[Music]
I’m here today to get you to think a
little bit differently about your food
but before I do that I want to tell you
why I started thinking differently about
food over a decade ago so almost 11
years ago I was pregnant with my second
child and I was diagnosed with
gestational diabetes and for you know
it’s not usually that big of a deal and
for most women and this happened to me
too as soon as you deliver a healthy
baby the diabetes goes away and that was
exactly my experience but while the
physical sort of ramifications of having
that condition went away immediately
after I delivered my daughter right the
relationship that I had to food and to
how I eat that’s been changed forever
right since that moment I haven’t
thought about food in quite the same way
and I eat differently because of that
experience now I’m also a professor of
political science right and this means
that am a little bit of a nerd and and B
that I tend to filter every experience
that I have through the lens of politics
so you know ten years ago eleven years
ago when I was getting this diagnosis I
was you know ferociously trying to
consume every sort of book on food and
nutrition and then I started thinking oh
gosh this is a ripe opportunity for me
to talk about politics which is
something that I love and so I started
to think about what are the political
ramifications of food policy how is food
policy made how does it impact what I
eat and what I feed my family and so a
obsession that started as a result of a
pregnancy diagnosis right continues to
this day and I am still an avid reader
in and basically any new nutrition or
food politics politics books that comes
out and you can ask my husband and
children they’re these books litter our
house that litter my home office right
now okay it’s become such an obsession
that I even developed a course at the
University called the politics of food
which I now teach every spring and it’s
also really changed a lot about how I
teach what I really want for you today
is to come away from this thinking a
little different about the food
that’s on your plate every day and I
want you to be able to think about the
decisions that impact the sort of how
the food ends up on your plate every day
I want you to be able to think of that
and I’m gonna do that through three
different examples and I chose these
examples because they’re examples that
were really impactful for me when I
started this journey and there are also
examples that were really impactful for
my students as I am teaching my course
so I’m gonna give you three little
vignettes and I want you to keep in mind
that I’m only scratching the surface
right in this very short talk to show
you the impact of food and politics and
maybe you’ve never really thought that
much about the impact of food of
politics on food one of my students and
the first time I taught my course he
said that he thought the title of the
course politics of food was a joke
because he didn’t think there was any
relationship between the two he was
convinced otherwise by the end of the
semester so anyway let me start with my
first example my first example is
probably my favorite and it is sugar
okay so sugar is big news these days and
sugar is big news for good reason we are
in the midst of an obesity epidemic as
we all know hey there are more and more
people who are diagnosed every year with
diabetes and that doesn’t matter what
age you are there are more and more
people who are diagnosed with this
disease okay
why is that the case right how did we
get here how do we get into this
position and I want to sort of think
about how politics has influenced the
ways in which sugar we are sort of awash
in sugar every single day so we like to
think that decisions about food
decisions about nutrition that these are
made by dietitians nutritionists
scientists experts and certainly those
experts are consulted when food policy
is made but I often tell my students
that you can be a brilliant scientist
and you can have brilliant theories but
if you can’t speak to a politician in a
way that the politician will care about
it
your impact on policy is actually going
to be quite minimal but there are people
out there who are incredibly good at
speaking to politicians in a language
that they understand and that is
lobbyists right so there are a lots for
the food industry and in particular
lobbyists for the candy industry
lobbyists for the soda industry
lobbyists for the sugar industry itself
and many others who are very good at
influencing politicians and how they are
going to vote on legislation that’s
related to labeling of food for example
that’s related to the nutrition
recommendations that come down from
various bodies of the government right
so we’re not talking about something
that’s necessarily driven by expert it’s
driven by policy and we know that our
politicians are not experts in nutrition
and yet they do a whole lot to decide
how much we know about our food and the
