Mrs. Obama said that 16 corporations accounting for up to 25 percent of the American food supply chain would trim a total of one trillion calories by 2012 and 1.5 trillion calories by 2015. Sounds impressive, but I am not really sure exactly what it means. Trim calories, from what? OK, to be fair, here’s how the press release attempts to explain it:

Healthy Weight Commitment Foundation manufacturing companies will pursue their calorie reduction goal by developing and introducing lower-calorie options, changing recipes where possible to lower the calorie content of current products, or reducing portion sizes of existing single-serve products.

First off, who is the Healthy Weight Commitment Foundation? Good question, certainly sounds official, but a quick perusal of the website reveals a virtual who’s who of Big Food: Coca-Cola, General Mills, Kraft Foods, and of course, PepsiCo, whose CEO Indra Nooyi serves as vice chair. (Kellogg’s CEO got the top spot and was at today’s White House briefing, see leadership.)

And you gotta love this mission statement: “Our mission is to try to help reduce obesity – especially childhood obesity – by 2015.” Try to help? Reduce? Especially? Sounds pretty lame. But I digress.

The member companies are pledging to do three things: One, develop and introduce lower-calorie options. But if they are making new products, isn’t that actually adding calories to the food supply? Next, for current products, where possible they will lower calorie content. When is it not possible? Why, when Big Food says so, that’s when.

Finally, they will reduce portion sizes. Now all of the member companies are packaged food manufacturers, not restaurants, where portion sizes are out of control and where Americans spend roughly half of their food dollars. So this just means that we might get more products like the current “100-calorie packs,” which just encourages more packaging waste, at higher prices to boot.

As this is just another voluntary promise by industry, how will we even know if the companies follow through? No worries, they thought of everything. As the press release explains, under the agreement, “the Healthy Weight Commitment Foundation will report annually to the Partnership on the progress that we are making toward this pledge.” So I guess that should cover it.

What’s going on here should be obvious to anyone who has been paying close attention to food industry tactics over the past few years. It’s certainly no coincidence that this announcement comes on the heels of last week’s report from the White House Task Force on Childhood Obesity. Indeed, with less than 5 business days in between the two media events, the memory of that comprehensive report, containing 70 policy recommendations is now conveniently overshadowed by Big Food’s promise of 1.5 trillion fewer calories. That’s industry math: 1.5 trillion beats 70.

But before we toss the Task Force report into the historical dust bin, let’s see which policy recommendations might have gotten Big Food upset. First there’s # 2.6: “All media and entertainment companies should limit the licensing of their popular characters to food and beverage products that are healthy.” Uh oh, that could mean no more SpongeBob Squarepants Popsicles, that would stink.

Then there’s # 2.7: “The food and beverage industry and the media and entertainment industry should jointly adopt meaningful, uniform nutrition standards for marketing food and beverages to children, as well as a uniform standard for what constitutes marketing to children.” Meaningful? Uniform? Those are dirty words to Big Food. They prefer words like “try” and “reduce.”

Oh and they really don’t like recommendation # 2.9: “If voluntary efforts to limit the marketing of less healthy foods and beverages to children do not yield substantial results, the FCC could consider revisiting and modernizing rules on commercial time during children’s programming.” What was that, the FCC? Why, that’s an actual government agency named in the report, how did that happen?

Food companies that market to children (including pledgers Coca-Cola, Kraft Foods, and PepsiCo) are afraid that Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move campaign might result in actual policy making, otherwise known as laws and regulations, those things that government agencies make when they are doing their jobs.

Every so often, when the threat of government regulation rears its ugly head, the food industry pounces on it to beat it down, by announcing new and improved promises, pledges, commitments, initiatives, partnerships, or coalitions at just the right time, all aimed at keeping government at bay and the public convinced that they are acting responsibly.

Kelly Brownell, director of the Rudd Center on Food Policy and Obesity at Yale University called it right when he told the Wall Street Journal that this move was little more than public relations:

This is where the market is taking these companies anyway, and I don’t know that this represents much of a concession. I also believe that the motive behind this is to fight off government regulation by creating the appearance of voluntary changes by the industry.

