Nicholas freudenberg discusses how the food, tobacco, alcohol, pharmaceutical, gone and out of industries have negatively impacted Public Health. He offers space for the public to respond. This hourlong program is next on booktv. I am Marion Nestle and its my pleasure to start this panel. I want to say it to say it is a great honor to be here to launch next. Nick senate to me me for a blurb and i was really happy to get that. I get lots and lots of requests for blurbs, but i dont usually write them quite like i wrote this but. Would it embarrass you too much if i read the blurb . [inaudible] all right. Cover your face. Heres what i said. I meant every word. A superb, magnificently written courageous and compelling expoee of how corporations enrich themselves at the expense of Public Health and how we can organize to counter Corporate Power and achieve a healthier immerses edible food environment. They should be required reading for anyone who cares about promoting house, protecting Democratic Institutions in achieving a more equitable and just society. Not bad . And i meant every word of it. Nick asked me to talk specifically about what weve learned from that tends to incite to try to change Food Industry practices. My area of Research Institute politics and ive written a lot of books. Im currently working on one about the soda industry, cocacola and pepsicola. My comments are going to be based on that the work ive been doing on that. My starting position in all of this is to make sure people understand that corporations are not social Service Agent these, even ones that sell food that you love te. They are businesses is that quarters to please and that is absolutely their first responsibility. Is the first responsibility legally and sometimes it can seem to lethality. The easiest example to talk about his cocacola and pepsico because they make a product that is sugar and water and nothing else and there is not increasing evidence that sugar sweetened beverages are associated with problems like obesity and all of the conditions for which obesity is a risk that their emesis correlation. Its not causation. But by this time, the amount of evidence that has accumulated in this tilting up to show that sugars are in large quantities harmful and in liquid form they may be even more harmful. As Robert Lessing who is the primary proponent of sugar is poisoned these days as if you get him in a quiet corner, this is a dose problem and it does really its not such a problem to have sugar one in a while. Im a lover of sugar as anyone who knows me will say. A soda isnt poison and one a week or every few days. Nobody is going worry about. It is very, very large amounts separate Public Health people to the point where their eyebrow is raised. So the amount of sugar is pretty staggering. It is about one teaspoon per ounce. So for a 20ounce soda is going to be 20 teaspoons. They add up very quickly and because of the ray sodas are flavored, you dont note that it vastly and most people are astounded when they realize how much sugar there is this notice. And there is no plenty of evidence that adults and children who drink sodas are heavier, how worse diet and has much more problem with chronic disease than people who dont. So getting people to drink less soda has become an increasingly tall school and lots and lots of places theyre working on ways to try to encourage people to drink less soda. In order to work in this area, you immediately encounter a great deal of opposition from Soda Companies who really dont like the idea that people are going to try to restrict the way they market to children, removed their products from schools, tax them and as we saw in new york, i tend to reduce the size of the amount you can drink at any one time or buy it anyway time or most recently, to put warning labels on soda cans. The soda industry has responded to these kinds of initiatives in ways that for those of us who are millionaires find absolutely staggering. They put millions and millions of dollars into fighting advocacy at times. So advocates have to be cleverer, smarter and more sophisticated if they are going to make any progress. I think advocates and making progress because just this week, cocacola announced its fourthquarter earnings from last year and it fails the sodas are down. They have been declining at a pretty steady rate since about 1998 and they are continuing to decline. The last drop was about 9 , which is the eighth drop in any one year. With Soda Companies are doing is misleading marketing overseas. If this sounds like some thing you have heard before because it begins to remind you what happened the cigarette companies, that is not an accident. So stanford advocacy not its neat to take into consideration the fact that any Advocacy Program is going to be greatly outspent and we saw that. Just one example, and the Tax Initiative in richmond california in which Soda Companies have spent advocates for the tax by a factor of 87 to one. Richmond, california is a very, very Poor Community in the east bay. The average income is about 23,000 a year. It is 80 minority, black and hispanic internet has extremely high rates of obesity and type2 diabetes. Among the highest in the state and also the highest consumption of soda in the state. So it was a reasonable place to attempt to put in a soda tax and it lost in part because of his outspent by this enormous percentage. But i think there were other reasons it his outspent. Those reasons have to do with the lack of community organizing. It came out at the council on this kind of jumped on this issue without a lot of work to see how the community and how it could be encouraged to support a Public Health measure that didnt look on its face there was no community. To do