Nation on the Take by Wendell Potter

Author:Wendell Potter [Penniman, Wendell Potter and Nick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781632861108
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2015-12-16T16:00:00+00:00

Enter Big Food

One enormous force distorting the debate on healthy eating is Big Food. The food and beverage industry, along with crop and food producing, processing, and sales companies, spent close to $92 million lobbying Washington in 2014 alone.13 That figure does not include the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the lobbying behemoth that often joins Big Food and many other industries in lobbying battles.

On the other side, the most prominent organization lobbying for healthier eating—the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI)—spent $82,000 in 2014. That’s less than 1 percent of the lobbying budget for just one company, Coca-Cola, which reported spending $9.3 million lobbying Washington that same year.

Here’s another way to look at this David vs. Goliath battle: in 2011, CSPI spent about $70,000 on lobbying. The coalition of companies opposed to new federal guidelines on the marketing of food and beverages—guidelines that would only have been voluntary—spent that much every thirteen hours in 2011, according to an analysis by Reuters.

On just one contentious issue we will examine in this chapter—whether the government should establish optional guidelines for how companies can market food to children—the industry and its allies outspent opponents by at least a 17-to-1 margin, according to our own analysis. On this issue, we could find only a dozen groups lobbying on the side of child nutrition, including CSPI, the American Cancer Society, the Environmental Working Group, and associations of dentists, pediatricians, and dietitians. Lobbying against them were more than three dozen food, beverage, and media companies.

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