Independent analysis of the Healthy Weight Commitment Foundation trillion calorie pledge

An independent evaluation reported today that the Healthy Weight Commitment Foundation succeeded in removing more than a trillion calories from the U.S. food supply, as originally pledged.

Through this pledge, leading food and beverage manufacturers had promised to reduce total food energy sold by 1 trillion calories, from a 2007 baseline through 2012.

Using Nielsen scanner data from supermarket electronic cash registers and from a random sample of consumer households, Shu Wen Ng, Meghan M. Slining, and Barry M. Popkin estimated calorie trends and reported the results today in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

To some extent, the accomplishment simply reflects downward trends in the packaged food and beverage sector, which is losing market share over time -- mostly to the restaurant industry but perhaps partly to healthier food options. In an accompanying editorial in the same journal, Dariush Mozaffarian asks whether the pledge is a "marketing ploy."

As a rule, nutritional targets -- and other quantitative information intended for general audiences -- should be stated in easily explained per-capita terms. Who knows what a trillion calories in aggregate even means?

It reminds me of silly infographics that take a common-sense concept and convert it to some obscure immense quantity. For example, in my in-box this month, I have an infographic from Guiding Stars, which aims to report the amount of running required to burn off the average American's sugar consumption. Sugar is estimated at 3 pounds per week (a sensible way of explaining the quantity), while the amount of running is stated as 2.7 times around the globe over a lifetime (an irrelevant quantity designed merely to appear large to easily-impressed readers).

Today's study by Ng, Slining, and Popkin nicely goes beyond its assessment of the original trillion calorie pledge and also reports the modest but non-negligible resulting calorie changes on a per-capita basis. To the extent that the results reflect improvements in particular categories, such as sugar sweetened beverages, the findings are still reasonably upbeat.

The Healthy Weight Commitment Foundation -- and the companies that made pledges -- will be delighted by today's coverage in major media outlets such as U.S. News and World Report, which states the good news broadly: "Obesity continues to plague the country, but it appears as though food companies are beginning to take strides in helping alleviate the problem."

Kellogg announces new climate change commitments

The Kellogg Company today unveiled new commitments to address actions by itself and its suppliers that affect climate change. General Mills on July 28 had announced similar initiatives.

From Kellogg's statement (.pdf) today:

As stated in our Kellogg Global Supplier Code of Conduct, we expect suppliers to support our corporate responsibility commitments by implementing sustainable operating and farming practices, and agricultural production systems. Suppliers must strive to reduce or optimize agricultural inputs; reduce greenhouse gas emissions, energy and water use; and minimize water pollution and waste, including food waste and landfill usage.

The anti-hunger organization Oxfam International had been encouraging leading food manufacturers to make such commitments. Oxfam's recent report, Standing on the Sidelines, had argued that food and beverage companies need to do more. Today, Oxfam praised Kellogg's announcement:

“We welcome Kellogg’s efforts to become an industry leader in the fight against climate change and the damage it is causing to people everywhere,” said Monique van Zijl, campaign manager for Oxfam’s Behind the Brands campaign. “Kellogg’s new commitments add momentum to calls on governments and the wider food and agriculture industry to recognize that climate change is real, it’s happening now, and we need to tackle it.”

In the announcement today, Kellogg says it will set targets for greenhouse gas reductions, produce a climate change adaptation strategy, take steps to limit deforestation impacts in its supply chains, and commit to disclosure of key climate change information. Oxfam said Kellogg plans to participate in the Business for Innovative Climate and Energy Policy (BICEP) group and sign the Climate Declaration.

How grains and oilseeds flow through the U.S. food economy

The U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) recently (in December 2013) announced the once-every-five-years release of benchmark national input-output accounts, showing how resources flow from one industry to the next in the U.S. economy.

For people interested in the economics of the food system, some graduate students and colleagues and I last year developed a tool in Tufts' Visual Understanding Environment (VUE) for interactively illustrating such input-output flows. A working paper (#44) describes the tool. A previous blog post shows an example. The visualization tag at this blog collects other posts about interesting food policy data illustrations.

In this video, I use the new BEA benchmark input-output data to describe how grain and oilseeds flow through the food economy. Before making the video, I rounded the numbers to the nearest billion dollars and deleted some negligible small resource flows, so serious students of these data will want to refer to the original files from BEA. Because the numbers likely will be illegible in the video player embedded in the blog post, I've included a link to the original video, which you can download and play with higher resolution on your computer's own video program (such as Windows Media Player or the Mac equivalent).

Report and audit from the Fair Food Standards Council

The Fair Food Standards Council this week published its first report and audit from the Fair Food Program.

This report explains the operations, monitoring, and auditing of the agreements that the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) has reached with selected major food manufacturers, restaurant chains, and food retailers.  Through these agreements, farm workers are able to protect their rights and earn a wage premium for part of their work (for example, they may earn a bonus per bucket on tomato harvest).  The report includes inspiring accounts of the difference these agreements can make, on issues ranging from getting paid for the full amount of time on worksite to protecting women from risk of rape by a crew boss. 

Previous posts on this blog describe my visits to the CIW in Florida in 2009 and 2012, which have affected how I think and teach about labor issues in the U.S. food system.  Barry Estabrook includes an engaging account of these labor issues in Tomatoland.

