Corporate Food Giants Have Reason to Worry -- Some Very Brave Supermarkets Are Sharing Nutritional Score Numbers with Customers

Food  

AlterNet / By Marty Kaplan

Corporate Food Giants Have Reason to Worry -- Some Very Brave Supermarkets Are Sharing Nutritional Score Numbers with Customers

Nuval food rankings go from 1-100; Mott's Original Applesauce gets a 4, Keebler Townhouse Bistro Multi-Grain Crackers get a 3. 

 

March 6, 2013  |  

 

I couldn't believe my eyes.

I was in a Minneapolis branch of Byerly's, an upscale grocery chain in Minnesota. Scanning the aisles for a small extravagance for my dinner hosts, I noticed that the shelf labels included not just the price-per-unit, which I'm used to, but little blue and white linked hexagons marked on a scale of 1 to 100 -- a "NuVal" score.

NuVal scores don't tip you off to a bargain. They tell you how good or bad a food is for your health.

Yeah, right. The idea that a food store would admit -- would explicitly declare, on the spot, as your hand is reaching for it -- that a product it's selling is nutritionally crappy: that violates every principle of Marketing 101, not to mention Ayn Rand 101.

This is different from the labels that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has required since 1990. Those are well-intentioned marvels of confusion, containing so much information (are you getting your minimum daily requirement of magnesium?), so much disinformation (calculating calories per serving, when a serving is half the amount a runway waif would eat), so much incomprehensible information (I forget -- is tripotassium phosphate good or bad for you?) that you can get an anxiety attack trying to figure out which granola will nourish you and which will kill you.

But NuVal scores make that simple, and sometimes shocking.

Cocoa Puffs, for example, gets a NuVal score of 26, but so does Life ("you don't have to be a grown-up to benefit from the whole grain inside"), and Kashi Strawberry Fields Cereal ("plenty of whole grain goodness") gets a 10, same as Cap'n Crunch.

An apple gets a 96, which you might expect. But unsweetened applesauce gets a 29, apple juice gets a 15 and Mott's Original Applesauce ("a great tasting snack that's actually good for you") gets a 4.

Nabisco Nilla Wafers ("simple goodness") get a 6, and Keebler Townhouse Bistro Multi-Grain Crackers (multi-grain! surely good for you, no?) get a 3 (no).

You'd expect fresh broccoli to get 100, as does Birds Eye Cooked Winter Squash. Grapefruits are 99, and sweet potatoes are 96. But Vlasic Old Fashioned Sauerkraut gets a 4.

Skim milk comes in at 91, 1 percent milk at 91 and 2 percent at 55. Capri Sun gets a 1. So does Odwalla Pomegranate Limeade with 20 percent juice. Who would buy products like these if they actually knew what poison -- I mean, um, empty calories -- they amount to, and if they had manifestly better alternatives an arm's reach away?

The NuVal numbers are the brainchild of David L. Katz, M.D., MPH, an adjunct associate professor at the Yale School of Medicine. A dozen doctors and nutritionists, funded by the nonprofit Griffin Hospital in Derby, Conn., developed the scoring system, based on 30 factors including vitamins, fiber, salt, sugar, fat quality, protein quality, glycemic load, energy density and calories. From the public health evidence about those factors, they constructed an algorithm that processes the data into a single number. As new food science research is published, and as products are reformulated by their manufacturers, the algorithm and the individual scores are updated. (If that's happened to any of the products I've mentioned, I'll be glad to revise the numbers online.)

It's a miracle that some 30 retail food chains are adopting the scores. You won't find them at Whole Foods or Trader Joe's, and from the locations page of the NuVal website it looks like the only chain in my neck of the woods -- Kroger, which in Los Angeles owns Ralphs and Food4Less -- is running a "pilot program in select areas" (Kentucky, apparently). But Lunds and Byerley's, which use NuVal, are venerable markets in Minnesota, as is King Cullen on Long Island, N.Y.; grocers in the NuVal fold aren't just a bunch of crunchy hippies.

As you might imagine, there's been pushback. Ocean Spray, whose Light Cranberry Juice Cocktail gets a 2, says NuVal doesn't reflect their product's urinary tract health benefits. Sara Lee, whose Ball Park hotdogs get a 7, says other Ball Park products score higher. General Mills complains that details of the algorithm aren't public, as does the National Consumers League, which turns out to be an astroturf front for the likes of Monsanto, Bristol Myers Squibb, the Chemical Specialties Manufacturers Association and the National Meat Association. And according to Dr. David Katz, the NuVal founder, the algorithm "has been described in detail in peer-reviewed publications accessible to all. It has been made available in its entirety to research groups throughout the U.S., Canada, and the U.K.; to federal agencies in the U.S.; to the Institute of Medicine; and to private entities that have requested such access."

I'm no food puritan. My culinary patrimony consists of shmaltz, gribines and kishka. (Don't ask.) I believe that the joylessness caused by renouncing "bad" foods -- and the guilt that's caused by consuming them -- conceivably undoes the good that's done by substituting celery for Oreos. I know that adding eye-popping 1-to-100 scores to grocery price tags won't cut down on gargantuan portion sizes; or make meals more mindful occasions; or alert us to our complicity with corporate farming; or prevent the processed food industry from addicting us to salt, sugar and fat; or get our butts off the couch and start moving. But giving consumers a no-brainer tool while they're standing in the supermarket aisle is surely a more promising way to stop the slow-motion suicide we call the American way of eating than declaring March to be National Nutrition Month.

