It was a seminal moment. For the first time, breaking all convention, Ronald turned to the TV cameras and addressed himself to his viewers directly. It had never been done before, and it set off a revolution the consequences of which we still struggle to fight. When Ronald Reagan ended his presidential debate with Jimmy Carter in 1979 with “Are you better off than you were four years ago?”, his media savvy changed mass politics forever.

But long before that, another Ronald messed with mass communications no less indelibly, paving the way for today’s politicians and pundits. Appropriately, the first Ronald was a clown. In 1963, sixteen years before Reagan’s fateful piece to camera, Ronald McDonald broke every rule in advertising when he turned to the lens and stunned children by speaking to them directly, saying:

“Here I am kids. Hey, isn’t watching TV fun? Especially when you got delicious McDonald’s hamburgers. I know we’re going to be friends too cause I like to do everything boys and girls like to do. Especially when it comes to eating those delicious McDonald’s hamburgers.”

It’s easy both to wince at how crass this sounds, and to overlook its audacity. With entire TV channels premised on direct marketing to children, it seems impossible that there might have been a time where kids were considered anything other than shorter, louder, more pestering versions of adult consumers. But it wasn’t always thus. It took a canny cabal of admen to tap the pockets of a newly affluent generation of youngsters. They wanted to redefine the frontiers of what advertising in television age could be. And they succeeded.

Today, the McDonald’s corporation boasts that their frontman is more recognizable than Santa Claus. He’s the champion of a $32 billion brand. With a wink and a smile, Ronald has charged into neighbourhoods around and inside schools, targeting children with a range of unhealthy food, plumbing every depth to keep his parent company’s arches golden and bright in the minds of impressionable young eaters.

McDonald’s and other fast food corporations shelter behind the fact that their advertising is ‘free speech,’ as protected by the First Amendment and that, in any case, the corporations clearly declare their commercial intentions. So, for instance, when children go to Ronald.com to play McD-themed games they’ll see in small white letters on a pale background at the top right the words “Hey kids.This is advertising!” This isn’t terribly helpful. Although children may know that something is advertising, they are unlikely to understand what, exactly that means.

Michele Simon, a lawyer and author of Appetite for Profit, tells it straight: “McDonald’s knows that vulnerable children are the perfect advertising audience, since they don’t even know they’re being marketed to.” She suspects that for the group brave enough, and with deep enough pockets, there’s a huge and successful lawsuit to be brought against McDonald’s (and against all advertising against children) for deceptive practices. She’s backed up by the medical profession: the American Academy of Pediatrics says that “advertising directed toward children is inherently deceptive and exploits children under eight years of age.” In other words, the very idea of advertising to children is a fraud. Children are simply unable to generate and entertain rational opinions about goods and services, which cuts away the argument that advertising is just a more entertaining version of truth-telling. When it comes to children, advertising is far closer to brainwashing.

Parents are being hoodwinked too. One of the reasons that kids are permitted by pestered parents to enter a McDonald’s is the possibility that they might choose a healthy meal when they’re there. As Wendi Gosliner, a Researcher at the Center for Weight and Health at UC Berkeley observes, “not one of the 24 Happy Meal combinations offered contains the foods and nutrients children need to meet the Dietary Guidelines. Now, they’re promoting processed fresh apples dipped in caramel sauce and sweetened milk as ‘healthy’ choices. Well, these meals and these choices are hurting our children’s health.”

There’s a bigger picture story here too. Ronald isn’t just a clown. He’s not just a pioneer in the marketing of food to children: he’s also an architect. Without him, the food system we have today would look very different. Here and around the world, the way food is grown, subsidized, processed and eaten has been fashioned by the needs of the McDonald’s corporation.

More sales for the clown mean bigger returns for Cargill and Tyson’s factory farms, Archer Daniels Midland’s high fructose corn syrup processing plants, and Monsanto’s pesticide production facilities. And it’s our tax dollars that go into everything from the cheap commodities that they depend on, to the small business loans and tax credits that allow fast food franchises to breed in and around our schools. For these subsidies, and for the lax regulations around health and advertising to children, the fast food industry has spent millions in lobbying fees, and aggressively courted political favour. Ronald McDonald may have a big smile, but his shoes are steel-tipped.

Ultimately, McDonald’s cheap food is cheat food. Ronald is more of a Hamburgler, dipping into our pockets with our children’s fingers, and leaving us with bills for long afterward. We pay for it all in the end. The cost of diabetes in the US alone is $700 for every man, woman and child. For people of colour, diet related disease is incredibly important – one in two children of colour born in 2000 will develop diabetes.

