McDonald’s Trims Its Happy Meal

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/27/business/mcdonalds-happy-meal-to-get-healthier.html?ref=fastfoodindustry

By STEPHANIE STROM

Published: July 26, 2011

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Bowing to pressure from health advocates and parents, McDonald’s is putting the Happy Meal on a diet.

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A Happy Meal in San Francisco, which banned the inclusion of toys in children's meals unless nutritional requirements were met.

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Happy Meal Makeover

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The company announced Tuesday that it would more than halve the amount of French fries and add fruit to its popular children’s meal in an effort to reduce the overall calorie count by 20 percent.

But McDonald’s appeasement only went so far. A toy will still come with each Happy Meal despite criticism that the trinkets, often with tie-ins to movies like “Toy Story,” foster a powerful connection between children and the often calorie-laden meals.

While Happy Meals account for less than 10 percent of all McDonald’s sales, the signature box and its contents — first introduced in 1979 — have become a favorite target in recent years. Lawmakers and consumers have rallied around breaking that childhood link between toys and fast food, with the efforts increasing as Michelle Obama and national public health officials point to the estimated 17 percent rate of obesity among the nation’s youths.

San Francisco, for example, has banned the inclusion of toys in children’s meals unless certain nutritional requirements are met. A New York City councilman is proposing a similar law.

Other restaurant chains have gone further than McDonald’s in acceding to calls for improving the fare on children’s menus and eliminating marketing appeals. In June, Jack in the Box announced the end of toys in its children’s meals, and this month, Burger King, IHOP and more than a dozen other restaurant chains backed an effort led by the National Restaurant Association to serve and promote healthier options for youngsters.

“McDonald’s is not giving the whole loaf, but it is giving a half or two thirds of a loaf,” said Michael F. Jacobson, executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, which is representing a woman in California who is suing McDonald’s for including toys in its Happy Meals. “This is an important step in the right direction.”

McDonald’s made it clear that it was changing the composition of Happy Meals in response to parental and consumer pressure. It also pledged to reduce the sodium content in all of its foods by 15 percent, with the exceptions of soda and desserts. It set a deadline of 2015 for limiting salt, and said it would spend the rest of this decade cutting back on sugars, saturated fats and calories and making adjustments to portion sizes.

The new Happy Meals will be introduced in September and rolled out across the company’s 14,000 restaurants by April 2012. They will all include apple slices, but in a smaller amount of three to five slices than the current eight to 10 offered as an alternative. (The Apple Dippers also will be renamed after the company phases out the caramel dipping sauce, according to Tuesday’s announcement.)

“It’s a trade-off between everybody getting a small portion and 10 percent of kids getting a larger portion, which is better than nothing and maybe will accustom kids to eating fresh fruits and vegetables when they go out to eat,” Mr. Jacobson said.

Parents will have the option of requesting more fruit or, possibly at a later date, vegetables instead of fries. McDonald’s will also offer a fat-free chocolate milk option, along with the option of low-fat milk or the traditional soda. The price is not expected to change.

Today’s Happy Meal with chicken nuggets has 520 calories and 26 grams of fat, and the reconstituted version, with 1 percent milk, will total 410 calories and 19 grams of fat, according to the company.

The company said it had experimented with eliminating French fries altogether from the boxes, but that generated a lot of customer complaints. Danya Proud, a spokeswoman for the company, said that McDonald’s tests also found that parents wanted soda among the drinks available, too. “That’s what we’ve really felt all along, that ultimately, it’s a parent decision to make about their child’s well-being,” she said.

McDonald’s has long offered parents the option of asking for fruit rather than fries, although a study by Yale University’s Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity found that only 11 percent took advantage of that option.

While some critics of fast-food and public health officials praised the moves (Mrs. Obama called them “positive steps”), others complained that McDonald’s did not go far enough. Marion Nestle, a professor of nutrition at New York University and an outspoken critic of the food industry, called the changes a “sham,” in part because McDonald’s is not doing more to limit soda with the Happy Meal.

“They’re going to get huge publicity for this — an ounce less of French fries,” Dr. Nestle said. “I’m not impressed.”

In fact, when apples are added to the Happy Meal with a soda, the amount of sugar in the new package increases.

