The New York Times
By Mark Bittman
1. Lunch
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Allow me this generalization: Healthy food initiatives threaten profits and are therefore fought or deflected or co-opted at all costs by the producers of hyperprocessed food. This is true even when those costs include producing an increasingly sick population — and a disproportionate number of defenseless children — and an ever-growing portion of our budget spent on paying for diet-related illness. Big Food will continue to pursue profit at the expense of health as long as we let them.
And the relatively honest members of the political right will say that it’s not enough to prevent new legislation; their goal is to roll back or damage existing laws or programs that benefit people.
Thus, a Republican-backed House bill would allow schools to opt out of the Obama administration’s two-year-old upgrades to healthy lunches if they are losing money. Those upgrades mandated that schools cut back on foods high in calories, sugar, salt and fat in favor of the consumption of fruits, vegetables and somewhat healthier if still-processed items.
This attack can barely be described without mocking it, since it’s often referred to as something like a “healthy-school-lunch rollback.” Its boosters, predictably, claim they are asking only for a little “flexibility” — the flexibility to serve more junk food.
Why would anyone want to roll back healthy school lunches? (You might as well ask why anyone would want to roll back clean air rulings, and though the answer is not precisely the same, the sentiment is: Sacrifice the individual on the altar of profit.) The official answer is of course fiscal.
A waiver that would allow schools to opt out of the mandates if they’ve lost money for six months in a row is being pushed by the food-service industry, which is to some extent hiding behind the industry-backed lunch ladies of the School Nutrition Association. (Workers serving school lunches, needless to say, are under-equipped, underfunded and understaffed; none of that is addressed by this rollback, which would serve only to increase the ranks of the undernourished.)
It’s no surprise that children have complained about the new, healthier standards. Children should be heard. Children should also be fed well, and government is the only institution big enough to officially resist and respond to the onslaught of industry marketing steadfastly determined to plump the little darlings up with the destructive calories of pizza, burgers, chicken nuggets, breakfast cereals and the other stuff kids learn to eat before they learn to think. Of course they’re protesting, but most wouldn’t go to school if it weren’t mandatory, either. Kids don’t know what’s good for them. That’s a given.
The new nutrition standards are the most positive step the Obama administration has taken toward steering childhood nutrition in the right direction, and they’re working; 90 percent of schools meet the new standards, which means tens of millions of kids are eating more fruits and vegetables. Only someone who’s losing money on that deal could object, and even the normally industry-friendly secretary of agriculture, Tom Vilsack, is on the right side here. So it must be pretty plain to all who care to look. (The bill does not have a name or number yet; but it’s time to complain to your congressional delegation.)
2. Fries
Several people alerted me to the kerfuffle over allowing white potatoes in the WIC — Women, Infants and Children — program, including the White House’s senior adviser on nutrition policy, Sam Kass, and the Columbia professor Irwin Redlener; Catherine Rampell, a columnist for The Washington Post, wrote a fine op-ed about this a couple of weeks ago.
WIC gives vouchers to buy food to people who’d otherwise have trouble affording it. Unlike food stamps, which allow people to buy almost anything, including nonfood like soda, WIC strives — not always successfully, I’m sorry to say — to limit purchases to actual food. And the program, for the most part, works; low-income young people are healthier thanks to WIC, and maybe even less prone to obesity.
The issue is that WIC recipients can buy fruits and vegetables, except for one: white potatoes. As Redlener said to me: “I have nothing against the potato. But there’s a dangerous precedent here.”
I have nothing against potatoes, either. But there’s almost no one in America, WIC recipients included, who isn’t getting enough potatoes. And that’s what the Institute of Medicine (I.O.M.) was thinking when it excluded potatoes from the WIC program. Because everyone knows that in the United States, “potatoes” equals “fries.”
Who’s upset about this? The potato lobby, of course. (Even I would be upset about this if I were the potato lobby.) But the rest of us can be more impartial. Let’s recognize that the potato industry can afford to take a step back and let federal dollars enable poor people to choose cauliflower, peas, lettuce and a few other vegetables, and see French fries as an occasional treat, as all of us would be better off doing.
I could envision a lovely scenario in which potatoes were added to WIC in place of the absurdly long list of boxed breakfast cereal including, for example, Honey Bunches of Oats and Frosted Mini-Wheats in some states. If we got the processed grain lobby fighting it out with the processed potato lobby … that might be interesting. Of course, once you open things up, anything can happen and, in the current political climate, that “anything” is likely to be bad. WIC is good enough so that the status quo is preferable.
3. Soda
The status quo isn’t preferable in the lack of regulation of harmful foods, like sugar-sweetened beverages. Many smart, energetic people have been trying to find ways into this for years. A soda tax seems the best bet to cut consumption (and keep more kids from starting to slug soda in the first place), but no political entity — no city, state or federal government — has been able to overcome the industry’s ability to countercampaign. New York’s Big Gulp rule was innovative and interesting and not quite dead in the water, but it has many detractors and is, at best, not much more than a token.
Now a group of Californians has proposed SB 1000, a bill that would mandate a warning label for cans and bottles of soda, and would read, simply, “STATE OF CALIFORNIA SAFETY WARNING: Drinking beverages with added sugar(s) contributes to obesity, diabetes, and tooth decay.”
Three-quarters of Californians seem to support it. The arguments for cutting consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages have been made by numerous experts, strongly, consistently and convincingly.
We are in a public health crisis largely brought about by the consumption of sugar and hyperprocessed carbs. It’s fine to scream “don’t eat as many of them,” but that message can’t possibly match the power of the billions of dollars spent annually by an industry ($400 million a year on marketing soda to teens alone) encouraging us to consume more. Government’s proper role is to protect us, and this would be a fine way to start.
Soda, as I’ve said before, is the cigarette of the 21st century; 50 years from now all of this will seem obvious. Warning labels would begin to turn this terrible tide around. Support California legislators and organizations who are working to get SB 1000 passed (and look at this amazing list!); this week and next are key. Think of it as the “save our children” act.
