MLK Day reflection: 8 places I love in Georgia's 5th Congressional District

Today, Martin Luther King Day 2017, feels like a good day to list some of my favorite places in Rep. John Lewis' 5th Congressional District in Georgia, from a visit one year ago, in January, 2016, which I will long remember:

1. Emory University, where I learned about local food initiatives at the Wholesome Wave annual summit;
2. the Eastside Trail, where a fun bike ride showed that Atlanta is capable of sustainable alternative transportation, beyond its car-centric reputation, for those who seek it;
3. the Antioch Baptist Church North, full to the rafters with holy music and powerful Word, and totally welcoming to a (white) Christian visitor from out of town and (of all things) his Jewish friends who joined him for the church service out of ecumenical interest;
4. the Center for Civil and Human Rights, which hosts the single most dramatic experiential exhibit I have ever witnessed, in which the visitor sits down at a lunch counter and puts on earphones (and to even say what happens next would be a spoiler);
5. the Atlanta History Center, famous for Civil War memorabilia and the Margaret Mitchell house, but which also was packed with Hispanic visitors on the day I visited, because of a special program for Día de los Reyes Magos.
6. the World of Coca-Cola, a museum dedicated to proving that any product, no matter how empty of nourishment, can be converted by a sufficiently bold and brilliant huckster into the subject of an advertisement so moving that it brings tears to the eyes of the most hardened food policy analyst;
7. the Martin Luther King memorial and gravesite, because even young nations such as ours deserve a pilgrimage destination; and
8. the Amtrak Station, because though I am flying less, our divided country fortunately is still bound together by old rusty infrastructure links that predate our current disregard for the environmental challenges of our times.

I will try to live the next four years with one foot in our democracy's painful contemporary struggles and the other foot planted in the better America that sometimes is hidden in plain sight. This is how I will try simultaneously to do good and enjoy life. Some may slander this good and profoundly American place, but the 5th Congressional District in Georgia has something to teach us. 

Is the Center for Consumer Freedom no longer working on soda?

The Center for Consumer Freedom (CCF) is a classic industry-funded front group, secretive about its funding sources and utterly mercenary in its writing.

I once enjoyed debating soda policy in New York City with J. Justin Wilson from CCF in Episode 1 of a series of roundtables organized by the Museum of Food and Drink.

The Center was on my mind recently, after watching the the excellent 2014 documentary Merchants of Doubt on Netflix. There is a related book by the same title.

The Center's once-lively website now seems moribund. Here is a chart of its number of Headlines posts in the past year. The remaining activity seems focused only on attacking animal welfare organizations, not on other old favorite topics such as defending soda.

The last mention of sugar sweetened beverages that I could find was almost a year ago, covering some trivial beverage industry victory in Howard County, Maryland.

From the topic coverage, we can guess who the CCF's current funders are. Perhaps, with increased scrutiny, other industries have been providing less funding to CCF. One imagines that this organization operates on a strictly "pay to play" basis. It is hard to picture CCF continuing to cover a topic based merely on principle.

Marion Nestle's Soda Politics: Taking on Big Soda (and Winning)

Marion Nestle's new book is Soda Politics: Taking on Big Soda (and Winning) (Oxford University Press, 2015).

The book is thorough, balanced, hard-hitting, and motivating. It covers health effects, industry structure, marketing to adults, marketing to children, marketing overseas, policy responses, and advocacy movements.

The writing is clear, unassuming, and terse.

The coverage of health effects is persuasive. Nestle discusses cutting edge concerns without overstatement or exaggeration (additives and cancer, particular properties of fructose). She more strongly emphasizes the main established links with even-handed and authoritative force (tooth decay, liquid calories, links to overweight and obesity, and type II diabetes).

Nestle avoids many possible pitfalls in such a book. Though she quotes industry propaganda that paints her as a shrill critic of the modern food system, her own writing shows her to be a careful listener and reader of diverse perspectives. She calls out what is wrong, yet never demonizes opponents. Her chapter on Derek Yach, one-time World Health Organization public health champion and later PepsiCo vice president, is insightful and understanding.

Some radical authors of critical books on a particular industry seem ready not just to reform that industry, but perhaps to do away with all other such industries. One gets the sense that the author is using one industry as a vehicle for more broadly condemning the modern global capitalist economy, but the implied alternative remains blurry.

Other more mainstream authors of critical books find themselves lost for something sensible and upbeat to say in the final chapter. I most dislike it when these final chapters resort to empty hopes that well-meaning people in the industry will just see the light and change their ways.

With Nestle, instead, the reader can picture just what would happen if her book becomes influential: leading health organizations would wean themselves from soda industry money, public opinion would become more demanding, state and local advocates would win new policies on marketing, taxation, and school environments, soda consumption would follow tobacco's downward path, and the United States would enjoy lower rates of obesity and chronic disease.