types of food that are recommended for
us to eat all the time I want you to
think about something thing about the
last piece of packaged food that you ate
right you know there’s that little white
box on the side of any container or any
food package that says Nutrition Facts
on it right if you look on that you’ll
see that there are daily percentage
values listed for things like fat and
cholesterol and fiber but there’s no
percentage listed for sugar that’s no
accident the sugar industry has been
very good and very successful at
persuading Congress to adopt legislation
that kind of keeps you in the dark about
how much sugar you’re actually eating if
you think of it if you see on the side
of a package well there’s 12 grams of
sugar and what I’m about to consume
you’re not really quite sure if that’s a
lot or if that’s not really that much
right there’s a very simple calculation
that we don’t know but we all should
know and it’s this one 4 grams of sugar
is one teaspoon somehow it’s a little
bit easier for us to understand what one
teaspoon looks like rather than than
four grams of sugar hey this is a
calculation that doesn’t appear anywhere
on our food packages and yet it would be
helpful for us to know how much sugar
were actually consuming if we thought of
it in terms of this calculation so
let me give you a little bit of a better
example okay so think about that
Gatorade that you drank after your
workout okay that is typically about 36
grams of sugar which is because
everybody carries sugar packets around
in their pockets okay that’s about nine
teaspoons of shirt so this is nine
teaspoons of sugar right that’s there
okay I don’t know what to do with it
right okay so nine teaspoons of sugar so
that’s in your Gatorade okay you can
think about the healthy yogurt the
healthy strawberry yogurt that you had
for breakfast
so that was likely about 24 grams of
sugar so your healthy yogurt let’s just
take that’s about that much sugar for
your healthy yogurt in a six ounce cup
so that’s not very that’s a lot of sugar
for yogurt okay but here’s the kicker
you know that Mountain Dew the 20 ounce
of Mountain Dew that you guzzled in the
car right this is a super uncomfortable
pocket right this is that’s what I was
hoping you’d do right okay so that is
will keep the sugar up here this is 19
teaspoons of sugar right and that well
yeah okay that’s going into the yogurt
sugar but this is how much is in a 20
ounce bottle of regular Mountain Dew
okay now what I want you to keep in mind
is that the latest Dietary Guidelines
for Americans right this is the document
that’s produced by the government and
consult in consultation with
nutritionists recommends that we consume
no more than 10 teaspoons of sugar per
day so if you’ve consumed a 20 ounce
Mountain Dew right
you’ve already consumed almost double
the recommended amount for an entire day
right so that’s a pretty I think
impactful example a messy one too and
I’m just really glad it’s out of my
pockets okay so sugar and politics have
been entwined for a super long time
there is a little glimmer of hope on the
horizon and that glimmer of hope is that
the Food and Drug Administration has
revealed that it has a plan for a new
Nutrition Facts label that will make it
a little bit easier
for you to see exactly how much sugar
you’re eating and each you know item of
food that you consume the bad news is
they’re going to have added sugars it’s
going to be really large on that package
so you can’t miss it the bad news is
that they’ve been so successful at
persuading Congress on legislators that
it is going to be too much of a hardship
for them to do this right away
that we don’t know exactly when this new
food label is going to start appearing
right so this is a little bit of an
issue for us so this is my first example
of food and politics and it’s related to
my second example okay my second example
I want to address a different question
for you which is why does it seem so
expensive to eat healthy so we just
talked about how we might be awash and
sugar and how that could happen with the
influence of the food industry but let’s
think about why it seems to us that it’s
so expensive to eat healthy okay so
think about this you maybe remember this
this is the old food pyramid we don’t
use this one anymore but I like this one
because it helps to I think illustrates
something here at the bottom of this old
food pyramid was the bread rice cereal
and pasta group six to 11 servings you
know how the food pyramid works as you
go up the food pyramid that means you
are eating less of those categories okay
so why is it that this bottom you know
this is still sort of the foundation of
what we think of the foundation of our
diets why is it that this bottom these
carbohydrates on the bottom have been so
ingrained and all over and our grocery
shelves all over in our probably on our
plates and in our snack drawers and so
ingrained in our in our consciousness as
the foundation of our diets well as you