This column first appeared at The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles. You can read more of Kaplan's columns here, and email him there if you'd like.

Martin Kaplan, research professor at the USC Annenberg School for Communication, holds the Norman Lear Chair in Entertainment, Media and Society. He has been a White House speechwriter; a Washington journalist; a deputy presidential campaign manager; a Disney studio executive; a motion picture and television producer and screenwriter; and a radio host.

 

 

Food  

AlterNet / By Tara Lohan

Nestlé Recall and Mafia Connections: 5 Things You Should Know As Horse Meat Scandal Grows

The lessons extend far beyond meat products, and far beyond Europe.

Photo Credit: BKingFoto/ Shutterstock.com

February 19, 2013  |  

 

 

By now you’ve likely heard about the horse meat scandal that is rocking Europe. As far as food scandals go, this one is intriguing. Of course, this is not the first time we’ve learned that the meat we buy may not be everything we thought it was. Remember "pink slime"? The only good news here is that, so far, it doesn’t seem to be an imminent health threat, although it does raise some very alarming questions. 

As food politics expert Marion Nestle wrote, “The unfolding drama around Europe’s horsemeat scandal is a case study in food politics and the politics of cultural identity. Cultural identity? They (other people) eat horsemeat. We don’t.”

As Nestle explains, “Most Americans say they won’t eat horsemeat, are appalled by the very idea, and oppose raising horses for food, selling their meat, and slaughtering horses for any reason.” Horse meat, however, is eaten in numerous countries around the world like China, Japan and Indonesia, as well as countries in Europe, including France and Switzerland. 

It’s one thing to knowingly eat horse meat; it’s quite another to have it slipped into your food. This opens a pandora’s box of questions about the food we're buying. For starters: What else is in there (donkey and pig, and the list may grow)? What does it reveal about food safety and our complex food chain? Who is responsible for duping consumers, and how did they get away with it?

It turns out there is a lot we can learn from Europe’s surplus of horse burgers.

1. The Mighty Fall

The most recent news surfacing today is that Nestlé, one of the largest food companies in the world, has now been entangled in the scandal. The New York Timesreports that Nestlé is pulling two products sold in Italy and Spain: Buitoni Beef Ravioli and Beef Tortellini, as well as Lasagnes à la Bolognaise Gourmandes sold to catering companies in France.  

Nestlé is just the latest in the list of Europe’s top food companies involved. The story first broke in the UK and Ireland when major supermarket chains Tesco and Aldi were found to be selling beef products that contained horse meat. It spun from there. AdAge reports, “Burger King binned thousands of Whoppers and Angus Burgers, which were sourced from the same Irish beef supplier, Silvercrest, and Findus ‘beef’ lasagna was found to contain 100% horse meat.” 

Silvercrest has been fingered, as well as Liffey Meats in Ireland and Dalepak in Yorkshire, accordingto Felicity Lawrence of the Guardian:

Silvercrest and Dalepak are both subsidiaries of ABP Food Group, one of the largest beef processors in Europe.”

... Huge blocks of frozen meat at a cold store in Northern Ireland, Freeza Foods, which had been quarantined by officials suspicious of its labelling and state of packaging, were found to contain 80% horse. 

Other top food companies were implicated when the scandal hit France (more on that soon), but the presence of large food companies at the heart of the issue is troubling. While bigger companies are often able to offer products cheaper than small and local stores, some may be questioning if the savings are really worth it if consumers are getting duped. A look at the complex supply chain raises even more fears.

Lawrence writes:

Supermarket buyers and big brands have been driving down prices, seeking special offers on meat products as consumers cut back on their spending in the face of recession. The squeeze on prices has come at a time when manufacturers' costs have been soaring. Beef prices have been at record highs as has the price of grain needed to feed cattle. The cost of energy, heavily used in industrial processing and to fuel centralised distribution chains, has also soared. There has been a mistmatch between the cost of real beef and what companies are prepared to pay.

So, are we really shocked?

2. A Tangled Web

Horse meat has ended up in so-called beef products to varying degrees — some have been found to contain traces of horse DNA, which may have been the result of processing plants not properly cleaning equipment. And some products have been found to contain upward of 80 to 100 percent horse meat, which signals a much larger problem. 

Getting to the bottom of how this came about has involved a lot of finger pointing. In Ireland, the ABP Food Group blamed supplies in Netherlands and Spain, and later Poland. “Five weeks into the scandal and the links in the Irish chain have still not been fully established,” writes the Guardian's Lawrence.” But this gets even more interesting in France, as she explains:  

Comigel had subcontracted its ready meal production to a factory in Luxembourg, Tavola. It was supplied with meat by a company called Spanghero. Spanghero had bought meat from a Dutch fraudster already convicted of passing horse off as beef, Jan Fasen.

The Dutch trader ran a company called Draap, which spelled backwards is paard or Dutch for horse. It was registered in Cyprus in 2008, with an offshore vehicle in the British Virgin Islands. It emerged during Fasen's trial in Holland that he had supplied French companies with horsemeat imported from South America and Mexico fraudulently labelled as Dutch and German "beef" going back to 2007.

The horsemeat found in the recent tests on ready meals exported from France was said to have been sourced by Draap from Romania. The Romanian government has said its meat was legally exported correctly labeled as horse. The French government said Spanghero was the first agent to stamp the horse as beef; Spanghero has denied doing so deliberately. Fasen says Spanghero and French manufacturers were in on the deception from the beginning.

It turns out there may be a whole lot more criminal to this case.