As part of an effort to provide better access to nutritional information about its foods, the company has developed its first mobile application for the public. McDonald’s executives also plan to tour the country to hear directly from consumers about their concerns.

“We are doing what we can,” Ms. Proud said. “We have to evolve with the times, and the times require us and our customers are asking us to offer more options.”

Ms. Proud said that even with the changes, the Happy Meal would not meet San Francisco’s requirements, which demand both a fruit and vegetable serving, among other things, before a company can include a toy with a child’s meal.

Public health experts expect the company to mount a legal challenge to that ordinance before it goes into effect in December, but Ms. Proud said McDonald’s was still evaluating its options.

William Neuman contributed reporting.

A version of this article appeared in print on July 27, 2011, on page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: McDonald’s Trims Its Happy Meal.

Food Safety...or lack thereof

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/23/business/with-a-long-list-and-short-on-money-fda-tackles-food-safety.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=food&st=cse

On Food Safety, a Long List but Little Money

Jesse Newman for The New York Times

The F.D.A.'s deputy commissioner for foods, Mike Taylor, visited a farm on Long Island in anticipation of the food safety law.

By WILLIAM NEUMAN

Published: August 22, 2011

This summer there has been a drumbeat of food-related illnesses. Strawberries containing E. coli killed one person in Oregon and sickened at least nine others. Ground turkey contaminated with salmonella poisoned more than 100 people nationwide, with one dead, and prompted one of the largest meat recalls ever. Imported papayas tainted with salmonella sickened at least 99. Sprouts grown in Idaho were linked to salmonella illnesses in five states.

The landmark food safety law passed by Congress last December is supposed to reduce the frequency and severity of food safety problems, but the roll call of recent cases underlines the magnitude of the task.

“It’s an enormous undertaking,” said Mike Taylor, the Food and Drug Administration’s deputy commissioner for foods, whose job it is to turn the far-reaching law into a coherent set of rules that farmers, food processors and importers can follow and regulators can enforce.

The agency is taking on the expanded mission at a time when Washington budget-slashing means that regulators have little hope of getting additional money and may instead have their budgets cut by Congress.

“We have to have the resources to implement this law,” Mr. Taylor said.

“The stark choice is we either find the resources or we forgo implementing this law the way Congress intended. You can’t build something brand-new without the resources to do it.”

The agency is now in the process of writing the food safety rules called for by the law, with the goal of preventing outbreaks like those this summer. (The nation’s meat and poultry supply was already regulated by the Agriculture Department and is unaffected by the new law.)

One of the most complex jobs involves setting standards for farmers to grow and harvest fruits and vegetables safely. The first draft of the farm rules is due early next year. The agency has not said what they will include, but they are expected to deal with basics like hand-washing stations for field workers, tests of irrigation water and measures to protect fields from wild animals that can track in bacteria.

Investigators in Oregon say they believe that deer may have brought E. coli into the strawberry fields there, so such federal rules could potentially help prevent future outbreaks of that kind.

Yet the standards must take into account a huge variety of crops, farming practices and farm sizes.

The task is all the more delicate because the agency has never before had a major presence on American farms.

For a year and a half, well before Congress passed the food safety law, Mr. Taylor has been on a listening tour, visiting farmers around the country and seeking to allay their fears that an army of food safety bureaucrats will come storming through their fields telling them how to do their jobs.

Recently, he visited Long Island, where he tramped through the sandy fields of the 30-acre Deer Run lettuce farm of Bob Nolan in Brookhaven.

Mr. Nolan said he was initially anxious about the new law but was now eager to help the agency make it work for farmers. Mr. Taylor was joined by several agency employees involved in writing the farm rules, and Mr. Nolan told them that he hoped the visit would help them better understand how a farm worked.

He went over steps he had taken to improve food safety, including creating a tracking system that linked every head of lettuce he sold to the section of field where it was grown and doing yearly tests of irrigation water for dangerous bacteria. And he asked for clear guidance in the rules for techniques like how to safely use composted horse manure to fertilize his fields.

The complexity of the F.D.A.’s task became clear as the day went on. At the second stop, a potato farm in Riverhead, the owner Jimmy Zilnicki said that he knew little about what the government expected of him.

