Posts Tagged ‘Big Food’
Posted on Tuesday, June 12th, 2012 by Michele Simon
As Congress proposes cuts to hungry families, my new report raises questions about how much food makers, retailers, and big banks profit from food stamps.
With the debate over the 2012 Farm Bill currently underway in the Senate, most of the media’s attention has been focused on how direct payments—subsidies doled out regardless of actual farming—are being replaced with crop insurance, in a classic shell game that Big Ag’s powerful lobby is likely to pull off.
Meanwhile, the Senate may hurt the less powerful by cutting $4.5 billion from the largest piece of the farm bill pie: the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly called food stamps). Reducing this lifeline for 46 million struggling Americans (more than 1 in 7—nearly half of them children) has become a sideshow in the farm bill circus, even though SNAP spending grew to $78 billion in 2011, and is projected to go higher if the economy does not improve.
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Posted in Big Food, Food Policy | Tagged: Big Food, Eat Drink Politics, farm bill, food stamps, J.P. Morgan Chase, SNAP, USDA, Walmart | Michele on Google+ | View/Add Comments (18) |
Posted on Friday, May 11th, 2012 by Michele Simon
Institute of Medicine Gives Big Food Another Deadline – or else!
This week, the nation’s top public health experts gathered at a much-trumpeted obesity conference hosted by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention called Weight of the Nation. (A quick glance at the agenda reveals nothing that would even begin to challenge the food industry.)
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Posted in Child Nutrition, Marketing to Children, Public Health | Tagged: Big Food, Center for Food Safety, Center for Science in the Public Interest, lobbying, obesity, targeted marketing, voluntary self-regulation, Weight of the Nation | Michele on Google+ | View/Add Comments (2) |
Posted on Sunday, February 19th, 2012 by Michele Simon
When I ask people to name the largest food company in America, most don’t realize the answer is PepsiCo. You may just think soft drinks when you hear the name, but PepsiCo actually owns a dizzying array of food and beverage brands across five massive divisions: Pepsi-Cola, Frito-Lay, Gatorade, Tropicana, and Quaker Oats. As I recently told CNBC for their documentary, Pepsi’s Challenge, perhaps the leading maker of sugary drinks and salty snacks should bear some responsibility for America’s bad eating habits.
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Posted in Big Food, Child Nutrition, Public Health | Tagged: Big Food, junk food, PepsiCo, public health | Michele on Google+ | View/Add Comments (6) |
Posted on Tuesday, February 14th, 2012 by Michele Simon
As Enrollment Increases, USDA Should Require Purchase Data from
Food Stamp Retailers to Better Evaluate Nutrition Intake
This week Congress begins hearings on the 2012 farm bill, the massive piece of legislation that gets updated about every five years and undergirds America’s entire food supply, but that few mortals can even understand. As nutrition professor Marion Nestle recently lamented, “no one has any idea what the farm bill is about. It’s too complicated for any mind to grasp.”
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Posted in Big Food, Public Health | Tagged: Big Food, farm bill, SNAP, USDA | Michele on Google+ | View/Add Comments (6) |
Posted on Thursday, January 5th, 2012 by Michele Simon
It doesn’t take much for the food industry to freak-out over potential government action, but this latest corporate outcry is especially galling and self-serving. After more than 20 years of “assessment” the Environmental Protection Agency is finally expected this month to release limits for safe exposure to dioxins, nasty industrial pollutants that cause cancer, among other health harms. You may have heard of dioxin as the military herbicide Agent Orange used in Vietnam, where it earned its distinction as “the most toxic compound synthesized by man.”
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Posted in Big Food, Food Safety, Public Health | Tagged: Big Food, food safety | Michele on Google+ | View/Add Comments (3) |
Posted on Wednesday, July 27th, 2011 by Michele Simon
When McDonald’s sneezes, the media jumps. Such was the case yesterday when the company announced it was giving the Happy Meal a makeover. Well not really, but that’s how it got reported, because the media loves simple stories. But when it comes to marketing and PR by multinational corporations, nothing is ever that simple.
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Posted in Child Nutrition, Marketing to Children | Tagged: Big Food, child nutrition, McDonald's, San Francisco, targeted marketing | Michele on Google+ | View/Add Comments (20) |
Posted on Monday, May 16th, 2011 by Michele Simon
My colleague, Nancy Huehnergarth, is executive director of the New York State Healthy Eating and Physical Activity Alliance, aka NYSHEPA. More importantly, she is a tireless public health advocate who truly understands that we are in a political fight against Big Food. I am pleased to cross-post her critical call-to-action, originally posted on her own blog. It’s dedicated to anyone who has ever written a fact sheet and wondered why it didn’t carry the day. (Information on NYSHEPA. Follow Nancy on Twitter.)
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Posted in Big Food | Tagged: Big Food | Michele on Google+ | View/Add Comments (3) |