3. Trouble in Romania

It just so happens that Romania may have an excess of dead horses on its hands. John Lichfield of the Independent reports that a change in traffic rules is to blame:

Horse-drawn carts were a common form of transport for centuries in Romania, but hundreds of thousands of the animals are feared to have been sent to the abattoir after the change in road rules.

The law, which was passed six years ago but only enforced recently, also banned carts drawn by donkeys, leading to speculation among food-industry officials in France that some of the “horse meat” which has turned up on supermarket shelves in Britain, France and Sweden may, in fact, turn out to be donkey meat. “Horses have been banned from Romanian roads and millions of animals have been sent to the slaughterhouse,” said Jose Bove, a veteran campaigner for small farmers who is now vice-president of the European Parliament agriculture committee.

While the explanation of where some of the horse meat could have come from is straightforward, how it got to dinner plates is not. As Lichfield explains, “It came from abattoirs in Romania through a dealer in Cyprus working through another dealer in Holland to a meat plant in the south of France which sold it to a French-owned factory in Luxembourg which made it into frozen meals sold in supermarkets in 16 countries.”

4. Blame the Mafia

From here, the story just gets weirder. Jamie Doward reports for the Observer that organized international gangs are suspected of involvement in the scandal. Doward writes:

Experts within the horse slaughter industry have told the Observer there is evidence that both Polish and Italian mafia gangs are running multimillion-pound scams to substitute horsemeat for beef during food production. There are claims that vets and other officials working within abattoirs and food production plants are intimidated into signing off meat as beef when it is in fact cheaper alternatives such as pork or horse. ...

"I'm concerned that this is an international criminal conspiracy here and we've really got to get to the bottom of it," [Britain’s environment secretary Owen Paterson] said.

5. Rethinking Our Food

So, we found out that beef products may contain horse, and also pig, and possibly donkey, as well. What to do with that information? For some people, it means buying less meat or from different sources. Reuters reported that 60 percent of people it surveyed in the UK said they were turning to local butchers for their meat and 25 percent said they would buy different cuts instead of processed meat. 

AdAge reported that sales of frozen burgers dropped 40 percent in the beginning of February, while the meat-substitute Quorn saw a spike in sales of 10 percent. Emma Hall writes that, “More than two-thirds of British adults said they would be less likely to buy frozen meat products in the future.”  

The biggest effect so far has been a drop in public trust. But after countless food safety scandals over the years, some of them deadly, why do we trust a system that’s needlessly complex?

“The food and retail industries have become highly concentrated and globalized in recent decades,” Lawrence writes for the Guardian:

“A handful of key players dominate the beef processing and supermarket sectors across Europe. They have developed very long supply chains, particularly for their economy lines, which enable them to buy the ingredients for processed foods from wherever they are cheapest at any point, depending on exchange rates and prices on the global commodity markets. Networks of brokers, cold stores operators and subcontracted meat cutting plants have emerged to supply rapidly fluctuating orders ‘just in time.’ Management consultants KPMG estimate there are around 450 points at which the integrity of the chain can break down."

That’s worth repeating — there are 450 places where something could go wrong before your food gets into your hands.

If there was ever a reason to eat more locally produced food and to know where your food comes from and who grows and processes it, this would be a damn good one because this extends far beyond just meat products, and far beyond Europe.

Tara Lohan is a senior editor at AlterNet and editor of the new book Water Matters: Why We Need to Act Now to Save Our Most Critical Resource. You can follow her on Twitter @TaraLohan.

What it Means that Monsanto Holds the Patents on Life

Food  

AlterNet / By Katherine Paul, Ronnie Cummins

What it Means that Monsanto Holds the Patents on Life

How long are we going to let Monsanto bully farmers and politicians into controlling the very source of life on earth?

Photo Credit: © igor.stevanovic/ Shutterstock.com

March 1, 2013  |  

 

 

Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court began hearing arguments in a seed patent infringement case that pits a small farmer from Indiana, 75-year old Vernon Hugh Bowman, against biotech goliath Monsanto. Reporters from the New York Times to the Sacramento Bee dissected the legal arguments. They speculated on the odds. They opined on the impact a Monsanto loss might have, not only on genetically modified crops, but on medical research and software.

What most of them didn’t report on is the absurdity – and the danger – of allowing companies to patent living organisms in the first place, and then use those patents to attempt to monopolize world seed and food production.

The case boils down to this. Monsanto sells its patented genetically engineered (GE) “Roundup Ready” soybean seeds to farmers under a contract that prohibits the farmers from saving the next-generation seeds and replanting them. Farmers like Mr. Bowman who buy Monsanto’s GE seeds are required to buy new seeds every year. For years, Mr. Bowman played by Monsanto’s rules. Then in 2007, he bought an unmarked mix of soybeans from a grain elevator and planted them.

Some of the soybeans turned out to have been grown from Monsanto’s patented Roundup Ready soybean seeds. Monsanto sued Mr. Bowman, won, and the court ordered the farmer to pay the company $84,000. Mr. Bowman appealed, arguing that he unknowingly bought soybeans grown from Monsanto’s seeds, not the seeds themselves, and that therefore the law of “patent exhaustion” applies.
The press and public have fixated on the sticky legal details of the case, and the classic David vs. Goliath nature of the fight. But win or lose, Mr. Bowman’s predicament is part of a much bigger problem.

The real issue is this: Why have we surrendered control over something so basic to human survival as seeds? Why have we bought into the biotech industry’s program, which pushes a few monoculture commodity crops, when history and science have proven that seed biodiversity is essential for growing crops capable of surviving severe climate conditions, such as drought and floods?

