Our Junk Food Nation
By Juliet B. Schor and Gary Ruskin
The Nation
August 18, 2005

http://www.alternet.org/envirohealth/24157/

The recent conflict over what America eats is an example of how in
Bush's America, corporate interests trump public health.
Gary Ruskin

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.

Beach Runner wrote:
> Our Junk Food Nation
> By Juliet B. Schor and Gary Ruskin
> The Nation

_The Nation_ is not a science publication, it's a far-out leftist
polemic rag.