Smart Choices look an awful lot like multinational corporations
I often come across food policy related articles, and sometimes am organized enough to post about them. This one just confused me off the bat so I thought I’d share it with you all. Yesterday’s New York Times had an article aptly and ironically titled, For Your Health, Froot Loops, which outlines a new program called “Smart Choices”, a food-labeling campaign “designed to help shoppers easily identify smarter food and beverage choices”.
Despite my love of good food and my commitment to sustainable agriculture practices, I confess to have been raised on Count Chocula and Instant Breakfast, two entirely un-wholesome products that in my mind were the most delicious things any breakfast pantry could offer. I am not opposed to processed foods on principal, and I realize that children’s rallying cries in the aisles of the supermarket can be a powerful force. I simply oppose adding healthy check marks to those foods to make it even easier for children and their parents to justify eating them.
While I understand the principal of making healthy food shopping easier for busy, working parents, Smart Choices seems to completely defeat the purpose. Instead of making it easier to choose healthy, whole grain and unprocessed foods, they instead cater to companies with enough money to buy in to the program, slapping healthy check marks on such companies’ products and increasing sales in the very companies whose products are the most processed. A quick product search on the Smart Choices wesbite tells me that if I’m looking for a healthy choice in the “seed, nut and nut butter” category, Peter Pan and Skippy offer the best options. For cereal you can try Cocoa Krispies and Lucky Charms. I went through every item recommended on the Smart Choices site and found they were all products of only sixteen companies, including Kraft, General Mills, Unilever and Conagra. The NYTimes article reports that companies must pay Smart Choices to bear its label — up to $100,000 a year based on amount of sales. It’s no wonder our “healthiest” food choices seem to come from the wealthiest companies on the market.
Marion Nestle, the noted food politician at NYU, has recently blogged about the Smart Choices program, and then re-blogged on the same topic after criticism from a Senior Vice President at Kellogg. Although NYTimes reporter William Neuman manages to find nutritionists who support the Smart Choices program, Nestle (in my mind one of the most reputable and sought after nutritionists in the field) writes, “I am not one of them”.