This will mostly happen because of actions outside of the soda companies.

Like businesses in general, food businesses -- even the most socially conscious -- must put profits first. To be effective, advocates must understand that soda and other food corporations are willing to spend fortunes to influence political processes. Without anywhere near that kind of funding, it becomes necessary to find smarter methods for using the political process to counter soda industry marketing.

Nestle delivers a steady stream of advocacy-related diagnosis and suggestions in short well-organized paragraphs at the end of chapters throughout the book. The final chapter then seamlessly provides conclusions that feel consistent with the whole work.

The book is above all informative. For those readers who share Nestle's critical perspective on the food industry, it is obvious that this book would be informative. But here is the greater surprise: this solid book is by far the best source on this topic for any reader, with any perspective on economics or politics.

If I worked for a trade association, or an industry front group, or an esteemed professional association that relies on soda industry funding, or the House Agriculture Committee, or a sugar manufacturer, or a high-powered corporate law firm, I might store this book in my desk drawer rather than my book shelf ... yet I would read it word for word.

Independent analysis of the Healthy Weight Commitment Foundation trillion calorie pledge

An independent evaluation reported today that the Healthy Weight Commitment Foundation succeeded in removing more than a trillion calories from the U.S. food supply, as originally pledged.

Through this pledge, leading food and beverage manufacturers had promised to reduce total food energy sold by 1 trillion calories, from a 2007 baseline through 2012.

Using Nielsen scanner data from supermarket electronic cash registers and from a random sample of consumer households, Shu Wen Ng, Meghan M. Slining, and Barry M. Popkin estimated calorie trends and reported the results today in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

To some extent, the accomplishment simply reflects downward trends in the packaged food and beverage sector, which is losing market share over time -- mostly to the restaurant industry but perhaps partly to healthier food options. In an accompanying editorial in the same journal, Dariush Mozaffarian asks whether the pledge is a "marketing ploy."

As a rule, nutritional targets -- and other quantitative information intended for general audiences -- should be stated in easily explained per-capita terms. Who knows what a trillion calories in aggregate even means?

It reminds me of silly infographics that take a common-sense concept and convert it to some obscure immense quantity. For example, in my in-box this month, I have an infographic from Guiding Stars, which aims to report the amount of running required to burn off the average American's sugar consumption. Sugar is estimated at 3 pounds per week (a sensible way of explaining the quantity), while the amount of running is stated as 2.7 times around the globe over a lifetime (an irrelevant quantity designed merely to appear large to easily-impressed readers).

Today's study by Ng, Slining, and Popkin nicely goes beyond its assessment of the original trillion calorie pledge and also reports the modest but non-negligible resulting calorie changes on a per-capita basis. To the extent that the results reflect improvements in particular categories, such as sugar sweetened beverages, the findings are still reasonably upbeat.

The Healthy Weight Commitment Foundation -- and the companies that made pledges -- will be delighted by today's coverage in major media outlets such as U.S. News and World Report, which states the good news broadly: "Obesity continues to plague the country, but it appears as though food companies are beginning to take strides in helping alleviate the problem."

Kellogg announces new climate change commitments

The Kellogg Company today unveiled new commitments to address actions by itself and its suppliers that affect climate change. General Mills on July 28 had announced similar initiatives.

From Kellogg's statement (.pdf) today:

As stated in our Kellogg Global Supplier Code of Conduct, we expect suppliers to support our corporate responsibility commitments by implementing sustainable operating and farming practices, and agricultural production systems. Suppliers must strive to reduce or optimize agricultural inputs; reduce greenhouse gas emissions, energy and water use; and minimize water pollution and waste, including food waste and landfill usage.

The anti-hunger organization Oxfam International had been encouraging leading food manufacturers to make such commitments. Oxfam's recent report, Standing on the Sidelines, had argued that food and beverage companies need to do more. Today, Oxfam praised Kellogg's announcement:

“We welcome Kellogg’s efforts to become an industry leader in the fight against climate change and the damage it is causing to people everywhere,” said Monique van Zijl, campaign manager for Oxfam’s Behind the Brands campaign. “Kellogg’s new commitments add momentum to calls on governments and the wider food and agriculture industry to recognize that climate change is real, it’s happening now, and we need to tackle it.”

In the announcement today, Kellogg says it will set targets for greenhouse gas reductions, produce a climate change adaptation strategy, take steps to limit deforestation impacts in its supply chains, and commit to disclosure of key climate change information. Oxfam said Kellogg plans to participate in the Business for Innovative Climate and Energy Policy (BICEP) group and sign the Climate Declaration.

How grains and oilseeds flow through the U.S. food economy

The U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) recently (in December 2013) announced the once-every-five-years release of benchmark national input-output accounts, showing how resources flow from one industry to the next in the U.S. economy.

