Food For Thought

If eating is something we must do in order to survive, then why is it killing us? Watch Jamie Oliver’s speech from the 2010 TED Conference and you’ll learn that “diet-related disease is the biggest killer in the United States right now.”

It’s a statistic as overwhelming as ‘over 1 billion sold.’ But make no mistake; our national problem isn’t a lack of awareness that fast food is unhealthy. Instead, we (people and brands) have structured a society where the easiest option is the least healthy and few know how to help themselves eat any differently.

I’ll admit that I’m part of a pampered generation. Parents who could cook never bothered to teach many of us, and many of us were content not to learn; I was shocked at how many people I met in college who didn’t even know how to boil pasta. But worse than our generation being somewhat spoiled is that our nation’s relationship with food has become an abusive one—one where fewer parents cook for their children because they’ve become habituated to a system that provides their food.

And what of public schools? Weren’t they always “preparing us for the real world”—training us to become functioning members of society—yet for all our education, our generation was taught little of dietary nutrition, grocery shopping on a budget, or cooking our own meals. And so we’ve been left to learn from no one, limited to satisfy our hunger with over-processed options, and now obesity can be found in the cafeterias of elementary schools.

I only touch on these failings of parents and public schools so I might raise this question: Would the brands contributing to our nation’s obesity willingly take action to fix it or do these brands hold quarterly profits higher than human lives—requiring the pressures of government legislation, or a shifting market, in order to address the issue? Surprisingly, we’ve already had some volunteers, and they’re major ones.

PepsiCo, Coca-Cola, and Dr. Pepper Snapple Group—they should sound familiar even if you’ve never had a soft drink. Yet these three titans (and main contributors to childhood obesity) have established new “School Beverage Guidelines,” which focused on providing “lower-calorie and higher nutrient beverages in schools, including waters, 100% juices, and portion-controlled sports drinks.” Since this effort began in 2004, shipments of full-calorie carbonated sodas “were 95 percent lower in the first half of the 2009-10 school year than they were…before the guidelines went into effect.”

Call me cynical, most of my generation is anyway, but I can’t help wondering: did these brands truly do this voluntarily or did they volunteer only because of their foresight? In other words, did they see a market already turning more and more against carbonated soft drinks and toward healthier options?

Did they see that people like Jamie Oliver would be rousing health movements? Did they see that someone like Michelle Obama would start active plans against childhood obesity? If they did, this good deed is more appropriately deemed a smart business decision, securing their future dollars through alternative products that act responsively, and, only by coincidence, responsibly to the turning market.

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