Authors: Michael Moss
Ginsburg joined with the majority in upholding the marketing program but had a quibble that prompted her to write a separate opinion. She said she could simply not support the notion that the marketing activities were “government speech.” How could they be, she asked, when others within the USDA were trying to urge people to eat
less
meat? Even Ginsburg had to work hard to put this message together, citing the relevant pages from the panel’s 2005 guide on nutrition in her opinion. The part about Americans needing to eat less saturated fats came from one section of the report, and the part about meat being a big source of these fats from another. But the panel’s intent was clear, she said.
“I resist ranking the promotional messages funded under the Beef Promotion and Research Act of 1985, but not attributed to the government, as government speech,” she wrote in conclusion, “given the message the Government conveys in its own name.”
Ginsburg, of course, could have said the same thing—and a good deal more—about the government’s other big checkoff, the one for dairies, which put the beef marketing to shame. At a time when the USDA, in its own publications, was urging Americans to eat
less cheese-laden pizza, the dairy marketing program was boasting of its huge success in getting Americans to eat more cheese on their pizza, in their snacks, and in products scattered all over the grocery store. The dairy marketing program has even teamed up with restaurant chains like Domino’s to help foster concoctions like “The Wisconsin,” a pie that has six cheeses on top and two more in the crust.
“This partnership sells more cheese,” the checkoff’s manager explained in a 2009 column published by a trade publication. “If every pizza
were made with one additional ounce of cheese, it would require an additional 2.5 billion pounds of milk annually.”
Each year, the USDA reports to Congress on the marketing program’s victories on behalf of the dairy industry, focusing largely on its prowess in getting Americans to eat more of the stuff. With Kraft’s efforts to transform cheese from a food into an ingredient, it could claim only partial credit for the tripling of consumption since 1970. The USDA, however, has given the dairy marketing program several million dollars in taxpayer money each year to promote cheese consumption overseas, and its success on this front can be more rightfully claimed. It even caused the Department of Agriculture to gush in its 2002 report to Congress.
“In Mexico, a joint promotion with Domino’s Pizza featured the USDEC logo on all Domino’s pizza boxes with the slogan, ‘Made with 100% U.S. Cheese.’ Domino’s delivers more than 1.6 million pizzas a month in Mexico.” The following year, the agency reported that Domino’s had added “cheesy bread” to its Mexico offerings, and this alone led to 36 tons of additional cheese sales each week. There was one thing the 2002 report did not mention. At the same time that taxpayer money was being used to promote cheese in Mexico, the people of Mexico were on their way to having the highest rates of obesity in the world after U.S. citizens.
This zeal at the USDA for boosting the consumption of cheese, along with red meat, helped explain what I found in the next phase of my reporting. At one point, even Kraft grew wary of its efforts in promoting processed foods. A cabal of concerned insiders convinced Kraft’s leadership to reexamine some of its policies with an eye toward easing the company’s impact on the obesity crisis. It was a remarkable effort, with mixed results, but there was one thing about it I could not square: The Kraft officials didn’t feel they could wait for the Department of Agriculture to pursue a new course. Kraft knew, or at least it would learn, that with the agency’s conflicted role in fighting obesity, those in the industry who wanted to do the right thing by consumers would have to do it on their own.
*
Using the standard of 2,000 calories a day, an average on which the nutritional labeling on packaged foods is based, a person would need to consume no more than fifteen-and-a-half grams of saturated fat—about three scoops of ice cream or two glasses of whole milk—to reach the 7 percent level.
†
The Nutrition Labeling and Education Act of 1990, passed by Congress, required the FDA to set food labeling rules.
‡
Other special interests like egg producers, cereal manufacturers, and a second food industry funded group, the International Food Information Council, won their own panel members, while four others were nominated by academic institutions. But none of the thirteen members was nominated by a consumer advocacy organization. The nominating letters were released to me through a Freedom of Information Act request.