“We’re all just trying to find out what this food safety thing is all about,” he said. Besides, he argued, potatoes were a safe crop and he questioned whether it was worth including them in food safety rules.

Mr. Taylor told him that the F.D.A.’s job was to focus most of its efforts where the food safety risks were greatest.

The third stop was a 65-acre organic farm in Riverhead, run by Eve Kaplan-Walbrecht and her husband, Chris. They grow a dizzying array of crops, from arugula to zucchini, most of which they sell directly to customers through farmers’ markets and buying clubs.

They, too, had made costly improvements with an eye toward food safety, including building a large processing shed with a concrete floor, treated water, a bathroom and refrigerated storage. The new law exempts small farms that average less than $500,000 a year in sales and sell mostly to local customers. But Ms. Kaplan-Walbrecht said that her farm, known as Garden of Eve, brings in too much money to qualify for the exemption.

She worried that the new law could become a burden for small farmers, either by adding paperwork or by unleashing regulators with little understanding of how a farm worked.

“If you’re going to be in fear that someone’s going to show up and there’s going to be a rabbit in your carrot patch and you’re going to get in trouble, then that’s a problem,” she said.

But while farmers worry that the rules will be too stringent, food safety advocates worry that budget cuts could render the law toothless.

The Congressional Budget Office has said the F.D.A. will need hundreds of millions of dollars in new financing to execute the law, and there appears little chance that Mr. Taylor will get it.

The Republican-controlled House of Representatives has passed an appropriations bill that largely eliminates new money for the F.D.A. The Democrat-controlled Senate has not made its own proposal. But advocates fear that the new Congressional supercommittee that is to propose cuts under the debt ceiling deal could further pare the agency’s finances.

A budget freeze or cuts would have the greatest impact on the ambitious increase in inspections called for under the new law, which ramp up each year.

“Writing rules is inexpensive; enforcing them is expensive,” said David W. Acheson, a former associate commissioner of the F.D.A. who is now a food safety consultant. “There will be a public health impact because enforcement won’t be to the extent they want to do it.”

The agency has already said that, without lots of new money, it won’t be able to conduct the thousands of foreign food inspections the law would require after a few years. Increasing domestic inspections would be difficult, too. The F.D.A. has about 1,000 inspectors trained to visit food establishments but most of them also inspect drug and medical device facilities. Hiring new inspectors or retraining existing ones is costly.

So far, Mr. Taylor has won praise for the introduction of the new law. A lawyer and longtime official at the F.D.A. and the Agriculture Department, he headed the U.S.D.A.’s food safety office in 1994 when the agency declared it illegal to sell ground beef containing a toxic form of E. coli bacteria, a move that was fiercely opposed by the meat industry. He has also worked in the private sector, most recently as a vice president for public policy at Monsanto, the agricultural chemical and biotech company.

“I’ve never seen the agency go at anything with such enthusiasm,” said Carol L. Tucker Foreman, a food policy expert at the Consumer Federation of America. But she feared that without a higher budget, the agency would take shortcuts. The law requires the most frequent inspections at the riskiest facilities, and Ms. Tucker Foreman questioned whether the agency would simply classify fewer operations as high risk to make its job easier.

Mr. Taylor said that would not happen. “We’re not going to game the system,” he said.

Designing a Better Food Label

Link for article & pictures of possible new food labels:

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/28/designing-a-better-food-label/?scp=3&sq=michael%20pollan&st=cse

How should the government improve the food label?

A project at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Journalism has taken on the task of designing a better food label, asking for ideas to replace the current black and white Nutrition Facts label that appears on every food package. Although the designs aren’t part of the official effort to redesign food packages, the Berkeley project has generated dozens of new ideas that are likely to be considered by the United States Food and Drug Administration, which is in the process of revising the existing food label. This fall, the Institute of Medicine is expected to release its own report on food packaging and labeling.

“We asked food thinkers and design minds to come together and give advice on how they might rethink the food label and bring some insight into how design impacts choice,’’ said Lily Mihalik, co-creator of the project and a fellow in the News21 program, which is a journalism fellowship supported by the Carnegie and Knight Foundations. “There are a lot of things right with the current label, but at the same time people are confused. The question is whether a new nutrition facts label could help people make more educated decisions.’’

Renee WalkerClick on the photo for more.

