns about the chemical cocktails used on farm fields or genetic engineering used on seeds.

They’re also investing in front groups, nonprofit organizations established to be perceived as working in the public interest but effectively PR arms for industry that pour millions into marketing campaigns. Take Elanco, which is a member of the Industry Partner Council of the U.S. Farmers and Ranchers Alliance, whose communications efforts include a campaign countering concerns about antibiotic overuse on factory farms — this despite the well-founded science on dangerous antibiotic-resistant bacteria fostered by just such overuse.

For a forthcoming Friends of the Earth report on the food industry’s corporate spin, I reviewed the expenses of 14 of these nonprofit food industry front groups, seven of which were launched since 2009. Based on filings with the Internal Revenue Service, these groups spent more than $135 million on media campaigns, websites, media representative training and more from 2009 to 2013. That figure doesn’t even include the more than half a billion dollars spent by just three trade associations — the Grocery Manufacturers Association, CropLife America and the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO) — in that period. (Note: BIO’s spending includes amounts for agricultural and health care biotechnology.)

All this money is having an effect. The PR firm Ketchum, for example, was employed last year by BIO to develop a campaign to improve public perception of genetically modified organisms, including developing GMOAnswers.com, a website with industry-approved commentary about GMOs. As part of this work, Ketchum seeks out negative biotech-related tweets and points authors toward GMOAnswers.com. Since its launch, said a Ketchum representative in Delta Farm Press, “There’s been about an 80 percent reduction in negative Twitter traffic as it relates to GMOs.”

This infusion of well-funded spin is distorting the conversation about food, health and sustainability. As organic food sales boom, some of the most lucrative companies in the world are threatened. In response, these companies are spending more than ever to shape the conversation about food and sustainability. As they do, it’s all the more essential that the public make informed choices based on science, not spin. Fortunately, despite the millions being spent on it, more people are exposing this spin, and organic continues to go mainstream — whether the chemical and biotech industry likes it or not. 

Originally published in Al Jazeera America

Photo by Tim Psych/Flickr

The post Organic is Going Mainstream appeared first on Real Food Media.

by Anna Lappé 

“Doubt is our product,” wrote executives for tobacco giant Brown & Williamson in a now infamous 1969 memo on industry communications strategy. The memo was revealed during discovery in class-action lawsuits against tobacco companies that would eventually yield a trove of 85 million pages. Among those pages are details about the public relations playbook of an industry that — as far back as 1958 — knew that smoking caused cancer and used public relations to fight regulation for decades.

“Merchants of Doubt,” a brilliant new film from documentarian Robert Kenner (of “Food Inc.” fame), reveals this spin and tracks how other industries, from chemical manufacturers to pharmaceuticals, are ripping pages from Big Tobacco’s playbook to fight their own regulation and public scrutiny.

Based on the book of the same name by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, the film reveals, in particular, Big Oil’s role in climate change denialism. It makes the argument that the world’s biggest energy companies funded PR and lobbying firms that fomented doubt about climate science and thereby stalled action on climate policy. The film pulls back the curtain on the backstage battle to win the hearts and minds of the American public, with nothing short of a stable climate in the balance.

Big Oil’s PR machine

When I was writing “Diet for a Hot Planet,” my book about the connections between the food industry and climate change, my editor suggested I cut the chapter addressing climate change denial.

“Anna,” she said, “the debate is settled. Denial is over.”

You can’t blame her for thinking so. It was 2006. “An Inconvenient Truth” had just come out. Al Gore’s painstakingly researched film about global warming, which would go on to gross $24 million and win the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, built its message on years of accumulating clarity about the crisis. As far back as 1979, scientists Steve Schneider and Roger Revelle had testified before Congress about global warming. In 1988, NASA scientist James Hansen made front-page news for bringing the global warming crisis to the national spotlight. In front of a Congressional committee, he testified that evidence proved, with 99-percent certainty, that global warming was the result of man-made greenhouse gas emissions. The same year, future-President George H.W. Bush said on the campaign trail, “In my first year in office, I will convene a global conference on the environment at the White House … We will talk about global warming … And we will act.”

