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NestleFM.qxp 7/5/07 3:53 PM Page iii
MARION NESTLE
food
POLITICS
HOW THE FOOD INDUSTRY
INFLUENCES NUTRITION AND HEALTH
food
POLITICS
NestleFM.qxp 7/5/07 3:53 PM Page ii
MARION NESTLE
food
POLITICS
HOW THE FOOD INDUSTRY
INFLUENCES NUTRITION AND HEALTH
CONTENTS
PART ONE I
UNDERMINING DIETARY ADVICE 29
1. From “Eat More” to “Eat Less,” 1900–1990 31
2. Politics versus Science: Opposing the Food Pyramid, 1991–1992 51
3. “Deconstructing” Dietary Advice 67
PART TWO I
WORKING THE SYSTEM 93
4. Influencing Government: Food Lobbies and Lobbyists 95
5. Co-opting Nutrition Professionals 111
6. Winning Friends, Disarming Critics 137
7. Playing Hardball: Legal and Not 159
PART THREE I
EXPLOITING KIDS,
CORRUPTING SCHOOLS 173
8. Starting Early: Underage Consumers 175
9. Pushing Soft Drinks: “Pouring Rights” 197
PART FOUR I
DEREGULATING DIETARY SUPPLEMENTS 219
10. Science versus Supplements: “A Gulf of Mutual
Incomprehension” 222
NestleFM.qxp 7/5/07 3:53 PM Page vi
PART FIVE I
INVENTING TECHNO-FOODS 295
13. Go Forth and Fortify 298
14. Beyond Fortification: Making Foods Functional 315
15. Selling the Ultimate Techno-Food: Olestra 338
Conclusion:
The Politics of Food Choice 358
Afterword:
Food Politics: Five Years Later and Beyond 375
P R E FA C E T O T H E 2 0 0 7 E D I T I O N
on february 22, 2002, two weeks before Food Politics was due to
appear in bookstores, my editor at the University of California Press called
with disturbing news. Three highly critical attacks on the book had been
posted on the Web site of the Internet bookseller Amazon.com. The re-
viewers—all anonymous—accused the book of inappropriately blaming
the food industry for matters of personal responsibility.
“Nestle forgot a not-so-little thing called WILL POWER!” said the first
review. “Marion Nestle, one of the foremost food nannies in this coun-
try, has produced a book that heaps the blame for obesity, diabetes, and
heart disease on food producers, marketing executives, and even school
principals. Everyone, it seems, is responsible for those love handles except
for the very people who are carrying them around.” From reviewer #2:
“Individuals incapable of thinking for themselves will truly appreciate . . .
Food Politics. [Hasn’t the author] ever heard of personal responsibility,
exercise, and appropriate dieting?” And from reviewer #3: “Marion Nestle’s
book ‘Food Politics’ makes clear that the political system she favors is
dictatorship—with her in command. . . . The author’s motto could be ‘if
it tastes good don’t eat it.’”
Because I adore food and make no secret of it, this last comment sug-
gested that these reviewers must not have read my book. But before
I could say so, Sheldon Rampton, the coauthor of Toxic Sludge Is Good
for You: Lies, Damned Lies, and the Public Relations Industry (Common
Courage Press, 1995)—whom I do not know personally—responded
for me:
vii
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viii . P R E FA C E T O T H E 2 0 0 7 E D I T I O N
For what it’s worth, potential readers of Nestle’s book should note that the
first three “reader reviews” of this book are pretty obviously cranked out by
some food industry PR campaign. To begin with, they were all submitted on
the same date, February 22—“reader reviews” of a book that isn’t even sched-
uled to go on sale until March 4! For another thing, they all hit on the same
food industry “message points”: that critics are “nagging nannies” whipping up
“hysteria” on behalf of “greedy trial lawyers,” etc. February 22 is also the
date that noted industry flack Steven Milloy of the “Junk Science Home Page”
wrote a review trashing Nestle’s book. Milloy is a former tobacco lobbyist and
front man for a group created by Philip Morris, which has been diversifying its
tobacco holdings in recent years by buying up companies that make many of
the fatty, sugar-laden foods that Nestle is warning about. I haven’t even had a
chance yet to read Nestle’s book myself, but it irritates me to see the food
industry’s PR machine spew out the usual ( . . . ) every time someone writes
something they don’t like. If they hate her this much, it’s probably a pretty
good book.
I could not have done better myself. But then a second attack came a
few weeks later from a lawyer for the Sugar Association, a group repre-
senting the interests of producers of sugar cane and beets. The letter
charged me with making “numerous false, misleading, disparaging, and
defamatory statements about sugar” such as “the false and inaccurate
statement that soft drinks contain sugar.” It said soft drinks “have con-
tained virtually no sugar (sucrose) in more than 20 years,” and if I did not
“cease making misleading or false statements regarding sugar or the
sugar industry . . . the only recourse available to us will be to legally de-
fend our industry and its members against any and all fallacious and
harmful allegations.” Mind you, the ingredient labels of soft drinks say
they contain “high fructose corn syrup and/or sucrose,” and both sweet-
eners are made of glucose and fructose—sugars. Thus, the lawyer’s letter
could have only one purpose: intimidation. I wrote back saying so and
heard nothing further from this group.
By the time Food Politics had been out for a month, I could see that it
had struck a nerve. In connecting the dots between food industry marketing
and rising rates of obesity, I was simply stating the obvious: Food compa-
nies contribute to obesity because, like any other business, their job is to
sell products and increase returns to investors. They may argue, as did the
“reviewers,” that what you eat is a matter of personal responsibility, but
their corporate responsibility is to get you to buy more food, not less.
