Must-Read: Fat Nation

by Brian Reich | 22 Apr 2010, 1:11pm

Marc Ambinder (politics editor of The Atlantic) is one of the smartest political reporters in the nation.  He is already a must-read on all things campaign or public policy related. Now, after reading his cover story in the May issue of The Atlantic Monthly (”Fat Nation: Its Worse Than You Think. How To Beat Obesity”), I rank him as one of the smartest reporters on the subject of food policy and the political challenges associated with behavior change as well.

There are three things that Marc Ambinder does better than any reporter I have seen on this issue.  They are:

1. Some reporters focus on one small piece of the obesity issue - the connection between poverty and obesity or maybe the need for legislation to help get fatty foods out of school lunch programs.  Others offer a broad analysis of all the issues without providing sufficient depth or insight.  Marc Ambinder makes it clear that the current approaches to addressing obesity in this nation are not comprehensive or sufficient - he leaves nothing to chance.  For example, he writes:

If we are to solve the many problems that obesity is creating for American society, we must first move beyond the stale “willpower versus the food-industrial complex” debate. We need to understand what causes obesity, and what can really address it. And we need to try everything from rezoning fast-food restaurants and restricting food advertising to supporting new treatments and rewriting insurance policies. We won’t summon the collective will to take these steps until we recognize that our attitudes toward obesity are as unhealthy as the condition itself. We don’t want to look at fat people, much less pay for their medical care; we don’t want to be contaminated by them. But if we want fewer fat people in our midst, then we, as a nation, must start by treating them without condescension or contempt, and recognize the real obstacles that stand between them and better health.

2. Marc Ambinder has a personal connection to this issue, but he didn’t write this article as a memoir.  In fact, he turned his own personal story into an opportunity to help shift the focus of the debate about obesity.  He did that by applying the same reasoned, intelligent, detailed level of thinking he does to any political issue he covers.  For example, he writes:

I’m intimately acquainted with the struggle against fat. I may have been skinny as a child—my family used to joke about putting meat on my bones—and I played sports in school, but by the time I was bar mitzvahed, I was overweight. In my 20s, I spent hundreds of hours with personal trainers and diet doctors, and tried virtually every popular diet at least once. Lots of money in the pockets of the gurus; no joy for me. Approaching the age of 30, I passed the nebulous but generally accepted clinical threshold separating the merely overweight from the obese: a ratio of weight (in kilograms) to the square of height (in meters) of 30 or more. (A body-mass index, or BMI, of 18.5 to 24.9 is considered “normal”; from 25 to 29.9 is considered “overweight.”) I also developed severe diabetes and sleep apnea. My aching back was the least of my problems.

Perhaps my own losing struggle with weight reflects a failure of willpower. That seems more plausible to me than the argument that I was a helpless victim of Arby’s. But most fat people aren’t like me: as an upper-middle-class professional, I could draw on plenty of resources in my battle against weight. The people most vulnerable to obesity, however, do not have access to healthy food, to role models, to solid health-care and community infrastructures, to accurate information, to effective treatments, and even to the time necessary to change their relationship with food. And if that is true for fat adults, it is even more true for fat children, many of whose choices are made for them. Their vulnerability to obesity is much more the result of societal inequalities than of any character flaw. Indeed, for all the attention paid to fat’s economic costs, the epidemic’s toll on children is a stark reminder of its moral dimension. Without some form of intervention, researchers worry, large numbers of black and Hispanic children in the United States will grow up overweight or obese and lead shorter, less fulfilling lives. Is that a legacy we want to live with?

3. It would be easy for someone like Marc Ambinder, with more than enough political news to cover, to write a good cover story for his magazine and move on to other issues.  But this is anything but a one-and-done story.  He has already committed several blog posts to the issue of obesity, in the context of politics and public policy, and I suspect there will be many more in the future.  Here are three of the posts I think are worth reading:

Too Fat To Fight?

