Creating a 21st Century Food System
As we recover from our annual Halloween sugar binge, worth $2.4 billion to the candy industry, rumblings of change can be heard from every corner of the food system. In Washington, a bill to reduce sugar consumption has been introduced by Rosa DeLauro (The Sweet Act) and Congressman Tim Ryan has written to the FDA requesting that the sugar content of food be shown on labels in easily understandable teaspoons rather than in grams (a complex measure of mass).
And Food Policy Action (with help from Tom Colicchio and others) just successfully tested its hypothesis that food can be a voting issue. It’s first target, Representative Steve Southerland will not be returning to Capitol Hill from Florida to continue his vilification of hungry citizens struggling to find their next meal.
In Berkeley, voters approved a tax on soda. And while the significance of this can be brushed off (after all, what would you expect from Berkeley?), the beverage industry thought the threat was significant enough to spend $2.4 million to squash this effort. Across the bay, where a similar effort fell just shot, award-winning pastry chef Emily Luchetti has launched a campaign to urge us to think before we eat. Her #DessertWorthy efforts ask us all to enjoy a real dessert – and to revel in the splendor of such magnificent treats -- rather than using up our quotient of sugar on cheap junk snacks.
The personal challenges and public consequences of our sugar-rich/nutrient poor diets is painfully documented in the recent documentary, FedUp, by Laurie David and Katie Couric and was the platform for our discussion with Rob Lustig and others at the 2014 James Beard Foundation conference on health and food. And sugar will likely be a topic of lively conversation this week as well at The New York Times conference (Food for Tomorrow: Farm Better. Eat Better. Feed the World) at Stone Barns.
Who needs to be at the table to create a 21st century food system?
The question all of these initiatives are grappling with, at root, is not just about schools or sugar or nutrition or the farm bill. It is not even just about agricultural yield and the need to feed 9 billion people. The real question is what kind of system do we need in the 21st century?
