The soda industry won big in Chicago this week when county commissioners voted to scrap the 1-cent-per-ounce tax on sugary drinks that had been in place for just two months.

This is a stark turn for the effort to tax these drinks, which has been making headway as voters and City Councils in at least a half-dozen other cities, including San Francisco and Philadelphia, in recent years approved measures in favor of soda levies. The sudden about-face in Chicago, after a battle in which both sides spent millions on TV and radio ads, offers an important lesson for advocates of these taxes, ourselves included, as the industry we call Big Soda takes aim at other communities: We can’t forget the grass roots.

While we are longtime healthy-food advocates, we have only recently awakened to the alarm bell of sugary drinks. For years, these drinks were flagged for “empty calories” that lead to weight gain. Today, the public health community understands that consuming sugar — particularly in liquid form — increases risks of serious health conditions, such as heart disease, Type 2 diabetes and nonalcoholic fatty liver disease, not to mention tooth decay. A 2010 study found that consuming just one to two sugary drinks a day increases your risk of developing diabetes by 26 percent.

While sugar is everywhere — in cookies and crackers, breads and pasta sauce — the single largest source in the American diet is sugary drinks. A 20-ounce Coca-Cola contains 65 grams of added sugar, significantly exceeding the American Heart Association’s daily maximum recommendation for adult women, 25 grams, and adult men, 36 grams.

It’s not hyperbolic to claim that sugary drinks pose a major public health threat. Nationally, we spent $245 billion on diabetes medical costs in 2012. By 2030 we could be spending as much as $818 billion on the direct medical costs of heart disease. Both illnesses are associated with the consumption of sugary drinks.

Fortunately, we have effective tools for addressing this crisis. Taxes on sugary drinks are one. As a peer-reviewed study published this spring found, since the tax went into effect in Berkeley, Calif., in March 2015, purchases of healthier drinks have gone up and sales of soda have gone down, all without consumer grocery bills increasing or the local food sector losing money. The tax raised about $1.5 million last year for nutrition and health programs in a city of 113,000 people.

Since Berkeley passed its tax, seven municipalities have followed suit, and many others, even some states, are interested in doing the same. This has Big Soda scared because these taxes — with the awareness they create about the health effects of sugar and the consumption they reduce — threaten the industry’s bottom line.

How scared? Leaked internal Coca-Cola emails last year revealed a “coordinated war” against policies like these, says a public health advocate, Kyle Pfister, who has studied these documents. This war, waged by the American Beverage Association and sugary drink manufacturers like Coca-Cola, includes a slew of duplicitous tactics, like funding research to give a hue of legitimacy to their anti-tax claims, pursuing social media influencers, lobbying at every level of government and targeting key journalists for persuasion. These time-tested tactics have been used by the tobacco industry in its fight against cigarette taxes.

The industry also starts and funds faux grass-roots organizations. In another email, a trade group representative boasted about the impact of Philadelphians Against the Grocery Tax, an industry-funded group, which deployed an aggressive media strategy that achieved a “significant shift in public attitudes away from initial majority support for the discriminatory tax” in Philadelphia. In the end, the industry lost there.

In Cook County, which includes Chicago, the industry’s “Can the Tax” campaign spent millions on local TV ads and pressured commissioners, in particular critiquing the use of the soda tax revenue to help cover budget deficits. (In other cities, the money has been directed to public health concerns or, in the case of Philadelphia, to fund universal pre-K.) When Jesus Garcia, a Cook County commissioner, signaled he would vote to repeal the tax, he acknowledged that the beverage industry used its financial power to shape public opinion before supporters of the tax were able to craft their own message for a public debate.

There is an important lesson here: When efforts for sugary-drinks taxes are driven and supported by community coalitions that build public awareness early on, they’re better able to withstand industry attacks. Strong coalitions are vital both to adopt new taxes and to ensure they remain to curb consumption and generate funds for public health programs.

In Berkeley, the industry waged a $2 million anti-tax campaign. We credit the success of the tax effort there to a broad-based community coalition — a united front of the local NAACP., Latinos Unidos, teachers unions and many more groups. This compact was strong enough to withstand the industry’s onslaught. We won decisively, with 76 percent of the vote. Community engagement is key.

While the Cook County decision is a setback, it’s a clear reminder of what it will take to win. There’s no substitute for good, old-fashioned community building. We know we will be outspent. Let’s not be outnumbered.