For people interested in the economics of the food system, some graduate students and colleagues and I last year developed a tool in Tufts' Visual Understanding Environment (VUE) for interactively illustrating such input-output flows. A working paper (#44) describes the tool. A previous blog post shows an example. The visualization tag at this blog collects other posts about interesting food policy data illustrations.

In this video, I use the new BEA benchmark input-output data to describe how grain and oilseeds flow through the food economy. Before making the video, I rounded the numbers to the nearest billion dollars and deleted some negligible small resource flows, so serious students of these data will want to refer to the original files from BEA. Because the numbers likely will be illegible in the video player embedded in the blog post, I've included a link to the original video, which you can download and play with higher resolution on your computer's own video program (such as Windows Media Player or the Mac equivalent).

Report and audit from the Fair Food Standards Council

The Fair Food Standards Council this week published its first report and audit from the Fair Food Program.

This report explains the operations, monitoring, and auditing of the agreements that the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) has reached with selected major food manufacturers, restaurant chains, and food retailers.  Through these agreements, farm workers are able to protect their rights and earn a wage premium for part of their work (for example, they may earn a bonus per bucket on tomato harvest).  The report includes inspiring accounts of the difference these agreements can make, on issues ranging from getting paid for the full amount of time on worksite to protecting women from risk of rape by a crew boss. 

Previous posts on this blog describe my visits to the CIW in Florida in 2009 and 2012, which have affected how I think and teach about labor issues in the U.S. food system.  Barry Estabrook includes an engaging account of these labor issues in Tomatoland.

The new report on the Fair Food Program includes more detail than I have previously seen about how the fair food premiums are recorded, distributed, and audited.  I had been wanting to read about these audits, which increase my confidence in the pass-through mechanism for the premium -- the brand-name companies must pay tomato grower enterprises, which must pass along the correct amount to the workers (minus a specified deduction for the paper-work and transactions costs).  The CIW is able to reach such agreements with brand-name food and restaurant companies (which have a public reputation to protect), while it would have been more difficult to win agreement on a premium directly from the growers (who operate in a cut-throat competitive market).  I found it illuminating to see an exhibit with a photograph of an actual pay stub recording the premium.  Understanding this slightly convoluted system better, it is easier to think of it as a feasible business model worth expanding to other areas of U.S. farm labor.

Food Tank recommends books for fall 2013

Danielle Nierenberg and Anna Glasser at Food Tank this week listed Food Policy in the United States: An Introduction as a "must read" book for fall 2013.

Food Tank: The Food Think Tank was founded by Nierenberg (a graduate of the Friedman School at Tufts) and Ellen Gustafson. This video lays out the initiative's objectives.
 

The 10th Anniversary Edition of Marion Nestle's Food Politics

For people in the nutrition world who care about public policy, Marion Nestle's 2002 book Food Politics is the single most useful source there is.

I thought about several other important sources before making that statement.  The federal government's dietary guidance may be authoritative, but it is tamed and diluted in ways that Nestle explains precisely.  Eric Schlosser covers labor issues passionately, Michael Pollan addresses the techno-skeptical mood of the local food movement, and Wendell Berry is poetic, but Nestle is the steadiest and most solid critic of the modern food industry and its nutritional shortcomings.

A highlight of Nestle's revised and expanded 10th Anniversary Edition of Food Politics is the new 50-page Afterword.  It brings the book up to date by covering MyPlate, Let's Move, front-of-pack labeling, children's advertising initiatives, school meals reforms, and soda taxes.  I will certainly add it to my course syllabus.

In some ways, these topics in the Afterword are new.  In other ways, they are minor variations on themes that already were central in the earlier 2002 edition.  These themes usually involve the food industry's success in resisting and reversing proposed improvements in food and nutrition policy.  Nestle insists that she remains optimistic, but the reason she gives has little to do with the nutrition policy initiatives she covers at greatest length, and more to do with the grassroots food movement that has grown up in response to dissatisfaction with the status quo:

I am often asked how I remain optimistic in light of the food industry's power to control and corrupt government.  That's easy: the food movement.  Everywhere I look, I see positive signs of change.

Though Nestle doesn't give up hope, re-reading this book ten years later tempts me to give up more profoundly on the "politics" in Food Politics.  Not yet, but maybe some day.

Michael Moss: Salt, Sugar, Fat

New York Times reporter Michael Moss's book released this year is Salt, Sugar, Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us.

The book has some older themes and some newer distinctive contributions.  The basic indictment of highly palatable processed food is familiar to readers of Michael Pollan, Marion Nestle, Eric Schlosser, and David Kessler, and to viewers of movies such as Supersize Me and Food, Inc.  The novelty and strength of Moss's new book is the persuasive on-the-record interviews with food industry executives and scientists as they try to understand the consequences of their products and even to make improvements.

