If companies are really committed to Black lives, their statements of support should include an honest reckoning with their own products and practices.

In a virtual town hall in June, Coca-Cola’s Chairman and CEO James Quincy said: “Diversity and inclusion are among our greatest strengths … We must put our resources and energy toward helping end the cycle of systemic racism.” Dow Chemical’s Chairman and CEO Jim Fitterling similarly committed to being an “ally” helping overcome “systemic oppression.” And Johnson & Johnson’s Chairman and CEO Alex Gorsky stated, “unequivocally that racism in any form is unacceptable.” These three proclamations echo others penned by Fortune 500 companies since the public reckoning with police violence and systemic racism has swept across the country in the wake of the murder of George Floyd in May.

But examine the impact of these companies on the lived experience of Black people and it’s clear these commitments fall far short of restitution. Consider Johnson & Johnson. Internal company documents have revealed that the company knew since at least 1957 that its talc-based powders could be contaminated with asbestos, a possible carcinogen, for which there is no known safe level of exposure. Despite these concerns, the company pushed these products in the United States and beyond, specifically targeting Black and Brown women. The company’s marketing plans included a race-based distribution model, moving baby powder samples through churches and beauty salons in African American and Latino neighborhoods, and seeking marketing agencies specializing in promotions to “ethnic consumers.” The impact is clear: A study of Black women who used these powders found they had more than a 40 percent increased risk of ovarian cancer compared to Black women who didn’t use them.

Several weeks after its CEO’s Black Lives Matter statement, a Missouri court ruled Johnson & Johnson must pay $2.1 billion in damages to nearly two dozen women whose ovarian cancers were linked to its talc-based powders.

Or consider Coca-Cola, whose CEO made a $2.5 million commitment in June to racial justice charities. Put aside, for a moment, that such a pledge is a paltry 0.27 percent of the company’s annual US advertising spend. The company could have used this political uprising to honestly reflect on how its business practices continue to harm Black communities. Its signature sugary drinks, for example, are a driving force behind one of the biggest public health crises of our time — diet-related illnesses like type 2 diabetes, kidney diseases, and heart disease — that disproportionately impact African Americans. Drinking as little as one 12-ounce sugary drink a day increases your chances of diabetes by 26 percent. A staggering fact made more worrisome in the face of findings that people with type 2 diabetes have a significantly increased Covid-19 mortality rate.

Yet a recent report on sugary-drinks marketing found Coca-Cola and its peers still disproportionately target Black consumers, particularly young Black people. As a result, Black teens have been seeing roughly 2.3 times as many ads for sugary drinks and energy drinks compared to White teens.

Then there’s Dow, whose Chairman and CEO’s Black Lives Matter statement made no mention of the impact the company’s manufacturing plants and products have had on communities of color. Dow, one of largest petrochemical producers in Louisiana, for example, is one of the many corporations that have located toxic manufacturing facilities along an 85-mile stretch of the Mississippi River between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, home to many predominantly Black communities. The rates of cancer in the region are a staggering 50 times greater than the US average, giving the area the unwelcome name, Cancer Alley.

Dow. Johnson & Johnson. Coca-Cola. These are just three of the many companies claiming allegiance with those fighting racial injustice around the country. But as the old cliché reminds us: Actions speak louder than words. If these companies were really committed to Black lives, their statements would have included an honest reckoning with their own products and practices, past and present, and a pledge to act on such a reckoning.

Header photo by Austin Kirk.

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By the late nineteenth century, Americans rich and poor had come to expect high-quality fresh beef with almost every meal. Beef production in the United States had gone from small-scale, localized operations to a highly centralized industry spanning the country, with cattle bred on ranches in the rural West, slaughtered in Chicago, and consumed in the nation’s rapidly growing cities. Red Meat Republic tells the remarkable story of the violent conflict over who would reap the benefits of this new industry and who would bear its heavy costs.