Companies would rather not have customers know how they have to
operate in today’s overabundant and competitive food economy. As
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ix . P R E FA C E T O T H E 2 0 0 7 E D I T I O N
Food Politics points out, the U.S. food supply provides an average of
3,900 calories a day per capita, an amount roughly twice average need.
To expand sales under these conditions, food companies lobby govern-
ment agencies, forge alliances with health professionals, market directly
to children, sell junk food as health food, and get laws passed that favor
corporate health over human health. In the normal course of doing busi-
ness, food companies contribute to changes in society that encourage eat-
ing more food, more often, in more places, and that discourage choices of
more healthful foods in reasonable amounts.
I wrote Food Politics to refocus attention on the environmental—that
is, the social, commercial, and institutional—influences on food choice,
rather than on the personal. If poor food choices are only a matter of per-
sonal responsibility, then we only need to educate people to eat better.
But if environmental factors make it difficult to eat healthfully, we need
to change society to make healthful choices the default. I hoped that Food
Politics would help shift attention from the personal to the societal changes
needed to influence food choice, food marketing among them.
In March 2002, these ideas seemed surprising. They challenged readers
to think about food companies in a different way, not just as providers of
bountiful food at low cost, but also as contributors to an unhealthful
environment of food choice. But Food Politics was lucky in its timing. Eric
Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation (Houghton-Mifflin, 2001) had appeared
less than a year earlier. Its compelling exposé of the “dark side” of indus-
trialized food production reached a huge audience and stimulated wide-
spread public interest in food issues.
Furthermore, while Food Politics was in press in December 2001, the
U.S. Surgeon General, Dr. David Satcher, issued a Call to Action to Pre-
vent and Decrease Overweight and Obesity. To meet the urgent need to
promote better food choices and more physical activity among all Amer-
icans, but especially among children, he urged not only more education,
but also environmental actions by communities, schools, workplaces,
health care institutions, and the food industry to make it easier for every-
one to eat less and move more. Food Politics appeared at just the right
time to provide documentation of the need for such actions.
And how such actions have proliferated! Taken together, concerns
about obesity—and the way food is produced—have led to nothing less
than a social movement. Fragmented, uncoordinated, and spontaneous as
this movement appears, it has all the hallmarks of democracy at its best,
with elements decidedly of the people, by the people, and for the people.
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x . P R E FA C E T O T H E 2 0 0 7 E D I T I O N
The food movement embraces a great range of issues that have in com-
mon demands for more healthful alternatives to the current food system,
as well as for more meaningful—moral, ethical, and sustainable—alter-
natives. I discuss some aspects of the issues advocated by this movement
in my subsequent books, Safe Food (University of California Press, 2003)
and What to Eat (North Point Press/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2006).
Here are some of its various elements:
ɀ
The Good Food Movement: This is what Farm Aid calls the
demands for local, organic, or humanely raised food produced by
family farms. The Slow Food Movement is an important contributor
to this category. This was founded in 1989 in Italy to counter the
culture of fast food with food that tastes good; is produced in clean
ways that do not harm the environment, animals, or health; by people
who receive fair wages for their work. Also contributing to this move-
ment are groups that oppose genetically modified or irradiated foods.
The movement’s importance is revealed by sales figures: organic and
other “good” foods comprise the fastest-growing segment of the food
industry.
ɀ
The Farm-to-Community Movement: This category aims to connect
farmers to local communities through farmers’ markets, community-
supported agriculture (customers pay farmers in advance for seasonal
produce), and programs that link farmers to schools, restaurants, and
other institutions.
ɀ
The Community Food Security Movement: This coalition of 325
organizations has been working since 1994 to provide fresh, locally
produced foods to low-income urban and rural communities that
bear the highest burden of health problems associated with poor
diets. These organizations do such things as placing supermarkets in
inner cities, providing fresh vegetables to corner stores, and ensuring
access to land for immigrant farmers.
ɀ
The Stop-Marketing-Foods-to-Kids Movement: Since 2002, in
response to increasing evidence of the harmful effects of marketing
junk food to children, advocates, lawyers, and legislators have been
seeking ways to restrict, restrain, or block this practice.
ɀ
The School Food Movement: In this most remarkable category,
parents, teachers, and food service directors throughout the country
are demanding—and achieving—tastier and healthier meals in schools
and the elimination of junk foods.
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xi . P R E FA C E T O T H E 2 0 0 7 E D I T I O N
Separately and together, these movements are cause for much opti-
mism. I see evidence of their work everywhere I go throughout the United
States, Canada, and Europe. Their purposes converge on two goals: first,
to create a food system that promotes health and protects the environ-
ment, and second, to support individual responsibility for food choice
with collective responsibility—community, government, and corporate—
so as to make it easier for people to eat more healthfully.
This is a thrilling time to be a food or nutrition advocate, an advocate
for children’s health, or, for that matter, an advocate for greater corpo-
rate accountability. As more people recognize how food companies influ-
ence government policies about dietary advice, school foods, marketing
to children, or health claims on food products—the matters addressed in
Food Politics—more want to get involved in ways to improve the food
environment. Plenty of issues are worth working on, and plenty of groups
are working on them. Join them. Eating more healthfully—and encour-
aging others to do so—is well within the realm of possibility and thor-
oughly consistent with the best practices of democratic societies.
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