Unreasonable complaints about local food

From Arnold Kling at EconLog:

Ed Glaeser writes about another one of my pet peeves, locavorism. I always tell locavores that they should go further and only buy clothes made from local materials. Only use computers made from local materials. In fact, they should only consume goods that we can make ourselves using materials we can find on their own property.

My response:

It's easy to deliver an off-the-cuff dismissal of local food. But, did you even read Glaeser's article? Like many of the commenters here, he likes local gardens for their educational value. And surely Kling doesn't mind people choosing local food according to their own preferences.

You might object to government policies that strictly favor local food, but basically there really aren't many policies like that in the real world. Most government policies favor the conventional food system. And you might object to an over-sold argument that we should eat ONLY local food, but if that's your complaint, you should quote a particular opponent, because I think most writers on this topic are more reasonable.

The thing that I don't like is headline writers who exaggerate an argument to get us arguing among ourselves, when we all probably come pretty close to agreeing on the substance anyway. Notice that the Boston Globe subheading -- "Urban farms do more harm than good to the environment" -- has nothing to do with what Glaeser wrote.

Really, Glaeser should write the Boston Globe to ask the newspaper to change its dimwitted headline.

Transparency in the food service contract for DC schools

Journalist and Slow Cook blogger Ed Bruske has been digging tenaciously -- like the gardener he is -- for information about rebates in the food service contract for DC schools.  This is great citizen journalism.

In a development that could finally crack the code of silence surrounding rebates in school food service, lawyers for D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray have reversed a longstanding decision by local school officials and ordered the release of data showing how much money food manufacturers pay in rebates in order to place their products on children’s cafeteria trays in the nation’s capitol.

The decision comes in response to an administrative appeal I brought before the mayor after attorneys for D.C. Public Schools denied access to the rebate information on grounds it constituted “trade secrets” that could, if disclosed, harm the competitive position of the schools’ hired food service provider, Chartwells.

I originally had sought the information more than a year ago through the city’s Freedom of Information Act in an effort to determine the extent to which rebates might influence the choice of food D.C. schools serve. As a result of my FOIA requests, I was able to determine that Chartwells had claimed receiving more than $1 million in rebates from food manafucturers during the second year of its contract with the schools. However, the schools, citing a “trade secrets” exemption to the FOIA law, refused to release an itemization of which manufacturers had paid the rebates. The schools also declined to release detailed contract proposals submitted by Chartwells and Sodexo in the original bidding process.

John F. Carroll, an assistant New York attorney general invesitigating rebates in that state, has said the manufacturer discounts pose an “inherent conflict of interest” in school food service because they provide a financial incentive to choose highly processed and often sugary products over healthier foods. They also encourage purchases of large, national brands over locally produced goods that might be less expensive and more healthful, but do not pay rebates.

My own investigaton of school food in the District of Columbia showed that children routinely were being served the equivalent of 15 teaspoons of sugar in the morning in the form of popular branded products such as Apple Jacks Cereal, Pop-Tarts, Giant Goldfish Grahams and Otis Spunkmeyer muffins, along with chocolate and strawberry milk. D.C. schools have since stopped serving those products, removed flavored milk from the menu and otherwise taken steps to lower the sugar in school food.

The rebating practice is pervasive in the food industry and in school food service, especially where large food service management companies such as Chartwells, Aramark and Sodexo are involved. But while rebating no doubt generates billions of dollars to grease the wheels of the processed food industry, precise information about the practice  is a secret closely guarded by manufacturers as well as by those who benefit from the cash it produces. Essentially, the manufacturers write checks to companies who purchase their products in large volumes. Chartwells’ parent company, the $22 billion international conglomerate Compass Group, maintains an entirely separate entity called Food Buy solely to write purchase contracts and collect rebates generated by its many subsidiaries.

Under the federal school meals program, food service companies retained through “cost reimbursable” contracts must pass any rebates they receive to their school district clients. After I tallied the rebate amounts Chartwells had declared on its monthly invoices to D.C. schools, it was revealed that school officials had asked Chartwells for an itemized accounting of the rebates but had been waiting nine months to receive one. School food services Director Jeffrey Mills was said to be troubled by the rebates and their influence over Chartwells’ food purchases.

As a result of the ongoing investigation in New York, Sodexo last year agreed to pay $20 million to settle claims that it had failed to reimburse schools and other government clients for the rebates Sodexo had received. Subsequently, D.C. Council member Mary Cheh (D-Ward 3), author of a “Healthy Schools Act,” asked the city’s then-attorney general, Peter Nickles, to assist the schools in recovering any rebate monies they might be owed. Cheh also oversees implementation of the District’s FOIA laws.

Information about rebates is so sensitive that the School Nutrition Association, which counts Chartwells and other food management companies as well as numerous manufacturers as members, removed from YouTube a taped version of a speech Carroll delivered to the group in March. In that speech, Carroll disclosed that rebates typically generate checks from manufacturers worth 10 percent to 15 percent of all food purchases. Some items are rebated up to 50 percent of the purchse price.

In Denver earlier this year, representatives of the Service Employees International Union were ejected from a conference held by the American Association of School Administrators because they were distributing information about school food rebates and planned to hold a workshop on rebates in school contracting. Aramark and Chartwells were both sponsors of the event, and Sodexo lists itself as one of the association’s “strategic partners.”

In a letter to me dated May 26, the mayor’s deputy general counsel Donald S. Kaufman wrote that attorneys for D.C. schools had erred when they invoked the “trade secrets” exemption to my FOIA request without showing how releasing the rebate and contract information would “result in substantial harm to the competitive position” of Chartwells, a requirement of the D.C. FOIA law.