I ended up with two competing impressions.  First, I felt sympathetic to the industry scientists and executives, several of whom really would have preferred to sell better products, but who were defeated by competitive pressures.  Second, it seemed that the industry people themselves are usually naive about the possibility of making substantial improvements on a company-by-company voluntary basis.  I say "usually" naive, because I think deep down they know their efforts are partly for show, and at key junctures the industry scientists and executives are forced to be blunt about the real situation.

I have seen this pattern in my own conversations with food industry scientists and executives.  In nine sentences out of ten, they will express great optimism that their company can make healthy changes in its product mix.  Then, in the tenth sentence, especially if pressed with a hard question about whether the proposed changes are sufficiently ambitious to make a real difference, they will say, "Oh, well, don't be unrealistic.  You can't expect THAT from us in the real world of competition."

An article-length version of the book was published in the New York Times Magazine.  The Grocery Manufacturers Association released a statement treating Moss's book as an "obesity book" with an unfair axe to grind: "Michael Moss’s work misrepresents the strong commitment America’s food and beverage companies have to providing consumers with the products, tools and information they need to achieve and maintain a healthy diet and active lifestyle."  But this statement misses a key theme of Moss's book, which focuses above all on the quixotic efforts of industry scientists and executives to make improvements.

Reuters: Washington soft on childhood obesity

From yesterday's long report by Duff Wilson and Janet Roberts at Reuters:

At every level of government, the food and beverage industries won fight after fight during the last decade. They have never lost a significant political battle in the United States despite mounting scientific evidence of the role of unhealthy food and children's marketing in obesity.

Lobbying records analyzed by Reuters reveal that the industries more than doubled their spending in Washington during the past three years. In the process, they largely dominated policymaking -- pledging voluntary action while defeating government proposals aimed at changing the nation's diet, dozens of interviews show.

Oxfam partners with Coca-Cola to study the company's poverty footprint in Zambia and El Salvador

Oxfam America in March released a report analyzing the poverty footprint of beverage giant Coca-Cola and multinational bottling company SABMiller in Zambia and El Salvador.  The report was jointly authored by the three organizations.

Marion Nestle gave Oxfam a hard time about this report: "I can only guess that Coca-Cola’s grant to Oxfam must have been substantial."  In a comment on Marion's blog, Chris Jochnick from Oxfam explained that Coca-Cola had contributed $400,000 to the research project, and -- separately from this research project -- had given Oxfam $2.5 million in 2008-2010 for humanitarian work.

Altogether, I feel the Oxfam project contributed to the companies' public relations messaging, overstated the companies' beneficial contribution to local economies, under-emphasized the health concerns about their impact, and did not adequately preserve Oxfam's own independence in the cooperative analysis.

Oxfam America is truly my favorite humanitarian assistance organization -- because of sensible economic and policy commentary combined with good works on the ground -- so I hope my blog post on this particular report gets a thoughtful reading from Oxfam staff. In particular, I have no complaint about Oxfam's vision for the private sector role in economic development. Yet, I did not like this report.

Poverty footprint

First, the report appeared to credit the companies with contributing more than $100 million in economic activity to the local economy, generating millions of dollars in tax revenue for local governments and creating many thousands of jobs.  However, after reading the report closely and asking Oxfam staff some questions about it, I think readers should be careful not to think of those dollars and jobs as a real impact of Coca-Cola's presence.

The report itself has a bold statement of its analytic goals: 

Oxfam is developing the Poverty Footprint Methodology as a means to understand the full range of impacts multinational corporations have on poor communities, and to provide a platform for engagement around those impacts.

The report's most important quantitative results imply the companies have a large and beneficial macroeconomic impact:

An examination of the Coca-Cola/SABMiller value chain’s macroeconomic impacts reveals that its Gross Value Added (GVA) in 2008 was approximately $21 million in Zambia and $83 million in El Salvador.  In addition, the Coca-Cola/SABMiller value chain supported an estimate of more than 3,741 formal and informal jobs in Zambia and 4,244 formal jobs in El Salvador.

However, these numbers are not a correct estimate of the companies' "footprint" or impact on local economic activity, tax collections, and jobs.  If Coca-Cola did not exist, or were not allowed into Zambia and El Salvador, two things would be different from the current situation: (a) other beverage companies, including local companies, would sell more product, and (b) other beverages, including traditional beverages and water, would provide a larger share of the consumer's hydration needs.

If other beverage companies took up the slack, much of the economic activity and tax payments and job creation would have happened anyway.  It would be interesting to know how much profit Coca-Cola takes out of the local economy and returns to international shareholders in the United States and Europe.  At times, the Oxfam report appeared to be addressing the issue, but it didn't really.  Buried deep in the report, footnote 22 on p. 84 acknowledged: "The Coca-Cola Company’s profit information was not shared with the research team." 