might imagine my answer is always going
to be that it’s a political decision
throughout history throughout our recent
history in particular governments have
been subsidizing staple crops like these
like wheat like corn and like soy and it
has made it much they have basically
made a decision that they were going to
buy these crops from farmers at almost
any price right in almost any condition
so in effect government is making it
cheaper it’s making it nice for farmers
because they don’t have to worry about
sort of the variances in the market it’s
also been kind of nice for us because
since government is picking up some of
the tab to buy these crops that means
our food is cheaper right but it’s also
meant that our food is artificially
cheap we don’t ever really pay the full
price of what it costs to produce foods
that are made with these staple crops
like wheat corn and soy and it just so
happens that the foods that we love that
we sort of make with these staple crops
are foods we find absolutely
irresistible it is very cheap as you
know I go to the grocery store is very
cheap actually to buy cookies it’s very
cheap to buy soda it’s very cheap to buy
all sorts of junk food that are made
with these staple crops because we’re
not actually paying what the full cost
is to produce them but it’s actually
kind of expensive to buy the ingredients
for a salad that’s gonna fill you up the
same way right so we often see things
like this right here you can have a
hamburger fries and a coke for $4.99 but
if you get a kind of boring salad and in
water right it’s $6.99 so people are
always saying oh god it’s just so
expensive to eat healthy well why is it
expensive to eat why is it so expensive
to eat healthy it’s not that it’s
expensive to eat healthy it’s
inexpensive to eat poorly right you can
eat poorly one of the biggest
beneficiaries of government subsidies
has got to be corn right we eat corn or
corn bribe products in almost everything
there’s corn all over that $4.99 meal
they’re from the bun from the corn
likely that was fed to the livestock to
create that hamburger – of course the
high-fructose corn syrup that made that
coca-cola so government makes it easier
for us to eat junk and a little bit
harder for us to eat well after all
there’s no subsidy for broccoli
there’s no subsidy for kale for apples
or for blueberries so when you hear
people say gosh you know it’s just so
expensive for
me to eat healthy right they’re not
wrong right but they’re unwittingly
complaining about government subsidies
that make it really easy for us to eat
junk right and really hard for us to eat
well easily okay so thinking about junk
food is going to lead me to my third
example okay and this is an example that
may be really close to some of you
because you might live it every day for
better or for worse right I am a parent
hey you might be parents too and you
want your kids to eat well we all want
our kids to eat well one of the primary
places where our kids are consuming most
of their calories is at school and so
it’s important that we think about
school food and school food as it turns
out is maybe the most political of the
topics that I could I could talk about
right and I’m only going to scratch the
surface so if you go online and you look
up pictures of school food maybe you’ve
seen this before you look up pictures of
school food you’re gonna find pictures
of American school lunches that look
like this mmm
right you’re gonna see these greasy
squares of Pizza some chocolate milk it
looks like some institutional cookie up
there in a package and some less than
appetizing looking corn right but then
if you google lunch school lunch in
other countries you’re gonna come up
with things like this France right this
is a French school lunch and is
beautiful and it looks like it’s
restaurant quality and they’re drinking
water out of real glasses and they have
actual plates and they have actual
silverware right
these are lunches in France that are
served family-style it’s quite lovely
why don’t our school lunches look like
this the answer of course is politics
everything comes back to politics in my
world right but this is definitely a
political issue so when your kid goes to
eat in the cafeteria the choices that
are available to them and the way that
everything looks in the cafeteria is
largely to do with our National School
Lunch Program
the National School Lunch Program has
been around since 1946 and the kicker is
it was never designed to meet the
nutritional needs of children what was
it designed to do it was designed to be
a sort of exit sort of a dumping ground
for excess government commodities in
products like milk and cheese and pork
so all of those choices that your kids
have in the school line and all of the
complaints that they get about the
National School Lunch are because it was
never really designed for nutritional
excellence right it was designed to get
rid of a lot of food very quickly and it