Obesity: Ten Ideas To Fight The Problem

Indulge This: What the Obesity Movement Can Learn From the Defeat of Big Tobacco

Not only do I hope you will read Marc Ambinder’s story in The Atlantic Monthly, and his blog posts… I hope you will take a moment to share the article with all of the other media, organizations and activists who are working to address the issue of obesity, or any complex social issue.  I am so tired of the same old approaches to addressing complex social issues — whether it is from the media, a celebrity (see my criticism of Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution), or the nonprofit/philanthropy community.  As I have said many times before, we need a complete reset — a new way of thinking, organizing and communicating about serious issues, complex or otherwise, if we expect to make any progress.  Marc Ambinder offers a different kind of coverage and analysis of this issue and there is a lot we can all learn from him.

TAGS : Jamie Oliver Marc Ambinder Must-Read Obesity The Atlantic Monthly
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Why Jamie Oliver’s TED Wish Won’t Come True

by Brian Reich | 11 Feb 2010, 9:52am

TED, the ’small nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading’ awarded its annual TED Prize to Jamie Oliver, the noted British chef and global food celebrity.  The $100,000 prize is being given to help advance Oliver’s efforts to transform the way we feed our children.

Jamie Oliver’s wish to transform the way we feed our children is big and inspiring.  But it will fail.  In fact, I am afraid that it is doomed from the start.  Let me explain:

Here is what Jamie Oliver wants to do:

Set up an organization to create a popular movement that will inspire people to change the way they eat. The movement will do this by establishing a network of community kitchens; launching a travelling food theater that will teach kids practical food and cooking skills in an entertaining way and provide basic training for parents and professionals; and bringing millions of people together through an online community to drive the fight against obesity. The grassroots movement must also challenge corporate America to support meaningful programs that will change the culture of junk food.

And here is what’s wrong with it:

1) Organizations don’t create popular movements. The first part of Jamie Oliver’s plan is to “Set up an organization to create a popular movement that will inspire people to change the way they eat.”   But organizations don’t create popular movements.  And organizations don’t inspire people.  Moreover, there are more than a million registered nonprofit organizations in the United States, and tens of thousands of new nonprofits are created every year — many of them focused on the very same challenges that Jamie Oliver is seeking to address.  All those organizations are competing for the same dollars and attention, asking the same audience to commit and take action.  Instead of forming another new organization, Jamie Oliver should be looking to support the organizations that are already engaged in this type of work, and providing them with the training, guidance and other support necessary to help the unique and powerful aspects of his plan become a reality.

2) Real Change Happens Offline. Another key aspect of Jamie Oliver’s plan is to bring ‘millions of people together through an online community to drive the fight against obesity.’  There are two basic problems with this part of the plan: first, there are already thousands of online communities competing for people’s attention, and some like Facebook, have successfully captured the interest of the very same people that Jamie Oliver’s campaign hopes to reach.  For a new online community to be successful, not only will it have to provide, and support, all the interactions and information that people expect to find in an online community, but it will have to convince people to shift their attention from the places they already spend time, to something else.  Those are big hurdles to overcome, especially when the focus is on a single issue like obesity.  Second, for all the excitement that an online community might generate, real change happens offline.  There are elements of Jamie Oliver’s plan that recognize the need to provide instruction and support to people where they live, and in ways that they find compelling or reflect how people learn and make choices.  The cost and complexity of promoting information and connecting people online is far less than mobilizing a massive program offline, however, and promoting the online effort will almost certainly come at the expense of seeing meaningful, measurable change when equally ambitious offline efforts are not pursued.  Instead of seeking to build an online community around this effort, Jamie Oliver should be looking at ways to integrate his work into the existing online communities where the target audience is spending time already.  And, he should be looking for ways to use technology and the internet — their reach, as well as the critical and unique role that they play in people’s lives today, and how they are changing our behaviors — to support, sustain, enhance, and expand the reach and impact of the offline programs that are critical to the success of this effort.

