As cited in an article in AdAge today, Kellogg’s is removing anti-oxidant claims from its Rice Krispies cereals– another move following the elimination of the “Smart Choices” food labeling system. The FDA is also now going to also create its own front-of-pack labeling system, which will surely be as easy to read as the USDA’s food pyramid.
What about some new food sourcing guidelines??
After being in market for under a year, the FDA has ordered food companies to discontinue the usage of the “Smart Choices” food labels, citing concerns over the standards used to choose products that are included in the program.
My feelings on the issue are mixed– at its heart, I dont’ think the program was meant to do harm to consumers, and perhaps, even if included on a box of Trix, it made people more conscious of food nutritional values. Or maybe it just made them buy more and think they were being “healthy.” In either case, the program will be no-more for a while.
I am sure that many in the industry are happy (especially Marion Nestle), but hopefully a meaningful and nutritionally-beneficial program will come out of this. I think the idea is there and is good– it’s time for the food companies and the FDA to make it a reality.
PS: I know that I owe you all a few entries on Paris. It’s been nuts here, so I apologize.
So I need to have some sort of opinion.
I feel like I would be remiss not to post about Gourmet magazine being yanked from the shelves after the November issue (I don’t need to link to it because if you’re reading my blog, you probably know about this already). Working in the marketing business, I have had long standing relationships with a few people who worked at Gourmet, and I have nothing but positive things to say about them all.
That said, my own relationship with the magazine has been a tumultuous one. That’s a little melodramatic, but blogs revel in the extremes. I am a dedicated reader of both Gourmet and bon appétit. I will put that out there first. Around five years ago, I devoured bon ap like there was no tomorrow. To be honest, I didn’t like Gourmet. I thought it was too hoity-toity, with all of its edit about traveling to Italy and eating truffles in Piedmont, and going to Warsaw to eat pierogi. It was so snobbish. BA was there, like a trusted advisor, for home chefs, like me. I wasn’t going anywhere but the D’Agostino around the corner, and if I was feeling frisky, to the Grand Central Market. I could have carried my passport if I went to Chinatown, just to make it feel authentic, but for all intents and purposes, I was a land-locked, cash-strapped, twenty-something with a tiny kitchen and a moderately strong food imagination. Replete with recipes, BA was my go-to guide in the culinary world.
Then a funny thing happened. The economy crashed. Gourmet lost ad pages. All of a sudden, Flushing, Queens, was the new “hot spot.” The ad pages dropped dramatically. McKinsey knows that. But anyone who is a dedicated reader could have told you that long before looking at a P&L sheet. For us readers, this was great. We were getting: a) more relevant content; b) fewer pesky ads (ssh, don’t tell anyone I said that); and c) a better sense as to what Gourmet had been trying to do from the onset, before it got sucked into the Condé Nast “holier-than-all-other-magazines” way of operating. I became a dedicated Gourmet reader. I relished its arrival in my free magazine pile every month. bon appétit lost me along the way, at some time around its “food porn” redesign. I had gone Gourmet, and there was no turning back. Chicken liver is for oafs… I only eat foie gras from the Périgord.
And now, Gourmet is gone.
Personally, I am conflicted about this. While I will probably head back to BA, groveling with the smell of stale caviar on my breath, I will miss the feeling that I got from reading Gourmet. That said, in all honesty, I will not read it online, I will not buy cookbooks under the brand name, and I will not watch “Diary of a Foodie.” Basically, the brand will be dead to me. And life will go on. I really liked CHOW magazine, too, and we all know how that ended.
On a more professional note, I am less conflicted. I am happy to see it go. I think Condé needs to wake up and smell the roses, and I am glad that McKinsey is making this happen. The editorial was great, but great editorial doesn’t always pay the bills (unfortunately for the editors). From an advertiser’s viewpoint, the product was mediocre at best, and the disproportionately high ad pricing resulting in a disproportionately high decline in ad pages proves it. Sorry, maybe you should have negotiated rates when you had the chance.
Thoughts?
An article in the LA Times today talks about “Smart Choices”-labeled food products, and Marion Nestle, a very vocal critic about the whole thing, claims that “it’s all about marketing.”
I’m not sure I agree with her. But what do you all think?