As physicist and environmentalist Vandana Shiva explains, we have turned seed, which is the heart of a traditional diversity-rich farming system across the world, into a powerful commodity, used to monopolize the food system.

According to a recent report by the Center for Food Safety and Save our Seeds, three companies – Monsanto, DuPont and Syngenta – control 53 percent of the global commercial seed market. They have pressured farmers to replace diverse, nutritional seeds, seeds that are resilient because they’ve been bred by small-scale farmers to adapt to local climates and soil conditions, with monocultures of genetically engineered seeds. In the U.S. these crops are predominately corn and soybeans. According to the report, entitled “Seed Giants vs. U.S. Farmers,” 93 percent of soybeans and 86 percent of corn crops in the U.S. come from patented, genetically engineered seeds.

Monsanto profits handsomely from selling its patented seeds. But the real profits are in selling farmers its proprietary pesticides, like Roundup. Farmers can spray huge amounts of Roundup on Monsanto’s Roundup Ready soybeans, killing everything except the soybean plants. It’s a win-win for Monsanto. And it’s sold as a win to farmers, who have been told that by following the Monsanto method, they’ll increase their yields and make more money. Monsanto even claims that its GE crops are the answer to world hunger.

But little of what Monsanto has promised, to farmers and the world, has proven true.

Since farmers first began buying into Monsanto’s scheme in 1995, the average cost to plant one acre of soybeans has risen 325 percent, according to the Center for Food Safety’s report. Corn seed prices are up by 259 percent. Those increases don’t include the cost of the lawsuits Monsanto has aggressively filed against farmers the company claims have violated patent agreements. By the end of 2012, Center for Food Safety calculates that Monsanto had received over $23.5 million from patent infringement lawsuits against farmers and farm businesses.

And the rest of us? What have we gained from this aggressive monopoly of seeds and crops? Nothing. In fact, the losses continue to mount.

Monsanto promised that its GE crops would help the environment by reducing the need for pesticides. But according to the USDA, farmers used up to 26 percent more chemicals per acre on herbicide-resistant crops than on non-GE crops. And as several dozen aggressive "superweeds" have become resistant to glyphosate, the primary herbicide used on GE crops, the biotech industry is ramping up its war on weeds with a new generation of GE crops that can surviving spraying with 2,4 D, paraquat, and other super-toxic herbicides.

As for GE crops being necessary to feed the world, that promise has also been debunked. In 2010, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) warned that the loss of biodiversity will have a major impact on the ability of humankind to feed itself in the future.

According to “A Global Citizens Report on the State of GMOs: Failed Promises, Failed Technologies:”

The fable that GMOs are feeding the world has already led to large-scale destruction of biodiversity and farmers’ livelihoods. It is threatening the very basis of our freedom to know what we eat and to choose what we eat. Our biodiversity and our seed freedom are in peril. Our food freedom, food democracy and food sovereignty are at stake.

It’s safe to say that the majority of the general public would love to see the small farmer from Indiana knock Monsanto down a peg. Last year, a Monsanto ally threatened to sue the state of Vermont if legislators passed a law requiring labels on all foods containing genetically modified organisms (GMOs). 

Lawmakers capitulated, despite the fact that voter support was running at more than 90 percent. Later in the year, Monsanto and large food corporations spent $46 million to defeat a citizens’ initiative in California that would have required mandatory labeling of GMOs.

Monsanto may be Public Enemy Number One, but a win for Mr. Bowman is hardly a win for mankind. It’s time we ask ourselves: How long are we going to let Monsanto bully farmers and politicians into controlling the very source of life on earth? How long will we tolerate the growing monopolization and genetic engineering of seeds by an aggressive cabal of chemical and pesticide corporations who pose a deadly threat to our health, our environment and the future of our food? And when does “how long” become too late?

Katherine Paul is director of development and communications at the Organic Consumers Association.

Ronnie Cummins is founder and director of the Organic Consumers Association. Cummins is author of numerous articles and books, including "Genetically Engineered Food: A Self-Defense Guide for Consumers" (Second Revised Edition Marlowe & Company 2004).

Why America Has the Cheapest, Most Addictive and Most Nutritionally Inferior Food in the World

Food 

Democracy Now! / By Amy Goodman

Why America Has the Cheapest, Most Addictive and Most Nutritionally Inferior Food in the World

Author Melanie Warner talks about her new book "Pandora’s Lunchbox: How Processed Food Took Over the American Meal."

 

 

Photo Credit: Shutterstock.com

March 1, 2013  |  

 

 

AMY GOODMAN: As we continue deep inside the $1-trillion-a-year "processed-food-industrial complex," we turn to look at how decades of food science have resulted in the cheapest, most abundant, most addictive and most nutritionally inferior food in the world. And the vitamins and protein added back to this processed food? Well, you might be surprised to know where they come from. That’s the focus of a new book by longtime food reporter Melanie Warner, author of Pandora’s Lunchbox: How Processed Food Took Over the American Meal.

Melanie, welcome to Democracy Now! She’s joining us from Denver, Colorado. Vitamins, vitamin-added food. You think you go to the grocery store, and you want to get a little added punch, and you want to ensure that your kids, that your family, has added vitamins. What’s the problem with that?

MELANIE WARNER: You know, one of the things with processed food that I found while doing this book, is not only that it has an abundance of the things that Michael was talking about—salt, sugar, fat—it’s also what it’s lacking, which, it turns out, is naturally occurring nutrition, in many cases. So that’s vitamins and minerals and fiber and things like antioxidants.