I asked Oxfam if the analysis compared the situation with Coca-Cola to a situation without Coca-Cola, which is the relevant comparison for assessing "impact."  Helen Dasilva of Oxfam replied, "The objective was not to compare an economy with the system to an economy without."  The result is to give the companies credit for big dollar impacts that overstate their real contribution to job creation and the economy.  This is an analytic approach that one commonly sees when a county or State or industry boasts about the importance of its local economic activity, but this is not an approach that an independent analysis should take in assessing a multinational company's impact in a developing country.

Sugar-sweetened beverages and obesity

Second, the report included no critical discussion of expanded consumption of sugar sweetened beverages, displacement of traditional foods and beverages in the diet, and rising rates of overweight and obesity in developing countries.

When I asked Oxfam about this, Dasilva responded:

The focus of this project was not to study or address the issues surrounding obesity, nor did we conduct an analysis of the impact of Coca-Cola products on overall nutrition or health. That was a result of our limited bandwidth.

Dasilva agreed to forward some of my questions to Coca-Cola, which would not answer specific questions about the growth of sales of sugar-sweetened beverages in Zambia and El Salvador.  In particular, because a large fraction of the population in developing countries is children, I asked about growth in sales to children.  Coca-Cola's answer was clever:

We have a global Responsible Marketing Policy that covers all our beverages, and we do not market any products directly to children under 12. This means we will not buy advertising directly targeted at audiences that are more than 35% children under 12. Our policy applies to television, radio, and print, and, where data is available, to the Internet and mobile phones. Because of this policy we do not track sales to children under age 12 as it is against our global policy to directly target this age group with any marketing for our beverages.

I think of the advertising policy as a secondary issue. The real question is how much full-sugar Coke is the company selling to children. I don't believe a policy about advertising is sufficient reason to dodge a question that was not about advertising, but rather was about sales.  This is a tough question that Oxfam should have asked Coke but didn't.

Oxfam's independence from Coca-Cola messaging

Third, because of the joint authorship, it is impossible to tell what parts of the report are Coca-Cola writing, and what parts are Oxfam writing.

I asked Oxfam if this joint authorship caused the organization to make compromises in the language it would have used in a report that it authored independently.  Dasilva responded:

Bringing two significant multinationals and a global development organization together to agree on language in any report will be challenging. This report was no different and the result isn’t perfect. While it is safe to assume our varied cultures, missions and ways of working led to differences of opinion, it would be tough to pinpoint specific language differences given how many comments from all sides went into the final document.

I appreciate Dasilva's frank answer.  An Oxfam-authored report would have been quite different from this jointly authored report.  I look forward to reading the Oxfam-authored version some day.

Joseph Gallo Farms

As you travel through the food producing regions of the United States, every farm and food manufacturing business has its own story.  Yet, in the most intensive food producing regions of California, some of these stories seem to have a particularly epic scale, appropriate to the setting.

The story of  Joseph Gallo Farms is like a bottled up distillation of every manner of U.S. food policy issue.

The other week, while visiting the Salinas Valley to learn about the environmental challenges of concentrated animal agriculture in close proximity to large-scale vegetable production, I took these roadside photographs of one of the large-scale Joseph Gallo Farms dairies.

Joseph Gallo Farms produces Joseph Farms California Natural Cheeses.

You may ask, why does this dairy company not produce "Joseph Gallo Farms" cheeses?  Why drop the last name?  Well, now, there indeed is a story.

Joseph Gallo was the younger sibling of Ernest and Julio Gallo, who founded the largest exporter of California wines and one of the wine industry's most famous brands.  To protect the wine brand, Ernest and Julio successfully sued their younger brother to prevent him from using the Gallo name on cheeses at the retail level.

The judge who authored the 1992 court decision clearly got caught up in the operatic narrative and let loose his inner novelist.  Here is just one early section.  If this blog post were a movie, the screen would fade on the current decade and you would see an antique automobile puttering along a dusty dirt California road in the early 1900s.

This lawsuit arises out of a tortuous family history apparently involving sibling rivalry on a grand scale. Because Joseph's counterclaims concern his parents' estates, the relevant facts date back nearly a century.

I. The Rise of the Gallo Family, the Establishment of the Winery, and Ernest and Julio's Guardianship of Joseph

The individual parties to the action, Ernest, Julio, and Joseph, are the children of Joseph Gallo ("Joseph Sr.") and Assunto ("Susie") Bianco, immigrants to Northern California from Italy in the early 1900s. Joseph Sr. and Susie married in 1908. Ernest was born in 1909, Julio in 1910, and Joseph in 1919. Following their marriage until the advent of Prohibition in 1919, Joseph Sr. and Susie operated various boarding-houses and saloons, in connection with which they served and sold wine purchased from other California wine dealers. Evidently they stenciled the family name GALLO on the ends of the wine kegs, although they did not make the wine themselves. Throughout the 1920's, the family purchased a series of vineyards, where they grew their own wine grapes, bought wine grapes from other local growers, and shipped the grapes to the midwest and the east coast, where customers made wine with them for their home use under an exception to Prohibition. Ernest and Julio became involved in this shipping business during the mid- to late-1920s. While Joseph Sr. did have a brush with the law for bootlegging during Prohibition, there is no other evidence that he and Susie sold wine after 1919.