So it’s Advertising Week here in NYC, and amidst all of the marketing jargon being thrown around, there was an event entitled “Team Earth: Empowering a Sustainability Movement.” AdAge called it “an event to seek out,” and a last-minute scheduling snafu did not get the even as much publicity as it probably deserved, but it did allow me a seat.
And, it nicely commenced at 5pm, getting me out of the office and on my way to Locanda Verde to meet BG for dinner.
Anyway, the panel was led by some guy at CNBC that I’ve never heard of. The panel consisted of the Chairman of Conservation International, Peter Seligmann, the CEO of Starbucks, Howard Schultz, and the Chairman of Wal-mart, Rob Walton. These heavy hitters in the conservation movement were talking about sustainability and how it has to play a crucial role in business moving forward.
Seligmann threw out a few interesting points. His first point was that the quality of the environment is going down. I guess we all knew that anyway, but he reiterated it. But, he said that engagement, awareness, and understanding is up, and that’s a good thing. The public only really dedicates something like 17% of its interest to the sustainability movement, which is shockingly low, considering that every person on this planet is directly affected by what we’re talking about here. He also stressed the importance of including corporations, hence his sitting on a panel with C-suite execs from two huge global brands.
Schultz, who can’t seem to catch a break these days, despite all of the advertising efforts (did anyone see the Businessweek brand rankings this week– they’re down 16% in brand value), echoed Seligmann’s sentiments, saying that sustainability will simply be part of the rules of engagement moving ahead. There is a balance needed, he said, between making money and having a social conscience. Since everyone refers to coffee as “tall” and “grande” these days, maybe he should have had a social conscience back then when he made us sound like losers when we want a small coffee.
He went on to talk about how people are willing to pay to support it and it has to be a real business change, and not just a marketing ploy. It has to be a truly integrated strategy, part of the company’s DNA, and so on. Now, coming from him, who convinced the country that four bucks is a perfectly acceptable price for a cup of coffee, I’m not sure that he can speak to “willing to pay for it” from the right perspective. If people are willing to pay $4 for a cup of coffee, they will probably still pay $4 for a very slightly smaller cup of free trade coffee. Or $4 for a smaller cup of coffee and a series of about 40 advertising panels in the tunnel between Times Square and the Port Authority. Either way, people do have a social conscience, and by paying a little extra, they think they are helping.
Lastly, Rob Walton talked about Wal-mart’s commitment to sustainability. The thing about Wal-mart is that when they talk, people listen. I personally am not a huge fan of Wal-mart. I’ve been to one once, and I didn’t enjoy the experience. I think their business practices are questionable, and I think they ruin neighborhoods. All of that aside, I do applaud them for what they are doing to drive the food industry around the world to embark upon a path to more environmentally conscious production (remember that whole “when they speak…” bit?).
Now, being the businessman he is, Walton said that what got Wal-mart involved was the opportunity to make a difference… in a profitable way. Wal-mart got you again! But, seriously, that’s the only way to make big business change their tune. At the end of the day, a business is there to make money. For any of this sustainability stuff to stick, it’s going to have to make someone some Benjamins. Even Seligmann admitted that you’ve gotta keep your feet on the ground and not keep your head in the clouds with some pipe dream. For the big guys to get involved, you’ve gotta tell them what it’s going to mean for them business wise. It it don’t make dollars, it don’t make sense.
Anyway, interesting stuff. Check out Team Earth. It’s like a feel-good forum for big companies.
Everyone that knows me well knows that I am not the biggest fan of Michael Pollan. I don’t DISlike him, but there’s something about him that just gets to me, and it’s really frustrating because I agree with his general arguments, but I just feel like something is missing there. I find his intents to be good, but I think that his vision is a bit narrow-minded, and, like any good convincing writer does, excludes a multitude of factors in explaining individual phenomena (much like Malcolm Gladwell).
In any event, Mr. Pollan, has been featured in a recent edition of the New York Times, with an article entitled “Big Food vs. Big Insurance.” Not surprisingly, he attributes a large portion of the health industry’s costs to poor diet and America’s general fatness from eating cheap calories. He throws a bone to other factors, such as smoking, but fails to mention anything environmental or exercise-related. That aside, the article is a thoughtful piece (per usual, I will admit), and definitely worth a read. Also worth a read is this article found on the Huffington Post, by Christopher Gavignan. Both articles speak to the question of access to healthy, natural food, and how the relative “cheapness” of heavily subsidized and processed food has caused this major dilemma.