So, you take something like cereal—you know, you walk down the cereal aisle, and you’re bombarded with health messages: It’s high in vitamin D, a good source of calcium, fiber, antioxidants. You see these things all over the package. And one of the things—one of the questions I asked myself when I was starting to work on this book was: Why is it nearly impossible to find a box of cereal in the cereal aisle without vitamins, added vitamins and minerals, in the ingredient list?
And it turns out, because most cereal has very little inherent nutrition. And this is in part because of processing. The processing of food is very intensive. It’s very—it’s very technical, and with cereal, can be very damaging to naturally occurring nutrients, especially vitamins and oftentimes fiber. So, what manufacturers do is they add back in vitamins. So, essentially, you see all these wonderful claims on the package, but essentially—and you look at the panel, and you’re getting 35 percent and 40 percent of your recommended daily allowance of these vitamins, but they’re essentially added in like a vitamin pill, which many people maybe are already taking in the morning.

And I was really surprised to learn where some of these vitamins come from. I never really thought about it in much detail, as probably most people don’t. But it turns out that they’re—these vitamins are not coming from the foods that contain them. Like vitamin C does not come from an orange, and vitamin A does not come from a carrot. It’s very far from that. They come from things that really aren’t actually foods. Vitamin D, for instance, was probably the most shocking. It comes from sheep grease, so actually the grease that comes from sheep wool. You have giant barges and container ships that go from Australia and New Zealand over to China, where most of—a lot of our vitamins are produced. About 50 percent of global vitamin production comes from China inside these huge factories, very industrial processes. A lot of vitamins are actually chemical processes.

AMY GOODMAN: Wait.

MELANIE WARNER: And they’re very technical and complex.

AMY GOODMAN: A lot of people, if they’re with someone, they’re looking at them right now. Wait a second. So, China gets all these shipments of sheep wool from Australia, and they’re pulling the sheep grease off of them to make vitamin D?

MELANIE WARNER: Yeah, sheep grease is actually very useful for a lot of things. It can be used to make moisturizer in lip balm. It can be used for industrial purposes, for lubricants for engines and machines and things like that. But one of its uses is to be converted, through a number of chemical steps and chemical processes, to vitamin D, which is added to our food and used in supplements. So, yeah—

AMY GOODMAN: What about—

MELANIE WARNER: —it’s just one of—

AMY GOODMAN: What about nylon, Melanie? What does nylon have to do with vitamins?

MELANIE WARNER: Yeah, it’s one of—it’s one of these chemicals that goes into the making of one of the B vitamins. It’s many—there are many food additives, actually, that are used in food but actually also have industrial purposes associated with them. One of my favorites is a chemical called, a food additive called azodicarbonamide, and that’s actually used quite extensively in bread and bread-type products, and it’s used as a dough conditioner and a manufacturing aid. And its main use outside of the manufacturing of bread is for creating foamed plastic, so things like yoga mats.

And I encountered some news articles a number of years ago where a tanker truck overturned on the Dan Ryan Expressway in Chicago carrying azodicarbonamide. And city fire officials had to issue their highest hazmat alert and evacuate everyone up to a half mile downwind because of this chemical spill. So you look at something like that, and you wonder: Is this something that we really want in our morning toast and our—the bread that goes on our turkey sandwiches?

AMY GOODMAN: Well, that’s a very important question. Now, of course, the processed food industry, the gross sales are enormous, but you may have redefined "gross" sales. Let’s talk about some of the experiments the scientist Melanie Warner conducted. Talk a little about chicken tenders.

MELANIE WARNER: Yeah, I’m not much of a scientist, but a number of years ago, when I started covering the food industry, I became curious about expiration dates that are printed on packages. Pretty much you to go into the supermarket, and every package in the store will have an expiration date on it. And I wondered: Well, what will happen? What do these expiration dates mean, and what will happen after this date has come and gone? Some of these dates are actually quite far out; they’ll be six to nine months or even more.

So I started collecting a number of food products, and I saved them in my office. And then I would open them after the expiration dates had passed, sometimes long after the expiration dates had passed because I had forgotten about them. And what I found out over time—I collected all kinds of products: cereal, cookies, Pop-Tarts, fast-food meals, frozen dinners, I mean, you name it. I have all kinds of gross stuff in my office at this point.

And what I found—there were a few exceptions—but what I found was that most of this food did not decompose or mold or go bad, even after long, long periods of time. I mean, I started this seven, eight years ago, and I still have slices of cheese that are perfectly orange, processed cheese.

AMY GOODMAN: From years and years and years ago?

MELANIE WARNER: Years and years and years ago, yeah. And they’re—

AMY GOODMAN: And what keeps their color? And what keeps them looking completely preserved?

MELANIE WARNER: There are a variety of reasons for this, depending on the product. Sometimes it’s because of powerful chemical preservatives that are in it. Sometimes it’s because of additives that lower the acidity of products, so that no microorganisms can grow. And sometimes it’s because food manufacturers very intentionally remove all the water from products. That’s the case with cereal and cookies.

AMY GOODMAN: Melanie, right now, for our TV viewers, we’re showing images of guacamole, bought in a store, presumably—

MELANIE WARNER: Yes, right.

AMY GOODMAN: —you know, maybe even a Whole Foods-type store, you know, a natural food store—

MELANIE WARNER: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: —and your own guacamole, and the difference how long it’s preserved.