But as “Merchants of Doubt” shows, and what my editor didn’t know, is that the Big Oil PR machine was just greasing its wheels. The offensive had yet to come.

Big Oil developed a well-funded communications campaign inspired by Big Tobacco’s techniques — funding fake science, think tanks and front groups with innocuous-sounding names such as the Global Climate Coalition (GCC). Supported by energy companies such as Shell Oil, Exxon and BP, the GCC lobbied on Capitol Hill, fighting a global climate treaty and domestic climate legislation by producing issue briefs with the patina of truthiness.

As Kenner shows, such front groups claimed that global warming advocates were manufacturing the crisis as a Trojan Horse for greater government intervention, a claim that riled up the libertarian base and conservative groups such as Americans for Prosperity. The ascendancy of the Tea Party in the mid-2000s stoked fear among conservative candidates that speaking out about climate would make them unpopular with this increasingly powerful voting bloc. This was how the false notion that there was “no consensus” on climate change began to take hold in the public consciousness.

In 2009, 31,478 scientists allegedly signed a petition claiming there was “no convincing scientific evidence that human release of … greenhouse gases is causing … catastrophic … disruption of the Earth’s climate.” Ron Paul quoted from it in testimony before the U.S. House of Representatives that year. Never mind that among those signatories, only 39 were climatologists and many were non-experts (including people on the payroll of Big Oil). Some were even obviously fake names, such as members of the Spice Girls (the mention of which produced my favorite B-roll moment in the film).

But the damage was already done. By late 2009, the Pew Center was reporting a “sharp decline” in Americans who believe that there is “solid evidence” of human-caused climate change: Only 36 percent of respondents agreed that “global temperatures are rising as a result of human activity, such as burning fossil fuels” — down from nearly half just one year earlier.

It has been nearly three decades since Hansen’s warnings about global warming. But you can watch C-SPAN footage — from just two months ago — of Sen. James Inhofe throwing a snowball on the Senate floor to poke fun at climate science. (Inhofe, mind you, is the chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.) You can also read the news about Florida Gov. Rick Scott’s unwritten ban on using the phrases “climate change” or “global warming” under any circumstance.

The spin machine of the oil industry, in other words, is alive and well. The Western States Petroleum Association (WSPA) — whose members include BP, Chevron, Exxon and Shell — is one of the most powerful lobbying forces in California. Since 2009, it has spent millions of dollars in lobbying and in supporting a tangled web of front groups, including Californians for Energy Independence, California Drivers Alliance, Californians Against Higher Taxes, Kern Citizens for Energy and Californians for Affordable and Reliable Energy, according to a leaked PowerPoint presentation — all groups that are promoting the interests of the trade association. Doubt is the product, indeed.

Learn from Big Tobacco

Still, if Big Oil can learn from tobacco, so can we. As documented in a forthcoming companion piece to Kenner’s film, the fight against Big Tobacco was won largely because of sustained organizing that exposed what the industry knew — and when it knew it — about the harms of smoking. Groups such as Corporate Accountability International (for which I am a strategic advisor) and the Network for Accountability of Tobacco Transnationals succeeded in blocking the tobacco industry from participating in international treaty talks. It took decades of organizing, but the World Health Organization’s tobacco treaty finally entered into force in 2005. So far, it has been ratified by 179 countries.

There’s a shot in “Merchants of Doubt” of a woman smoking in a hospital bed, with baby monitors attached to her pregnant belly. Today’s reaction to that image — a gasp of disbelief — is a sign that while it took 50 years, the truth about tobacco finally won out.

The more climate chaos we experience — deadly hurricanes, floods, droughts, heat waves and cold shocks — the more Big Oil and its ilk will spend to peddle doubt. The only trouble is, as Oreskes says in the film, we don’t have 50 years to win back the public.

