Our Junk Food Nation
By Juliet B. Schor and Gary Ruskin, The Nation
Posted on August 18, 2005, Printed on August 19, 2005
http://www.alternet.org/story/24157/
In recent months the major food companies have been trying hard to
convince Americans that they feel the pain of our expanding waistlines,
especially when it comes to kids. Kraft announced it would no longer
market Oreos to younger children, McDonald’s promoted itself as a salad
producer and Coca-Cola said it won’t advertise to kids under 12.
But behind the scenes it’s hardball as usual, with the junk food giants
pushing the Bush Administration to defend their interests. The recent
conflict over what America eats, and the way the government promotes
food, is a disturbing example of how in Bush’s America corporate
interests trump public health, public opinion and plain old common
sense.
The latest salvo in the war on added sugar and fat came July 14- 15,
when the Federal Trade Commission held hearings on childhood obesity
and food marketing. Despite the fanfare, industry had no cause for
concern; FTC chair Deborah Majoras had declared beforehand that the
commission will do absolutely nothing to stop the rising flood of junk
food advertising to children.
In June the Department of Agriculture denied a request from our group
Commercial Alert to enforce existing rules forbidding mealtime sales in
school cafeterias of "foods of minimal nutritional value" — i.e., junk
foods and soda pop. The department admitted that it didn’t know whether
schools are complying with the rules, but, frankly, it doesn’t give a
damn. "At this time, we do not intend to undertake the activities or
measures recommended in your petition," wrote Stanley Garnett, head of
the USDA’s Child Nutrition Division.
Conflict about junk food has intensified since late 2001, when a
Surgeon General’s report called obesity an "epidemic." Since that time,
the White House has repeatedly weighed in on the side of Big Food. It
worked hard to weaken the World Health Organization’s global
anti-obesity strategy and went so far as to question the scientific
basis for "the linking of fruit and vegetable consumption to decreased
risk of obesity and diabetes." Former Health and Human Services
Secretary Tommy Thompson — then our nation’s top public-health officer
– even told members of the Grocery Manufacturers Association to "’go
on the offensive’ against critics blaming the food industry for
obesity," according to a November 12, 2002, GMA news release.
Last year, during the reauthorization of the children’s nutrition
programs, Republican Senator Peter Fitzgerald of Illinois attempted to
insulate the government’s nutrition guidelines from the intense
industry pressure that has warped the process to date. He proposed a
modest amendment to move the guidelines from the USDA to the
comparatively more independent Institute of Medicine. The food
industry, alarmed about the switch, secured a number of meetings at the
White House to get it to exert pressure on Fitzgerald. One irony of
this fight was that the key industry lobbying came from the American
Dietetic Association, described by one Congressional staffer as a
"front for the food groups." Fitzgerald held firm but didn’t succeed in
enacting his amendment before he left Congress last year.
By that time the industry’s lobbying effort had borne fruit, or perhaps
more accurately, unhealthy alternatives to fruit. The new federal
guidelines no longer contain a recommendation for sugar intake,
although they do tell people to eat foods with few added sugars. The
redesigned icon for the guidelines, created by a company that does
extensive work for the junk food industry, shows no food, only a person
climbing stairs.
Growing industry influence is also apparent at the President’s Council
on Physical Fitness. What companies has the government invited to be
partners with the council’s Challenge program? Coca-Cola, Burger King,
General Mills, Pepsico and other blue chip members of the "obesity
lobby."
In January the council’s chair, former NFL star Lynn Swann, took money
to appear at a public relations event for the National Automatic
Merchandising Association, a vending machine trade group activists have
been battling on in-school sales of junk food.
Not a lot of subtlety is required to understand what’s driving
Administration policy. It’s large infusions of cash. In 2004 "Rangers,"
who bundled at least $200,000 each to the Bush/Cheney campaign,
included Barclay Resler, vice president for government and public
affairs at Coca-Cola; Robert Leebern Jr., president of federal affairs
at Troutman Sanders PAG, lobbyist for Coca-Cola; Richard Hohlt of Hohlt
& Co., lobbyist for Altria, which owns about 85 percent of Kraft
foods; and José "Pepe" Fanjul, president, vice chairman and COO of
Florida Crystals Corp., one of the nation’s major sugar producers.