Sadly, this time industry made sure that government came on board even before the announcement. At the press conference, Michelle Obama predicted, “In the weeks and months to come, we expect to hear more announcements regarding specific steps on reducing sugar, fat and sodium in the foods that our children eat.” Great, brace yourself for even more PR and empty promises.

If I was skeptical about the likely success of Let’s Move before, I am downright cynical now.

Post-script: For a somewhat less cynical viewpoint, see Marion Nestle’s blog post.

Originally published on Appetite for Profit.

Sixteen of the top U.S. food and beverage manufacturers announced yesterday they will work toward removing 1.5 trillion calories from the American diet annually by 2015, with a total of 1 trillion to be cut by 2012.

The pledge to cut major calories from food products is an agreement between the Partnership for a Healthier America, an independent, nonpartisan organization, and The Healthy Weight Commitment Foundation, a coalition of 80 of the nation’s largest retailers, non-profits and food and beverage companies.

First Lady Michelle Obama, who is leading a national effort to solve the childhood obesity epidemic within a generation, praised the agreement at a White House press event yesterday, during which the announcement was made.

“Solving the obesity epidemic requires far more than anything government can do alone and today’s announcement represents an important step forward to providing Americans with healthier choices so that they can choose to lead healthier lives,” said Mrs. Obama, who also serves as honorary chair of the Partnership.

How will the biggest food and beverage companies cut those pesky calories? According to the coalition, companies will expand and introduce new lower-calorie options; change product recipes, where possible, to lower the calorie content of current products; and/or reduce portion sizes of existing single-serve products.

To make sure companies are meeting their calorie reductions, the Partnership will collect data and monitor progress on an annual basis and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) will evaluate whether or not the industry effort will affect calories consumed by children and adolescents.

By all accounts, the agreement marks an unprecedented commitment from food and beverage companies to cut calories and press for healthier options in the processed food sector, but the announcement yesterday–which was short on details–left food policy experts and the media asking a lot of questions.

“What are we to make of all this? asked food politics guru, author, and professor Marion Nestle on her blog after the announcement yesterday. “[Is] this a great step forward or a crass food industry publicity stunt?”

“History suggests the latter possibility,” wrote Nestle. “Food companies have gotten great press from announcing changes to their products.  On the other hand, the RWJF evaluation sounds plenty serious, and top-notch people are involved in it.  If the companies fail to do as promised, this will be evident and evident reason for regulation.”

Eddie Gehman Kohan, editor of Obama Foodorama, a widely-read blog chronicling White House food and agriculture policy, also expressed some concern over accountability yesterday, but noted the historic nature of the announcement.

“It’s a big moment in the history of food politics and child health,” says Kohan. “The participating food giants own many of the most identifiable, quintessentially American and long-beloved brands, and they have now voluntarily staked their good names on this commitment, and publicly married themselves to Mrs. Obama’s campaign.”

In a Q&A following the White House event yesterday, a small crowd of reporters grilled Lisa Gable, executive director of the Healthy Weight Commitment Foundation, for more detail on the industry pledge.

Most hard-hitting questions on statistics, percentages, and on specific examples of caloric reductions were met with a referral to Foundation fact sheets–which don’t provide much additional detail.

When asked whether reformulating products to lower calories would increase chemicals in food, Gable offered little detail.

“We’re really looking at macronutrients. We’re really looking at making food healthier options for our consumers,” Gable said. “There are different ways companies choose to reformulate foods, and I’m just not in a position to talk about that.”

Pictured: David Mackay, CEO of Kellog Company and chair of the Healthy Weight Commitment Foundation (left), First Lady Michelle Obama (center), Dr. James R. Gavin III, chairman of the Partnership’s board of directors (right). Photo by Helena Bottemiller.