The panel of judges included the food writer Michael Pollan; the consumer health activist Michael Jacobson; Dr. Robert Lustig, a San Francisco pediatrician; Laura Brunow Miner, a San Francisco graphic designer; and Andrew Vande Moere, a Belgian design professor.

The winning entry, from a San Francisco visual designer, Renee Walker, uses colorful boxes to depict the relative proportion of ingredients in a product. (Click on the photo to see four different examples of the label.)

“Walker’s design is dramatic, intriguing and holds great promise,’’ said Mr. Pollan. “I liked being able to see the visual breakdown of foods, although I wonder how her design would work with more complicated products, like Lucky Charms, say, or a PowerBar. Even so, it’s a step in the right direction. What I’d like to see next is some sort of color coding for the food groups and some attempt to show the degree of processing of various foods. Eating doesn’t have to be complicated; figuring out what’s in your food shouldn’t be either.”

Joey Brunelle

Mr. Jacobson put the label in third place over all, and said he especially liked the graphic representation of food ingredients.

“I like the bold, colorful rectangles showing how much of which ingredients are in the food,” he said. “Of course, just listing percentages in the ingredient label would save a huge amount of space, but this graphic is a lot more attractive and easier to understand.”

The second place design, from Joey Brunelle, replaces serving size calories with total calories per package or bottle. A green, yellow and red color-coding system denotes reasonable, questionable or unhealthy amounts of carbohydrates or fat.

Bradley Mu

“I think Joey’s design works because it’s realistic for a consumer to read and benefit from,” said Ms. Miner. “It uses common iconography, like the red/green/yellow (stoplight), which I saw in a few designs, in an incredibly simple way. It’s one of the few designs that works at a glance.”

Two designs, from Bradley Mu, a freelance Web designer and recent interactive media graduate from Elon University in North Carolina, and Dylan Brown, creative director at Pixar Canada in Vancouver, British Columbia, tied for third place. Mr. Mu’s label mimics the traditional food label but uses color and highlights natural foods in green type and food additives in bold. It also features the glycemic index, a measure of how quickly a food increases the level of sugar in the body.

Mr. Vande Moere said that the green versus bold type would give food makers an incentive to include more healthful ingredients.

“The bar graphs are informative and minimalistic, while not making up the majority of allocated space,” he said. “The color coding is consistent, simple and meaningful.”

Dylan BrownClick on the photo for more.

The design by Mr. Brown uses color-coded letter grades to rate food ingredients, offering green A’s and B’s, yellow C’s and red D’s and F’s.

“I like the minimalist approach,’’ said Mr. Jacobson. “Clear lettering, clear grades with added color-coding, and no fancy, space-taking graphs for people to puzzle over.”

He continued: “If anything, this label could convey somewhat more information, such as serving sizes. Too bad the food industry would never allow ‘F’ ratings to go on their labels.”

Although the judges gave none of the designs a complete endorsement, they noted that each label offered some improvement over the current food label. Other concerns, like the amount of processed ingredients in a food, were more difficult to represent in the label, noted Mr. Pollan.

“The focus on nutrients is probably inevitable, but it distracts from the issue of whether you’re getting real food or not,” he said. “The degree of processing matters more, very often, than the nutrients as expressed in a label. So how do we capture that?”

Although the judging panel has picked its favorites among the label submissions, the project is now asking members of the public to vote on their favorites. The project’s Web site, Rethink the Food Label, will take votes through midday Sunday and announce the winner next week. Visitors to the site can also view a slide show of all the submitted designs.

USDA's Advice for Eating Right is Hard on the Wallet

Link: http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2011/08/05/138998928/usdas-advice-for-eating-right-is-hard-on-the-wallet

There are myriad reasons why it's tough to follow a healthful diet in this day and age, and the formidable obesity epidemic in this country is a testament to the fact that too many of us simply can't do it.

The government, in theory, wants to lead us down a more healthful path, with tactics like the Dietary Guidelines, updated every five years with the latest nutritional science and suggestions for how to balance meals.

But fruits and veggies can be pricey relative to sugary, fatty foods, and the guidelines don't really help consumers on a tight budget figure out how to boost their intake of these healthful foods, public health experts say.