MELANIE WARNER: Yeah, I think this was an unusual tub of guacamole, and it had an unusual dose of food additives. My husband came back from the store with it one day and said, "Oh, they announced—made an announcement that they made it fresh over at the deli." So I thought, "Oh, this is great." And I looked at the ingredients, and there were some ingredients on there that I had never even heard of. And I was spending a lot of time doing research on food additives. So I kind of—I put it away, I stored it in the fridge. And I thought, "Well, I’ll look into this later and see what these additives are."

And then, an interesting thing happened about nine months later. I completely forgot about it in the back of the fridge. My mom, who lives with us, she announced that she had tried some of the guacamole. And I thought she was referring to a recent purchase that I had made at a different store that we had bought for a party. But I thought, you know, I think a lot of that’s—that’s gone. And it turns out that she had tried the old guacamole, the nine-month-old stuff. And I was horrified, because she’s an older person, she’s in her early eighties, and food-borne illness in older people is no small thing. So I was terrified that she was going to be horribly ill. In fact, she wasn’t. She was—

AMY GOODMAN: Because the guacamole was how old?

MELANIE WARNER: Nine months. It was nine months old, yeah. So—and she had eaten it because it had no mold on it, it didn’t smell bad. It was a little bit—when I looked at it, it was a little bit discolored around the edges, you know? So some people might have thought, "Oh, maybe I’m not going to eat it." But she looked at it and thought, "Oh, this is a nice guacamole." So... And in the end, thankfully, she had only had a little bit, and she was totally fine. She had no effects whatsoever.

AMY GOODMAN: Melanie, 15 seconds before we end part one of this discussion. What most surprised you?

MELANIE WARNER: I think just the overall extent to which the technology and food science has merged with food production, and the level of engineering that goes and the level of technology and the level of processing that goes into—that goes into our food. And also, the extent to which the FDA is not watching over what goes into our food in terms of food additives very closely.

Amy Goodman is the host of the nationally syndicated news program, Democracy Now!.

The Weaponizing of Salt, Sugar and Fat: The Secrets of How Big Food Got Us Hooked on Junk

Food  

Democracy Now! / By Amy Goodman

The Weaponizing of Salt, Sugar and Fat: The Secrets of How Big Food Got Us Hooked on Junk

Michael Moss talks about his new book, "Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us."

 

Photo Credit: Adisa/ Shutterstock.com

March 1, 2013  |  

 

 

AMY GOODMAN: We spend the rest of the hour going deep inside the "processed-food-industrial complex," beginning with the "The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food." That was the cover story in the recent New York Times Magazine that examined how food companies have known for decades that salt, sugar and fat are not good for us in the quantities American’s consume them, and yet every year they convince most of us to ingest about twice the recommended amount of salt, 70 pounds of sugar—22 teaspoons a day. Then, there’s the fat. Well, New York Times reporter Michael Moss explains how one of the most prevalent fat delivery methods is cheese.

MICHAEL MOSS: Every year, the average American eats as much as 33 pounds of cheese. That’s up to 60,000 calories and 3,100 grams of saturated fat. So why do we eat so much cheese? Mainly it’s because the government is in cahoots with the processed food industry. And instead of responding in earnest to the health crisis, they’ve spent the past 30 years getting people to eat more. This is the story of how we ended up doing just that.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times investigative reporter Michael Moss. His new book is called Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us. He goes deep inside the laboratories where food scientists calculate the "bliss point" of sugary drinks or the "mouth feel" of fat, and use advanced technology to make it irresistible and addictive. As a result of this $1 trillion-a-year industry, one-in-three adults, and one-in-five kids, is now clinically obese.

Welcome to Democracy Now!, Michael. You open your book with a remarkable summit. Talk about who was there.

MICHAEL MOSS: This is a meeting in 1999 that engaged the CEOs of some of the largest food companies in the country, and they were presented with a vivid picture of the emerging obesity crisis. And what really amazed me about this meeting, when I found out about it and found the records to it and talked to some of the people who were present, is that it was none other than one of their own, a senior executive at Kraft, who basically laid the emerging obesity crisis at the feet of the processed food industry and pleaded with them to do something collectively to turn the corner.

AMY GOODMAN: What happened?

MICHAEL MOSS: And coming from him, it was just so powerful. They reacted, as you can imagine, rather defensively. They said, "Look, we’re already providing people with choices in the grocery store. We are committed to nutrition, as we are to convenience and low prices." Frankly, they were worried about the lost millions in sales if healthier products they created weren’t as attractive as the ones they do make.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about the CEO who basically ended the meeting.

MICHAEL MOSS: The head of General Mills made all of these points and was especially, I think, aghast at being blamed for the obesity crisis, because, again, he felt that in the cereal aisle, for example, General Mills was providing Cheerios with low amounts of sugar, and he didn’t see a need to down-formulate, if you will, all of the products in the grocery store in order to deal with this obesity crisis, which, you have to remember, back in ’99, was not as grave as it is today.

AMY GOODMAN: And, of course, the obesity crisis, I mean, in their terms, is about lawsuits, class action lawsuits. What does obesity mean? Why is this such a critical issue?

MICHAEL MOSS: Well, yes and no. The Kraft official who raised this back in 1999 was actually very deeply and sincerely concerned about the health effects on people and not so worried about litigation.

What this did, though, mean to the companies, though, was—was what I write about in the book, which, I have to tell you, Amy, was a bit of a detective story. I managed to come across a trove of internal documents that enabled me to get insiders to talk. And when they did, what it showed was that salt, sugar, fat are the three pillars, the Holy Grail, if you will, on which the food industry survives. And through their research, they know that when they hit the perfect amounts of each of those ingredients, they’ll send us over the moon, products will fly off the shelves, we’ll eat more, we’ll buy more—and being companies, of course, that they will make more money.