“DCPS has not pointed to any authority, nor are we aware of any, which holds that the amount or source of rebates or volume discounts is, as a matter of law, protected commercial or financial information for the purposes of FOIA, nor is it apparent that the disclosure of such information would result in competitive harm,” Kaufman wrote.

“The response of DCPS is insufficient to justify the withholding of the documents,” Kaufman wrote in this “final decision” of the mayor’s office. “The documents must be provided to Appellant,” meaning me.

Under the D.C. FOIA, decisions by individual city agencies can be challenged in court, or appealed administratively directly to the mayor. I chose to appeal to the mayor. I suspect that Chartwells may now be contemplating a court filing to block release of the rebate information.

As with many debates in U.S. food policy, the behind-the-scenes argument over transparency is at least half the battle.  If Chartwells does block the release of the rebate information, we will share the news here.

House bill would cut food assistance programs, protect farm subsidies

According to the Associated Press summary, the appropriations bill passed by the Republican-led House of Representatives would cut WIC and international food aid, while protecting most farm subsidies.

The AP report said the bill:

• Directs the Agriculture Department to rewrite rules it issued in January meant to make school meals healthier. Republicans say the new rules, the first major overhaul of school lunches in 15 years, are too costly.
• Forces USDA to report to Congress every time officials travel to promote the department’s “Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food” program, which supports locally grown food, and discourages the department from giving research grants to support local food systems. Large agribusiness has been critical of the department’s focus on these smaller food producers [note: see earlier post for context].
• Prevents USDA from moving forward with new rules that would make it easier for smaller farmers and ranchers to sue large livestock companies on antitrust grounds. The proposed rules are meant to address the growing concentration of corporate power in agriculture.
• Delays for more than a year new rules for reporting trades in derivatives, the complex financial instruments blamed for helping precipitate the 2008 financial crisis. A Republican amendment adopted Thursday would require the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which funded in the bill, to first have other rules in place to facilitate its collection of derivatives market data.
• Prevents the FDA from approving genetically modified salmon for human consumption, a decision set for later this year.
• Questions the scope of Obama administration initiatives to put calories on menus and limit the marketing of unhealthy foods to children.

The tart AP article was mentioned in our comments section recently, and was covered by Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution under the rueful headline, "Not from the Onion."

USDA unveils new plate-shaped MyPlate graphic for dietary guidance

USDA's new food plate, unveiled today, makes a great impression.  It communicates proportionality in frank terms, just like the original Food Guide Pyramid.  The accompanying written messages are clear and well-chosen to focus on the most important nutrition and health issues.  The authors wisely did not try to communicate every nutrition science principle -- for a more detailed summary, one can read the Dietary Guidelines, which are themselves quite accessible.  Like the Dietary Guidelines, the new graphic seems fairly vegetarian-friendly, describing the protein group without insisting on meat.  The tone is upbeat and not preachy.  And the whole thing seems friendly to real foods rather than technocratic food inventions.  I give it an A+.  Enjoy your food!

  

	Balancing Calories
	●	Enjoy your food, but eat less.
	●	Avoid oversized portions.
	Foods to Increase
	●	Make half your plate fruits and vegetables.
	●	Make at least half your grains whole grains.
	●	Switch to fat-free or low-fat (1%) milk.
	Foods to Reduce
	●	Compare sodium in foods like soup, bread, and frozen meals ― and choose the foods with lower numbers.
	●	Drink water instead of sugary drinks.

Urban gardens, chickens, and goats

My family and I had a blast this month at the Tour de Cluck, a peculiarly Davis, California, sort of event.  Hundreds of people meet at the Davis Farmer's Market on a Saturday, get on their bikes, and visit a large number of chicken coops that families all over town keep for eggs.  From last year's video, you can get a sense of the event, and also of the bicycle culture here, complete with bike lanes and bike paths everywhere.

Davis is bustling with local agricultural experimentation.  In April, I enjoyed a presentation by local author Spring Warren, who wrote a book about feeding her family for a year with an urban Quarter-Acre Farm.  Since August, we have lived a couple blocks away from the Village Homes, a 70-acre conservation-oriented residential neighborhood, where the streets are named after places in Middle Earth and the neighbors share a lot of space in common, including a garden, chicken coops, and a vineyard.

If gardens and chickens are not enough to inspire you, consider goats.  In June, my family will finally get to visit our old friends Tom and Didi, who -- along with their children, friends, dog, and goats -- found a lively and musical way to tell the story of their efforts to get permission to keep goats in Seattle.  The following video is on the website of the Goat Justice League.  The goats, Rosie and Phyllis, were even featured in an article in the American Bar Association Journal this month.

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.

Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food

In a speech today on the UC Davis campus, Kathleen Merrigan gave a fascinating tour of USDA's bustling and diverse work on local food, healthy food, direct marketing, and rejuvenation of U.S. farming.  Some of this work is collected on the USDA website under the heading, Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food. 

Merrigan is the current Deputy Secretary of Agriculture and a former faculty colleague at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts.

She has a true gift for talking about profound social and environmental principles in an accessible and persuasive way.  Although many farmers (and many agricultural economists) get nervous about overly fanatical locavorism, Merrigan is a sort of antidote for everything that divides us.  She makes a compellingly pro-farmer argument for local and sustainable food production.  At a time when many urbanites are suspicious of USDA, and sometimes even suspicious of the farming community, Merrigan makes both look good.  I hope farmers across the country get to hear her speak.

Merrigan's speech today was sponsored by the Agricultural Sustainability Institute at UC Davis.  She presented the first Eric Bradford and Charlie Rominger Agricultural Sustainability Leadership Award to a graduate student here.

Here are some links to things mentioned Merrigan's speech: 

• the National Restaurant Association's trends analysis, which focuses on local food,
• USDA's Food Desert Locator,
• USDA's Food Environment Atlas,
• the First Lady's Let's Move campaign.