Fast Food and Ag Industry Giants Pretend to Be Healthy

By Jacob Wheeler, In These Times. Posted December 14, 2007.

For three days early this fall, the Pennsylvania Convention Center was home to corporate entities such as PepsiCo, Hershey's, Taco Bell, Crisco and McDonald's. They weren't there to count calories but to rub bellies with members of the American Dietetic Association, who had gathered in Philadelphia for the annual Food & Nutrition Conference & Expo.

PepsiCo cares about you. The company's "Health and Wellness" website pictures a smiling family in tennis shoes and workout clothes enjoying a brisk walk. All are consuming Pepsi products. Dad is drinking a can of Pepsi. Grandma is toting a bag of Lay's potato chips. Aside from the questionable workout, we're left to wonder: When did Pepsi become an advocate for health?

Marsha Holmberg, a food editor at the Oregonianwho flew in from Portland, says too many Americans have become culinary illiterates, convinced by television commercials that processed food is nutritious. "Nobody thinks they have the time to cook," Holmberg says. "They think it's complicated. In reality, it takes as much time to make from a mix as it does to make from scratch. It's an illusion that food preparation takes time."

At the convention's bookstore, neat rows of dietitian guidebooks -- with covers of colorful fruit and vegetables, alongside the occasional whole grain cereal or wheat stalk -- lined the booths. The message was healthy food, which professionals agree is the backbone of a sound diet.

Yet not everyone was eating from the same menu.

Registered dietitian Regena Gerth was promoting Taco Bell's new "Fresco Style" line -- which substitutes cheese with "fresh Fiesta Salsa." "Patrons will continue to go to fast-food restaurants," she says, "so the least we can do is offer healthy options -- anything that can be incorporated into a diet." She failed to mention that gut-busting Tex-Mex food filled with meat and beans is still the drive-thru favorite.

At the Unilever stand, the company marketed its Hellmann's mayonnaise, demonstrating how to turn it into a meal in 10 minutes. Nearby, McDonald's fried up public relations (millions served) -- trying to recover from the heartburn wrought by Super Size Me, the 2004 documentary about the perils of eating at Mickey D's.

Asked if it was ironic that McDonald's was at the Food & Nutrition Conference & Expo, registered dietitian Julia Braun said not at all. "We're not trying to be a health restaurant, but we still want to offer healthy options," she said, admitting that this was an image campaign.

Frankenfood purveyor Monsanto, was also in attendance, the company's public relations team extolling the virtues of technical engineering on a massive scale. Would it not be safer and more environmentally sound for consumers to rely on local food sources, especially given the E.coli fallout from mass-produced foods such as spinach and beef? (Not to mention the pollution emitted by transporting produce across a continent?)

"The market can't be full of good, affordable foods without technical engineering," said Karen Marshall, Monsanto's senior director of public affairs. "Proponents of small organics overlook that we need big farms, as well. I also wouldn't say that smaller is safer, because large means accountability."

By and large, the Chicago-based American Dietetic Association (ADA) and a majority of its 67,000 members -- what the association refers to as "the nation's food and nutrition experts" -- have failed to embrace the local food movement, much less sound the alarm over our culture's unsustainable reliance on mass-produced food: the pollution caused by trucking corn, fruit and meat across multiple state lines, and shipping it across the world; the environmental destruction wrought by farmers pressured into a monoculture agriculture system; and the inherent health risk of eating a bunch of spinach from an unknown source.

The valuable local food lessons of Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma seem not to have registered at the ADA -- or, at least, not enough to have supplanted its need to court corporate sponsors for its annual conference.

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Jacob Wheeler is an assistant editor at In These Times.

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