“Americans now eat an average of 33 pounds of cheese a year, nearly triple the 1970 rate,” writes New York Times investigative reporter Michael Moss in this article about Dairy Management Inc., a U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) “marketing creation” with a $140 million annual budget “largely financed by a government-mandated fee on the dairy industry.” According to Moss, “The organization’s activities, revealed through interviews and records, provide a stark example of inherent conflicts in the Agriculture Department’s historical roles as both marketer of agriculture products and America’s nutrition police.” Moss claims that despite federal efforts to curb the consumption of saturated fats, Dairy Management has “worked with restaurants to expand their menus with cheese-laden products,” in addition to spending “millions of dollars on research to support a national advertising campaign promoting the notion that people could lose weight by consuming more dairy products.” His exposé opines that the group’s…
Category Archives Media Coverage
Choices Magazine, an outreach publication of the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association, has released its 3rd Quarter 2010 issue focusing on the economic implications of rising U.S. obesity rates. Topics include medical costs and implications for policymakers; consumer behavior; farm policy; the diverse effects of food assistance programs; nutrition labeling; taxes on sweetened beverages; and the “behavioral economics” associated with what Americans eat.
“Sorry to scare you, but on Halloween much of the chocolate Americans will hand out to trick-or-treaters will be tainted by the labor of enslaved children,” writes Andrew Korfhage in this October 18, 2010, AlterNet article alleging that chocolate manufacturers have failed to eradicate child labor practices as promised. According to the author, Hershey’s and other companies pledged “nearly a decade ago to set up a system to certify that no producers in their supply chains use child labor,” but have yet to take any “meaningful action.” Korfhage credits a 2001 exposé with documenting the “scandalous conditions under which most U.S. chocolate is made,” noting that the effort spurred Representative Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.) and Senator Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) to introduce legislation seeking “slave-free” certification for all U.S. chocolate. “[B]ut before Harkin’s bill could pass the Senate, the chocolate industry had announced a voluntary four-year plan to clean up its own…
Where science has left a void, politics and marketing have rushed in,” writes Denise Grady in this New York Times article detailing the contentious scientific debate over bisphenol A (BPA) and its potential human health effects, including “cancer, obesity, infertility, and behavior problems.” Because researchers have not yet reached a consensus, the issue of BPA’s safety has become “highly partisan,” according to Grady. On the one hand, Democrats and environmental groups have urged regulators to adopt a precautionary, “better-safe than-sorry approach” similar to the one favored by the European Union. On the other hand, “Republicans, anti-regulation activists and the food-packaging and chemical industries” have insisted that BPA is harmless and “all but indispensable to keeping canned food safe.” Grady attributes much of this rancor to the challenge of reproducing and reconciling study results, which often rely on different methodologies and data sets with varying degrees of integrity. “Animal strains, doses,…
“Energy bars and energy drinks are just the tip of this antioxidant-enhanced, vitamin-enriched, high-fiber iceberg,” writes Anneli Rufus in an August 3, 2010, AlterNet article examining health claims based on nutraceuticals such as “vitamins, minerals, amino acids, herbs, other botanicals, and that amorphous category known as dietary supplements.” According to Rufus, “nutraceuticals hark back to preindustrial folk remedies,” but are not yet proven to work in people. As Stephen DeFelice of the Foundation for Innovation in Medicine told her, the functional-foods industry “is all marketing, marketing, marketing without the clinical research to back it up.” Rufus goes on to trace the history and development behind “the nutraceutical boom,” noting that consumers are again seeking “good for you” foods after a century of focusing “entirely on flavor, speed and ease.” To meet this demand, functional-food companies must walk “a tricky linguo-legislative tightrope” in marketing their products, with restrictions placed on claims linking…
In this literature review, The New Yorker’s Elizabeth Kolbert recounts the decline of bluefin tuna and other aquatic species due to overfishing, technological advances and lukewarm governance by authorities like the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT). According to Kolbert, the world passed “the point of what might be called ‘peak fish’” in the late 1980s, when the global catch topped out at 85 million tons. “For the past two decades, the global catch has bee steadily declining,” she warns. “It is estimated that the total take is dropping by around five hundred thousand tons a year.” Kolbert thus turns to several books on aquatic ecosystems and ocean sustainability to explain the confluence of cultural, historical and technological factors that have brought whole fisheries to the brink of extinction. To this end, she trawls such watery tomes as (i) Saved by the Sea: A Love Story with…
This article examines the fallout from Kellogg Co.’s recall of 28 million cereal boxes that, according to a public statement, contained “elevated levels of hydrocarbons, including methyl naphthalene, normally found in the paraffin wax and film in the liners.” The company voluntarily pulled the products after receiving complaints about an “off-flavor and smell,” which caused nausea and other gastrointestinal ailments in some consumers. Schor highlights the failure of Congress to pass reform measures that would allow the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to issue mandatory recalls. “[T]he legislation sits in limbo in the upper chambers as industry groups chafe at Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s (D-Calif.) bid to ban another chemical with an unclear safety history, bisphenol A, from food containers,” she writes. Citing a recent Environmental Working Group (EWG) report that underscores the potential toxicity of methyl naphthalene, Schor raises questions about the overall safety of food packaging. EWG has “urged…
La Vida Locavore blogger Jill Richardson claims in a July 6 AlterNet article that a recent webinar touting a “perspective on pesticide residues” was benignly marketed to federal and state health officials by a “self-described non-profit organization,” the Alliance for Food and Farming. While the Alliance’s website does not identify its supporters, Richardson asserts that the organization is an industry “front group” representing California-based farm and pesticide interests, one of which apparently argued in the film Food, Inc. that “foods containing clones should not be labeled.” “[F]ront groups are a common vehicle industry uses to delude, confuse, and sometimes overtly defraud the public,” Richardson says. She cites author Anna Lappé’s book Diet for a Hot Planet highlighting a 1969 tobacco industry internal memo that discusses “establishing a controversy,” and Lappé opines that “The food industry long ago saw the benefits of fomenting confusion; confusion defuses public outcry about our toxic…
This article calls for government authorities to treat “junk food” and the obesity epidemic exactly as they addressed smoking. Noting that the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s latest dietary guidelines have recycled the same advice given 30 years ago, while the rate of obese Americans has roughly doubled in that time, columnist Davis Lazarus calls for “draconian” measures to reduce consumption of high-fat, high-salt, high-sugar products. Among other matters, he contends that such an aggressive campaign could mean anything from making certain foods less appealing by removing them from schools, government buildings and workplaces, to taxing sweetened beverages, stepping up wellness programs and subsidizing healthy foods instead of corn.
“The Food and Drug Administration [FDA] is seriously considering whether to approve the first genetically engineered [GE] animal that people would eat—salmon that can grow at twice the normal rate,” reports New York Times biotechnology correspondent Andrew Pollack in this article about the decade-long regulatory process. Pollack identifies the petitioner as a Waltham, Massachusetts, company named AquaBounty Technologies, which has now submitted “most or all of the data the [FDA] needs to analyze whether the salmon are safe to eat, nutritionally equivalent to other salmon and safe for the environment.” The fish under review is an Atlantic salmon that contains “a growth hormone gene from Chinook salmon as well as a genetic on-switch from ocean pout.” As AquaBounty Chief Executive Ronald Stotish explained to Pollack, the accelerated maturation would not result in “salmon the size of the Hindenburg,” but would help bring fish to market in one half the usual…
