Kroc-style: dog eat dog, rat eat rat

Here's the lyrics to Dire Straits frontman Mark Knopfler's latest single, "Boom, Like That." An NPR interview (with clips) describes the song as "a wry chronicle of the renegade business tactics of McDonald's mogul Ray Kroc."

you wanna make a dream
reality
competition?
send ‘em south
if they’re gonna drown
put a hose in their mouth
do not pass ‘go’
go straight to hell
i smell that
meat hook smell
or my name’s not kroc
that’s kroc with a ‘k’
like ‘crocodile’
but not spelled that way, now
it’s dog eat dog
rat eat rat
kroc-style
boom, like that

Judge approves McDonald's trans fat ruling

A judge in California has approved the settlement that McDonald's reached with plaintiffs who sued the company for quietly reneging on an earlier promise to eliminate trans fats (see U.S. Food Policy last February). According to the Associated Press over the weekend, "McDonald's said it was pleased the case has been settled and that it had reduced the amount of trans fat in its McNuggets, Crispy Chicken, and McChicken products." As part of the agreement, McDonald's will pay the plaintiffs' legal expenses and support the American Heart Association to the tune of several million dollars. For many of the company's competitors, nobody even knows how much trans fat there is. Good for McDonald's.

Congressional action to cut social programs

When Congress returns from break, lawmakers will turn their attention to passing the laws that implement broad program cuts -- including cuts to social programs -- stipulated in the budget resolution this Spring. Medicaid may lose billions (relative to its baseline projected growth due to caseload and medical costs). Food stamps are threatened to a somewhat smaller degree: $3 billion over five years are to be cut from the budget area that includes both food stamps and farm programs. Perhaps $2.4 billion will be cut from farm programs and $600,000 from food stamps (see Jonathan Weisman in the Washington Post yesterday).

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has good background reporting making the case that food assistance programs reduce hunger and bolster nutrition. In other recently updated reports, the Center on Budget warns about specific proposals on the table, including one for a five-state block grant, and another that would permit more flexible waivers (administrative decisions that grant states authority to experiment with program rules and design). The authors of the latter report argue that new "superwaivers" are dangerous, because USDA's Food and Nutrition Service already has sufficient authority to permit state waivers for some kinds of policy initiatives, which allow innovations without threatening the welfare of program participants. The Center's strength is explaining arcane policy debates like these, the better to protect low-income Americans from dangerous daggers buried in thickets of legislation. Still, whether with "superwaivers" or without, I would like to see more ambitious food stamp policy innovations that seek to improve the program's nutritional effectiveness, make clearer that the program does not provide an incentive for overconsumption of food for particular subpopulations, and improve the program's flexibility for participants.

If you would like to contact your legislator to express a view about food stamp cuts, see the food stamp action pages on the websites of the Coalition on Human Needs and the Food Research and Action Center.

The end of the August Eat Local Challenge

What fun this month to participate in the August Eat Local Challenge, which I heard about through Jen at the weblog life begins at 30. Our family set our bar low -- promising only to eat more local food than usual, and to learn some new recipes with local food that would be worthy to serve guests. The Eat Local Challenge provided this city boy with much enjoyment, education about our food and its origins, and grist for much reflection over the coming year.

This afternoon, I took the kids to Waltham Fields Community Farm (which, as I mentioned previously, is where my family has a community supported agriculture share). We had a great time, picked up our allotment at the main food table, picked still more food and a bouquet of floors in the field, met farmers and other customers who we are getting to know by name. Any of you readers who are real farmers or real cooks can have a laugh at my expense, but I am disproportionately proud of our meal this evening: fresh corn on the cob (from the farm), brown rice (not local) and black beans (not local), topped with a salsa of onions (probably not local) and fresh tomatoes, garlic, corn, cilantro, and hot peppers (all from the farm), with watermelon for first dessert (from the farm), followed by ice cream for second dessert (probably not local). The kids dived in and consumed it all.

Eating local is partly about learning awareness of what food is in season. And for a teacher coming to grips with the end of summer, this week's seasonal treat was a shocker! (Hurrying back to my class preparation...)

One difference between Quiznos and Subway

Matt Apuzzo of the Associated Press earlier this month described the super-fast growth of Quiznos sandwich shops and explained the similarities and differences between the restaurant chain and the leader in its market, Subway:

Quiznos, too, benefits from the competition. Subway preaches the health benefits of sandwiches over hamburgers with an annual advertising budget that exceeds $100 million.