retains a lot of that still to this day
so school lunch is maybe one of the most
political of the topics that we could
talk about because any effort to try to
change school lunch is met with a lot of
resistance think back to 2010 there was
the Healthy hunger-free Kids Act and the
whole point of the Healthy hunger-free
Kids Act was to increase the amount of
fruit and vegetables and whole grains
and reduce the amount of sodium and fat
in school lunches and so that was
enacted and what happened kids weren’t
eating it right kids weren’t eating it
and you get all of these posts about how
awful American school lunch was online
that you could see so any to any attempt
to change this kind of a school lunch
program is very very political because
Congress can tinker around the edges is
Congress who can pass things like the
Healthy hunger-free Kids Act is Congress
who can decide that ketchup as a
vegetable that Pizza counts as a
vegetable that french fries count as a
vegetable and it’s always the national
school lunch program that gets a bad rap
for it and the schools that have to
actually try and carry it out within
those limitations so school lunch highly
highly political and it’s it’s an issue
that Congress has had a lot of problems
resolving and fighting a lot with
parents and nutritionists alike okay so
I could give you a million more examples
about the intersection of food and
politics and why this is something that
we need to think about right it’s
something that is on our plates every
single day hey politics you know people
don’t usually like to talk about
politics but people really love to think
about and photograph their food right
they love to do this but
because we don’t like talking about
politics it means that essentially our
legislators don’t know that it’s
important to us and they’re really able
to legislate and have the the influence
of interest groups and make
recommendations without our input okay
this is something that we have to change
food is about the most political thing
that is out there right but we have to
be able to talk about it
you may not remember all of the times
that food was brought up in our last set
of political elections that’s because it
wasn’t it was never talked about right
so let’s start talking about it
food is maybe the one of the most
political issues that we never ever talk
about let’s start a conversation about
food and there’s no time like the
present because it’s time for lunch
thank you
[Applause]
I’m here today to get you to think a
little bit differently about your food
but before I do that I want to tell you
why I started thinking differently about
food over a decade ago so almost 11
years ago I was pregnant with my second
child and I was diagnosed with
gestational diabetes and for you know
it’s not usually that big of a deal and
for most women and this happened to me
too as soon as you deliver a healthy
baby the diabetes goes away and that was
exactly my experience but while the
physical sort of ramifications of having
that condition went away immediately
after I delivered my daughter right the
relationship that I had to food and to
how I eat that’s been changed forever
right since that moment I haven’t
thought about food in quite the same way
and I eat differently because of that
experience now I’m also a professor of
political science right and this means
that am a little bit of a nerd and and B
that I tend to filter every experience
that I have through the lens of politics
so you know ten years ago eleven years
ago when I was getting this diagnosis I
was you know ferociously trying to
consume every sort of book on food and
nutrition and then I started thinking oh
gosh this is a ripe opportunity for me
to talk about politics which is
something that I love and so I started
to think about what are the political
ramifications of food policy how is food
policy made how does it impact what I
eat and what I feed my family and so a
obsession that started as a result of a
pregnancy diagnosis right continues to
this day and I am still an avid reader
in and basically any new nutrition or
food politics politics books that comes
out and you can ask my husband and
children they’re these books litter our
house that litter my home office right
now okay it’s become such an obsession
that I even developed a course at the
University called the politics of food
which I now teach every spring and it’s
also really changed a lot about how I
teach what I really want for you today
is to come away from this thinking a
little different about the food
that’s on your plate every day and I
want you to be able to think about the
decisions that impact the sort of how
the food ends up on your plate every day
I want you to be able to think of that
and I’m gonna do that through three
different examples and I chose these
examples because they’re examples that
were really impactful for me when I
started this journey and there are also
examples that were really impactful for