The Great Depression caused the grape business to suffer. Prices dropped; the 1932 season was a financial disaster for Joseph Sr. and Susie. On June 21, 1933, Joseph Sr. took Susie's life and his own.

The court decision goes on to recount that Joseph was raised by his brothers as guardians, his part of the inheritance was used as an early source of capital for Gallo Wines, he sued his brothers and was repaid, and, many years later, they prevented him from using his full name as the brand name for his cheeses.

A layperson may be astonished that Joseph Gallo could not use his own real name as his brand. But, several key features of this particular dispute favored the older brothers. The Gallo wine brand is a "strong" and widely known brand. Because wine and cheese are consumed together, and it is plausible that a wine company could sell cheese, a consumer might really be confused about the connection between the cheese brand and the wine company. Consumer research showed that a written label disclaimer did not suffice to clear up the confusion.

If you buy Joseph Farms California Natural Cheeses in your grocery score, there is more history to that food label than you might otherwise know.

Sam Fromartz on small-scale slaughterhouses

Sam Fromartz, keeper of the blog Chews Wise and author of the book Organic Inc., has a fascinating piece in today's Washington Post about small-scale slaughterhouses.

Meat processing is one of the most concentrated sectors of the entire food system. Fromartz describes the efforts of one Joe Cloud in Harrisonburg, VA, to break into the business.

Cloud is riding a wave of consumer demand for meat from local farms, which has burgeoned along with the rash of deadly E. coli food poisoning incidents, hamburger recalls and undercover videos about grossly inhumane practices at a few large plants. Prominent chefs, who work with farmers and processors like T&E to get high-quality meat, have also championed the products.

For farmers, the sales are alluring; they make more money per animal when they sell direct, even if these channels represent less than 2 percent of all meat sales. It's also a way to escape the conventional system of meat production, since Virginia cattle typically are raised in-state for a year before being shipped to feedlots in Nebraska, Kansas and Texas to be fattened up and slaughtered -- and then shipped back as meat.

"Every step of the journey, someone has their hand in your pocket," said Jeff Lawson, who raises cattle and sheep at Green Hill Farm in Churchville, Va., a few miles outside Staunton. "If I could sell every animal I raised through Joe Cloud to get to your dinner table, I would. Any farmer would."

Forbes sells the next best thing to snake oil

Forbes Magazine this month named Monsanto as "Company of the Year."

Monsanto's business model employs the company's monopoly on several lines of genetically modified crop seeds to extract an unusually large fraction of the producer surplus earned by corn and soybean farmers. The seeds grow corn and soybean plants, which have pesticidal properties or which can tolerate especially large applications of the chemical pesticide glyphosate (Roundup). Roundup, of course, is sold by Monsanto.

That business model is profitable, but it does not usually win praise from others. So, Monsanto's public relations folks spend endless hours promoting products that have not yet been marketed successfully, which some day may end world hunger, repair the environment, or reverse obesity and chronic disease.

Forbes credulously repeats these promises about future products as if they were already here, while burying its more skeptical coverage of Monsanto's main business lines.

The article focuses first of all on Monsanto's efforts to provide omega-3 fatty acids through genetically modified soybeans. These fatty acids are found naturally in fish oils. Citing a not-yet-refereed paper from a recent scientific conference, Forbes gushes: "Wouldn't that be a wonderful product to have for sale? Stops heart disease--and protects the environment, too. People could get their nutritional supplements without depleting fish stocks."

Stops heart disease? For starters, let us look for the statement on omega-3 fatty acids in the Food and Drug Administration's page about health claims that have significant scientific agreement. No wait, omega-3 and fish oil claims are not there, because the evidence is too weak. So, let us look on FDA's page about second-tier "qualified" health claims that have mixed scientific evidence, and which are permitted only because the Supreme Court restricted FDA's ability to regulate claims that might perhaps maybe come true. Here, we find that fish oil merits a qualified health claim. If Monsanto made this claim on a label, the company would have to state the claim's evidence base in "supportive but not conclusive research." Instead of such frankness, wouldn't it be nice for Monsanto if it could instead convince Forbes to carry the message that the product will "stop heart disease."

Even if you believe the fish oil health claim, which many people do, Monsanto's genetically modified technological marvel would achieve the same outcome that you already have available in a common dietary supplement.

Forbes' adoration of Monsanto is not the unanimous view of the business media. Here is Jim Cramer's more insightful summary last Fall of Monsanto's business and policy risks. I use this video in my teaching, in a class session on imperfect competition in the food industry.