Originally published in Al Jazeera America

Photo by Septentria/Flickr

The post The Long, Dirty Trail of Fake Science appeared first on Real Food Media.

by Anna Lappé 

Forty-four years ago my mother, Frances Moore Lappé, published Diet for a Small Planet, a book that dared to suggest human beings could survive, even thrive, on a plant-centered diet and that doing so would be good for our bodies and the planet. Part meatless cookbook, part treatise on the roots of hunger and the waste, inefficiency and injustice of diverting prime cropland to feed livestock rather than people, her book went on to sell more than 3 million copies.

At the time, the messages in her book were so threatening to the meat industry that the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, the trade group for US beef producers, hired a team of nutritionists to prove her vegetarian recipes were inedible. It’s hard to imagine now, seeing as you need only tune in to the daytime talk show “The Chew,” flip open Food & Wine or sidle up to a table at Alice Waters’ Chez Panisse restaurant in Berkeley, California, to realize plant-centered meals are everywhere — and devoured.

Last month, some four decades after my mom published that book, the scientific advisory committee for the federal nutrition guidelines, which inform everything from food stamps to school lunches, recommended for the first time that Americans choose a more plant-centered diet for both health and environmental reasons. The committee’s report states:

A diet higher in plant-based foods, such as vegetables, fruits, whole grains, legumes, nuts and seeds, and lower in calories and animal-based foods, is more health promoting and is associated with less environmental impact than is the current U.S. diet.

And, as the advisory committee notes, the average US diet currently “has a larger environmental impact in terms of increased greenhouse gas emissions, land use, water use and energy use.” That’s in part because we eat more red meat and poultry per capita than anywhere else in the world, save Luxembourg.

Studies show that reducing red meat and poultry consumption is a key way to cut water use and greenhouse gas emissions. Beef is the main culprit: A 2014 study found that beef production in the United States requires 28 times as much land and produces five times as much greenhouse gas emissions as the average production of other livestock. And a 2012 comparative analysis (PDF) of water use across a wide variety of foods found beef was the most water intensive, with a water footprint per gram of protein six times as large as for legumes.

Thankfully, there are ample meatless ways to get the protein we need — say, from those water-thrifty legumes. One cup of cooked lentils delivers 18 grams of protein; a cup of kidney beans, 15 grams; a cup of quinoa, 8 grams. Protein can even be found in foods where some least expect it, such as spinach and mushrooms.

But before you go grabbing the nearest Big Mac and declaring, Charlton Heston–style, “From my cold, dead hands!” note that the recommendations are not touting extremism. They’re calling for a modest reduction, which should be an easy ask for the typical American, who is consuming 70 percent more protein than his or her body can even use. This is a small step that’s based on common sense and science. As Bob Martin, the director of food system policy at Johns Hopkins’ Center for a Livable Future, said, “Even just cutting meat out of your diet one day a week can significantly reduce saturated fat in your diet while providing a big environmental benefit.”

But once again the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association and other trade groups threatened by these regulations are in PR high gear. Lobbyists in Washington are hitting Capitol Hill to try to prevent these recommendations from ending up as part of official federal nutrition guidelines.

Today stakeholders from around the country will testify about these recommendations at a hearing for the US Departments of Agriculture and Health and Human Services. The speakers will include representatives of the more than 120,000 people who signed a petition calling on these agencies to heed the advisory committee’s recommendations. Among those set to testify is Kari Hamerschlag from the environmental nonprofit Friends of the Earth, who said that “implementing these guidelines could mean billions saved in avoided health care costs from heart disease, cancer, diabetes and other diet-related diseases that have been associated with high meat consumption.” In fact, the Union of Concerned Scientists studied (PDF) how much the nation could save on health care if we the people ate our daily recommended fruits and vegetables (something few of us do at the moment): a whopping $16 billion annually.

Timed with the hearing on the Hill, a full-page open letter is running today in The New York Times and The Washington Post, signed by more than 100 groups and individuals — from leading health experts to celebrity chefs to my mom — calling on our elected leaders to listen to the science and not the spin. These recommendations are good for our health and for the planet: What could be better than that?

Originally published in Al Jazeera America

Photo by Eric Osmundson/Flickr

The post The Diet We Need For a Sustainable Planet appeared first on Real Food Media.