my students as I am teaching my course
so I’m gonna give you three little
vignettes and I want you to keep in mind
that I’m only scratching the surface
right in this very short talk to show
you the impact of food and politics and
maybe you’ve never really thought that
much about the impact of food of
politics on food one of my students and
the first time I taught my course he
said that he thought the title of the
course politics of food was a joke
because he didn’t think there was any
relationship between the two he was
convinced otherwise by the end of the
semester so anyway let me start with my
first example my first example is
probably my favorite and it is sugar
okay so sugar is big news these days and
sugar is big news for good reason we are
in the midst of an obesity epidemic as
we all know hey there are more and more
people who are diagnosed every year with
diabetes and that doesn’t matter what
age you are there are more and more
people who are diagnosed with this
disease okay
why is that the case right how did we
get here how do we get into this
position and I want to sort of think
about how politics has influenced the
ways in which sugar we are sort of awash
in sugar every single day so we like to
think that decisions about food
decisions about nutrition that these are
made by dietitians nutritionists
scientists experts and certainly those
experts are consulted when food policy
is made but I often tell my students
that you can be a brilliant scientist
and you can have brilliant theories but
if you can’t speak to a politician in a
way that the politician will care about
it
your impact on policy is actually going
to be quite minimal but there are people
out there who are incredibly good at
speaking to politicians in a language
that they understand and that is
lobbyists right so there are a lots for
the food industry and in particular
lobbyists for the candy industry
lobbyists for the soda industry
lobbyists for the sugar industry itself
and many others who are very good at
influencing politicians and how they are
going to vote on legislation that’s
related to labeling of food for example
that’s related to the nutrition
recommendations that come down from
various bodies of the government right
so we’re not talking about something
that’s necessarily driven by expert it’s
driven by policy and we know that our
politicians are not experts in nutrition
and yet they do a whole lot to decide
how much we know about our food and the
types of food that are recommended for
us to eat all the time I want you to
think about something thing about the
last piece of packaged food that you ate
right you know there’s that little white
box on the side of any container or any
food package that says Nutrition Facts
on it right if you look on that you’ll
see that there are daily percentage
values listed for things like fat and
cholesterol and fiber but there’s no
percentage listed for sugar that’s no
accident the sugar industry has been
very good and very successful at
persuading Congress to adopt legislation
that kind of keeps you in the dark about
how much sugar you’re actually eating if
you think of it if you see on the side
of a package well there’s 12 grams of
sugar and what I’m about to consume
you’re not really quite sure if that’s a
lot or if that’s not really that much
right there’s a very simple calculation
that we don’t know but we all should
know and it’s this one 4 grams of sugar
is one teaspoon somehow it’s a little
bit easier for us to understand what one
teaspoon looks like rather than than
four grams of sugar hey this is a
calculation that doesn’t appear anywhere
on our food packages and yet it would be
helpful for us to know how much sugar
were actually consuming if we thought of
it in terms of this calculation so
let me give you a little bit of a better
example okay so think about that
Gatorade that you drank after your
workout okay that is typically about 36
grams of sugar which is because
everybody carries sugar packets around
in their pockets okay that’s about nine
teaspoons of shirt so this is nine
teaspoons of sugar right that’s there
okay I don’t know what to do with it
right okay so nine teaspoons of sugar so
that’s in your Gatorade okay you can
think about the healthy yogurt the
healthy strawberry yogurt that you had
for breakfast
so that was likely about 24 grams of
sugar so your healthy yogurt let’s just
take that’s about that much sugar for
your healthy yogurt in a six ounce cup
so that’s not very that’s a lot of sugar
for yogurt okay but here’s the kicker
you know that Mountain Dew the 20 ounce
of Mountain Dew that you guzzled in the
car right this is a super uncomfortable
pocket right this is that’s what I was
hoping you’d do right okay so that is
will keep the sugar up here this is 19
teaspoons of sugar right and that well
yeah okay that’s going into the yogurt
sugar but this is how much is in a 20
ounce bottle of regular Mountain Dew
okay now what I want you to keep in mind