10 foods approved by the new Smart Choices program

This week the New York Times wrote an article criticizing the new industry sponsored Smart Choices program which aims to help "strapped for time" consumers make fast choices by way of a front-of-the-label logo. From the Smart Choices website:

The Smart Choices Program™ was created by a diverse group of scientists, nutritionists and food industry leaders, to harmonize existing front-of-pack nutrition labeling icons, symbols and systems. The intent is to provide a single, simple message for the consumer - regardless of which brands they buy or stores they shop in. Our vision is that the Smart Choices Program will be the most widely-used front-of-pack nutrition labeling program in the U.S. across retail channels and brands.

The Smart Choices Program provides a front-of-pack symbol and calorie indicator that helps consumers make smarter choices for products in 19 categories, including: cereals, meats, fruits, vegetables, dairy and snacks.

The categories also include: snack foods and sweets, desserts, water (plain and carbonated), and fats, oils and spreads.

Here are 10 foods approved by the labeling scheme:

10. Breyers Smooth & Dreamy Fat Free Ice Cream (Chocolate Fudge Brownie)- Unilever

9. Frosted Flakes Cereal (Original)- Kellogg

8. Cocoa Puffs Cereal- General Mills

7. Keebler Cookie Crunch (Original)- Kellogg

6. Country Crock (Churn Style)- Unilever

5. BAGEL-FULS Bagel with Cherry Filling & Cream Cheese (Cherry & Cream Cheese) -Kraft Foods

4. Healthy Choice French Bread Pizza (Simple Selections Pepperoni French Bread Pizza)- Conagra

3. Kid Cuisine- (All Star Chicken Nuggets, Campfire Hotdog, Carnival Corn Dog, Constructor Cheeseburger, Magical Cheese Stuffed Crust Cheese Pizza, BBQ Shake - Ups)- Conagra

2. Lunchables- Fun Pack (Chicken Dunks, Turkey and Cheddar Sub, Cheese Pizza)- Kraft

1. Betty Crocker Fruit Roll-Ups Crazy Pix (Cool Chix® Berry Wave)- General Mills

Reviews of Food, Inc.

Responding to Marc Gunther's review, "Food Inc: tasty but unsatisfying":

Enjoyed your review, but took Food, Inc. more favorably on several key points. It’s not surprising that you have trouble distinguishing the real merits behind the save-the-world green marketing of Coke, Pepsi, Cheerios, and Post. The movie did well to raise questions about even the most green brands like Stonyfield. The real contrast it draws is between conventional and local and organic food.

I understand the question about whether the world can produce enough food, but I have a pair of standards for those who raise this concern: (a) Did they acknowledge that advanced non-GMO technologies are immensely productive and that GMOs make only a modest further improvement?, and (b) did they discuss the inefficiency of historically unprecedented per capita grain-fed meat and dairy in the same paragraph as their concern about non-GMO technology? Without these points, the repeated mantra “But how can we feed the world” risks misdirection.

Food, Inc.

Robert Kenner's new documentary, Food, Inc., hits hard by picking its fights carefully.

It could have criticized biotechnology broadly, winning a mix of agreement and disagreement from scientists, activists, and farmers in the audience. Instead, the movie nails its indictment of Monsanto's lawsuits against farmers and local seed processors. It skewers the patent laws that give a chemical company control of 90% of the U.S. soybean crop. "Monsanto did not agree to be interviewed." Whether scientist, activist, or farmer, pretty much everybody in the audience has to be outraged.

It could have promoted a vegetarian or animal rights case against modern meat production, again winning a mix of agreement and disagreement from a diverse audience. Instead, the movie tears into the economic abuse of contract farmers and slaughterhouse workers, while letting the powerful visuals of a high-tech poultry factory, a beef slaughterhouse, and industrial chicken farming operations deliver any additional lessons that the viewer wants to entertain and receive. "Smithfield did not agree to be interviewed." Whether low-wage worker or high-income gourmet, farmer or city person, anybody in the audience is compelled to at least acknowledge the filmmaker's viewpoint.

It could have sounded the alarm about any number of food safety concerns, some of which divide public health officials from the good food movement believers. Instead, it chose microbial contamination in meat, an issue that is entirely mainstream. The story of two-year-old Kevin Kowalcyk, who died from eating a hamburger, leaves the audience with little room for computations of nontrivial risk levels that we should just accept without complaint in the name of economic efficiency and low meat prices.

A running theme discussed how different sectors of the food industry try to keep information from consumers. "Tyson refused to be interviewed." The third or fourth such refusal finally generated a chuckle from the audience. A clip of an industry official trying lamely to explain why cloned meat could not be labeled, because consumers cannot be trusted to interpret this information favorably, is infuriating.

In a Twitter conversation yesterday, before I saw the film last night, Kenner suggested the politics of information as a key focus for a viewer.

@usfoodpolicy: Looking forward to #foodinc tonight in MA. What scene will be most surprising to a farmer in the audience? nutrition prof? ag economist?

