The Food Police (19 page)

Existing government information policies have had only minimal effects—as if most of us didn’t already know that carrots were healthy and pizzas weren’t before Michelle Obama put healthy eating center stage. The USDA’s food pyramid, once familiar to all schoolchildren, did not stem the rising tide of obesity (and according to low-carb advocates, it actually contributed to it), and it is unclear that changing the pyramid to a plate, in its latest incarnation, will have any substantive effect on what we eat. Mandated nutritional labeling on food items in grocery stores has had very little, and in some cases a deleterious, effect on the healthfulness of food choices.
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The new mandatory calorie labeling law for restaurants buried in Obama’s health care reform bill has been shown to have little effect on what people order, and sometimes leads to counterproductive choices. My own research shows that the labeling’s biggest effect may be to reduce the profitability of restaurant owners.
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As one group of researchers indicated in the pages of the
New York Times
, “To pin our hopes
on calorie posting is bad lawmaking based on poor reading of science.”
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One Harvard economist called calorie labeling a “revenue-less tax.” A Berkeley economist concluded, “The causal-chain from mandatory information consumption to improved health outcomes is so weak that one wonders whether it is worth making people feel bad about themselves.”
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Faced with the reality that fat taxes and information campaigns are unlikely to work the way they’re advertised, the food police have resorted to attacking one of our most cherished liberties: the freedom of speech. Here is Popkin in
The World Is Fat
: “If we still had the Fairness Doctrine, and if public health advocates successfully applied this to the billions of dollars that the food and beverage industries spend on advertising, a great deal of money would be available for counter-advertising, research, and other activities that promote healthier diets. But it’s twenty years since the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine.”
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Yep, even the advocates of fat taxes know that such taxes won’t meaningfully reduce weight, but they pine for them anyway, so they can use the funds to create their own commercials. What is “fair” about a government that can forcefully take our money through taxation and then turn around and give it to some elite food preachers, all the while prohibiting food industries from spending money they’ve
earned
? The original Fairness Doctrine could at least claim some aura of legitimacy at a time when most broadcasting took place over public airwaves, but that logic is now gone. Moreover, when the FTC repealed the Fairness Doctrine in the late 1980s, it did so because of evidence that the law quieted dissension and controversial speech.

The food police argue that there is a dire need to counteract the advertising of Big Food. But companies selling high-fat, high-sugar foods are already living in a media environment that undermines their goal to sell more. What adorns the covers of the magazines lining the checkout stands at the grocery store? Overly thin celebrities and supermodel waifs. Turn on the TV and who appears? Skinny news anchors and commercials featuring people with six-pack abs. The prevailing cultural and advertising message is clear: thin is cool, fat is not. So it’s apparently okay to make my wife feel guilty about her weight when she checks out at the supermarket but not okay for Kelloggs to encourage her to eat frosted shredded wheat?

One has to wonder why a company as manipulative and powerful as McDonald’s would introduce such failures as the McLean Deluxe. The food nutritionist extraordinaire Marion Nestle is disturbed that Big Food is lurking in labs trying to conjure up recipes that taste good and then, shockingly, advertise to get us to try them. If McDonald’s isn’t in the business of trying to sell me things that taste good again and again at a price I’m willing to pay, I’m not sure why the company exists. What bothers me is that Nestle is so troubled that there is a company that serves this purpose.

The food police seem to forget that Big Food competes not just on taste but on health, too. It was actually the
removal
of government bans on advertising health claims that led to product innovation and healthier offerings.
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If consumers care about health, then food manufacturers have an incentive to deliver what we want. Look around the next time you’re in the grocery store and you’ll see the shelves overflowing with low-sodium, low-carb, high-fiber products. McDonald’s,
Wendy’s, Burger King, and the whole lot offer salads, grilled chicken sandwiches, and fruit to kids. So, yes, of course Big Food tries to get us to buy more of what they make, as does any other company. But as long as you care about healthfulness, so will they.

The proposals to restrict speech have gained significant traction in the Obama administration. A partnership of four federal agencies has formed something called the Interagency Working Group. The group has issued guidelines that would severely limit marketing of certain foods, especially ads aimed at children. The guidelines are so broad as to prohibit your local doughnut store from sponsoring Little League T-shirts. Two U.S. congressmen appalled at the group’s guidelines argued, “American favorites such as Honey Nut Cheerios, Cheez-It, Barnum’s Animal Crackers, peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches and even celery and bottled water couldn’t be marketed or advertised to children in any manner.”
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I don’t want my kids to be unhealthy, but I have a remote control and I know how to use it.

Kicking Tony the Tiger off
Dora the Explorer
may not seem like such a big deal, but if you want your kids to have cartoons to watch, somebody has to pay for them. If Kraft and General Mills are no longer allowed to fund commercials for children’s shows, that means the shows will be less profitable and therefore more infrequent. You might think that’s a good thing—unless you work at Disney or Nickelodeon or even NBC. More important, a government that can tell companies what they may and may not say with their own money is treading on very dangerous territory. As an editorial in the
Tampa Tribune
noted, “They get rid of Snap, Crackle and Pop, would they
next target the AFLAC duck and the GEICO gecko?”
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These kinds of rules promote the worst kind of crony capitalism, because they force businesses to spend more time attending to the bureaucrats than to their customers.