Today, researchers at the University of Washington published a study in Health Affairs that looked at four nutrients — potassium, fiber, Vitamin D and calcium — which the most recent set of guidelines (released in January) said we weren't eating enough of.
  What they found among people they surveyed in the Seattle area was that consuming the recommended amounts of these four nutrients would make the average person's food bill go up — by as much as $380 per year with just one of the nutrients (potassium). That is too much for some low-income families, they say.

"We're trying to understand the dietary imbalance, and our study shows there's an economic layer to it, which the Dietary Guidelines don't account for," Pablo Monsivais, an epidemiologist at the University of Washington and the lead author of the study, tells Shots. "In theory it's possible for people to meet the guidelines, but they would have to be reoriented towards the lowest-cost foods."

Monsivais and his colleagues conducted a random telephone survey of about 2,000 adults in King County, Wash., on what they ate and how much they spent on food. They followed up with a questionnaire in the mail to which about 1,300 people responded.

On the question of potassium, respondents said they consumed an average of 2,800 milligrams per day — 700 milligrams less than what the guidelines recommend. The researchers calculated that it would cost them an extra $1.04 a day, or $380 per year, to meet the guideline.
Potassium isn't inherently expensive, the study notes – bananas and potatoes are cheap ways to get it — but many people wouldn't necessarily go for those foods if they were trying to boost their potassium, based on what they currently eat.

Monsivais has an idea, though, of what an affordable "MyPlate" would look like: It would be filled with lentils, cabbage, eggs, and carrots. And for dessert? Oranges, apples or bananas — all nutritious and cheap.

Another way to get people to eat more nutritious food is to help families on food assistance shop at farmers' markets. The Health Affairs study references Boston Bounty Bucks, a program that makes it easier for food stamp users to go to 21 farmers markets around Boston. All purchases made at these markets with the federal government's Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, are matched up to $10 by the BBB.

The Union of Concerned Scientists coincidentally released a report today also encouraging the government to do more to make the healthful fruits and vegetables at farmers' markets accessible to the poor.

"What we want to see are policies to allow low-income people to redeem their food assistance benefits at farmers markets," UCS economist and report author Jeffrey O'Hara tells Shots. "Some states don't even allow it, and there is evidence that these benefits work well for low-income people and actually help them increase their food and vegetable consumption."

Welcome to Geography 3660 Fall 2011!

What do you know about where your breakfast comes from? Every day we eat food that is produced hundreds or even thousands of miles away from where we are eating. For breakfast, we might eat oranges from Florida, jam that was packaged in England, granola that contains nuts grown in Hawaii, or drink coffee made from beans that grow in Brazil. Or, we might be eating more locally produced foodstuffs, such as peaches in season in Georgia. In any case, eating breakfast links us into geographic networks of food production, distribution, consumption, and ultimately power, which are international in scope. Our breakfast depends on environmental conditions, economic networks and alliances, labor regimes, international politics and other events that have happened over time in many places. Sitting at the breakfast table, we are connected by complex commodity chains to growers in Latin America, processors in Europe, labor leaders in the Caribbean, trade negotiators in Washington D.C., and their counterparts in dozens of other countries. Meanwhile, the modern food system is built upon untold social dislocation and environmental disruption. The rise of international markets for foodstuffs is closely linked to the history of empire and colonialism, as well as to agricultural, industrial and technological and social revolutions. Entire national economies have been formed around the export of single commodities such as coffee or bananas. This course is intended to inform you about the “where” of your food, stimulate your curiosity about where your food comes from, and illustrate how people, places, governments and economies are connected to one another in the production of food, and how those connections are made possible.

While this is officially a lecture course, lecturing time will be heavily interspersed with in-class discussion. I place a high value on in-class participation, which means that your full attendance for the term will be important to your grade in the course. Full attendance means that you arrive for class on time, and do not make plans to leave until the class period is over. For my part, I will start the class on time, and will not extend the class beyond the allotted time period. Your active participation in the class should also contribute to a positive learning environment for yourself and others; this means that we should all respect the right of others to learn, and respect the diversity of each other’s backgrounds and learning styles. Among other things, this means that you pay full attention to the course material, do not talk during lecture, do not peruse unrelated reading material during class, etc. This is part of your education – it is up to you to claim it and make the best of it, while making room for others to do the same.