Michele Simon: Cracking the Politics of Food

“That led me down the path of explor­ing the pol­icy and polit­i­cal aspects of our food sup­ply. I actu­ally dis­cov­ered Marion Nestle’s work in the late nineties, before her book Food Politics came out. That’s what really inspired me to pur­sue this idea that pol­i­tics has some­thing to do with how we eat and the infor­ma­tion we learn about our food.”

Simon also fights for bet­ter pol­icy on alco­hol sale and con­sump­tion. For more than four years she served as research and pol­icy direc­tor for Marin Institute (now Alcohol Justice), an alco­hol indus­try watch­dog group. Her ground­break­ing 2007 report on alco­holic energy drinks led to a fed­eral ban on these dan­ger­ous prod­ucts. “Alcohol is the num­ber one drug of choice among youth, and under­age drink­ing remains a huge pub­lic health dis­as­ter,” Simon said. “Similarly, adult over­con­sump­tion is the third lead­ing cause of death in America. The pol­icy levers in alco­hol are actu­ally sim­i­lar to tobacco and food. In the case of alco­hol, they are to make prices higher so that we dis­cour­age over­con­sump­tion, to limit avail­abil­ity so as to not have a bar on every cor­ner, and also to limit advertising.”

Simon’s goal in the food realm is to expose the industry’s machi­na­tions, for the ben­e­fit of those attempt­ing to fight it. “I’d say my mis­sion is to get under­neath the head­lines that we see about food indus­try promises, pledges and com­mit­ments and really explain the con­text for what’s going on,” she con­tin­ued. “I tend to focus on the con­sumer end of the food sup­ply, so—looking at the actions of major food com­pa­nies like Kraft, McDonald’s, PepsiCo and General Mills—what they’re doing, how they’re claim­ing to be part of the solu­tion, how they’re really under­min­ing pub­lic health, despite their claims to the con­trary, and then how that plays out in the polit­i­cal arena.”

To that end, Simon founded Eat Drink Politics. “It’s a con­sult­ing busi­ness that I started with the recog­ni­tion that there isn’t really enough empha­sis on iden­ti­fy­ing who these major lob­by­ing play­ers are and how they oper­ate,” she said. “Since I also spent sev­eral years work­ing in alco­hol pol­icy, Eat Drink Politics is a way to bring together my exper­tise in both food and alco­hol pol­icy, because these are really neigh­bor­ing issues. No mat­ter what big indus­try you’re look­ing at, the tac­tics are very sim­i­lar. So it’s a means for me to help non­prof­its, advo­cates, gov­ern­ment officials—whoever needs assis­tance in tak­ing on these major indus­tries and lobbyists—understand who they’re up against and how they operate.”

For any­one attempt­ing pol­icy change, Simon points to the vital impor­tance of the age-old adage “Know your enemy.” “I don’t have the magic for­mula, but the first step is to acknowl­edge that there is a prob­lem. Too often, groups go blindly in to try to get a pol­icy passed with­out doing an assess­ment of what to expect and how many resources are going to be needed to get the job done.

“It takes a real com­mit­ment, and it takes analy­sis of the oppo­si­tion. No politi­cian goes into any race—whether it’s at the local level or right up to president—without doing an analy­sis of the oppo­si­tion. Yet we have too many peo­ple in food pol­icy who aren’t both­er­ing to think about that: who on the other end is going to oppose this; what do they need to antic­i­pate; what kind of resources are they going to need to make sure they’re ready for what could be a very heavy onslaught of opposition?”

While it can be a tough bat­tle, Simon grants cre­dence to the fact that the gov­ern­ment itself has its hands tied. “The fed­eral gov­ern­ment is mostly doing what it can, given the severe lim­i­ta­tions that the polit­i­cal sys­tem places on it,” she said. “It’s not like the pres­i­dent can just wave a magic wand. There’s some­thing called Congress, and then there’s some­thing called the food indus­try that has huge polit­i­cal power. That is not Obama’s fault—that is the fault of our very messed-up polit­i­cal sys­tem. At the end of the day, that sys­tem is what we need to fix.”

Another pre­dom­i­nant fac­tor in this bat­tle is, of course, the media. Most main­stream media will not touch many of the issues rel­e­vant to chang­ing our food sys­tem. For this rea­son Simon is thank­ful for the numer­ous chan­nels that have risen up through the pro­lif­er­a­tion of the Internet. “The good news is, these days there are all kinds of alter­na­tive meth­ods of infor­ma­tion shar­ing,” Simon observed. “While we might not be hear­ing on the nightly news about what’s going on with Monsanto, we do have good out­lets online.

“It’s def­i­nitely more chal­leng­ing to reach main­stream America this way, but we don’t need to reach every­one to get things done. I’ve heard it said that if we changed 10 per­cent of the people’s minds, we could actu­ally move the ball for­ward. So I’m not as con­cerned about get­ting infor­ma­tion out to every­one; I’m more con­cerned about get­ting it out to enough peo­ple, and enough of the right peo­ple. That would mean pol­i­cy­mak­ers and even peo­ple who are already work­ing on these issues. Helping those who are already work­ing on these issues to con­nect the dots and broaden their work is, I think, some­thing we can do through many dif­fer­ent channels.”

Simon urges indi­vid­u­als to become involved on a pol­icy level. “There is no short­age of projects to get involved with, and I always tell peo­ple, ‘Just find one,’ she said. “In your neigh­bor­hood, there is bound to be some way to get involved with improv­ing the food sys­tem, whether it’s through upgrad­ing food in your child’s school dis­trict, or through some local effort to pro­vide bet­ter access to fresh fruits and veg­eta­bles, or at the state level to improve pol­icy there, or of course any num­ber of ways to work at the fed­eral level.”

Simon’s final word is opti­mistic. “I’m hope­ful because there is a grow­ing aware­ness that things are pretty messed up and we need to fix them,” she con­cluded. “I’m grate­ful for var­i­ous media out­lets like Organic Connections that are help­ing to get the word out there. It’s great to see new groups that are jump­ing on the food pol­icy band­wagon, new foun­da­tions that real­ize this is a hot topic they want to get involved with. And, mostly, I’m encour­aged by the pas­sion of peo­ple on the ground who are work­ing on these issues all over the country.”

For more on Michele Simon, includ­ing her blog and arti­cles, visit www.appetiteforprofit.com.

To find out about Michele’s orga­ni­za­tion Eat Drink Politics, visit www.eatdrinkpolitics.com.