The new report on the Fair Food Program includes more detail than I have previously seen about how the fair food premiums are recorded, distributed, and audited.  I had been wanting to read about these audits, which increase my confidence in the pass-through mechanism for the premium -- the brand-name companies must pay tomato grower enterprises, which must pass along the correct amount to the workers (minus a specified deduction for the paper-work and transactions costs).  The CIW is able to reach such agreements with brand-name food and restaurant companies (which have a public reputation to protect), while it would have been more difficult to win agreement on a premium directly from the growers (who operate in a cut-throat competitive market).  I found it illuminating to see an exhibit with a photograph of an actual pay stub recording the premium.  Understanding this slightly convoluted system better, it is easier to think of it as a feasible business model worth expanding to other areas of U.S. farm labor.

Food Tank recommends books for fall 2013

Danielle Nierenberg and Anna Glasser at Food Tank this week listed Food Policy in the United States: An Introduction as a "must read" book for fall 2013.

Food Tank: The Food Think Tank was founded by Nierenberg (a graduate of the Friedman School at Tufts) and Ellen Gustafson. This video lays out the initiative's objectives.
 

The 10th Anniversary Edition of Marion Nestle's Food Politics

For people in the nutrition world who care about public policy, Marion Nestle's 2002 book Food Politics is the single most useful source there is.

I thought about several other important sources before making that statement.  The federal government's dietary guidance may be authoritative, but it is tamed and diluted in ways that Nestle explains precisely.  Eric Schlosser covers labor issues passionately, Michael Pollan addresses the techno-skeptical mood of the local food movement, and Wendell Berry is poetic, but Nestle is the steadiest and most solid critic of the modern food industry and its nutritional shortcomings.

A highlight of Nestle's revised and expanded 10th Anniversary Edition of Food Politics is the new 50-page Afterword.  It brings the book up to date by covering MyPlate, Let's Move, front-of-pack labeling, children's advertising initiatives, school meals reforms, and soda taxes.  I will certainly add it to my course syllabus.

In some ways, these topics in the Afterword are new.  In other ways, they are minor variations on themes that already were central in the earlier 2002 edition.  These themes usually involve the food industry's success in resisting and reversing proposed improvements in food and nutrition policy.  Nestle insists that she remains optimistic, but the reason she gives has little to do with the nutrition policy initiatives she covers at greatest length, and more to do with the grassroots food movement that has grown up in response to dissatisfaction with the status quo:

I am often asked how I remain optimistic in light of the food industry's power to control and corrupt government.  That's easy: the food movement.  Everywhere I look, I see positive signs of change.

Though Nestle doesn't give up hope, re-reading this book ten years later tempts me to give up more profoundly on the "politics" in Food Politics.  Not yet, but maybe some day.

Michael Moss: Salt, Sugar, Fat

New York Times reporter Michael Moss's book released this year is Salt, Sugar, Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us.

The book has some older themes and some newer distinctive contributions.  The basic indictment of highly palatable processed food is familiar to readers of Michael Pollan, Marion Nestle, Eric Schlosser, and David Kessler, and to viewers of movies such as Supersize Me and Food, Inc.  The novelty and strength of Moss's new book is the persuasive on-the-record interviews with food industry executives and scientists as they try to understand the consequences of their products and even to make improvements.

I ended up with two competing impressions.  First, I felt sympathetic to the industry scientists and executives, several of whom really would have preferred to sell better products, but who were defeated by competitive pressures.  Second, it seemed that the industry people themselves are usually naive about the possibility of making substantial improvements on a company-by-company voluntary basis.  I say "usually" naive, because I think deep down they know their efforts are partly for show, and at key junctures the industry scientists and executives are forced to be blunt about the real situation.

I have seen this pattern in my own conversations with food industry scientists and executives.  In nine sentences out of ten, they will express great optimism that their company can make healthy changes in its product mix.  Then, in the tenth sentence, especially if pressed with a hard question about whether the proposed changes are sufficiently ambitious to make a real difference, they will say, "Oh, well, don't be unrealistic.  You can't expect THAT from us in the real world of competition."

An article-length version of the book was published in the New York Times Magazine.  The Grocery Manufacturers Association released a statement treating Moss's book as an "obesity book" with an unfair axe to grind: "Michael Moss’s work misrepresents the strong commitment America’s food and beverage companies have to providing consumers with the products, tools and information they need to achieve and maintain a healthy diet and active lifestyle."  But this statement misses a key theme of Moss's book, which focuses above all on the quixotic efforts of industry scientists and executives to make improvements.

Reuters: Washington soft on childhood obesity

From yesterday's long report by Duff Wilson and Janet Roberts at Reuters:

At every level of government, the food and beverage industries won fight after fight during the last decade. They have never lost a significant political battle in the United States despite mounting scientific evidence of the role of unhealthy food and children's marketing in obesity.

Lobbying records analyzed by Reuters reveal that the industries more than doubled their spending in Washington during the past three years. In the process, they largely dominated policymaking -- pledging voluntary action while defeating government proposals aimed at changing the nation's diet, dozens of interviews show.