Calories on fast food menu boards

New York City's rule requiring calorie counts on fast food menu boards may turn out to be more important than the city's new ban on most trans fats in restaurants, which originally received more media coverage (see earlier post).

Currently, the restaurant industry is battling to convince the courts that calorie counts on menu boards are infeasible. To the rest of the industry's embarrassment, Subway's proposed menu board showed that the calorie column is feasible and unobjectionable, from the perspective of a fast food restaurant with little to hide.


Dunkin Donuts tried to show that the calorie label would require unreasonably small print,...


... which prompted New York City's Health Department to have its own artist show how easily Dunkin Donuts could have succeeded if it had wanted.


For the latest news, see the posts on the Consumerist (1) (2) and the brief filed yesterday by the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), with signatures from some of the most prestigious health policy organizations and scientists in the country.

The internet and food policy advocacy

In yesterday's Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Bob Condor offered U.S. Food Policy's coverage of Country of Origin Labeling (COOL) as an example of using the internet to organize communities in support of public interest food policy positions. Condor's jumping off point was a description of the Chicago-based public interest marketing organization Sustain, which supports family and organic farming in the Midwest:

There are many perspectives about whether the Internet is dividing us or uniting people and communities.

Food activists tend to fall on the side of communitybuilding.

"It used to take days or even weeks to get the word out about an issue or rally," one organic food activist told me several years ago. "Our new weapon is e-mail. We can mobilize people in hours now. It's powerful -- and, believe me, we need it."

That activist, Chicagobased Jim Slama, and his green public relations and marketing firm, Sustain (sustainusa.org), were central figures in convincing U.S. consumers to send more than 275,000 e-mails and postings to the Department of Agriculture in 2000 to take exception to the proposed National Organic Standards.

Before then, organic certification was more in the hands of food activists who wanted to discourage the use of pesticides and other chemicals in plants. The private National Organic Standards Board was adamant that the proposed rules would allow irradiated and/or genetically engineered foods to qualify as organic, plus sewage sludge would be acceptable for watering any "organic"-label food.

Yuck.

But those 275,000 comments worked, thanks in large part to Slama and other activists spreading the word about an extended public comment period. The USDA couldn't neglect the number of comments (and prospective voters) no matter how many lobbyists might be knocking on their doors. By 2001, the final organic rule was passed after reinstating prohibitions on irradiation, genetically modified seed and that nasty sewage sludge.

Sustain's project on family farming, FamilyFarmed.org, was recently chosen at the NetSquared conference as one of 21 public interest projects for future funding and mentoring from leading social networking experts in Silicon Valley.

Oh, there go those happy cows again ...

A student forwarded this cartoon, which reminded me of an earlier dairy advertising campaign featuring "happy cows," which was the subject of a lawsuit by animal rights groups.

In an ironic twist, the federal government's cotton checkoff promotion program (funded by $55 million per year in government collections from cotton producers) is using the cartoon below to sell its cottonseed oil products to the dairy industry (whose own federal government checkoff programs are funded by $105 million per year in government collections from producers for fluid milk and another $273 million per year for other dairy campaigns).

The cartoon's tag line, designed to appeal to dairy farmers, is: "How will you treat your cows when they've overproduced?" It's a good question.

Click image for full size view.

Sentences for former FDA commissioners -- a cross-country comparison

In the United States this Spring (Associated Press via news-medical.net):

U.S. Magistrate Judge Deborah Robinson on Tuesday sentenced former FDA commissioner Lester Crawford to three years of supervised probation and ordered him to pay fines of about $90,000 for false reporting and conflicts of interest related to ownership of stocks in companies regulated by the agency, the AP/Washington Times reports.

In China this week (Associated Press via the Guardian):

BEIJING (AP) - China on Tuesday executed the former head of its food and drug watchdog who had become a symbol of the country's wide-ranging problems on product safety.

Zheng Xiaoyu's execution was confirmed by State Food and Drug Administration spokeswoman Yan Jianyang at a news conference held to highlight efforts to improve China's track record on food and drug safety.