Case in point: Michelle Obama recently appeared on the White House Lawn with the CEO of Darden Restaurants (owner of the Olive Garden and Red Lobster), whom she praised for promising to reduce calories and sodium by 20 percent over the next ten years. Why would a company such as Darden do something like this? Why wouldn’t it? When the Obama administration can selectively hand out waivers for their health care mandates and arbitrarily pick recipients of bailouts and green job grants, it’s pretty clear where the incentives lie. The do-gooders got to be seen doing good, while Darden got free publicity for something it could have done of its own accord. A 20 percent calorie reduction can be achieved with a 20 percent reduction in portion size, so Darden can cut costs and avoid looking cheap by appearing healthy. In the end, it’s all about the photo op. Besides, who ten years from now is going to check whether the company lived up to its promise?

The food police not only want to restrict food company speech, they also want the government to wage a propaganda war on its own citizens. Time and time again the food police cry for a antitobacco-like campaign against Big Food. Kelly Brownell has taken to equating Ronald McDonald with Joe Camel, and recommends that food activists “develop a militant attitude about the toxic food environment, like we have about tobacco.”
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Marion Nestle concurs with the analogy when writing, “Like cigarette companies, food companies … expand sales by marketing directly to children.”
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There’s a big problem with this analogy: you
don’t
have to smoke but you
do
have to eat. A smoker can avoid cigarette taxes by becoming a nonsmoker, but a non-eater is a dead eater. Most nutritionists would admit that eating a few Twinkies or Doritos in the context of an overall healthy diet won’t do much harm, but who wouldn’t say having a few smokes a week is a bad idea? Thus has begun the language war. “Big Food” is meant to conjure Big Tobacco. Sodas are called liquid candy. Bittman repeatedly refers to “real food” as though some foods were fake—as if béarnaise sauce made in three-star restaurants isn’t also “hyperprocessed” food. And now there is a full-on attempt to prove that sugar and fat are addictive. (Somehow these so-called food experts are surprised to learn that the reward centers of our brain are activated when we eat something tasty.)

Given all this, it is instructive to recall that “[i]n a June 1994 newspaper ad that criticized proposals to sharply raise tobacco taxes, R.J. Reynolds said, ‘Today it’s cigarettes. Will high-fat foods be next?’ Antismoking activists traditionally responded to this sort of slippery-slope argument by insisting that cigarettes were unique, ‘the only legal product that when used as intended causes death.’ To suggest that anti-smoking measures might pave the way for attacks on cheeseburgers and ice cream, they said, was just silly.”
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Looks like silly has officially arrived.

Without solid footing backing their anti-fat proposals, the food police have a powerful rhetorical strategy. Fat taxes won’t work? Neither will educational campaigns? But it’s all for the kids! As if emotional appeal were a good substitute for some kind of rationally compelling argument. Clearly, the
presumption is that parental responsibility is inept. Yet somehow I am supposed to believe that a nutritionist I’ve never met cares more about my children than I do?

If I can’t say no to Toucan Sam, I’m likely to have bigger problems on my hands than my kid’s pant size. However alarmed we might be about childhood obesity, it is prudent to think long and hard about where the arguments abrogating parental responsibilities are heading. Even an outlet as respectable as the
Journal of the American Medical Association
recently published a commentary by an M.D./lawyer team arguing that obese children should be taken from their parents and placed in foster care.
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Apparently obesity is now seen as tantamount to child abuse. If you’re willing to give up responsibility for your children, the food police are willing to take them—by force. As is so often the case with the food police, they are willing to take such a radical move without any evidence that the children, having been seized from their homes and handed over to the care of the state, will go on to lead overall better lives. Your broken home is the price the food police are willing to pay so Junior can lose a few pounds.

I
n their war on fat, the food police rarely stop to consider carefully why we have gotten fatter in the first place. They blame Big Food and agribusiness farm policy conspiracies, but the research shows that none of this stuff has really had much impact on obesity. In fact, one has to wonder why obesity is rising almost everywhere in the world if it is
our
farm policies and
our
evil food processors causing it all. Even a country such as France, which the food elite so wish to emulate, has
seen obesity rates more than double in recent decades.
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If one wants to understand why weight is rising, you have to look for trends that transcend cultures and national boundaries.

One of the key contributors to obesity is exactly that program the food police wish to reenact: the war on tobacco. Smoking tends to reduce weight, and in an era when smoking has dramatically declined, we should only have expected rising weight. One study analyzing a wide range of factors such as changes in food prices, number of restaurants, urbanization, and type of employment concluded, “We find that cigarette smoking has the largest effect: the decline in cigarette smoking explains about 2% of the increase in the weight measures. The other significant factors explain less.”
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If we have to choose between weighing a little more and smoking a little less, the healthier choice is clear. Yet the food police deny these trade-offs exist or are even relevant.

There is something even more important than tobacco lurking behind our weight gain. It’s technology. According to a group of Harvard economists,

Don’t let the nutritionists fool you. There is no such thing as a single ideal weight. There is more to life than what appears on our bathroom scale. It is only reasonable that we eat a little more food when it costs less and give up manual labor when an air-conditioned office job comes along. We can’t disentangle all the bad stuff we don’t like about obesity with all the good things we enjoy, such as driving, eating snacks, cooking more quickly, and having less strenuous jobs. Yes, we can have less obesity, but at the cost of things we enjoy.

When you hear we need a fundamental change to get our waistlines back down to where they were three decades ago, beware that it might take a world that looks like it did three decades ago. I for one am not willing to give up power steering, microwaves, and inexpensive takeout food even if my pants now fit a little more snugly. So if someone asked me what I was doing to fight the war on obesity, my answer would be the same as that of University of Chicago law professor Richard Epstein: “I play basketball.”
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