is that the latest Dietary Guidelines
for Americans right this is the document
that’s produced by the government and
consult in consultation with
nutritionists recommends that we consume
no more than 10 teaspoons of sugar per
day so if you’ve consumed a 20 ounce
Mountain Dew right
you’ve already consumed almost double
the recommended amount for an entire day
right so that’s a pretty I think
impactful example a messy one too and
I’m just really glad it’s out of my
pockets okay so sugar and politics have
been entwined for a super long time
there is a little glimmer of hope on the
horizon and that glimmer of hope is that
the Food and Drug Administration has
revealed that it has a plan for a new
Nutrition Facts label that will make it
a little bit easier
for you to see exactly how much sugar
you’re eating and each you know item of
food that you consume the bad news is
they’re going to have added sugars it’s
going to be really large on that package
so you can’t miss it the bad news is
that they’ve been so successful at
persuading Congress on legislators that
it is going to be too much of a hardship
for them to do this right away
that we don’t know exactly when this new
food label is going to start appearing
right so this is a little bit of an
issue for us so this is my first example
of food and politics and it’s related to
my second example okay my second example
I want to address a different question
for you which is why does it seem so
expensive to eat healthy so we just
talked about how we might be awash and
sugar and how that could happen with the
influence of the food industry but let’s
think about why it seems to us that it’s
so expensive to eat healthy okay so
think about this you maybe remember this
this is the old food pyramid we don’t
use this one anymore but I like this one
because it helps to I think illustrates
something here at the bottom of this old
food pyramid was the bread rice cereal
and pasta group six to 11 servings you
know how the food pyramid works as you
go up the food pyramid that means you
are eating less of those categories okay
so why is it that this bottom you know
this is still sort of the foundation of
what we think of the foundation of our
diets why is it that this bottom these
carbohydrates on the bottom have been so
ingrained and all over and our grocery
shelves all over in our probably on our
plates and in our snack drawers and so
ingrained in our in our consciousness as
the foundation of our diets well as you
might imagine my answer is always going
to be that it’s a political decision
throughout history throughout our recent
history in particular governments have
been subsidizing staple crops like these
like wheat like corn and like soy and it
has made it much they have basically
made a decision that they were going to
buy these crops from farmers at almost
any price right in almost any condition
so in effect government is making it
cheaper it’s making it nice for farmers
because they don’t have to worry about
sort of the variances in the market it’s
also been kind of nice for us because
since government is picking up some of
the tab to buy these crops that means
our food is cheaper right but it’s also
meant that our food is artificially
cheap we don’t ever really pay the full
price of what it costs to produce foods
that are made with these staple crops
like wheat corn and soy and it just so
happens that the foods that we love that
we sort of make with these staple crops
are foods we find absolutely
irresistible it is very cheap as you
know I go to the grocery store is very
cheap actually to buy cookies it’s very
cheap to buy soda it’s very cheap to buy
all sorts of junk food that are made
with these staple crops because we’re
not actually paying what the full cost
is to produce them but it’s actually
kind of expensive to buy the ingredients
for a salad that’s gonna fill you up the
same way right so we often see things
like this right here you can have a
hamburger fries and a coke for $4.99 but
if you get a kind of boring salad and in
water right it’s $6.99 so people are
always saying oh god it’s just so
expensive to eat healthy well why is it
expensive to eat why is it so expensive
to eat healthy it’s not that it’s
expensive to eat healthy it’s
inexpensive to eat poorly right you can
eat poorly one of the biggest
beneficiaries of government subsidies
has got to be corn right we eat corn or
corn bribe products in almost everything
there’s corn all over that $4.99 meal
they’re from the bun from the corn
likely that was fed to the livestock to
create that hamburger – of course the
high-fructose corn syrup that made that
coca-cola so government makes it easier
for us to eat junk and a little bit
harder for us to eat well after all
there’s no subsidy for broccoli
there’s no subsidy for kale for apples
or for blueberries so when you hear
people say gosh you know it’s just so
expensive for
me to eat healthy right they’re not
wrong right but they’re unwittingly
complaining about government subsidies