There are alternatives, of course. The sustainable agriculture that thrives in farmers markets and cooperatives don’t get the billions in subsidies that industrial agriculture does. Yet from the moment they are exposed to TV, our children are subject to the manipulations of Ronald and his friends. Corporations spend $17 billion a year turning children into consumers. Globally, for every dollar spent promoting food that’s good for you, $500 is spent promoting junk. For a parent wanting their kids to eat well, those are tough odds. Especially for those parents on restricted income.

Times are changing, though. Despite the millions that McDonald’s spends in advertising, and despite most people having a favourable impression of Ronald as a consequence, a new survey shows that most parents who have kids under 18 want Ronald to go. The Corporate Accountability International, an organisation which I advise, has released a terrific report entitled Clowning with Kid’s Health: The Case for Ronald McDonald’s Retirement, in which the survey data on Ronald is presented, and some tight legal and epidemiological arguments against him are made.

This isn’t some curmudgeonly attack on fun. For those who want to watch clowns, there’ll always be circuses and cable news. And it’s certainly the case that there are bigger questions here. Why is it that junk food is cheaper than healthy food? Why is there persistent poverty driving people into the arms of the junk food industry. Why isn’t there real choice in the US diet?

But as a matter of public health, as a way to give parents the chance to get their children eating well, as a way of making it possible to have fun with food without spending scarce cash on unhealthy food, the clown’s gotta go.

There is a precedent: Joe Camel, once more widely recognized than Mickey Mouse, is now a symbol of shame for the cigarette industry. Sure, cigarettes are themselves bad, but worse was the conscious attempt by the industry behind them to hook kids on a lifetime of ill health. We’re at a similar moment in the transformation of our food system. There’s lots to do to transform how we eat, but along the way we all need to recognize that parents need the space to be able to feed their kids well, to give the next generation the freedom to choose to eat healthily, and to build a more sustainable food system. As part of that, and I’m talking to you here, it’s time to Retire Ronald.

[Photo credit:tjgiordano]

I have an appalling memory. Birthdays, anniversaries, appointments, I’ve forgotten them all. The only poem I’ve ever been able to commit to memory (the only one that’s fit to print, at any rate) is this one by William Blake. It’s beautiful, haunting, a little too chilling for a candlelit dinner, but entirely appropriate for today’s February 14th posting:

The Sick Rose

O Rose, thou art sick!
The Invisible worm,
That flies in the night,
In the howling storm,

Has found out thy bed
Of Crimson joy;
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.

This Valentines, stay off the roses.

Not only are they pumped full of some of the nastiest agricultural chemicals, the people who grow and pick them likely have a fairly raw deal. As Alexandra Early, the writer of this lovely little article in the Boston Globe, learned when she went to Bogotá

“our domestic expressions of affection — which reach their largest volume on Valentine’s Day and Mothers’ Day — require painful, low-paid labor by a global workforce that’s largely female.

“Whether young or old, [the workforce] complained about the lack of protective equipment and clothing, which leaves them exposed to pesticides in the fields and to the fungicides that flowers are dipped in prior to shipment. They say the chemicals cause widespread headaches, asthma, nausea, and impaired vision. The repetitive tasks and long hours in assembly-line jobs have also left many flower workers with painful carpal tunnel injuries.”

The invisible worm in this story, the company behind it all, is Dole. Better known for its fruit, Dole also happens to be the largest importer and marketer of flowers in North America, and the largest fresh flower producer in Latin America, with its own daily charter flights of flowers, providing consumers in the North with flowers from thorn trees in the Global South.

Dole has, however, decided that wages in Latin America are too high, and that Chinese workers and flowers might prove more profitable. As a result “Dole recently announced the closing of its Splendor plantation, blaming the lay off of one-third of its Colombian workforce”. When the production of cut flowers moves to China, workers, mainly women, there will face exactly the same environmental and health problems as their counterparts in South America.

What is one to do? One could, as Alexandra Early suggests, buy flowers that carry the “VeriFlora” label. It’s ‘Fair Trade’ for flowers, a certification which promises some adherence to local labour regulations and organic environmental standards.

Another response is to swear off imported and mass produced cut flowers altogether. It’s a response worth taking seriously.

