From seed to plate our food system is broken — and Corporate Accountability International leaders are making waves in their work to fix it.

I’m thrilled to announce that Sriram Madhusoodanan, director of the Value [the] Meal campaign, has just been named a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Culture of Health Leader. And longtime ally, adviser, and founder of Real Food Media Anna Lappé will receive the James Beard Leadership Award in October.

Core to our work on the food system is connecting the dots between sustainable agriculture, food justice, public health, labor issues, and more. These prestigious awards signify we’re making great progress.

Shattering the status quo on health

As one of 40 Culture of Health Leaders nationally, Madhusoodanan will join outstanding individuals from across the country to participate in leadership development training and to collaborate and innovate to solve persistent problems. Culture of Health Leaders is a new program co-led by the National Collaborative for Health Equity and CommonHealth ACTION with support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

“The inspiration and vision these leaders bring to our program is astounding, and they come at health and equity from every angle,” said Brian Smedley, Culture of Health Leaders co-director and executive director and co-founder of the National Collaborative for Health Equity. “They will redefine the way leaders in every field use their innovation and influence to shatter the status quo on health in our country.”

Madhusoodanan leads Corporate Accountability International’s campaign challenging the corporate breakdown of our food system. Partnering with labor allies, community leaders, educators, and parents, he has led the organizing challenging McDonald’s, the corporation that has done more to distort our food system than any other. In the past year, his campaign challenged McDonald’s political influence-peddling via the National Restaurant Association, brought together parents and educators to end the exploitative marketing practice called McTeacher’s Nights, and helped communities pressure hospitals to end their contracts with McDonald’s.

Promoting justice and equality

The James Beard Foundation is recognizing Anna Lappé as a visionary who is influencing how, why, and what we eat. “This year’s honorees are game-changers who have made an impact in improving childhood nutrition, fighting hunger, and promoting justice and equality in our food system,” said Susan Ungaro, president of the James Beard Foundation.

“This is a particularly significant honor because of my respect for previous award winners and this year’s other honorees including Greg Asbed and Lucas Benitez of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, Raj Patel [also a Corporate Accountably International adviser], Rep. Jim McGovern of Massachusetts, and John Boyd, Jr.,” said Lappé.

Lappé is a widely respected author and educator, known for her work as an advocate for just and ecologically restorative food systems. She is the founder and director of Real Food Media, a project of Corporate Accountability International. She founded Real Food Media to develop creative media initiatives that strengthen the food movement. Recent projects include Voices of the Food Chain, a partnership with the Food Chain Workers Alliance and StoryCorps. This initiative brought the stories of food chain workers from the field to the restaurant in their own words to millions of people around the country.

We are deeply proud of our remarkable colleagues who are challenging corporate abuse with passion, creativity, and commitment.

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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

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McDonald’s is having a bumpy year. It just installed a new CEO after a mere two-and-a-half-year stint by his predecessor. In January it announced its latest returns — and the news was bad. It included such shareholder downers as a “global comparable sales decrease of 1 percent, reflecting negative guest traffic in all major segments.” Last month the business press reported that the Gates Foundation divested $1 billion in stock from the company last quarter. While the stock divestment doesn’t affect McDonald’s bottom line, it does affect its reputation: McDonald’s is stumbling.

In the face of this string of bad news, McDonald’s appears to be having a brand identity crisis and pouring PR money on its problems instead of addressing head-on their causes: a growing disinclination, especially among millennials, to support a company renowned for its ill treatment of workers, predatory marketing to kids and questionable food sourcing.

Struggling for Relevance

Millennials — 20- and early-30-somethings — are turning their backs on the brand. From 2011 to the end of 2014, the percentage of 19-to-21-year-olds visiting McDonald’s fell nearly 13 percent. As an August 2014 Fortune headline put it, “McDonald’s struggling to stay relevant with millennials.”

They are flocking elsewhere for a number of reasons. They came of age in a time with a lot more fast-casual options than previous generations could have anticipated — options that are better tasting, higher quality and still affordable. (Chipotle, anyone?) They’re turning to other brands that reflect more of their concerns with the environment, workers’ wages and animal welfare. Instead of listening to these concerns, McDonald’s is turning to PR spin to solve its problems.

While a diverse bunch, many millennials are more engaged in environmental and social causes than young people have been for a long time. In one recent poll, two-thirds of millennials said they would vote for a candidate who supports cutting greenhouse gas emissions, compared with just half of Americans over 65. Millennials have been on the front lines of some of the biggest environmental fights of our time, from the Keystone XL pipeline battle to the 450,000-person People’s Climate March in New York City last year.

They are a leading force in the good food movement, with national networks such as Real Food Challenge, which was founded just a few years ago and now enlists tens of thousands of college students to push for better food on college campuses, and Food Corps, a national AmeriCorps training program that fosters youth school garden educators. Books such as Michael Pollan’s “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” films like “Food Inc.” and advocacy groups such as Food & Water Watch are inspiring young people to ask questions about where their food comes from and raise hell about antibiotics and hormones in meat.