Originally published in The New York Times

Photo by Jean Balzan/Pexels

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When asked to picture a typical school lunch, most of us think of sad-looking chicken nuggets or soggy french fries. For many of the millions of public school students, that’s not far off mark. To transform what’s on kids’ plates, parents, teachers and administrators have been working for years, battling entrenched industry interests and paltry school budgets. Now advocates have a powerful tool to help them: a new procurement policy that helps put core values at the center of school food purchasing.

On May 24, the San Francisco Unified School District Board of Trustees is poised to pass the Good Food Purchasing policy to help usher in a new era for school meals, expanding on and codifying the transformational work already under way. The district would be, after Los Angeles Unified, only the second in the nation to do so.

Looking at the policy’s effect in Los Angeles, it’s clear to see the changes it has helped spark. When the district passed the policy, one of its largest suppliers, Gold Star Foods Inc., was inspired to ask tougher questions of its of bread, produce and poultry suppliers. As Gold Star CEO Sean Leer explained: “The way most school districts purchase, lowest price wins, but it should be more thoughtful. Buying food isn’t like buying toilet paper.” Leer is now able to attribute real worth to the suppliers who align with five values of sustainability, nutrition, local economies, animal welfare and worker rights.

Leer also started looking with fresh eyes at his supply chain: What could he localize that wasn’t already? How could he improve the food they offered to students? One answer was produce — and sourcing more of it locally: Before the policy, roughly 10 percent of the produce served in L.A. schools was sourced within 200 miles of the district. Today, from 50 to 72 percent is, depending on the season. That works out to a roughly $12 million redirection of resources to the local economy.

Leer found another answer in wheat. Gold Star had been sourcing out-of-state wheat for its 45 million to 55 million annual servings of bread and rolls. Leer discovered Shepherd’s Grain, a company with growers in Central California. “I committed to turning our entire bread and roll line over to Shepherd’s Grain,” he said.

Understandably, the bakery Gold Star worked with was hesitant to change a key ingredient like flour, but the bakery made the leap. Today, nearly all of the L.A. school district’s bread and rolls are made from wheat grown in Central California, milled in downtown Los Angeles. Compare that with pre-policy wheat: grown in the Dakotas, trucked to Denver, milled there and shipped to California. “The policy gave us a chance to make this huge change,” explained Leer. “And it didn’t cost any more. In fact, we’ve kept the prices the same for the last three years.”

The policy, originally developed by the Los Angeles Food Policy Council, also puts workers at the heart of purchasing decisions — from farmers to delivery workers. Shaun Martinez from the Teamsters union, said: “In school food, margins are extremely thin. Having a policy like this creates a market for people who do good things to actually survive.”

The policy has been used to review relationships, too. In 2015, the five-year, $60 million contract with chicken processor Tyson was up for renewal. Before, the contract always went to the lowest bidder. Now the district was seeking poultry suppliers that didn’t employ practices like the unsustainable use of antibiotics. Gold Star received a $20 million contract to provide the district with chicken raised without the routine use of antibiotics.

All this sounds so promising, but what arguably matters most is what the kids think. Perhaps that’s best summed up by Maylin Brunall, a senior at Thomas Jefferson High School in Los Angeles: “School — it’s my fancy restaurant now,” she said, with a big smile. “It’s local. It’s fresh. Everyone is treated fairly, and everyone is happy.”

San Francisco has a chance to continue to prove itself as a national leader in school-food reform. The school board trustees can pave the way by approving the new policy.

Originally published in The San Francisco Chronicle 

Photo by Paul Chinn, The Chronicle

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by Anna Lappé

An estimated 27,500 people in Los Angeles, 20,000 in Seattle, and 18,500 in the Bronx: Bernie Sanders is sparking some of the biggest crowds in primary history. For millions across the country, his message is clearly resonating. It’s refreshing to hear someone running for the country’s highest office finally articulate (without any prodding!) core progressive policies: from taking on Wall Street to reforming campaign finance to making college affordable—the list goes on. So it stunned many progressives to hear Sanders attack Philadelphia’s plan to tax sugary drinks; he called soda taxes regressive and came out swinging.

Like health advocates across the country, I think Sanders got it wrong: These taxes in fact reflect the progressive values he holds dear.

It’s the very communities Sanders says he’s trying to protect that have been at the beating heart of campaigns for soda taxes.

