Local Activism Can Help Fight Big Food PR

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While federal law provides only minimum guidelines for healthy school meals (and snack foods and branded beverages proliferate in school vending machines), state-based activism has the potential to push standards higher. That's the cautionary message delivered by food marketing critic Michele Simon at last week's 29th Annual National Food Policy Conference [6]. Simon's new book, Appetite for Profit [7], skewers food marketers for putting PR before public health and fighting state regulatory efforts. Simon had to note some odd juxtapositions in the annual corporate social responsibility [8]-food activist crossroads: for example, Coca Cola [9] sponsored the break before her own talk. The conference also featured New York University nutrition professor Marion Nestle [10], who Simon says "pulled no punches" in criticizing Big Food for giving lip service to nutrition while focusing most marketing on traditional products of low nutritional value.