Are Big Tobacco and Big Food equals?
By Owen Morris in News
Tuesday, Mar. 24 2009 @ 10:00AM
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| Flickr: Dave Knapik |
We've been posting an increasing number of law- and litigation-related items on Fat City. Whether that's simply because legislatures are in session, or due to a busy new administration or several food movements reaching maturity I do not know.
The latest comes not from law but from academia, where Kelly Brownell and Kenneth Warner, Yale and Michigan professors respectively, argue that the food industry's -- they call it "Big Food" -- products carry many of the same dangers that Big Tobacco did in the 1950s. Brownell and Warner are highly respected in the field of food science and thus their paper is getting major press and negative reaction.
The article reminds readers that in the 1950s, Big Tobacco released a paper and paid for it to be placed in hundreds of newspapers. The "Frank Statement to Cigarette Smokers" included the famous lines, "We accept an interest in people's heath as a basic responsibility... We believe the products we make are not injurious to health." Read the whole ad here. It's basically one big lie after another.
Brownell and Warner write, "The basic premise was simple -- smoking had not been proved to cause cancer. Not proven, not proven, not proven -- this would be stated insistently and repeatedly. Inject a thin wedge of doubt, create controversy, never deviate from the prepared line. It was a simple plan and it worked."
They suggest that food companies are taking a similar route now that their products are under increasing attack.
The Big Food method is to "focus on personal
responsibility as the cause of the nation's un-healthy diet, raise
fears that government action usurps personal freedom ... criticize
studies that hurt industry as 'junk science,' plant doubt when concerns
are raised about the industry." Those four ideas are stolen verbatim
from the Big Tobacco playbook.
Written in normal English (as opposed to academic English), the report (PDF) is easy to read. I recommend heading to page 16 where the authors talk about how the sugar industry used its connections inside the Bush Administration to try to get World Health Organization funding cut completely -- the U.S. donates nearly $500 million to prevent starvation -- over a fight on sugar labeling. Page 23 contains a lot of interesting information on caffeine and page 25 lists many commercial examples of food companies advertising in the same way cigarette companies did in the 1950s.
Ultimately, the comparison of food and tobacco centers on one issue: "whether industry can be trusted to make changes that benefit the public good and can be responsible with the accompanying marketing." For Big Tobacco the answer was a resounding no. Sadly, the answer looks the same for Big Food.
Written in normal English (as opposed to academic English), the report (PDF) is easy to read. I recommend heading to page 16 where the authors talk about how the sugar industry used its connections inside the Bush Administration to try to get World Health Organization funding cut completely -- the U.S. donates nearly $500 million to prevent starvation -- over a fight on sugar labeling. Page 23 contains a lot of interesting information on caffeine and page 25 lists many commercial examples of food companies advertising in the same way cigarette companies did in the 1950s.
Ultimately, the comparison of food and tobacco centers on one issue: "whether industry can be trusted to make changes that benefit the public good and can be responsible with the accompanying marketing." For Big Tobacco the answer was a resounding no. Sadly, the answer looks the same for Big Food.
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