As a resident of Berkeley, California, the first city in the United States that has passed a tax of this kind, and as someone who has been working to sound the alarm on the epidemic of diet-related illnesses for years, I have had a ringside seat at the battle against Big Soda. And I think that if Sanders had firsthand knowledge of the fight, he too might be moved to see these taxes differently.

Sanders claims soda taxes will “disproportionately affect low-income and middle-class Americans.” But here in Berkeley, as with other places soda taxes are being proposed, it’s the very communities Sanders says he’s trying to protect that have been at the beating heart of the campaigns.

When Berkeley took on the soda tax, the campaign connected people from all walks of life. The NAACP, Latinos Unidos, the entire school board, every single city council member, and dozens of other groups were all united in their support. Across race, class, and age, the community came together against a deluge of Big Soda money to defend a strategy to help take on one of the biggest public health crises of our time.

Supporters of these taxes understand they are “regressive” only in the most simplistic sense. As with any tax that could lead to higher prices to consumers, from cigarettes to carbon, one could allege they make the poor pay disproportionately more. In Philadelphia, the 3 cent per fluid ounce excise tax on sugary drinks levied on distributors could raise a $0.99 12-ounce Coke to $1.35 if the tax were passed on entirely to consumers. For a $7.25 hourly minimum-wage worker, that price hike would therefore be a bigger relative burden than for, say, the CEO of Coca-Cola who made roughly $7,000 an hour last year.

Philly’s soda tax could prevent 2,280 new cases of diabetes and 36,000 new cases of obesity every year.

But it’s wrong to leap from that simplistic calculation to call these taxes an encumbrance on the poor. It’s not like this tax is for something people have to buy—a tax, for instance, on water or fruits and vegetables. No one needs Coca-Cola to survive and, in fact, drinking soda is a key driver of serious illness. Indeed, a study of the effect of a soda tax in Philly found that the potential price increase could reduce soda consumption, preventing 2,280 new cases of diabetes and 36,000 new cases of obesity every year. Over the course of a decade, the levy could save the city $200 million in averted health care costs. That’s yuge! as Sanders would say.

Progressives have long understood that one of the ways to take on predatory industries whose products hurt the most vulnerable among us is through consumption taxes—something Sanders understands when he speaks in favor of taxing cigarettes.

So maybe Sanders just isn’t hip to the evidence about the harm caused by sugary drinks. And I get it: Many still don’t perceive soda as being as troubling as tobacco. But the science is in. Long-term, peer-reviewed studies have clearly demonstrated the links between sugary drinks and a wide range of illnesses, from diabetes to heart and liver disease to weight gain—not to mention the damage to dental health. Drinking just one or two sugary drinks a day can increase the chances of developing Type 2 diabetes by 26 percent. And reducing soda consumption is increasingly seen as the best first step to halting weight gain. (I experienced this myself when I cut out sugar-sweetened beverages as a cash-strapped grad student. No longer able to afford my habit of multiple Snapple drinks a day, I went cold turkey and dropped 15 pounds. Save for my two pregnancies, I have never gained them back.)

We also know the burden of these diet-related diseases is not evenly experienced by race and class—and that’s putting it mildly. I bet the CEO of Coca-Cola doesn’t live in a community where 1 in 2 residents either have diabetes or are on the way to being diagnosed with it, as is the case in many low-income communities nationwide. Consider this shocking fact: According to the American Diabetes Association, African Americans and Latinos are 70 percent more likely to be diagnosed with diabetes than their white peers. In other words, the potential benefits of these taxes will be greater for the communities whose health has been most undermined by soda.

The potential benefits of these taxes will be greater for the communities whose health has been most undermined by soda.

The most powerful moments of the Berkeley versus Big Soda campaign were hearing community members describe their direct experience with the costs of diabetes: from forfeited wages because of days spent caring for parents or kids to lifelong health problems including heart disease, comas, infertility, vision loss, insulin replacement, even amputations. (Yes, amputations.) At least 73,000 lower-limb amputations were performed nationwide in 2010 on people with diagnosed diabetes. The economic toll of this rising epidemic cannot be stressed enough.

These taxes are beneficial—and reflect progressive values—in another way: Revenues reaped can disproportionately benefit a community’s most at-risk residents. Here in Berkeley, our tax on distributors (one penny per fluid ounce) is on track to bring in $1.5 million annually, which will be used to support health education and diabetes prevention. In Philly, the mayor would use the revenue to fund universal pre-K.

