Food Giants' Endless Appetite for Profit

In recent years, the United States of America has morphed into what one writer calls "the United States of Arugula." The rise of the celebrity chef, of the 24-hour Food Network, and Martha Stewart's do-it-all perfectionism has brought on a similar yearning for all things gourmet.

During the same time, a number of notable books have shined a light on the darker side of our new food obsession. Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation, Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma and Peter Singer's The Way We Eat, among many others, showcase how the decisions we make at grocery stores or restaurants affect us and the planet. But very few books address the policies that shape the food supply and influence eating habits in this country, policies that make some foods cheap or expensive, that bring us "fresh" asparagus from Argentina, and that arguably have led to our current epidemics of obesity, diabetes and other health problems brought on by our food choices.

Michele Simon's new book, Appetite for Profit aims to address this oversight. Simon is the founder of the Center for Informed Food Choices and Research and Policy Director for the Marin Institute, and Appetite for Profit helps illuminate the many ways that food companies -- from General Mills to McDonald's -- market the unhealthiest foods to boost their profit margin and fight any attempts to reverse this trend. AlterNet spoke with Simon over the phone earlier this month.

Matthew Wheeland: First off, tell me how the book came about. You've obviously been working on these topics for a long time, so why now?

Michele Simon: I've been following the food industry and government policy for many years, but, really, in the last couple years the national debate has been heating up around the obesity epidemic and other topics.

Where I got the idea for the book was at a conference in 2004 hosted by ABC News and Time magazine. It was called "The Summit on Obesity" and they said they were bringing together 500 of the nation's top experts to forge solutions to the obesity epidemic. Giving the keynote address was former Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson, a man who knew nothing about public health, but he was giving his cheerleading speech about how we all "had to spread the gospel of personal responsibility," which sent chills down my spine. [Laughs]

He then went on to talk about all the major food companies and what a great job they were doing in coming on board, and one of the companies he mentioned was Coca-Cola. And Thompson said something to the effect that Coca-Cola has stopped marketing in schools, which I knew wasn't true.

Then a funny thing happened: He took questions from the audience. A man got up from the audience by the name of Charles Brown, who is a representative from Indiana. He wanted to know that if Coca-Cola was such a responsible company, then why had they sent five lobbyists to his state capital to kill his piece of legislation that would have required just half of all beverages sold in the school vending machines to be healthy? Well, Tommy Thompson didn't have a very good answer to that, and he just kinda stammered and said, "Well, I don't know anything about that, but if it happened again, you call me."

So that was kind of my eureka moment, because I realized that Representative Brown probably wasn't the only politician finding himself on the receiving end of this kind of lobbying, and I realized there was this kind of dichotomy, this hypocrisy where, on one hand, you had major food companies claiming to be part of the solution and meeting with these top government health officials to say that they were on board, but, on the ground in legislatures, where some policies were trying to get passed, it was a totally different story, or basically business as usual.