Times Relies on Food Police for Comment on Healthier Products
In mostly positive
free-market story, anti-industry nutritionist Marion Nestle
continues criticism of innovation.
According to the Aug. 11 New York Times, scientists are working To
Banish Fat In Tasty Ways. Now, if they could only figure out a way
to do the same to the food police.
The 1,800-word article was generally a celebration of
the free market, a positive sign of the Times. Reporter Melanie
Warner went into great detail showing companies developing foods
that let consumers have their cake and eat it, too. Warner
described the effort as a little-understood part of the $550
billion processed-food industry.
Unfortunately, the first person Warner turned to for
comment was Marion Nestle, a professor of nutrition at New York
University. Warners treatment implied that Nestle is a neutral
observer of the food industry. She isnt. Nestle is both a former
advisory board member of the left-wing Center for Science in the
Public Interest and a regular anti-food industry commentator. The
story didnt label her in a way readers could understand this
agenda.
Warner quoted Nestle criticizing industry plans to
insert vitamins and other helpful additives into food: What this
does is to turn food into medicine, said Professor Nestle.
Omega-3's occur naturally in food like fish, chicken and eggs, and
plants to a lesser extent. Why do we need to get it from bread?
The story followed with an explanation. One reason may
be that products that can be marketed as healthier often generate
higher sales and fatter profits for food companies. PepsiCo, for
instance, reports that sales of its healthier Smart Spot items
products like Baked Lay's potato crisps, Tropicana orange juice,
Diet Pepsi and Quaker oatmeal are growing at double the pace of
other products.
Warner didnt explain that Nestle is opposed to those
as well. In a Sept. 3, 2004, USA Today piece, Nestle made her
extreme attitudes clear. Julie Schmit quoted her commenting on
then-new PepsiCo Smart Spot products as foods people shouldnt be
eating at all.
There were other important problems in the Times story:
- Capitalism
misunderstood: Warner concluded the story with a quote
claiming the food industry is reliant on less healthy foods. If
Americans stopped eating large quantities of fried chicken,
sweetened breakfast cereal, cookies and snack chips, the financial
health of many companies would suffer. Warner didnt grasp that
food companies will sell American consumers whatever foods they
wish to buy. The recent rise and fall of the Atkins diet foods is
a prime example of that fact.
- Never satisfied:
The Times did a sidebar about General Mills trying to create a
healthier alternative to the cereal Alpha-Bits by making the
cereal 75 percent whole grains and removing all the sugar. The
Times still wasnt satisfied, describing the new product
considerably bulkier than before, and the letters that came out
of the machine, known as an extruder, looked a bit too chunky to
be legible.
- A taste test:
The Times went so far as to have dining reporter Julia
Moskin compare the new and old Alpha-Bits in a blind taste test.
According to Moskin, the reformulated cereal ''tastes like wet
cardboard, a lot like stale Cheerios.'' But Moskin didnt like the
older version either, calling it sweeter than anything in nature,
and with a chemical aftertaste.