As I mentioned above, my major complaint with both authors is a complete avoidance of the word “exercise” and the word “moderation.” Now, I’m not trying to say that the abundance of cheap fast-food and soda is a good thing (and I will address that a bit later) BUT I think that in large part the obesity problem can be linked to something much more personal than agribusiness and less processed food. That momofuku bo ssam I devoured was minimally processed, yet I’d have trouble squeezing into my jeans if I ate that a couple of times a week.
For example, one of the fittest people I know drinks a six-pack of Coke a day. He also works out for 2 hours a day, and has a body fat percentage around 8%. Now, I understand that there are always statistical anomalies, and that r-squared for obesity and its associated diseases is not 100. But then riddle me this. An article published in the American Journal of Medicine (I’m not a doctor, but I trust that doctors contribute to the publication) found through a study of the US population’s diet that fat and caloric intake actually decreased over the period from 1976 to 1991. Yet, obesity rates grew about 31 percent. What was this caused by? 60% of the US population lives a “sedentary lifestyle.” Sixty percent. That is ridiculous. And it’s something that is completely unaffected by BIG BUSINESS and GOVERNMENT SUBSIDIES (read those words out loud in your BIG MAN voice). Living in the spoils of New York City, you forget that it is possible to have a sedentary lifestyle. As my aunt once said to me, “the official New York City sport is walking.” And it’s true. It’s easy for us urban dwellers to say, “well, those people are fat because they eat a bunch of cheap crap at McDonald’s.” I would argue that’s not entirely true. You can get fat off of expensive crap.
Now, as a former fat kid, I can attest to the fact that when you don’t exercise, you don’t keep weight off. I got a Nintendo, I got a spare tire, it was pretty much that simple. My friends and I ate the same food, yet I was the overweight one. I think that too much emphasis for these guys is being placed on what is so bad about the food system in the US. I think that it is certainly important, and I myself eat a minimally processed diet, mostly because I enjoy cooking and the greenmarket and because it impresses burgergal when I pick up cool local food stuffs and cook her dinner. But, I would like to see equal vigor placed on physical fitness. Michelle Obama’s got a vegetable garden? Great. Let’s have a running track built around it.
I’ve got some other random thoughts related to the same topic:
– The big food guys aren’t necessarily bad guys. Like it or not, they need to be involved in order to solve the problem. They simply have a) too much money and b) too much political leverage for them to not be involved (and no, I do not work at a big food company). I think that McDonald’s has done a great job at expanding healthy offerings at their locations. But I don’t think it’s enough, and I don’t think that using local sustainable ingredients is the solution. I think that McDonald’s and its brethren need to promote moderation and exercise like they do value meals and snack wraps. This might have an immediate impact on profitability, but I think the longer term trends indicate that profitability might go down anyway, so why not help everyone out? Make a compelling case for them to help, that makes business sense, and they will help. Don’t paint a picture of gloom and doom and “down with McD’s.” It can actually bring in new customers and can help them have a “nice guy” image. Where has Ronald McDonald been, anyway?
– Junk food tastes good. I love Chicken Nuggets. I think they are among the best foods on the planet. I also like chips (Doritos Cool Ranch). And I like KFC fried chicken. And countless other things. People don’t care if they are eating a locally grown spear of asparagus if they don’t like asparagus. You can’t make them like it, either. I think it’s myopic to think that having locally grown food available and cheap will make people buy it. As I mentioned above, I think it’s about changing the way we think about chicken nuggets. Don’t make me feel bad because I like them and support the company that makes them.
– Don’t mistake a result for the problem. Take, for example, a case mentioned in Food, Inc. An immigrant family must eat fast food because they cannot afford to buy fresh produce for the family the way that they can buy six burgers at a fast food chain. Now, on the surface, the problem appears to be “wow, if the fresh food were cheaper, they would be able to eat more healthily.” To that I say, “incorrect.” The real argument is, “wow, if the income gap weren’t so large, they would be able to afford to buy the fresh produce and eat more healthily.” As a study in the UK found, “Obesity, diabetes mortality, and calorie consumption were associated with income inequality in developed countries. Increased nutritional problems may be a consequence of the psychosocial impact of living in a more hierarchical society.” I’m not going to touch the second part of that finding, but I think that is the real root of the problem with cheap calories. Don’t make them less cheap, make them even cheaper.
And I’m done.