In many ways, flowers are like ivory. When you see them in the shops, you know that there’s little way they were produced in a way consonant with environmental and social good practice. Even if the flowers were picked by millionaires, plucking buds from manure-strewn open fields where they were about to die of natural causes anyway, the flowers would still have to be flown all the way here. And there’s no way of avoiding that (nor do any of the standards seek to address it).

It’s something of which the industry is well aware. My partner’s office, for instance, formed a committee to make sure their office supplies, including cut flowers, were being purchased with minimal damage to the environment. They asked the flower guy what he recommended they buy. His response: “potted plants”. And so that’s what they’ve got – and their office still looks grand.

More seriously, the issue of ‘fair trade’ is one that deserves a bit more critical scrutiny than many have been prepared to give it.

Of course the people who work in agriculture, the people who are the world’s poorest, deserve a better income. Of course the wages paid by most agricultural corporations are unconscionable. Of course, people must earn more money.

The question is whether locking rural people into producing fripperies for the rich is the best way of doing it. And that’s precisely what one does when one promotes the pesticide-soaked jet-sent cut flowers industry, whether in its rapacious Dole-shaped form, or its more guilt-friendly ‘VeriFlora’ form.

To argue for ‘fairly traded’ cut-flowers is still to say “yes, I want these things. I want the economy of places in the Global South to produce them for me. I’m prepared to pay a little over the odds, but I’m not prepared fundamentally to take a step back and see whether my desire for cut flowers isn’t in some way contributing to the problem of poverty where they’re grown.”

It’s hard to argue that the cut flower industry is the cure to poverty in Colombia. It’s an argument, of course, that has been made by development agencies, and Dole itself. It’s an argument that’s rather undermined with Dole fucks off to China when it realises that it can get the same goods for less elsewhere.

What fair trade, at the end of the day, fails to understand is that there’s an opportunity cost to growing flowers, or indeed to any other attempt to ‘develop’ a population by paying it a bit more to export its agricultural produce.

By creating a honey-trap of a single, slightly-more-lucrative-than-anything-else crop (whether that’s flowers or corn or coffee), ‘fair trade’ forgoes the chance to re-examine how rural economies might be structured differently. Rather than exporting flowers, the best way to bring wealth to rural areas might be a combination of debt relief, land reform, agroecological farming and local industry. But not only does Fair Trade postpone a discussion about a social and political alternative, it doesn’t bring the discussion remotely closer to happening. It forgets about it completely.

Instead, ‘fair trade’ is simultaneously an act of charity and of amnesia (see a previous post for an example of charity at its worst). It’s a charity that keeps poverty at bay, but that forgets to address its root causes. And the problem with ‘fair trade’, whether it’s VeriFlora certification or anything else, is that it’s being sold as precisely a cure for poverty.

But ‘fair trade’ isn’t a cure for poverty. It’s a band aid, a temporary patch.

One argument against forswearing flowers is that it will leave workers without jobs. It’s an argument that more or less exactly demonstrates the arrogance of ‘fair trade’ – either workers produce for us, or they’ll have nothing.

Yet workers in Colombia are already organising for more comprehensive agricultural transformation, despite the government’s best efforts to stop them. But the one thing they’re not fighting for is ‘fair trade’. Why? Because it is a solution with thorns. One that deserves to wither and drop. And one that can very adequately be replaced with a self-sustaining and more vibrant programme instead.

So, this Valentines, remember to say it with potted plants.

One man who takes shopping’s stigmata very seriously is the Reverend Billy, preacher at the Church of Stop Shopping.

With an ear for scripture (the movie’s called What Would Jesus Buy) and an eye for viral marketing (the church is inspired by the “groundbreaking empire building of Staten Island’s notorious Wu Tang Clan”) the good Reverend is taking the message of salvation-without-shopping to the people.

And it turns out that it’s entirely possible to be happy without oodles of new consumer debt and spangly new toys. Who knew?

So, celebrate Buy Nothing Day in spiritual style either tomorrow in the United States, or Saturday Nov 28, by not shopping and discovering life without consumerism.

And, if you must buy something, my British publishers tell me, wait until next week, and then buy Nothing.

But that’s hardly fair. The point of telling kids to eat up is to try to build a sense of connection and value to the meal, not least so that they learn a primal lesson about not wasting food.

It’s a lesson that seems not quite to have taken in the United States, where the mechanisms for valuing food – driven by markets – are particularly shoddy. In a recent piece in the Public Library of Science, researchers have found that the average American tosses about the same as an average Haitian hungry person eats in a day. Of course, this average makes it seem that Americans individually are profligate. That’s not fair either. The majority of this waste is not generated in the home, but through the excesses of the food chain. It’s an entrenched and systemic problem. And teaching capitalism how to value food properly is far much harder than getting kids to eat their greens.