Hundred-thousand-dollar men include Kirk Blalock and Marc Lampkin, both
Coke lobbyists, and Joe Weller, chairman and CEO, Nestle USA. Altria
also gave $250,000 to Bush’s inauguration this year, and Coke and Pepsi
gave $100,000 each. These gifts are in addition to substantial sums
given during the 2000 campaign.
For their money, the industry has been able to buy into a strategy on
obesity and food marketing that mirrors the approach taken by Big
Tobacco. That’s hardly a surprise, given that some of the same
companies and personnel are involved: Junk food giants Kraft and
Nabisco are both majority-owned by tobacco producer Philip Morris, now
renamed Altria. Similarity number one is the denial that the problem
(obesity) is caused by the product (junk food). Instead, lack of
exercise is fingered as the culprit, which is why McDonald’s, Pepsi,
Coke and others have been handing out pedometers, funding fitness
centers and prodding kids to move around.
When the childhood obesity issue first burst on the scene, HHS and the
Centers for Disease Control funded a bizarre ad campaign called Verb,
whose ostensible purpose was to get kids moving. This strategy has been
evident in the halls of Congress as well. During child nutrition
reauthorization hearings, the man some have called the Senator from
Coca-Cola, Georgia’s Zell Miller, parroted industry talking points when
he claimed that children are "obese not because of what they eat at
lunchrooms in schools but because, frankly, they sit around on their
duffs watching Eminem on MTV and playing video games." And that, of
course, is the fault not of food marketers but of parents. Miller’s
office shut down a Senate Agriculture Committee staff discussion of a
ban on soda pop in high schools by refreshing their memories that Coke
is based in Georgia.
A related ploy is to deny the nutritional status of individual food
groups, claiming that there are no "good" or "bad" foods, and that all
that matters is balance. So, for example, when the Administration
attacked the WHO’s global anti-obesity initiative, it criticized what
it called the "unsubstantiated focus on ‘good’ and ‘bad’ foods." Of
course, if fruits and vegetables aren’t healthy, then Coke and chips
aren’t unhealthy. While such a strategy is so preposterous as to be
laughable, it is already having real effects.
Less than a month after Cadbury Schweppes, the candy and soda company,
gave a multimillion-dollar grant to the American Diabetes Association,
the association’s chief medical and scientific officer claimed that
sugar has nothing to do with diabetes, or with weight. Industry has
also bankrolled front groups like the Center for Consumer Freedom, an
increasingly influential Washington outfit that demonizes public-health
advocates as the "food police" and promotes the industry point of view.
Meanwhile, public opinion is solidly behind more restrictions on junk
food marketing aimed at children, especially in schools. A February
Wall Street Journal poll found that 83 percent of American adults
believe "public schools need to do a better job of limiting children’s
access to unhealthy foods like snack foods, sugary soft drinks and fast
food." Two bills recently introduced in Congress, Massachusetts Senator
Ted Kennedy’s Prevention of Childhood Obesity Act and Iowa Senator Tom
Harkin’s Healthy Lifestyles and Prevention (HeLP) America Act, both
place significant restrictions on the ability of junk food producers to
market in schools.
Interestingly, this is a crossover issue between red and blue states.
Concern about obesity and excessive junk food marketing to kids is
shared by people across the political spectrum, and some conservatives,
such as Texas Agriculture Commissioner Susan Combs and the Eagle
Forum’s Phyllis Schlafly, as well as California Governor Arnold
Schwarzenegger, have argued for restricting junk food marketing to
children. This may be one of the reasons New York Senator Hillary
Clinton has once again become vocal on the topic of marketing to
children, although Senator Clinton has called not for government
intervention but merely for industry self-regulation, requesting that
the companies "be more responsible about the effect they are having" –
exactly the policy the industry wants.
A vigorous government response would clearly garner the sympathy of the
majority of Americans. The growing chasm between what the public wants
and the Administration’s protection of the profits of Big Food is a
powerful example of the decline of democracy in this country. Let them
eat chips!
Gary Ruskin is executive director of Commercial Alert. Juliet Schor is
a professor of sociology at Boston College and the author of Born to
Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture.
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