Joshua Specht puts people at the heart of his story—the big cattle ranchers who helped to drive the nation’s westward expansion, the meatpackers who created a radically new kind of industrialized slaughterhouse, and the stockyard workers who were subjected to the shocking and unsanitary conditions described by Upton Sinclair in his novel The Jungle. Specht brings to life a turbulent era marked by Indian wars, Chicago labor unrest, and food riots in the streets of New York. He shows how the enduring success of the cattle-beef complex—centralized, low cost, and meatpacker dominated—was a consequence of the meatpackers’ ability to make their interests overlap with those of a hungry public, while the interests of struggling ranchers, desperate workers, and bankrupt butchers took a backseat. America—and the American table—would never be the same again.

A compelling and unfailingly enjoyable read, Red Meat Republic reveals the complex history of exploitation and innovation behind the food we consume today.

The post Red Meat Republic: A Hoof-to-Table History of How Beef Changed America appeared first on Real Food Media.

In our latest toolkit, Taking On Big Soda, we focus on sugar—especially sugary drinks—and the people-led initiatives taking on Big Soda and promoting public health. In part due to sugary drinks, preventable diet-related illnesses are on the rise in the United States and around the world. To reverse these trends means tackling the root cause of these illnesses. Spoiler alert: it’s not you and me and our lack of willpower to resist Coke or Doritos. No, the drivers of this crisis are the corporations pushing the processed foods and sugary drinks that undermine our health—and the lack of leadership among our elected officials to hold them accountable.

The solution? People power. One example is communities stepping up to pass sugary drinks taxes. In 2013, there were no US cities with a tax on soda. Today, despite serious and aggressive pushback from industry, nearly 9 million Americans—including residents of Seattle, Oakland, San Francisco, and Philadelphia—have measures in place to curb sugar consumption and invest revenues in community wellbeing thanks to successful soda tax campaigns.

While tackling corporate power, we also need to reclaim and rebuild community-based food systems that are not only healthier, but also socially just and ecologically sound as well as honor our cultures. In this toolkit, we offer resources (films, discussion guides, recipes, and more!) to help you learn more and spark conversations about how to give Big Soda the boot and grow healthy communities.

Get the Taking On Big Soda toolkit 

The post Take On Big Soda and Grow Healthy Communities with our New Toolkit appeared first on Real Food Media.

This is a special episode of Real Food Reads, featuring new co-host Tiffani Patton and recorded in front of an audience. Read about the event here. 

The post Unsavory Truth: How Food Companies Skew the Science of What We Eat appeared first on Real Food Media.

Extortion. That’s what people called it—and that’s certainly what it was. Coca-Cola, Pepsi, and other beverage giants just held California hostage and won.

The American Beverage Association, whose largest contributors include those two companies, raised most of the $8 million dollars
backing a November ballot measure that would have required a two-thirds majority vote to pass any local tax increase, including those for public services from parks to firefighters—you name it. As a threat, the backers of the ballot measure said they would
pull it only if legislators signed a bill to ban all local sugary drink taxes in the state until 2031. The pressure was on. One legislator characterized voting for a soda tax ban as a “Sophie’s choice.” Another said he and his colleagues were voting for it “with a gun to our head.”

This all happened fast, but industry deploying a preemption policy, like this one, to thwart democracy is nothing new. Around
the state, organizers who had been working on possible sugary drink tax initiatives woke up Sunday morning, June 24th, to the news of the impending deal. Legislators had until Thursday to vote. By Thursday evening, statewide ballot initiatives would be finalized.

At the legislative hearing on Thursday morning, more than two dozen expressed outrage at Big Soda’s attempt to bully legislators. But the testimony by young people from Stockton, California—a city of more than 300,000 people, 50 miles away from the Capitol—was particularly moving. (The foundation where one of us works had supported some of this organizing work).

“I come to you heartbroken,” said one organizer. Just one of the more than two dozen—including many high school students—who had been working for more than a year and a half to get a soda tax on the ballot in Stockton. They were weeks away from doing so.

“Our goal was to educate our community in order to make a difference,” another said. She described seeing kids—young
kids—affected by sugary drinks, including her own sister who had to have all her teeth pulled at age four because her parents hadn’t known how harmful sugary drinks were.

Like the communities the youth organizers live in, overwhelmingly, communities of color around the country are directly targeted
as consumers by soda companies. Because of this, people of color and low-income communities experience preventable health disparities at a largely disproportionate rate. The soda companies have a strategy. This is not simply an issue of individual choice or
miseducation, it is an issue of predatory marketing and an abundance of access to products that cause harm.

