This is why there is an epidemic of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease
in the U.S.:
food deliberately engineered to make people eat until they get fat.
Georgia is not quite one of the fattest states,
but Lowndes County is one of the fattest counties.
There is something we can do, even while Big Food
continues to act like Big Tobacco.
Michael Moss wrote for NYTimes 20 February 2013,
The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food,
On the evening of April 8, 1999, a long line of Town Cars and taxis
pulled up to the Minneapolis headquarters of Pillsbury and
discharged 11 men who controlled America’s largest food companies.
Nestlé was in attendance, as were Kraft and Nabisco, General Mills
and Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola and Mars. Rivals any other day, the
C.E.O.’s and company presidents had come together for a rare,
private meeting. On the agenda was one item: the emerging obesity
epidemic and how to deal with it. While the atmosphere was cordial,
the men assembled were hardly friends. Their stature was defined by
their skill in fighting one another for what they called
“stomach share” — the amount of digestive space
that any one company’s brand can grab from the competition.
James Behnke, a 55-year-old executive at Pillsbury, greeted the men
as they arrived. He was anxious but also hopeful about the plan that
he and a few other food-company executives had devised to engage the
C.E.O.’s on America’s growing weight problem. “We were very
concerned, and rightfully so, that obesity was becoming a major
issue,” Behnke recalled. “People were starting to talk
about sugar taxes, and there was a lot of pressure on food
companies.” Getting the company chiefs in the same room to
talk about anything, much less a sensitive issue like this, was a
tricky business, so Behnke and his fellow organizers had scripted
the meeting carefully, honing the message to its barest essentials.
“C.E.O.’s in the food industry are typically not technical
guys, and they’re uncomfortable going to meetings where technical
people talk in technical terms about technical things,” Behnke
said. “They don’t want to be embarrassed. They don’t want to
make commitments. They want to maintain their aloofness and
autonomy.”A chemist by training with a doctoral degree in food science, Behnke
became Pillsbury’s chief technical officer in 1979 and was
instrumental in creating a long line of hit products, including
microwaveable popcorn. He deeply admired Pillsbury but in recent
years had grown troubled by pictures of obese children suffering
from diabetes and the earliest signs of hypertension and heart
disease. In the months leading up to the C.E.O. meeting, he was
engaged in conversation with a group of food-science experts who
were painting an increasingly grim picture of the public’s ability
to cope with the industry’s formulations — from the body’s
fragile controls on overeating to the hidden power of some processed
foods to make people feel hungrier still. It was time, he and a
handful of others felt, to warn the C.E.O.’s that their companies
may have gone too far in creating and marketing products that posed
the greatest health concerns.
The combination of salt, sugar (esp. the carefully engineered mix of
sucrose and fructose on HFCS), and fat in fast foods has produced an
epidemic of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease. This combination
is pushed by the soft drink and fast food companies, and high
fructose corn syrup (HFCS) in most other processed foods adds to the
damage, pushed by their vendors. The whole mess is propped up with
corn subsidies and laws that let Monsanto get away with letting its
seeds drift and then prosecute neighboring farmers for seed theft,
whille deliberately-planted MON seeds require massive amounts of
pesticides, detected in the urine of school children from Kansas to
Manhattan. Then there are the CAFOs with their chickens that can
hardly stand up and cattle that are never allowed outside, both
pumped full of antibiotics from birth or hatching to slaughter,
breeding antibiotic-resistant bacteria and with traces of the
antibiotics left in the “food”.
In other words, it’s actually worse than this article says.
But what it says is bad enough.
Mudd then did the unthinkable. He drew a connection to the last
thing in the world the C.E.O.’s wanted linked to their products:
cigarettes. First came a quote from a Yale University professor of
psychology and public health, Kelly Brownell, who was an especially
vocal proponent of the view that the processed-food industry should
be seen as a public health menace: “As a culture, we’ve become
upset by the tobacco companies advertising to children, but we sit
idly by while the food companies do the very same thing. And we
could make a claim that the toll taken on the public health by a
poor diet rivals that taken by tobacco.”
This was in 1999.
The CEOs in the room acted predictably.
Like tobacco executives before them, they refused to change.
Roger Rosenblatt wrote for NYTimes 20 March 1994,
How Do Tobacco Executives Live With Themselves?
PEOPLE WHO WONDER how tobacco company executives can live with
themselves conclude that they must be in denial. That would explain
how they deal with their responsibility for a product that kills
more than 420,000 Americans a year — surpassing the combined
deaths from homicide, suicide, AIDS, automobile accidents, alcohol
and drug abuse. But to be in denial implies that one may not be held
accountable, in psychological terms, for one’s actions. Tobacco
people squarely face the accusation of accountability, and reject
it.
The picture is of
seven tobacco companies’ heads swearing before Congress
that their products were not dangerous,
even though they all knew the evidence that tobacco kills.
L.A. Times 15 April 1994,
7 cigarette makers deny adding nicotine,
“We have looked at the data . . . [and] it does not convince me that
smoking causes death,” said Andrew H. Tisch, chairman and chief
executive officer of the Lorillard Tobacco Co.
Back to the 2013 NYTimes food article:
…the one C.E.O. whose recent exploits in the grocery store had
awed the rest of the industry stood up to speak. His name was
Stephen Sanger, and he was also the person — as head of
General Mills — who had the most to lose when it came to
dealing with obesity….…Sanger began by reminding the group that consumers were
“fickle.” (Sanger declined to be interviewed.) Sometimes
they worried about sugar, other times fat. General Mills, he said,
acted responsibly to both the public and shareholders by offering
products to satisfy dieters and other concerned shoppers, from low
sugar to added whole grains. But most often, he said, people bought
what they liked, and they liked what tasted good. “Don’t talk
to me about nutrition,” he reportedly said, taking on the
voice of the typical consumer. “Talk to me about taste, and if
this stuff tastes better, don’t run around trying to sell stuff that
doesn’t taste good.”To react to the critics, Sanger said, would jeopardize the sanctity
of the recipes that had made his products so successful. General
Mills would not pull back. He would push his people onward, and he
urged his peers to do the same. Sanger’s response effectively ended
the meeting.
Sanger is retired as GM CEO now,
but he’s
a director of Target Corporation (since 2001) and Wells Fargo & Company (since 2003), and formerly served on the boards of Dayton Hudson, Donaldson, Grocery Manufacturers of America, and Minnesota Business Partnership. Sanger is a board member of Catalyst, the Guthrie Theatre, and the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy, and a member of the Business Council and the US Advisory Committee for Trade Policy and Negotiations.
Forbes lauds his
“seasoned, broad business perspective”.
Food company executives, unlike tobacco executives,
continue to ride high,
while the obesity and disease problem continues to get worse.
Georgia
isn’t quite one of the worst states for obesity.
But Lowndes County is one of the worst counties, in the 31.9% to 43.9%
obesity range, and that was for 2008:
Mapping U.S. obesity rates at the county level
by Max Masnick 15 November 2011.
This is one reason why
South Georgia Growing Local & Sustainable Conference
will be in Lowndes County in January 2014.
Other reasons include promoting the economy of south Georgia,
and good food tastes better.
See you there.
-jsq
PS: NYTimes junk food engineering article owed to Barry Shein.