Millennials are passionate about workers’ rights and income inequality, evidenced by the dynamism of Occupy Wall Street and the fight for a fair wage that heated up around the country last year in actions such as the Fight for $15. From its poor pay to its wasteful packaging to its sourcing of climate-destructive industrial meat and dairy, McDonald’s doesn’t represent labor-friendly, sustainable or healthy practices.

So if not to McDonald’s, where are millennials headed? Those who have the disposable income to do so are pulling up a stool at Chipotle, diving into a burger at Shake Shack or grabbing a sandwich at Panera Bread. In short, many are spending their money at fast-casual establishments, which saw a 2.3 percent jump among 19-to-21-year-olds and a 5.3 percent increase among 22-to-37-year-olds from 2011 to the end of 2014. Fast-casual restaurants show continuing signs of strong growth. Since Chipotle went public in 2006, “its stock price has risen more than 1,500 percent,” James Surowiecki wrote last month in The New Yorker.

While Chipotle and Shake Shack shouldn’t be confused with health food joints — a steak burrito from Chipotle can load you with 1,290 calories, and a double ShackBurger have 770 calories and your daily recommended dose of sodium — these chains arguably produce better-tasting food and have made explicit commitments to sourcing better ingredients. Shake Shack owner Danny Meyer, for instance, has promised to use only meat raised without hormones and antibiotics. Many of these restaurants offer better benefits and pay than McDonald’s does. Take Shake Shack’s starting hourly wage of $10 in New York City; it’s still not going to get a family of four out of poverty, but it’s better than the minimum wage.

Flailing Tactics

McDonald’s is trying desperately to lure back millennials. In its one nod to the priorities of this generation, it released a request for proposal late last year for media companies to develop “a big idea” that “generates significant support for a charity” and “engages millennials to support this charity by speaking directly to their philanthropic priorities and leveraging their behaviors and habits,” according to information obtained by The Wall Street Journal.

But mostly the company has been launching a host of new PR campaigns leading to schizophrenic positioning and mixed results. In January, USA Today reported that McDonald’s opened a café in Australia with healthy offerings on the menu and nary a Golden Arch in site, about the same time that it launched a TV spot bragging about old-school Big Macs unchanged by foodie influences. (Kale, quinoa, and soy were all name-checked — and mocked.) Last year saw the rebranding flop of both its iconic Ronald McDonald mascot and the Happy Meal, which set off a social media firestorm as young people around the world mocked the new creepy, toothy look.

It’s trying hard to be hip too, setting up shop last year in San Francisco to incubate digital strategies. The new office, based in the hotbed of digital disruption, will help the company be “more plugged into the flow of ideas,” said the company’s Chief Digital Officer Atif Rafiq. But as one Forbes commentator quipped, “All the talk about digital tech isn’t disruptive, it’s predictably also-ran.”

Last year McDonald’s tried to make a splash with its new dynamic in-store kiosk that lets customers customize their burgers. After spending big on the launch, McDonald’s had to rebrand it from Build Your Own Burger to Create Your Taste because it added chicken to the menu. Oops. It also launched what it calls Experience the Future, “a comprehensive restaurant execution concept” that “capitalizes on investments in reimaging, service and technology enhancements to improve the look, feel and convenience of the McDonald’s experience in ways that are in-tune with today’s consumer needs.” Which sounds more like PR gobbledygook than a serious attempt to rethink the chain.

These missteps, just a few signs of the company’s flailing, are reflected in weak earnings reports and personnel trouble at the top, with significant turnover in key positions. Two McDonald’s USA presidents, President and CEO Jim Skinner, Chief Marketing Officer Neil Golden and Chief Operating Officer Tim Fenton were replaced in the past several years. The trend continues with the early retirement of CEO Don Thompson late last month.

Walmart’s recent announcement that it will increase the wages for its lowest-paid workers makes it ever clearer that McDonald’s is out of step with the rest of retail. It’s time for McDonald’s to give people a reason to love it — and not just throw money at advertisements that tell us we should.

Postscript: Sounds like the new CEO might have gotten the memo. In an announcement today, McDonald’s committed to only “sourcing chicken raised without antibiotics that are important to human medicine.” It’s a step the company took after seven months of dialogue and concerted pressure from civil society groups, including Friends of Earth. The environmental organization’s senior program manager, Kari Hamerschlag, said in a press release, “While McDonald’s focus on poultry is a positive step forward, we look forward to a dramatic reduction of antibiotic use across the board, by focusing on improvements in their pork and beef suppliers’ management practices.” McDonald’s announcement makes it the largest restaurant chain in the country to adopt such a policy.