§
Worries have arisen about both of these methods, despite the industry’s conviction that they are safe. The needles used in mechanical tenderization could push
E. coli
and other harmful pathogens into the center of steaks where, normally, the cooking temperature is not high enough to kill the bugs. As for the brining, some of the solutions in use have added hefty loads of salt to the meat.
‖
The actual savings varied year to year, depending on how much burger was served and the percentage of defatted material used. In 2012, before the pink slime controversy forced the USDA to backpedal, agency officials said that they had planned to purchase 111 million pounds of ground beef using the defatted material at less than half the typical rate of 15 percent, which would have saved them 1.5 cents a pound, or $1.4 million.
a
Despite the ammonia’s intended purpose of killing pathogens, testing the processed meat turned up instances of contamination, in which the tainted product was diverted before it could reach consumers.
b
Among the de-fatted beef’s critics was Bettina Siegel, a Harvard Law School graduate who had previously worked for the food giant Unilever scrutinizing the legal aspects of its marketing and advertising. In early 2012, however, as a mother of two, she was writing a blog about food called the Lunch Tray from her home deep in meat country (Houston, Texas), and she organized an online petition drive to bar the processed beef from schools. Her petition quickly drew 200,000 signatures and caused the USDA to cave: In March 2012, the agency announced that schools would be able to choose burger without the material. It also allowed meat manufacturers to identify the processed beef as something other than “beef” on their labels, if they so chose.
E
llen Wartella was never one for processed foods. She took cooking classes, and both she and her husband loved to spend time in the kitchen. Together, they plied their two sons with homemade dinners, and while she tolerated their fondness for junk food and things that came in a box, she didn’t exactly encourage it. “When my kids were growing up, we bought Kraft Macaroni & Cheese because they loved it,” she said. “And I remember being appalled by that.”
In middle school, she recalled, one of her sons swooned for another of Kraft’s mega-hits, Lunchables, especially the version with pizza. His crush, however, soon extinguished itself. By the time they reached high school in the late 1990s, both boys had been exposed to the dark side of public health and marketing. They came to loathe the cigarette companies, in particular, for deliberately hooking the country on a habit that killed people in horrible, untimely ways.
Wartella worked as the dean of the College of Communications at the
University of Texas in Austin, where she had amassed some opinions of her own regarding industrial marketing. She had spent thirty years researching the affects of media on children, including TV violence and advertising, and her twelve books and 175 reports and papers had made her one of the country’s leading experts on the subject. In 2003, she got a call, out of the blue, from a senior executive from Kraft. He asked her if she would join a panel of health and marketing experts that the company was putting together for guidance on how to deal with obesity. The panel sounded to Wartella like something the august Institute of Medicine might assemble to examine a health crisis: Kraft had recruited two medical doctors versed in diabetes and public health, a psychologist who studied behavior and obesity, and a food nutrition researcher who specialized in obesity and heart disease—nine experts in all, with Wartella being asked to make it an even ten.
At the time, Kraft had two people acting as CEO, and both issued statements when the panel was formed explaining why the largest food company in the world was undertaking a mission that heretofore had fallen squarely within the domain of government, not private industry.
“The council will give Kraft access to a range of important voices from outside the company,” said Betsy Holden, one of the CEOs, “who can play an invaluable role in helping us develop our response to the global challenge of obesity.” To which her partner, Roger Deromedi, added: “We welcome the council’s knowledge, insight, and judgment, all of which will help us strengthen the alignment of our products and marketing practices with societal needs.”
Wartella was heartened by the notion of a publicly traded company talking about society’s needs and actually taking steps to learn how it might better serve them. Companies, after all, existed to make money for their stockholders, and Kraft was tied to one of the biggest moneymakers of them all: Philip Morris. The tobacco giant had owned Kraft for fifteen years, and this was a problem for Wartella’s kids. When she told them she’d been invited to join the panel, they responded with outrage.