that. And little attempt to get allies and the engagement. Some of those problems occurred here for as far as i could tell the mayor just dropped the 16ounce soda cap into the lap of everybody and people had to figure out onthefly how to reach onto it in the soda industry was much, much better prepared to deal with the idea of the soda cap because they had been working in the Minority Community for 50 years. They have a long, long history of supporting Community Organizations in the Minority Community and i dont think the city was prepared for an enormous pushback on this. I would give anything to know how much the soda industry spent on the attempt to defeat the 16ounce soda cap. I got a personal mailing to my home and my Research Assistant ran out and talk to people who are on wearing tshirts come in saying dont let the mayor decides what youre going to drink. When he asked them how much they were earning them to pay their salaries and they were getting 30 an hour. The best job in new york. Let me tell you. So theyre actually turns out to be an academic literature on how to do that if you see in that literature derives from the social movements of the past and the civil rights movement, womens rights movements, Environmental Movement and his books and articles or materials then you can use teaching at nyu unfitted advocacy. What im trying to teach the students is to do it right. In order to do it right, you have to identify what the problem is, choose a goal for addressing the problem, develop very strong researchbased rationale for the problem and further goal that youre trying to reach. You have to develop an effective frame for it. By fatah means the way youre going to talk about your issue to the public in a way that has some kind of emotional resonance with the public the industry is is much, much better than advocates are any gauge allies in this needs a lot of Community Organized team and doing but is actually classic public house. Planning and evaluation go into the community, silent beneath our, work with the community to figure out how to best address those needs. That takes a long time and a lot of offers. You need to be able to dress opposing views and have answers and ways of dealing with the kinds of issues your opponents are going to raise. There needs to be a big Public Education campaign that goes along with any food advocacy and of course if youre doing it right, you do ongoing evaluation of what youre doing and adjust accordingly. This is much easier in theory than practice. In that class, i send my students are too advocated may come against the reality very, very quickly. I think the issues of Community Engagement and establishing rings turned out to be the things that are hardest for them. The soda industry, for example, frames the whole question of drinking soda has freedom to choose. Pretty hard to beat that one and Public Health has a much harder time figuring out how to say that if you do this now, your help in 20 years is going to be a lot better than that would otherwise. I dont think that slides easily. The whole issue is absolutely critical so that communities have a vested interest in their own health goals. Theres lots of this going on. This advocacy around food issues, particularly soda issues going on all over the country. Numerous cities, date but have Tax Initiatives in the most recent one from california or the California Legislature has proposed a warning label on soda cans. What is going to happen with that i have no idea, although i am going to guess the soda industry since sacramento and force right now. It would be very anxious scene to see the advocacy strategy here to try to do these things in as many places as possible in order to require the soda industry to spend as much money as they possibly can and will see how it comes out. If you want to know more about that, read the book and read mine, too. [applause] the mac there a number of empty seats. If you have a number of seats next you can raise your hand for a minute and people can walk from either side of kind of empty teachers they. [inaudible conversations] you now, it is always interest and when you work for an interfaith or commit nation, the syndrome of the wood in the front row is universal. It is just one of those things that unite us. Hello again, i am so bored. I noticed the look of puzzlement as my checkered past was described. Let me just share one little piece that did not come out, but somehow or other fields like this full text all moment for me. During those five years where i was a chemical engineer, true story, my specialty was can manufacturing. Of course cans and soda cans are pretty much the same thing. But what good chemical engineers and the beer can or metal contain industry now that you may not on notice that in fact the code name to prevent the oxidation of the aluminum chair and needs to be far stronger and far more aggressive for soda. Then it does for. So i know there is wine in the back. There is however no soda and i think theres a reason reason as Public Health professionals. The other thing that i learned is that i dont have the book actually. But if i ever write one, mary ann is writing the blurb. No question about that. Working, however that the Interface Center on Corporate Responsibility and they think in a publichealth crowd im really confident that this is a group that understands complex systems and understands her to the interplay between the individual group and Larger Society and how some of the problems that we as a society create even those individuals who we are rigorously committed to avoiding getting that dynamic right is a very interesting challenge. So throughout my career, which is kind of had this theme of problem solving for public good just in different