The other charge Sanders makes against these taxes is that they are job killers, leading to “the loss of thousands of good-paying jobs.” There is no evidence this would be the case. Here in Berkeley, where the soda tax was implemented March 1, 2015, there’s been no indication of jobs lost.

It’s perplexing to me that Sanders would embrace an anti-soda-tax stance. His particular volleys—”It’s a jobs’ killer!” “It’s regressive”—are straight from the pages of the beverage industry’s PR playbook. And they echo tobacco industry misinformation that came before them. When cigarette taxes were first proposed, the industry cried foul, too, claiming the poorest people would be most burdened by rising costs, that jobs would be lost. Instead, we’ve seen one of the most positive public health success stories of a generation as smoking rates have plummeted.

Sanders argues that instead of soda taxes we should tax corporations more. Today’s effective corporate tax rate, he notes, is just 22.8 percent, down from 31.7 during the Reagan years and resulting in the loss of an estimated $166 billion every year. What progressive would disagree with Sanders here? But I’m not sure why Sanders presents these positions as either/or. Soda taxes are just one tool in progressive toolbox to take on corporate power and address the devastating epidemic of diet-related illnesses.

The soda industry’s trade group has spent an estimated $64.6 million since 2009 fighting soda taxes.

And what a tool they can be. The soda industry knows this. That’s why its trade group, the American Beverage Association, has spent an estimated $64.6 million since 2009 fighting soda taxes, according to analysis from the Center for Science in the Public Interest. (That doesn’t even include this year’s lobbying spend in California’s capital to fight a proposed statewide tax and more going to undermine fledgling efforts in Oakland, California, Philadelphia, and beyond). In Berkeley, a city of 116,000 people, the trade group spent $2.4 million in an onslaught of negative ads, misinformation, and paid supporters. Big Soda even got in-kind donations from Landmark Theaters to play anti-tax ads before movies in local theaters.

Despite this big spend and thanks to an incredible community effort—the kind of people power I would have thought Sanders would love—we won, and we won big. (Even San Francisco—where the industry outspent the community 31 to 1, shelling out $9.2 million to oppose the tax—55.6 percent of voters supported it, with the vote only failing because it fell short of the two-thirds needed there.)

I wonder whether things would be different if Sanders had been at the Berkeley versus Big Soda headquarters on election night. There, under the bare bulbs of a cavernous room on the main strip of downtown Berkeley, hundreds stood shoulder to shoulder watching as the election results rolled in—and cheering and hugging as the number of precincts crept up.

We stood, a community united, listening to what this campaign had meant to the people at the heart of it: A pediatric dentist recounted how the campaign had transformed her despair at the deterioration of dental health into determined action. A young Latino organizer whose aunt had been hospitalized that very evening from complications from diabetes, shared that the effort had given him a tangible way to use his agony about the illness ravishing his family to make a difference. An African American reverend shared how the grief of losing his 29-year-old son to diabetes propelled him to work tirelessly for the campaign; no other father should lose a son to this disease, he said.

If Sanders had been at the Berkeley soda tax HQ on election night, listening to these voices and more like them, I wonder if he, too, would have been brought to tears—and, whether he, too, would have joined in the thunderous applause as the final results came in. Despite Big Soda’s big spending, the people had triumphed. The final tally: 76.2 percent in favor of the tax.

Just like the city had done in setting policy precedent by being the first to voluntarily desegregate its schools, and to provide curbside recycling, to create curb-cuts for wheelchair accessibility, now Berkeley had passed the first tax on sugary drinks in the United States. There will be more.

Communities across the country are taking up similar taxes, from Philadelphia to Boulder, Colorado, to Oakland. In response, Big Soda will redouble its efforts to confuse the public, distort the science and undermine the credibility of advocates—and they’ll undoubtedly take on the dual mantras Sanders echoed. They have nearly bottomless pockets to do so. (Coca-Cola alone spent $3.5 billion in marketing in 2014.) But Berkeley has shown that strong coalitions can take on even the world’s largest corporate behemoths. It’s a David versus Goliath battle that any progressive should love.

Originally published in Mother Jones

Photo by Miranda Pederson/Daily News via AP

The post What Bernie Gets Wrong About the Soda Tax appeared first on Real Food Media.

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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