[Hat tip: Joe]

I’m going to be in the UK for the launch of The Value of Nothing next week, and I’ll be giving talks at the London School of Economics on Tues Dec 1, the Bristol Festival of Ideas on Weds Dec 2, and City University on Thurs Dec 3.

Full details here – if you’re a UK reader, it’d be lovely to see you there.

Last week, we heard that there were 49 million Americans going hungry, and a billion people around the world. The numbers are true, but it’s worth getting a little wonky to understand what they mean because there are literally hundreds of ways to count the hungry. If we used the US methods, hundreds of millions more people would be considered hungry around the world. If we used the UN methods, almost no-one would hunger in America.

In the US, the USDA draws its data from surveys that measure household food security, defined as the condition that obtains when a household has “access by all people at all times to enough food for an active,
healthy life.”

This is a technical definition, but as with all policy-related definitions, it has a long political history. While more explicitly political definitions like food sovereignty are helpful in understand why people go hungry, food security is helpful in understanding what it is to be hungry.

On their questionnaires, the USDA asks a panel of 10 questions (or 18 questions if there are children in the household) about, for instance, whether in the past 12 months “We worried whether our food would run out before we got money to buy more.” Questions like these try to grasp what we mean by hunger, by asking not about that gnawing feeling in the pit of the stomach shared by the hungry and crash-dieters alike, but about the absence of access to that food in order to live healthily.

Particularly in the United States, the feeling of anxiety around where the next meal comes from is one of the largest hidden costs of hunger. In asking people directly about their access to food, ‘food security’ is a helpful metric of the indignity, worry, and desperation that hunger causes.

But food security a broad definition, with little nuance. In the US, if the number of responses to the questionnaire indicating food insecurity are above six (or eight if the household has children), it’s possible to be categorized as having ‘very low food security’. But people on the brink of death in rural India will fit this category just as much as the millions of severely hungry but far-from-death people in the United States.

So it’s useful to have other ways of measuring the depth hunger. Counting the number of calories that individuals get to eat every day is how the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) measures hunger in the world. They count how many people eat less than 1900 calories a day, and their index of hunger is ‘undernourishment’. According to their most recent estimates, 1.02 billion people will be undernourished in 2009. Overwhelmingly these people were in poor countries (just over 15 million people were undernourished in rich countries from 2004-6 – if the global measure of hunger was ‘food insecurity’, the number of hungry would be substantially higher).

The data used to calculate undernourishment helps to compass the depth of hunger, the degree to which people are going seriously without calories every day. By counting the average calorie intake of people who are already undernourished, you can get a sense of how badly off the hungry are. When their average intake is 300 calories below the minimum daily intake of 1900, they’re considered intensely food deprived. The countries with deepest levels of hunger are Haiti, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Belize, where a hungry person has an average daily calorie intake of 430 calories below the minimum acceptable.

If your inner wonk is hot for more, Sara R. Millman and Laurie F. DeRose have a very readable and free book at the United Nations University entitled
Who’s Hungry? And How Do We Know?.

And once you’ve mastered that, you’ll be ready to play with the data at the Food and Agriculture Organization’s website.

And all of this for us to understand the many ways in which there are far far too many hungry people.

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The World Food Summit has just ended in Rome, at which the head of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, lauded the declaration as “an important step towards the achievement of our common objective – a world free from hunger.”

Sadly, the declaration itself is written in UN prose, a bloodless language created in committee and intended to be as bland as possible. Even the snappy summary, found in the press release, reads like it has been translated from English to Esperanto and back again by someone armed only with a dictionary of international management consultancy:

Renewed commitment to end hunger…
Countries also agreed to work to reverse the decline in domestic and international funding for agriculture and promote new investment in the sector, to improve governance of global food issues in partnership with relevant stakeholders from the public and private sector, and to proactively face the challenges of climate change to food security… UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon called the current food crisis “a wake-up call for tomorrow”.

Luckily, I speak fluent UN and, for your edification, here’s a handy guide to what it all means:

Renewed commitment

‘Renewed commitment’ is a fairly straightforward way of saying ‘we’re sticking to the promises we’ve made before, and we feel terrible that so many people are going hungry.’