kinds of nes, dat has been in the m. Bit is a very interesting place to be because in the Capital Market, like it or not, there are folks who have said many, many times that capitalism may be an unfair greedbased system. However, we have not yet come up with an alternative that works as well. So when you think about this idea of allocating capital, how do we make money flow . But is it the investors do . User to ask yourself, is it working . And then you start to think about problems with a publichealth crisis all over the world of obesity. All of a sudden you start to say, maybe there is a better system because we are certainly not pricing externalities properly. So coming from the Interfaith Center on corporate infidelity, by the way, other peoples speeches to recognize investors. We have a very, very long history of straddling the line between the building and access to power because of our role as investors. This all goes back to the apartheid south africa years. I will not tell that along the way. But what i will say is that the movement btm where investors primarily in faith institutions who had pension, foundations, Mission Related money started to say, if we are going to fund nations, if we are going to ensure that dickman may someday, if we are to travel around the world doing whatever it is we do, we need to make sure that we feel our capital is being justly allocated. We need to take responsibility for her. Thats where the whole notion of Corporate Responsibility for started to bubble up in the 1970s. Fast forward from the Antiapartheid Movement for civil rights and all of a sudden you have an organization celebrating our 43rd year of operations and we have become very specific with the issues that we take on and very broadly approached. One of the things that i absolutely love about next book is that it took at least six sectors and looked at the interplay of of marketing, different roles that the corporate consumers complex if you will have to use to convince folks, their customers, to do things good for them. And so, the work of the investors and the challenges on the one hand we are dust. We have pension obligation and in fact when you think about investors, theres always this tension about shortterm investing versus longterm investing. Frankly i would argue that we actually have the longest time horizon of eternity. We take this as very, very seriously. We try to encourage corp. Rations across a number of mispriced externalities to change how they operate. We are absolutely convinced and i think the record bears this out. By paying attention to these mispriced externalities, by sitting down with companies and talking about some team with an orientation that we actually anticipate problems and opportunities in the marketplace. One of the reasons that Corporate America let us into the board room, into the Conference Room to raise some of these issues that can be uncomfortable, that can be challenging and can be on the surface threatening to their business models, threatening to ideas about possibilities. They know we are straddling the sign. Investors need good return. We are investors who represent organizations working for the social good and we want them to do well and do good. But as this have to do with food politics . We have a group known as the access to nutrition group. We have the odd situation in modern society of both wrestling with obesity and having lack of access to good healthy food. We believe strongly that Corporate America has a huge role in mass in the very same way the 70s folks who made manufactured and marketed rice milk substitute in countries where milk was the clear best choice for infant morbidity and mortality that by helping companies to see that their investors might have a different point of view on issues like how they report their political contributions. The kind of lobbying that mary ann talked about. Right now there is absolutely no requirement for corporations to report to the fec where they spend their money. Either way, corporations are not a whole bunch of things. One of the things they arent these people. So no matter what to do since united had to say about the right of corporations to spend public dollars, the reality shareholders see this differently. So we are Encouraging Companies to report their lobbying expenditures and if you are a shareholder, if you read their own individual shares or if you have a Retirement Plan or yuan mutual fund shares, you need to do one simple action to encourage division that iccr represents in this area. Could you tell me how you voted on corporate lobbying disclosure . The good ones will give you the answer. They said we voted for disclosure. So first come of corporate, political expenditure disclosure is extraordinary important because regulation they are looking to encourage nutritional balance of their product portfolios. Whether youre an advocate of fun food or better for you food or whatever, the reality is in the marketplace, higher nutrition foods are more profitable. It can be shown by some on likely suspect and using that Business Case is important as an investor for the role of getting the less Healthy Options out of the marketplace. Strengthening to responsible marketing. Companies are very, very clever about how the market portfolios. Around the ats juries. They are trying to sell their product to make a buck. There are essays and standards being developed. Marion works hard in the wings. Ms consumers, we can make our voices known by what we buy, who we talked to him how he advocate. Expanding access to healthy choices. One of 50 that valuesbased investors to you is not only look at the come in if they pioneer stock or folio, but also start to look at to whom they lend money. So for example, in many,