As Big Soda has done with similar preemption policies around the country, the industry spun this bill as a ban on “grocery taxes,” the same tactic used to oppose the passing of sugary beverage taxes on Oakland’s 2016 ballot. Said one young person, “Sodas are not groceries. Groceries are foods you need. You do not need soda.” Another organizer made it clear: “People want to change; they want to be better. We were giving them solutions. The American Beverage Association is taking away our right to offer these solutions. They’re taking away our voices and our right to vote.”

This backroom dealing can sound like a far-fetched political scandal until you hear young people whose lives have been directly
affected by the target marketing of Big Soda and the misinformation spread by it.

Several years ago, Kyle Pfister, a public health advocate, wrote about internal Coca-Cola documents leaked to DCLeaks that revealed the company’s global political strategies to kill what the company
had identified as a major threat: Soda taxes.

This play by Big Soda is a sign they were leaving nothing to chance—certainly not leaving the choice for soda taxes to us voters. Soda corporations are throwing millions of dollars at these preemption policies with two more pending in Oregon and Washington, to protect their bottom line. They, too, see the data: Sugary drink taxes are proving to work. In the places where they have passed, soda consumption has dropped, water consumption is up, and revenue dollars are flowing toward valuable health and education programs particularly to communities most affected by sugary drinks. In Philadelphia, the soda tax is underwriting universal pre-K. In Oakland, the city has collected more than $8 million dollars in tax revenue since July 2017. Here, soda taxes will fund clean water in public schools and parks, support year-round meal service in the City’s head start programming, and support community led activities to educate and create healthy alternatives for those who are impacted by diet-related diseases connected to the overconsumption of sugar.

Preemption policies, like the one just pushed by the American Beverage Association and signed by Governor Brown on Thursday, are a time-tested corporate strategy to make a run-around democracy, prioritizing profits over people’s health. Big Tobacco has used them, so has the gun lobby. With millions of people’s
lives impacted around the country by diabetes, heart disease, and other illnesses linked to sugary drink consumption, it’s time we see Big Soda as we have come to see Big Tobacco: As a major threat to public health and—as we saw this week in California—to democracy as well.

Originally published in the East Bay Express

Photo by NeONBRAND/ Unsplash

The post Big Soda Is The New Big Tobacco appeared first on Real Food Media.

Industrial agriculture and processed food corporations are flooding supermarket shelves with seemingly endless choice. But this abundance of packaged products and sugary drinks is deceiving. In reality, we lack real choice: the choice for fresh, local, and far more nutritious foods.

Around the world, roughly 2 billion people are overweight, consuming too many calories from unhealthy sources driving a global public health crisis. One of the biggest culprits? Sugar and sugary drinks pushed by a handful of big corporations, with Coca-Cola and PepsiCo in the lead. These brands, which many have dubbed Big Soda, spend billions every year on a range of marketing and political tactics—including advertising, lobbying, and free trade agreements—to expand their reach in the United States and around the world.

These tactics are reminiscent of the tobacco industry’s decades-long fight against regulation and public education about the dangers of smoking. Like Big Tobacco, Big Soda has a vested interest in increasing sugary drink consumption despite the tragic and costly public health consequences. Like the tobacco industry, Big Soda markets aggressively, especially to young people and communities of color.

The good news? People power everywhere is taking on Big Soda. Strategies like soda tax campaigns, spearheaded by the communities most affected by health disparities, are spreading and making big wins. As part of a range of community-based strategies to reclaim our food systems, soda taxes have been successful in reducing consumption and generating revenues to support public health.

The resources in this toolkit will help you organize a fun and engaging film-based event, shine a light on Big Soda’s tactics, explore people-powered strategies, and offer ideas to counter Big Soda’s influence in our lives.

Photo by Andy Schultz/Flickr

The post Organizing Toolkit: Taking on Big Soda appeared first on Real Food Media.

We at Real Food Media know that to turn our collective energy into people power, we need to organize. From community gardens to town halls across the country and beyond, nothing is more powerful than people coming together to break bread, share ideas, and create the kind of world we want to see.

