Last Night
Last Night: Food Guru Marion Nestle
A couple of nights ago, I biked up to the University of Washington to see a lecture by food guru Marion Nestle, author of Safe Food, What to Eat, and a forthcoming book about calories. I'm a big fan of Nestle's Food Politics blog, which focuses on things like government food subsidies, genetically modified foods, the local-vs.-organic debate, and nutrition(ism). And while I disagree with Nestle on some very specific things*, I find her generally smart, challenging, and funny (a rare trait in a field populated mostly by finger-wagging CSPI types.)
Nestle's hour-long lecture focused on food advocacy (as of this September, 900 million people in the world are chronically hungry), obesity ("There's no question that people are eating more"), farm subsidies ("In the 1970s, US agricultural policy shifted from paying farmers not to grow food to paying them to grow as much as they could"), and the reasons poor people make "bad" food choices ("If you go into McDonald's with $5, you have two choices: You can buy five burgers or you can buy one salad. Why is that? Agricultural policy.")
But it was the part of her lecture on food marketing that I found the most intriguing.
Nestle linked the rise in food marketing to the fact that, thanks to agricultural subsidies that encourage maximum food production---one perverse result of which is that the US food system supplies about 3,900 calories for every man, woman and child in America. (In 1980, that number was 3,200; a typical adult needs no more than 2,000 calories a day.)
Add to that the Nutrition Labeling Act of 1990 (which allowed companies to make nutrition claims on packaged foods) and you get things like this:
"It says right there on the package: 'Chocolate Cheerios may reduce the risk of heart disease.' Well, it does say, 'may,' but there it is," Nestle said.
"It never occurred to me that the First Amendment was put in the constitution to allow food companies to market to kids with [false] health claims."
Nestle also tore into food companies' practice of marketing food specifically to kids. In 2009, for example, Kellogg's spent more than $20 million each to advertise Frosted Flakes and Froot Loops.
"Kids don't have a lot of money, but they do have an enormous amount of influence over what families buy," Nestle said. "Food companies want kids to pester their parents to buy their products. ... Food marketers want kids to think that they're supposed to eat their own foods ... that they're not supposed to eat the boring foods their parents eat. … This seems to me to be so undermining of parental authority that it's reasonable to take an advocacy position" against food marketers, she said.
* A couple of minor disagreements with Nestle's POV:
1) She takes the "calories in/calories out" paradigm as dogma despite research that implicates a lot of the junk food companies shove down our throats, like high-fructose corn syrup, in obesity.
2) She argues against banning the use of food stamps for soda on the grounds that such a ban condescends to poor people---conveniently ignoring similar restrictions on beer, wine, cigarettes and packaged food, which I wrote about here.
Nestle's hour-long lecture focused on food advocacy (as of this September, 900 million people in the world are chronically hungry), obesity ("There's no question that people are eating more"), farm subsidies ("In the 1970s, US agricultural policy shifted from paying farmers not to grow food to paying them to grow as much as they could"), and the reasons poor people make "bad" food choices ("If you go into McDonald's with $5, you have two choices: You can buy five burgers or you can buy one salad. Why is that? Agricultural policy.")
But it was the part of her lecture on food marketing that I found the most intriguing.
Nestle linked the rise in food marketing to the fact that, thanks to agricultural subsidies that encourage maximum food production---one perverse result of which is that the US food system supplies about 3,900 calories for every man, woman and child in America. (In 1980, that number was 3,200; a typical adult needs no more than 2,000 calories a day.)
Add to that the Nutrition Labeling Act of 1990 (which allowed companies to make nutrition claims on packaged foods) and you get things like this:
"It says right there on the package: 'Chocolate Cheerios may reduce the risk of heart disease.' Well, it does say, 'may,' but there it is," Nestle said.
"It never occurred to me that the First Amendment was put in the constitution to allow food companies to market to kids with [false] health claims."
Nestle also tore into food companies' practice of marketing food specifically to kids. In 2009, for example, Kellogg's spent more than $20 million each to advertise Frosted Flakes and Froot Loops.
"Kids don't have a lot of money, but they do have an enormous amount of influence over what families buy," Nestle said. "Food companies want kids to pester their parents to buy their products. ... Food marketers want kids to think that they're supposed to eat their own foods ... that they're not supposed to eat the boring foods their parents eat. … This seems to me to be so undermining of parental authority that it's reasonable to take an advocacy position" against food marketers, she said.
* A couple of minor disagreements with Nestle's POV:
1) She takes the "calories in/calories out" paradigm as dogma despite research that implicates a lot of the junk food companies shove down our throats, like high-fructose corn syrup, in obesity.
2) She argues against banning the use of food stamps for soda on the grounds that such a ban condescends to poor people---conveniently ignoring similar restrictions on beer, wine, cigarettes and packaged food, which I wrote about here.