The purpose of the summit was to create the political will to end hunger. Specifically, the goal was to change old policies, and commit to spending the $44 bn a year required to end hunger by 2025. (To put it into context, rich countries spend $1.3 trillion every year on weapons.) No such commitments were forthcoming. Instead, it’s business as usual, and the same old promises for change. As Francisco Sarmento from ActionAid puts it, “unfortunately, the poor cannot eat promises”.

Decline in international investment

Following a model of ‘economic liberalisation’ peddled by institutions like the World Bank in the 1980s, governments in poor countries were told to cut back their funding for agriculture. The ‘decline’ in investment was imposed, as the Filipino activist and academic Walden Bello observed, with apparently benevolent motives:

U.S. Agriculture Secretary John Block put it at the start of the Uruguay Round of trade negotiations in 1986, “the idea that developing countries should feed themselves is an anachronism from a bygone era. They could better ensure their food security by relying on U.S. agricultural products, which are available, in most cases at lower cost.”

So governments in poor countries stopped supporting their own small-scale farmers. Export-driven agriculture continued to get government cash – in Brazil, for instance, soy farmers received loans with negative interest rates, which explains why they are now the world’s largest soy exporters. But, in the main, the poorest farmers were left to fend for themselves, even when it has long been known that investment in agriculture is one of the best ways fighting poverty. After all the poorest and hungriest people invariably depend on agriculture for their livelihoods.

The language about the ‘decline in international investment’ is as close as the rich countries in the international community can come to a nostra culpa.

Relevant Stakeholders

One of the major problems with this food summit, as with food politics in general, is that the range of ‘stakeholders’ who matter in making agriculture policy is small.

Farmers are almost never at the table. Farm workers and landless people are always absent. The big agriculture corporations, the seed and pesticide companies, the grain traders, the food manufacturers are, by contrast, right in the centre of the policy huddle. But rarely are the people who actually grow food to be found in the corridors of power.

Those farmers who do have the ear of government are invariably large-scale farmers, the ones with money who stand to profit from increased trade, not the poor mostly-women farmers who grow the majority of food eaten in developing countries, and who are invariably overlooked in the making of international food policy.

Proactively face the challenges of climate change

Climate change will hurt poor farmers, and women in particular. Food production in Africa could fall by 50% by 2020. The language of the declaration makes it seem as if no-one has a clue about how to avoid this, and that Something Must Be Done.

But here’s the thing. The international community has already spent a few million dollars, a few years, and called on the talents of hundreds of top scientists to figure out how to address climate change in agriculture. In a report equal in scope and structure to the IPCC report on climate change, scientists led by the World Bank collaborated on the International Agricultural Assessment on Knowledge Science and Technology for Development (yes, the report was written in UN English too, though a more readable version is available as Agriculture at a Crossroads).

The report concluded that industrial agriculture, with its thirst for water and fossil fuels, will cause more harm than good. It also concluded that, based on the evidence so far, genetically modified crops have limited use in the fights against hunger and climate change. Instead, agro-ecological farming systems seem to offer the best way of reducing input-dependence, and sequestering carbon in the soil. But nowhere in the declaration is this research mentioned. By pretending that it never happened, the door is still open to large agribusiness to pretend that they’ve got the solution to a problem that has already been solved.

Wake-up Call

This is perhaps the most pernicious line – the widespread notion that the hunger crisis is somehow a ‘silent tsunami’. I’ve fulminated about this before but it’s sad to see that the language remains pervasive. Most recently, the idea that we need to ‘wake up’ to hunger was used by US Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack to talk about the historic levels of hunger in the US. In the US, the number of ‘food insecure’ people went up from 36 million in 2007 to 49 million in 2008, the highest since records began in 1995. Globally, the number of hungry people, classified as undernourished (a stricter criterion, since it counts the people eating less than 1900 calories a day) is over 1 billion, the highest since records began in 1970. This despite the amount of food being produced per person remaining roughly the same between 2007-8. So it’s not like there’s less food around. So why do people go hungry? Because the recession has produced more poverty, and people can’t afford the food that’s right in front of them. Who’s most affected? Women. Around the world, women.

They wake up to hunger every day. When you hear about ‘wake up calls’, it’s not the hungry who’ve been sleeping.

Here’s a bit of a plug for the new book – out in the UK in December, in the US in January. I was lucky enough to get to make this book trailer with Scott Hamilton Kennedy, whose documentary about the South Central Los Angeles farm, The Garden was spectacular, well deserving the Oscar nod that it got (and it was a particularly good year to be nominated ).