Our organizing toolkits offer resources to help you bring your community together, spark impactful conversations, dig deeper, and take action. (Last updated Spring 2019)

If you believe a just, healthy, and environmentally sustainable world is possible: let’s get busy.  

TOOLKIT THEMES:

BUILDING POWER WITH FOOD WORKERS

TACKLING CLIMATE CHANGE THROUGH FOOD

WHAT YOU’LL FIND IN EACH TOOLKIT:

• Curated film reels you can watch or screen for a group on the people, places, and stories at the heart of each theme
• Guiding questions to facilitate reflection and discussion
• Engagement activities to turn your film screening into a community-building, action-oriented event
• Downloadable resources to share with your audience
• Ideas for ways to organize in your own community for food system change
• A glossary explaining key terms used in the toolkit
• Tips for individuals and organizations interested in hosting their own event around these themes

TOOLKITS ARE GEARED TOWARDS:

Individuals

• Who care about good food and want to dig deeper to understand how our food system works (or doesn’t work) and how food can be a starting point for building a better world.

Groups

• Food, health, labor, and climate activists who are eager to organize their communities around concrete campaigns and actions
• Students and educators looking for tools that combine learning with action, inside and outside of the classroom
• Faith-based groups interested in fostering support for healthy, just, and sustainable food systems
• Neighborhood associations and other local organizations looking for ways to strengthen community through informed engagement with food issues
• Offices, unions, and other workplace groups that want to facilitate conversation among co-workers about their place in the food system

Have something else in mind? The sky’s the limit! Toolkits include materials accessible to people from diverse backgrounds and levels of experience. Tell us about your group and let us know if we can help you get organized by contacting info@realfoodmedia.org. 

Header photo: Annette Bernhardt, Oakland Fast Food Strike, December 2014.

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The post Real Food Media in The New York Times: How to Win Against Big Soda appeared first on Real Food Media.

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

The post How to Win Against Big Soda appeared first on Real Food Media.

The sugary drinks tax approved by Cook County—home to one of the nation’s largest cities, Chicago—can move forward, despite Big Soda attempts to block implementation in the courts.

As our colleagues at Healthy Food America said in the wake of the ruling, “We are pleased that Cook County is a step closer to making a real difference in the health of its residents.”

Starting with Mexico’s 2013 approval of a sugary drinks tax and the city of Berkeley’s win in 2014, these taxes are catching on: Cook County joins Philadelphia, Seattle, Oakland, San Francisco, and Albany, California. And the research on tax implementation is showing they work, reducing consumption of sugary drinks and upping consumption of water, while generating much needed revenue.

In 2016, the World Health Organization came out in favor of these taxes, stating: “If governments tax products like sugary drinks, they can reduce suffering and save lives. They can also cut healthcare costs and increase revenues to invest in health services.” Why? Because drinking soda and other sugary beverages is a “major factor in the global increase of people suffering from obesity and diabetes,” explained Dr. Douglas Bettcher of the WHO.

I don’t know about you, but I like the sound of saving lives. You know who doesn’t seem to? Big Soda. Want to know how worried the industry is about these taxes? Check out this leaked document with Coca-Cola Europe’s internal strategy mapping of the policies most threatening to the bottom line.

The industry is fighting back against these taxes, the attempt to block the tax in Cook County is just one example. I saw Big Soda’s bullying tactics up-close-and-personal when my small city of Berkeley, California, launched a campaign for a tax on sugary drinks. The industry was relentless in its misinformation, but despite outspending the community efforts, the industry lost in a landslide.

Today, more than $1 million is being generated from tax revenue each year to support public health and nutrition education efforts across the city, benefiting our most vulnerable neighbors.

Hopefully today’s victory in Cook County will inspire even more communities to explore this powerful tool to help address the epidemic of diet-related illnesses sweeping the country and the world.

Cheers to the over 5 million residents in Chicago and Cook County who will benefit from this win. *clinks glass of non-sugary sweetened beverage*

Anna and the Real Food Media team

The post A Blow to Big Soda in Cook County appeared first on Real Food Media.