Hugh Joseph calls for "A Pro-Food Farm Bill"

Most public attention focuses on the major multi-billion-dollar USDA programs for crop subsidies, nutrition assistance, and conservation. By contrast, on the op-ed page of yesterday's Boston Globe, Hugh Joseph, of the New Entry Sustainable Farming Project here at the Friedman School of Nutrition at Tufts University, spends more ink on innovative and comparatively small programs for local food systems :

How do we strengthen the "food" components of the farm bill? We could support supplementing school meal programs with hundreds of millions of dollars of additional fresh fruits and vegetables. This would encourage children to eat better, and open up large new markets for local and regional farmers. A stumbling block is the Department of Agriculture, which has told local school districts that they cannot give a preference for food purchases to local farmers.

Massachusetts currently benefits from USDA programs that promote local foods. Community Food Projects, started a decade ago, has funded 18 projects across the Commonwealth with grants up to $250,000 to support innovative anti hunger and nutrition programs that link to local food production and marketing. But the program receives only $5 million a year nationally. The $30 million authorization currently proposed in the House agricultural subcommittee would have a commensurate impact on our food producers and consumers.

Massachusetts also started the Farmers' Market Nutrition Program two decades ago, a program providing $20 million this year to WIC families nationwide to obtain fresh produce at local farmers' markets. A similar program for seniors is currently funded nationally at $15 million. A three- or four fold increase would help address the enormous unmet demand in Massachusetts and other states for these benefits at a tiny fraction of what is now spent to support large commodity producers.

The 2007 farm bill should encourage farm stands and other direct marketing links with consumers, and foster urban food growing, school gardens, and local food procurement efforts by institutions. It should also strengthen the Emergency Food Assistance Program and other food and nutrition assistance programs such as the Food Stamp Program, WIC, the Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Program, and the Commodity Supplemental Food Program. These are front line defenses to prevent hunger and food insecurity while promoting nutritional health, particularly among children, older adults, and families at highest risk.

Will biofuels starve the poor?

The law professor and applied economist C. Ford Runge and the agricultural economist Benjamin Senauer write in the recent issue of Foreign Affairs about "How Biofuels Could Starve the Poor." Quote:

By putting pressure on global supplies of edible crops, the surge in ethanol production will translate into higher prices for both processed and staple foods around the world. Biofuels have tied oil and food prices together in ways that could profoundly upset the relationships between food producers, consumers, and nations in the years ahead, with potentially devastating implications for both global poverty and food security.

Ethicurean links to Will Saletan at Slate and the Washington Post, who dissents ... er, half-dissents.

True, biotechnology can go wrong. But it can also go wonderfully right. Scientists are learning to split corn so it can make ethanol and still feed animals. We're studying the use of microbes to extract fuel from straw and wood waste. We're trying to grow biofuel in algae. We're even learning to make fuel from animal fat and excrement.

Yes, ethanol subsidies are a scam. Yes, we should drop our trade barriers and let Brazilian sugar cane wipe out American corn. Yes, we need solar power, conservation, and efficiency. But don't give up on biofuel. It just needs time to grow.

Wild world of nutrition supplements to get just a little oversight

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on June 25 announced new rules for the manufacture of dietary supplements, which will help ensure that they they have proper labels and contain what their labels say. The announcement is accompanied by instructions for public comments.

Despite the new rules, nutrition supplements are still wildly unregulated by comparison to drugs. Under a controversial 1994 law known as the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act (DSHEA), Congress denied FDA the power to regulate existing dietary supplements as pharmaceuticals and prevented FDA from requiring manufacturers to prove that supplements are safe or effective (see the mildly stated FDA view of this limitation and a quote from the Consumers Union).

Leading nutrition researchers, such as Alice Lichtenstein and Robert Russell here at the Friedman School of Nutrition at Tufts University, have spoken out with increasing vigor in recent years about the importance of getting nutrients from real foods (see a scholarly statement of their views and a Tufts news article).

[Update: another colleague here points out the pace of the federal government's progress on this issue: the new rule took 13 years to prepare and it will be another 1-3 years for implementation.]