that make it really easy for us to eat
junk right and really hard for us to eat
well easily okay so thinking about junk
food is going to lead me to my third
example okay and this is an example that
may be really close to some of you
because you might live it every day for
better or for worse right I am a parent
hey you might be parents too and you
want your kids to eat well we all want
our kids to eat well one of the primary
places where our kids are consuming most
of their calories is at school and so
it’s important that we think about
school food and school food as it turns
out is maybe the most political of the
topics that I could I could talk about
right and I’m only going to scratch the
surface so if you go online and you look
up pictures of school food maybe you’ve
seen this before you look up pictures of
school food you’re gonna find pictures
of American school lunches that look
like this mmm
right you’re gonna see these greasy
squares of Pizza some chocolate milk it
looks like some institutional cookie up
there in a package and some less than
appetizing looking corn right but then
if you google lunch school lunch in
other countries you’re gonna come up
with things like this France right this
is a French school lunch and is
beautiful and it looks like it’s
restaurant quality and they’re drinking
water out of real glasses and they have
actual plates and they have actual
silverware right
these are lunches in France that are
served family-style it’s quite lovely
why don’t our school lunches look like
this the answer of course is politics
everything comes back to politics in my
world right but this is definitely a
political issue so when your kid goes to
eat in the cafeteria the choices that
are available to them and the way that
everything looks in the cafeteria is
largely to do with our National School
Lunch Program
the National School Lunch Program has
been around since 1946 and the kicker is
it was never designed to meet the
nutritional needs of children what was
it designed to do it was designed to be
a sort of exit sort of a dumping ground
for excess government commodities in
products like milk and cheese and pork
so all of those choices that your kids
have in the school line and all of the
complaints that they get about the
National School Lunch are because it was
never really designed for nutritional
excellence right it was designed to get
rid of a lot of food very quickly and it
retains a lot of that still to this day
so school lunch is maybe one of the most
political of the topics that we could
talk about because any effort to try to
change school lunch is met with a lot of
resistance think back to 2010 there was
the Healthy hunger-free Kids Act and the
whole point of the Healthy hunger-free
Kids Act was to increase the amount of
fruit and vegetables and whole grains
and reduce the amount of sodium and fat
in school lunches and so that was
enacted and what happened kids weren’t
eating it right kids weren’t eating it
and you get all of these posts about how
awful American school lunch was online
that you could see so any to any attempt
to change this kind of a school lunch
program is very very political because
Congress can tinker around the edges is
Congress who can pass things like the
Healthy hunger-free Kids Act is Congress
who can decide that ketchup as a
vegetable that Pizza counts as a
vegetable that french fries count as a
vegetable and it’s always the national
school lunch program that gets a bad rap
for it and the schools that have to
actually try and carry it out within
those limitations so school lunch highly
highly political and it’s it’s an issue
that Congress has had a lot of problems
resolving and fighting a lot with
parents and nutritionists alike okay so
I could give you a million more examples
about the intersection of food and
politics and why this is something that
we need to think about right it’s
something that is on our plates every
single day hey politics you know people
don’t usually like to talk about
politics but people really love to think
about and photograph their food right
they love to do this but
because we don’t like talking about
politics it means that essentially our
legislators don’t know that it’s
important to us and they’re really able
to legislate and have the the influence
of interest groups and make
recommendations without our input okay
this is something that we have to change
food is about the most political thing
that is out there right but we have to
be able to talk about it
you may not remember all of the times
that food was brought up in our last set
of political elections that’s because it
wasn’t it was never talked about right
so let’s start talking about it
food is maybe the one of the most
political issues that we never ever talk
about let’s start a conversation about
food and there’s no time like the
present because it’s time for lunch
thank you
[Applause]
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