3) You Don’t Change The Culture of Junk Food By Challenging Corporate America. Jamie Oliver wants the grassroots movement that forms in support of this effort to “challenge corporate America to support meaningful programs that will change the culture of junk food.”  Unfortunately, that’s not how you get corporate America to change its behavior.  Corporate America doesn’t respond well to threats, or even public embarrassment and shame.  All the petitions and protests in the world won’t make a significant dent.  Corporate America responds to market demand.  If you want companies to sell healthier foods, we have to commit as a nation to buying them.  We have to demonstrate, with our dollars, that we prefer fruits and vegetables to Cheetos and Oreos.  Until we do, the changes that companies make to support a campaign like this will be driven more by cause marketing than good business… and that doesn’t have the kind of staying power necessary for this effort to succeed.  Companies that sell junk food can, and I believe should, begin to make changes on their own, and in doing so create a market for healthy foods (that I am confident will be far larger than the market or junk food over time).  Those shifts would also help to accelerate the behavioral changes that people need to make in terms of eating more healthy foods - because some of the most difficult choices will be made for them (e.g. there won’t be a choice).  But it won’t happen until companies can confirm the economic opportunity that a shift would create — and until then, we shouldn’t expect any real change to occur.  Instead of trying to compel corporate America to change the culture of junk food, from the outside, Jamie Oliver should be working with companies to create a marketplace for healthy foods, from the inside out.

—-

Here is the list of what Jamie Oliver has asked the TED community to provide:

• Help to establish the organization, with funding, office space and facilities.
• Find partners to equip and run the community kitchens, and food suppliers to provide the fresh ingredients.
• A partner to build and maintain a fleet of food theatre trucks.
• Education experts, graphic designers, artists and writers to develop and produce creative, fun teaching materials.
• Communications experts to create messaging for the movement.
• Web designers and developers to create and build the website.
• Establishment of a food line that generates a sustainable income for the movement.
• Corporate partners to invest in cooking and food education for their customers and champion honest food labelling.
• Your names added to the petition to challenge our leaders to make change now: www.jamiesfoodrevolution.com/petition

All I can think as I look at that list is that Jamie Oliver is going to spend a lot of time, and all of his TED Prize money — not to mention the energy and resources of countless members of the TED community who respond to his call to action — building an organization that won’t help him meet his goals.  You don’t need a big fancy office to launch a movement.  The resources spent to develop a website could almost certainly be spent elsewhere, with greater impact.  And while a petition may get you a big list of email addresses, it won’t change anything on its own. The operation that Jamie Oliver is trying to will generate some attention for this issue… and awareness certainly is important.  The operation that Jamie Oliver is trying to build will motivate some people to change their behaviors… every truck and event will touch a few people directly, and no doubt have a great impact.  And those stories could inspire people, or help others learn how to develop successful programs of their own.  But mostly, I think the operation that he builds will build Jamie Oliver’s brand and reinforce the role that TED can play in spreading big ideas.  But it won’t do enough to change how kids are fed.

Meanwhile, the First Lady launched her ‘Let’s Move‘ campaign this week with the full power of the Federal Government backing her effort to address childhood obesity.  Among the elements of her project are:

The Food & Drug Administration will work with foodmakers to make labels more “customer friendly.”

The American Academy of Pediatrics will encourage doctors to monitor children’s body mass index, a calculation of height and weight used to measure body fat.

The Obama administration will ask Congress to spend $10 billion over the next decade to give schools more money to serve healthier food.

$400 million in tax breaks will be proposed to encourage grocery stores to move into “food deserts,” areas with little access to nutritious food.

Children will be encouraged to exercise an hour a day.

I could level some of the same criticisms on the First Lady’s project that I have on Jamie Oliver’s.  There is still too much reliance on media and celebrity to shift behavior.  There is a flawed assumption on the part of the White House, and those who are supporting their work, that awareness will naturally result in impact.  And there is an over-reliance on the web, or the mainstream media, to deliver the information in ways that people can use it effectively.  But there are also incredible things that Michelle Obama can do — including help drive changes to the laws and policies that are needed to support any other change that needs to happen.

Jamie Oliver should team up with Michelle Obama (or vice versa - it doesn’t matter, the point is that they are stronger together than they are apart).  Both Jamie Oliver and Michelle Obama are committed to this effort.  They each have some innovative approaches to addressing this challenge and a significant platform and ability to leverage dollars and support for their campaign that few others possess.  But each of them is limited.  And right now they are in competition with each other.  That needs to change.  Unless, or until, they both shift the way they think about their campaigns, and how they engage the rest of us to help support their work, both have the potential to fall short of their goals.

TAGS : CauseShift Jamie Oliver Lets Move Michelle Obama Obesity TED Prize
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