Originally published on Food Safety News

Now, more than a half a century after that first declaration, that same date brought the movie Food, Inc. to theaters, a film that reveals the dysfunction of our food system. With obesity rates at the highest point in history, contaminated food regularly sickening thousands, and government estimating we will continue to spend 6.2% more on healthcare annually (this year, an additional $200 billion, more than our annual economic growth of 4.1%), it is clear that we have a problem as big as smoking: an addiction to cheap, unhealthy food perpetuated by an industry intent on maximizing profits at the expense of our health and our land. It is time to regulate Big Food by changing the culture in Washington that allowed it to proliferate.

According to a recent study [pdf] by Kelly D. Brownell and Kenneth E. Warner at Yale University, the food industry is using “similar legal, political, and business strategies” that were once employed in tobacco, including dismissing peer-reviewed studies that make a connection between their product and disease, paying scientists to produce pro-industry studies, denying the addictive nature of their products to create doubt in the minds of consumers, and advertising heavily to children. A powerful lobby also ensures that agribusiness as usual is maintained in Washington.

But we know the food system as it stands right now isn’t working, and that it isn’t sustainable. Cheap processed food requires commodities like corn, soy, wheat, and rice. The production of these crops currently depends on industrial-scale, acreage-intensive monoculture that is in turn not feasible without surplus water, cheap oil and fertilizer, and a stable climate, all of which are at risk for becoming scarce.

Instead of taking a seat at the table, Big Food has renounced as “junk science” peer-reviewed studies showing the correlation to obesity with the proximity to a fast food restaurant. It has actively denied the science proving the relationship between soda consumption and weight problems and diabetes. Big Tobacco spent years insisting that there wasn’t enough evidence that smoking caused lung cancer. The results were that millions of people had to die before the government acted.

Good health, food safety and sustainability will never exist in our current food system. Big Food is standing in the way of change with agribusiness campaign funding and corporate ties moving through the Washington revolving door that brings lobbyists, consultants and strategists to high level positions. Historically, thirty-two members of the Senate Agriculture Committee and fifty of the House Agriculture Committee have had these ties to industry.

We were able to rattle the grip of Big Tobacco loose and we can start to do so now with Big Food by tightening campaign finance reform. Agribusiness is one of the largest lobbying interests in the capital, spending nearly 140 million in 2008 according to the Center for Responsive Politics. In creating a system based on public financing, their power could be greatly diminished. Food production is controlled from seed to supermarket shelf by a handful of companies [pdf], who are in effect deciding what we can and cannot access to eat. 83.5% of all beef-packing was controlled by 4 companies in 2007, while the numbers for pork-packing (66%), chicken processing (58.5%) and turkey (55%) reflect the same lack of competition. This extends to soy bean crushing (80%) and wet corn processing (74%), both sectors producing many of the ingredients in the processed foods we consume. President Obama has promised to take a hard line on anti-trust regulations, including those impacting agricultural companies. This would be a great start to building a better food system.

In addition, our government should fully fund unbiased studies assessing the long term sustainability of our food system. Most food research is funded by industry, and therefore focuses on biotech and other subjects that favor its development, rather than forming true assessments of the safety of our food and the lasting health impacts of our current food system. We can also change the incentive structure by incentivizing better farming practices like crop rotation, intercropping, smaller-scale food and animal operations that improve the air, water and land quality of the local environment.

President Obama can also nominate a Surgeon General who could set the tone for a better food system. A strong Surgeon General should warn Americans about the longterm health effects of consuming fast foods, and educate and advise the public about the outcomes of unbiased government studies. He/she should also oversee the labeling of foods for their possible detrimental health effects. The tobacco industry no longer has the power to advertise wherever it pleases, nor can it advertise to children; cigarettes are properly labeled with health advisories. A similar tack needs to be taken with unhealthy food.

While millions still die of smoking related illness every year, it’s not too late to lift the veil from Big Food, and in doing so, save lives and public health for years to come.

h/t to Bonnie Powell and Naomi Starkman