Originally published in Al Jazeera America

Photo by Beth Wiki/Wikimedia

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This past weekend, biotech giant Monsanto paid bloggers $150 each to attend “an intimate and interactive panel” with “two female farmers and a team from Monsanto.” The strictly invitation-only three-hour brunch, which took place on the heels of the BlogHer Conference, promised bloggers a chance to learn about “where your food comes from” and to hear about the “impact growing food has on the environment, and how farmers are using fewer resources to feed a growing population.” Though the invitation from BlogHer explicitly stated, “No blog posts or social media posts expected,” the event was clearly designed to influence the opinions — and the writing — of a key influencer: the mommy blogger. Another invite-only event in August will bring bloggers to a Monsanto facility in Northern California for a tour of its fields and research labs. Again, while no media coverage is expected, the unspoken goal is clear.

Stealth marketing techniques, such as these by Monsanto, reveal how the food industry — from biotech behemoths to fast-food peddlers — is working surreptitiously to shape public opinion about biotechnology, industrialized farming and junk food.

We’ve come a long way from Don Draper’s whisky-infused ad concepts meant for old-style print publications. As our media landscape has changed, Big Ag has changed along with it, devising marketing to take advantage of this new terrain and influence the people and platforms — not just journalists and newspapers — that shape our understanding of farming and the health impacts of biotechnology and junk food.

Sean Timberlake, who has been blogging for nearly a decade, characterized industry’s move into the social media space as “sweeping and vast.” He explained that back when he started out, “I don’t think the Monsantos of the world understood what blogs were — or cared,” but now, “companies develop entire budget lines for social media programs. They build it into their whole ad budget.” Ad networks such as BlogHer and Federated — two of the biggest — facilitate companies’ advertising and outreach on blogs by aggregating blogs to sell as a bigger package. These networks, Timberlake explained, “can be leveraged and used as a bullhorn for their marketing.”

Sure, PR is an old game, but Big Ag is giving the age-old techniques of shaping public opinion a new, sneakier spin. Much of today’s marketing happens behind the scenes and off the printed page — on the Web pages of blogs, on Twitter feeds and Facebook pages, through sponsored content and industry-funded webisodes and on the stages of big-ideas festivals.

Monsanto is not the only food company engaging with the blogosphere. Mommy bloggers are the food industry’s newest nontraditional ally. McDonald’s has been wooing them aggressively too, offering sweepstakes in partnership with BlogHer for the company’s Listening Tour Luncheon, an exclusive event with the head of McDonald’s USA — framed as a two-way conversation about nutrition, but more likely a gambit to garner the support of a powerful group of influencers. And in Canada, McDonald’s offers All-Access Mom, behind-the-scenes tours of the company’s inner workings.

It’s not just through blogger meet-and-greets that industry is attempting to sway opinion. Video is an increasingly popular (and shareable) medium for PR disguised as content. This summer, for example, Monsanto is funding a Condé Nast Media Group film series called “A Seat at the Table.” According to a casting call, each three- to five-minute episode will cover questions such as “Are food labels too complicated?” and “GMOs: good or bad?” and will feature “an eclectic mix of industry and nonindustry notables with diverse viewpoints.” It’s hard to imagine truly free-flowing discussions resulting, paid for as they are by a company with a definitive take on — and stake in — the food-labeling wars. The U.S. Farmers and Ranchers Alliance, meanwhile, funded the documentary “Farmland,” described as a “look at the lives of farmers and ranchers,” but whose narrative — as critics have been quick to point out — “glorif[ies] the trend toward larger, more industrialized farms.” No surprise, given that the film’s financing comes from an agribusiness front group.

Big Ag is putting its communications dollars toward big-ideas events too, such as the Aspen Ideas Festival, where underwriters such as Monsanto are celebrated — and get a voice. Monsanto executives got to share their opinions onstage about GMO labeling (surprise: they’re not in favor of state-based labeling initiatives) and how best to feed the world (again: their chemicals and genetically engineered seeds are key to combating hunger). And past years have seen Coca-Cola, DuPont and Syngenta executives all touting their companies’ sustainability onstage.

The uptick in these stealth-marketing strategies coincides with growing popular outcry about agricultural chemicals, soda and junk food and genetically modified ingredients. Consider that despite millions spent on marketing over the two decades since genetically engineered seeds were first commercialized, 93 percent of Americans still think GMOs should be labeled and 65 percent are either unsure about the technology or believe it to be unsafe. Last year, when Monsanto retained the PR firm FleishmanHillard, known for its work with social media and agribusiness, to develop its new marketing initiatives, it did so “amid fierce opposition to the seed giant’s genetically modified products,” noted the Holmes Report, a PR industry publication.

The father of public relations, Edward Bernays, might never have dreamed up the age of Twitter and Facebook, but he likely wouldn’t be surprised to see food-industry tweets and Facebook ads dressed up as news. Bernays knew the importance of constant PR innovation. If the public “becomes weary of the old methods used to persuade it,” he wrote in his 1928 book “Propaganda,” then we must simply present our “appeals more intelligently.” Or, as we’re seeing with Monsanto and its food industry counterparts, if not exactly intelligently, then at least more surreptitiously: on the podium, the Twitter feeds and the mommy blogs.

Originally published in Al Jazeera America

Photo by Steve Jennings/Getty Images for McDonald’s via Al Jazeera America

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