Of butter tarts and election signs

It’s election season in this neck of the woods, with a federal election in May and a provincial one in the fall. I was trying to explain it to my 6-year-old in the car last night, and getting him to count the signs of the various parties.

“The oranges are winning, mommy!” he said as we neared our downtown Toronto home. (Which is sort of funny, because considering the current political climate it’s rather unlikely the oranges—the New Democrats (NDP)—are going to be winning in too many other places.) Then he added, “I don’t know what it’s all about though. What are they winning?”

Good question.

Right now, it’s all about staking out territory. I was glad to read in the Star that Rosario Marchese,  provincial MPP and NDPer—is putting his stake in the ground against fast food ads aimed at children. He’s putting forth a private member’s bill that would ban junk food marketing directed at kids under 13. It’s not exactly radical—the province of Quebec outlawed it in 1980—but you wouldn’t know if from the kinds of sputtering, outraged reaction you get when you start suggesting such bans.

Like say, city councillor Doug Ford, brother to Toronto mayor Rob, who responded to a proposed ban on pop in city ice arenas with this old saw:

“Once you get rid of all the sodas and the water, are you going to go after my butter tarts downstairs, too?” he asked members of the government management committee. “I’m not being sarcastic. And the next step would be let’s dictate what we should eat, what we can drive. Should we take the bus because it’s not healthy to drive a car. Where does it stop? Where does the socialism stop?”

Egad.

But if governments don’t take a stand for the health of their citizens, who will?

According to Michele Simon writing on grist.org—she’s the author of Appetite for Profit: How the Food Industry Undermines Our Health and How to Fight Back—when food companies voluntarily agree to limit the kinds of foods they market to children, the self-regulating tends to be “weak and self-serving.” She recently attended a conference in Brussels about the European situation and emerged feeling even more disillusioned than before.

“I left … with the impression that the food industry is engaging in the same charade all over the world: setting …voluntary guidelines designed to ensure companies can keep right on marketing their unhealthy brands to children while mollifying regulators and distracting researchers with evaluating their useless pledges, commitments, and initiatives.”

Clearly, governments standing up for their children—and the future health of their nation—rather than leaving the regulating to the companies themselves is the only way to effect real change in this matter. Is that socialism or just democracy? (I say we go after Ford’s butter tarts, too.)

Kids are the answer to the obesity epidemic

Canada’s national newspaper, The Globe and Mail is running a week-long series on the obesity problem in this country. According to Stats Can, when the agency went out and weighed people instead of asking them about their weight (apparently we lie…), it found  61% of Canadians are overweight.

Sweet potato soup with carrots on the side, as made by my six year old

What I found interesting about the lead-off article in the weekend paper—about how governments can affect change in people’s diet— was how little it emphasized children and food education. There was lots of talk about money incentives, taxes on sugary sodas, the ineffectiveness of “shock-value billboards” and (duh) shaming people into losing weight. But here’s all they said about kids and “fooderacy”:

“School-based interventions were harder to cost out, since the benefits are long-term. But the report’s authors did find it made sense to educate a captive audience, young enough to still be setting lifestyle patterns.”

Sounds pretty promising to me—so why not focus on said captive audience? What about a serious government commitment to teaching kids about food in school? Supporting school gardens? Real food education?

While I think taxing soda (and other junk food) and finding ways to change the agricultural subsidy of cheap food is part of the solution, talking to kids and changing food attitudes among children is so obviously key to long-term change. (And if governments aren’t thinking long-term, who will?)

Luckily, there are lots of smart people/parents thinking about how to get kids eating healthily and getting their hands dirty in the kitchen.  Take Dinner: A Love Story in NYC or Toronto’s own Sweet Potato Chronicles, the brainchild of former fashion editors Ceri Marsh and Laura Keogh. A blog/website about family food, it’s got recipes (that both kids and adults can make), profiles, info about food (say, the low-down on avocados), plus videos like “How to make a kale quiche your kids will like.” I especially like this week’s theme:  Quickie Dinners. Brilliant. Now if we can just get our government to be so quick and forward-thinking…

Bravo San Francisco

It’s not easy to stand up to big food corporations. So bravo to San Francisco (isn’t that a song?), which this week became the first major city in the US to forbid restaurants from offering bribes free toys to children to get them to buy unhealthy food.

Now, restaurants will only be able to offer these incentives if the Happy Meal or (insert other brand name) fast food meal package meets certain nutritional standards (less than 600 calories, less than 35% of the calories from fat, fewer than 640 mg of sodium) and includes at least a half cup of fruit or veg.

The bill still has to pass a final vote next week and won’t come into effect until 2011 but it’s a victory for parents, food activists and educators who believe that we all have a vested interest in the health of our children.

Opponents always go on about how it’s a parent’s responsibility to monitor their children’s food, and how this is just more evidence of a nanny state, blahblahblah. But I don’t buy this individualistic argument. The fact is, it’s not just parents who pay the price when their children eat junk. The international obesity epidemic, the rise in diet-related illnesses like certain cancers and diabetes are society-wide problems that require society-wide solutions.

I think this is only one of many challenges to the “triumph of the individual” approach to food that we’re going to be seeing over the next few years. After all, it wasn’t so long ago that we thought cigarette smoke and seatbelts were solely about individual choice.

The great soda debate

As of next year, schools in Ontario will no longer sell chocolate, gum, candy, licorice, energy bars, pop and popsicles on school property. It’s about time. After all, what are we saying to kids when we offer them junk food at school and then lecture to them about the food pyramid?

Weirdly, schools will be allowed to break the ban for 10 days a year. I guess it’s a concession to the naysayers and the many school fundraisers based on selling sweets, though surely there are other equally successful ways to raise money that don’t involve shilling cookie dough and chocolate almonds (full disclosure: I love chocolate almonds).

In any case, this move, of course, is part of a larger policy-based effort to deal with the obesity crisis that faces much of the Western world. Governments and school boards are being enlisted to introduce policies like banning junk from schools and imposing taxes on unhealthy food and drink.

But it’s a hard slog, especially when it comes to challenging powerful interests like those in the soda industry. Just how hard was explored in a piece in the New York Times this week. Faced with a proposed pop tax in the District of Colombia,

“The soda industry…is fighting back with newspaper and radio advertisements, among other things. It says a tax would most hurt “hard-working, low- and middle-income families, elderly residents and those living on fixed incomes” and would destroy jobs. Ellen Valentino, an industry official, recently told The Washington Post that companies would spend “whatever it takes” to make their case.”

Egad. So what they’re saying is that low-income people drink more soda because it’s cheap— thank-you subsidized corn and its sweet progeny high fructose corn syrup—and even though it’s making people unhealthy, burdening the health care system and rotting our teeth, we should be allowed to exercise our god-given right to drink as much as we like without being taxed for it. (Check out this chart from the NYT that shows how the cost of pop continues to decrease while the cost of fresh fruit and veg rises steeply.)

The Mexican government said essentially the same thing in 2006 when politicians quashed a tax on soda pop claiming it punished the poor. (Mexicans, apparently, now drink more Coke than milk—with the result being nearly one in 10 Mexicans lives with diabetes and the cost to Mexico to treat that disease is about $15 billion US a year.)

The US Senate is also considering a soda tax to help pay for health care reform. Of course, with the soda industry willing to spend “whatever it takes,” it’s not likely to be easy to win this battle—but it’s worthwhile to recall it wasn’t easy to win the fight against tobacco, either.