@RobertKenner: that we are not allowed to know what is in our food, we r denied info to know what we are eating, laws make it hard

That would be my recommendation to you also, as you see the film. Is it true, as some of the ag folks in the Twitter conversation claimed, that consumers are willfully or foolishly ignorant of the facts of food production? Or, are the consumers sovereign, here, while the food industry is trying to keep them in the dark about what is really going on in the kingdom?

The film is highly indebted to participants Michael Pollan, Eric Schlosser, Joel Salatin and a number of people who have written about the biotechnology industry. If you have already read those writers, don't expect new information, but you may enjoy the film anyway.


Update: I enjoyed Nicholas Kristof's review and blog post.

New advocacy coalition backs national menu labeling

The National Restaurant Association today announced support for national calorie labeling in chain restaurants.

The proposed legislation (.pdf), the Labeling Education and Nutrition Act of 2008 (LEAN Act), "will provide a national nutrition labeling standard for foodservice establishments with 20 or more locations."

The Center for Science in the Public Interest, a public interest group that has long supported restaurant nutrition labeling, joined with the restaurant trade association in supporting the bill. CSPI director Michael Jacobson has a related blog post at the Huffington Post.

Why would the restaurant industry, which has in the past strongly opposed such policies, now lend its support? There are several reasons. First, the bill is a compromise bill, providing the restaurant chains with some of their key policy priorities, including preserving a good deal of flexibility in deciding how to present the information and protection from what the restaurants describe as "frivolous" lawsuits. Second, the industry is facing the hard facts that menu labeling policies are succeeding at the state and local level around the country. As with other important nutrition labeling policies in the past, such as the current nutrition facts panel on packaged food, an important sector of the food industry chose to support a new government policy in return for more consistent and less burdensome regulation across jurisdictions.

Swine-flu update

A recent outpour of criticism of Tom Philpott's post connecting the swine flu outbreak with Granjas Carroll (a subsidiary of Smithfield Foods) has been stirring. Critics point out the news, which was linked to the Mexican newspaper La Marcha is not substantiated by facts and is speculative hearsay from the people of La Gloria. As 'Enviroperk' commented on Grist:

I am still looking for something stronger than "the residents believe" or stitching together a series of Google hits into a conclusion.

I think we all are, but I don't think it refutes the fact that something is not right in La Gloria and whether confirmed or not, the people of La Gloria are using the outbreak as a cry for help.

Enlace Veracruz212, a 'periodic analysis and investigation' blog in Mexico, recently posted a story that paints a grim story of what happens to a community when corporately owned factory moves in: environmental destruction and human rights violations in the name of job creation. The pictures the author included are not for the light of heart. Loosely translated:

The waters of "Carroll" cause pestilence gullies (that) seep into the ground. We do not know if (for) 600 jobs created by the Americans (Smithfield), the government.... is willing to poison 30 thousand of its citizens.

Among the arrest warrants(of dissenters),was Ms. María Verónica Hernández Arguello, identified as the main "harassment of the public" and other brave citizens of various communities of the Valley of Peroteand Journalists who were there to report the pollution caused by "Carroll of Mexico." And the governor promotes advocacy for journalists?

From Stephen Foley at the Independent:

A team of UN veterinarians is arriving in Mexico to examine whether this new deadly strain of swine flu, mixed as it is with genetic material from avian and human strains, could be lurking in pig populations undetected. Smithfield says none of its pigs are sick but the company has sent samples for testing.

"What happened in La Gloria was an unfortunate coincidence with a big and serious problem that is happening now with this new flu virus," he said. La Gloria residents, though, have been protesting against the farm for months.

Starting in February, one in six of the 3,000 residents reported health problems. The government initially dismissed the spike as a late-season rise in ordinary flu, but by April, health officials sealed off the town and sprayed chemicals to kill the flies that residents said were swarming about their homes.

I have read many responses that this is not a food issue. Really? This is absolutely a food issue. The practices implemented to feed the high protein appetites of the West (and growing world) are unsustainable and destructive at the expense of the developing world. Sure pork may be 'safe to eat,' but does that make it 'okay' to eat? Given the known (and now mounting) information of the destructive nature of CAFO's (Confined Animal Feeding Operations) to human health, water, soil, rural communities and the animals themselves, at what point will we draw the line? This is THE food issue.

One of the best responses I have seen is "Why the Smithfield-H1N1 question matters" again from Paula at Peak Oil Entrepreneur.

Chief executive Larry Pope responded to the link between swine flu and the safety consuming pork:

We are very comfortable that our pork is safe. This is not a swine issue. This is a human-to-human issue.

Although speaking specifically on the issue of safety, I think Mr. Pope should revisit his last comment. This is a human to human issue, between Smithfield Foods and the people of La Gloria.

Tom Philpott has since posted a follow up to his original post: Symptom: swine flu. Diagnosis: industrial agriculture?