“Both my boys were appalled at the idea of my joining an advisory board for Kraft,
because both my children are very antismoking,” she told me. “They said, ‘How could you work for a company that is pushing cigarettes?’ ”
Wartella, however, had an inkling she might be able to do some good. She was no expert on obesity, but Kraft was a principal player in a recent development she had been tracking with increasing dismay: the targeting of vulnerable kids through the use of online games and various social media marketing schemes. “My early research was all on helping young children distinguish between the editorial content of TV and the persuasive intent of the advertisements, which they have difficulty separating,” she told me. “Now, these new strategies were coming along that completely erased that.”
And kids were responding. Obesity was setting all sorts of records in 2003. The average adult was 24 pounds heavier than in 1960. One in three Americans—and nearly one in five kids, aged six to eleven—were classified as obese. As scientists poked at and measured the obesity crisis, one fact emerged from their studies that shocked people more than any other: Obesity was a lasting, seemingly incurable affliction. Kids who were overweight tended to stay that way for life.
Despite the proclamations from Kraft’s CEOs and her conversations with the Kraft executive who wanted her to join the advisory panel, Wartella had her doubts about the sincerity of Kraft’s undertaking. How could she not? Expert after expert was pointing the finger at processed food, and until now, Kraft had joined the rest of the industry in ducking blame. Why should she believe all this talk about society’s needs?
Wartella finally decided to join the advisory group, but only after making a vow to herself and her kids: She would quit if it turned out to be more of the same old obfuscation.
After the group’s first two meetings at Kraft’s headquarters near Chicago, Wartella’s fears about the company’s sincerity seemed to be justified. The talks roamed across the landscape of obesity, but only broadly, touching on nutrition, exercise, and portion sizes. Always, the conversation was deferential toward Kraft, the $35 billion elephant in the room. This changed, however, in the third session. Wartella had been asked to discuss
marketing, and she arrived having done her homework.
The session started out with Kraft officials presenting a rosy view of the company’s practices, which included a policy of not advertising to children younger than six. Wartella begged to differ.
In truth, she said, Kraft’s own websites were riddled with tricks that lured young kids to their sweetest and fattiest products. She cited games that entailed counting up Oreos, or going on hide-and-seek missions to find Barney Rubble, whose role in the game was to tout the company’s Fruity Pebbles cereal. These were marketing tricks that clearly circumvented the self-imposed advertising ban on children, she said, as did the company’s use of cartoon characters to hawk its mac and cheese and cookies. Even its packaging was decorated with Shrek and Dora the Explorer, the better to seduce young kids.
“I pointed this out, and I said, ‘You are at best disingenuous, and at worst you’re outright lying.’ The nutrition scientists and the other people on the advisory board were kind of appalled by the strength of my statements. One or two people came up to me afterwards and said, ‘They’re going to get you off this thing.’ ”
But that did not happen. The officials at Kraft listened. Not only that, they asked Wartella to dig even deeper into the company’s marketing practices and come back with more stinging critiques, which she did. Wartella came to believe that her original fears were unfounded. The panel
was
making a difference, and Kraft seemed to be, incredibly, starting to address the ways its own practices were contributing to the obesity crisis.
This was no small thing. For the processed food industry, 2003 was shaping up to be a furious, competitive race to boost America’s consumption of its products. Not only were wars taking place in which the sole objective was to flood the grocery aisles with items with ever higher loads of salt, sugar, and fat, a huge new player in groceries had accelerated the competition for space on the shelf. Wal-Mart had begun selling food, and just since 2000 the retailing giant had boosted its grocery, candy, and tobacco sales by 46 percent to $39.4 billion, sending food manufacturers rushing to the company’s headquarters in Arkansas to pitch their wares.
The big manufacturers were in a separate race to the bottom when it came to the economics of food, seeking out new ways to cut their ingredient costs, lower the price of their food, and thus turn processed food into the only logical choice shoppers could make.
*