AMY GOODMAN: Name names, and talk about examples of the weaponizing of salt, sugar and fat.

MICHAEL MOSS: One of the legendary senior scientists for the food industry, Howard Moskowitz, walked me through his creation recently of a new soda for Dr. Pepper, a new flavor line. And it was amazing how much effort went into that—you know, a regression analysis, high mathematics. He would take dozens and dozens of formulas, just slightly altered, to find what he calls the "bliss point" for sweetness in the sugar. And you can do this own experiment at home. Take a cup of coffee, keep adding sugar until you reach the point that you like it the most, and then when you add more sugar, you actually like it less. Well, the food industry knows that, and they spend huge amounts of effort finding the perfect spot, not just for sugar, but for fat and salt, as well.

AMY GOODMAN: Frito-Lay had scientist Robert I-San [Lin].

MICHAEL MOSS: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: Talks about people getting addicted to salt.

MICHAEL MOSS: Yes. He was a wonderful, brilliant scientist who worked—went to work for Frito-Lay in the late ’70s, when salt became an issue in Washington, and the FDA started holding hearings looking at whether potentially it should regulate salt and not consider it inherently safe. Dr. Lin began pushing Frito-Lay to cut back on salt in its own products, for economic reasons. He thought it would position the company really well. And he left Frito-Lay. And years later, when I met him and we went through the documents that he saved from his days at Frito-Lay, it was just amazing to sit down with him at his dining room table and listen to his regrets at not having been able to have done more way back in the ’70s and early ’80s.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about the tobacco industry’s effect on the food industry, Michael Moss.

MICHAEL MOSS: I love this part of the story, because it’s really surprising. Philip Morris became the largest food manufacturer in the United States starting in the late '80s, when it acquired General Foods and then Kraft. And as you can imagine, for the first decade of that ownership, it pushed the food managers to do everything they could to sell their products. But starting in the late ’90s, when Philip Morris came under increasing pressure for nicotine and tobacco—and it was the first tobacco company to acknowledge or, rather, to accept the idea of government regulation—the Philip Morris officials turned to their food people and said, "You guys" — and this is private, of course — "You guys are going to face the same issue we're facing over nicotine with salt, sugar, fat and obesity." And they began nudging their food managers to start thinking about ways to ease back on their dependence on those three ingredients.

AMY GOODMAN: The problem with obesity, what it means for, for example, children?

MICHAEL MOSS: You know, in my own household, I have two boys, eight and 13. And you can just see the sugar craving that kids have, inevitably, for sugar. You know, we’ve tried to work with our grocery shopping to get control and to—and I think that’s one of the key things—

AMY GOODMAN: How do you do it with your kids?

MICHAEL MOSS: Well, so, with the kids, my wife Eve kind of arbitrarily said, "Hey, guys, let’s try to limit your cereal, when we eat cereal in the morning, to five grams or less of sugar." And we found that when you engage them in that, shopping becomes an Easter egg hunt, and they’re able to go to the cereal aisle and find those cereals that meet that quota. And they may have to reach low, or I may have to reach high, to find them, because the most sugary ones tend to be at eye level, by calculation. But I think it’s a really important issue, is—you just can’t throw fresh carrots and fresh apples at kids without engaging them. They’ll chuck them out in the lunchroom. But if we could invigorate the home economics program in this country, which fell by the waysides, I think that would be a huge—

AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean, home economics?

MICHAEL MOSS: Well, home economics—kids in school used to be taught how to shop, how to cook from scratch, how to be in control of their diets. Doesn’t happen anymore. And I write about this in the book. What did happen is we got Betty Crocker, a figment of the imagination of a marketing official at a food company. She began pushing processed foods, convenience foods, as an alternative to scratch cooking.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain more.

MICHAEL MOSS: This was back in the '50s and ’60s. Betty Crocker, as you all know—I mean, I used to think she was a real person. She wasn't. She started out just as a marketing tool for the companies. But she was—became emblematic of the food industry’s usurpation, if you will, of the home economist. And their notion was, "Hey, look, who’s got time for scratch meals anymore? Let’s encourage consumers to buy our convenience foods to make things easier for them."

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about Lunchables, how they were invented, what they mean.

MICHAEL MOSS: I got to interview and see documents that were kept by Bob Drane, who worked for Oscar Meyer back in the ’80s when the company faced a problem with its meat. People were cutting back on consumption of red meat because it has saturated fat and salt. And Mr. Drane and his team set about looking for a way to repackage those products. He was most interested in saving jobs, and he cared very much about the company. And they came up with the Lunchables, which, as you know, is basically a TV—a cold TV dinner aimed at kids for school lunches.

But it has two remarkable things beyond kind of the ingredients that they used—meat, cheese, crackers, typically. First they went after working moms, who work outside of the home, and designed it and marketed it as a way for moms to get through the crush of the—the 7 a.m. crush in the household where everybody’s scrambling to get out of the house and off to school and work. But then they went after the kids with an amazing marketing campaign, because they realized that the Lunchables wasn’t about food. It was about empowerment for kids. And they came up with this slogan: "All day, you gotta do what they say. But lunchtime is all yours." And kids went nuts for it. Pizza Lunchables, think about it. It’s a piece of cold dough, cheese, tomato sauce, that the kids assemble themselves. But that meant everything to kids, and sales skyrocketed.

AMY GOODMAN: And then they added dessert.