"The sandwich-segment boom is based on health-conscious people perceiving sandwiches as better for them than burgers or fried chicken," said Dominick Voso, executive vice president of development for Quiznos.

For years, Subway has delivered that message through Jared Fogle, the company icon who lost 250 pounds eating its sandwiches. Quiznos, meanwhile, has struggled to establish brand identity. Early advertisements bordered on the bizarre: singing rodent-like characters, a man suckling on a wolf's teat and people getting shot with tranquilizer darts.

The idea is that the larger brand, Subway, uses its advertisements to sell the public on the idea of healthy sandwiches. And indeed, you can read everything you want to know about the Subway products on the company's website. The small brand, Quiznos, is riding Subway's coattails. But is Quiznos as healthy as Subway? Who knows?

The federal government's message to consumers -- through generic commodity advertising -- endorses Quiznos and its Steakhouse Beef Dip sub. But I suspect the nutrition profile of this sub would not keep Jared as thin as his Subway sandwiches do. The Quiznos web page keeps consumers in the dark about the nutritional quality of all but a few of its products, and the company has been unresponsive to my inquiry in the past.

I believe my campaign to find out the truth about the Quiznos sandwich deserves broad support, from food activists and mainstream market economists alike. The whole point of a free market is that consumers should be able to make informed choices without government intervention. The public right to know in this case seems even stronger, because the federal government is encouraging us to eat more of these Steakhouse Beef Dip Subs.

On the Quiznos nutrition web page, there is a link that you may use to send a message to the company asking for more nutrition information. Please write them to ask for the profile of the USDA-sponsored 10-inch Steakhouse Beef Dip Sub (with sauce), and help us out by posting the responses you receive in the comment section below. My comrade bloggers, please spread this message. Thanks!

National Academies recommend improvements to food assistance research data

A forthcoming report from the National Academies, already available online, makes strong recommendations for improvements to the data resources for research on food assistance and nutrition programs. The panel, which was chaired by John Karl Scholz from the University of Wisconsin and included top national leaders in food economics and nutrition, proposed a new inter-agency working group for food assistance data. The panel suggested that the new working group be led by the Office of Management and Budget or jointly led by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Department of Health and Human Services (reading between the lines, the panel is not recommending that the working group be led by USDA on its own).

The panel also strongly encouraged research that combines the strengths of survey data sets with adminstrative data sets from the food assistance programs. The survey data sets often have small samples, but they offer detailed insights into many aspects of respondents' food situation (for example, a wealth of nutrition information in NHANES, a wealth of spending detail in the CEX, and so forth). The administrative data often have immense samples (for example, all food stamp participants in the state of California), and they often have good data on income and program benefits, but they usually lack information about the outcomes of interest (whether food spending or nutrition outcomes). Using both kinds of data together is fairly rare, and the projects that do so produce some of the very best available food assistance research.

Upcoming events: Consumer Federation of America and Public Health Advocacy Institute

At the 28th Annual National Food Policy Conference of the Consumer Federation of America (.pdf) on Sept. 20 at9:00 a.m. at the National Press Club in Washington (perhaps to be recorded by CSPAN), a talk-show style debate and discussion:

Agricultural Subsidies: Effects on Nutrition, Consumers, Farmers, the Federal Budget, Trade and World Hunger.

Panelists:

Charles W. Stenholm, Senior Government Affairs Advisor
Olsson, Frank and Weeda

Senate Agriculture Committee senior staff member

Ken Cook, President, Environmental Working Group

David Beckman, President, Bread for the World

Parke Wilde, Assistant Professor, Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy, Tufts University

At the Third Annual Conference on Legal Approaches to the Obesity Epidemic, sponsored by the Public Health Advocacy Institute, at 1:00 p.m. on Sept. 24 in Boston:

Economics, Consumer Behavior and Government Policy

Economic forces are critically important influences on bottom-line consumer behaviors contributing to obesity. How do government policies that promote sugars and fats, such as through subsidies, contribute to industry practices involving food processing, packaging, pricing and marketing of obesity-generating products and consumption patterns? The influence of these factors on the obesity epidemic deserves careful evaluation.

Panelists

Katie Pratt, JD, LLM – Loyola Law School, Los Angeles

Parke Wilde, PhD – Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts

Michael Greve, MA, PhD – American Enterprise Institute

Anthony Robbins, MD, MPA – PHAI, Moderator