MICHAEL MOSS: And then they added dessert, hamburger Lunchables, hot dog Lunchables, pancake Lunchables—some of them with huge loads of salt, sugar, fat. Kraft, to its credit, is now pulling back on those ingredients, and you can actually find some much lower amounts. But it opened the door to something really important, which is the fast-food industry has moved into the grocery store, so you no longer have to go to a fast-food chain to find problematic foods.

AMY GOODMAN: Michael Moss, talk about cheese. Talk more about cheese.

MICHAEL MOSS: So, I was amazed to hear that figure, that we are, on average, eating as much as 33 pounds of cheese a year. And I thought, "How could that be?" And that’s triple the amount back in the '70s. And the story goes like this. Starting in the ’60s, people began drinking less whole milk as a way of reducing calories and intake of saturated fat. That left the dairy industry with a glut of whole milk and the milk fat they were extracting from the whole milk to make skim milk. They went to the government and asked for help. And they started making more cheese with that milk. The government, since it subsidizes the dairy industry, bought the cheese. It accumulated. It was storing the cheese in caves in Missouri, when none other than Ronald Reagan came into office and says, "This is crazy. We've got $4 billion worth of cheese that’s going moldy. Stop it." But they still wanted to support the industry, so they came up with a marketing scheme that allowed the dairy industry to collect tens of millions of dollars every year to encourage consumers—for advertising and marketing, to encourage consumers to eat more cheese, not just as a delicacy that you eat as an hors d’oeuvre before dinner, but as an ingredient in processed food. And so, suddenly, cheese began showing up as slices on sandwiches, as ingredients in packaged foods in the store. And our consumption of saturated fat, while we thought we were taking it out of our diets, snuck back in, because cheese is largely invisible as a fat in that form.

AMY GOODMAN: Michael Moss, Jeffrey Dunn, whistleblower, or at least quit Coke. He was in charge of, what, $44 billion of sale of Coke.

MICHAEL MOSS: Wasn’t quite that much. He was in charge of North America and Latin America. But I’m glad you raise that, because—

AMY GOODMAN: Rather, $20 billion.

MICHAEL MOSS: Jeffrey Dunn was the top warrior at Coke, and he was the heir apparent, or one of the heir apparents, of the entire company in 2000, when he began having a change of heart. And, by the way, he walked me through all the incredible marketing strategy that Coke has, including targeting the most vulnerable consumers, which the company calls "heavy users."

AMY GOODMAN: Don’t call them "consumers" anymore; they’re "heavy users."

MICHAEL MOSS: "Heavy users." Twenty percent of their customers drink 80 percent of the Coke, and those are the people that it’s gone after. But starting in 2000, Jeffrey Dunn had a change of heart. It started with reading a book about sugar and the health effects. It went to his fiancée, who started like nudging him: "Hey, Jeffrey, do you really want to be doing this with your life?" And then he went to Brazil, where Coke was starting to market soda to the emerging middle class there. And out of the blue, Jeffrey says it was almost a voice he heard, said to him, "Jeffrey, you know, you should—these kids need a lot of things, but one thing they don’t need is another Coke." He went back to the company, pushed them to work more on selling healthier drinks, including soda, and cut back on marketing to schools. He ultimately left the company.

And today, he is selling fresh carrots from a farm in California, but with this—and this is really important, because this may be one way out of the situation that we’re in: He is marketing carrots as junk food, meaning he’s stolen a page of the playbook from the junk food industry to make carrots attractive to kids. And I think that is so brilliant.

AMY GOODMAN: We should probably clarify that he was pushing, when we say "Coke," though it sounds like when you’re talking about "heavy users" coke, cocaine, we’re talking Coca-Cola.

MICHAEL MOSS: Absolutely.

AMY GOODMAN: And the problem with Coca-Cola and what it means and why, for example, when they pushed it to Mexico at the time of a terrible recession, they upped their advertising, because they thought, "Well, if anyone’s got any money, they could put it into Coke."

MICHAEL MOSS: And Coke will say, "Look, we’re only part of the" — in fact, recently they had an ad campaign saying, "Hey, we’re only part of the obesity crisis. You can’t blame everything on us, as calories is calories." But there is something interesting with liquids. Science is starting to show that our brains are less able to detect calories in liquids. So, people in the know, including food industry executives, when they run into health trouble, the first thing they do is cut calories out of all the liquids that they drink as a way of maintaining their weight.
AMY GOODMAN: What were you most shocked by?

MICHAEL MOSS: Well, it was one—one was that, how on a personal level, how so many executives I met don’t eat their own foods. The other thing I think that really shocked me was when I get to salt in the book, which is how dependent and how hooked the food companies are on salt, because it’s a miracle ingredient for them. It lets them avoid using more costly ingredients like spices and herbs, and of course has this thing they called "flavor bursts," which just gets you so excited about eating snack foods, especially.
But the other thing is, salt masks off-notes or bad flavors that are inherent to some processed foods. In meat, it’s called "warmed-over flavor," which happens when the fat in meat oxidizes when it reheats, and salt is one of those things that can cover up that taste. So I was really struck. And Kellogg invited me into their research and development department, made for me special versions of their icons, like Cheez-Its, which I could normally eat all day long. Without any salt, it was the most God-awful experience you can imagine, tasting those items. They are stuck between a rock and a hard place.

AMY GOODMAN: Michael Moss, I want to thank you for being with us. His book is called Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us. His cover story in last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, "The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food." This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. Michael Moss is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter. He won in 2010 for his investigation into the dangers of contaminated meat.

Amy Goodman is the host of the nationally syndicated news program, Democracy Now!.