Big Food: Foe and Friend

One of the things distinguishing obesity control from tobacco control is that there is no clear enemy. For many years, health promotion advocates were faced with a formidable nemesis: a small group of powerful companies and a powerful farm lobby. The hey day of Big Tobacco is past, though tobacco control fights will not be over for quite some time.

In contrast, there really is no Big Food. Unlike tobacco, the food industry is not a monolith, but is dispersed among a huge array of companies, both producers and retailers, and even on the agriculture side, food is far more scattered among many crops and commodities. The basic approach to smoking is to discourage youth from starting and get smokers to quit. Obesity is far more complex, even if we just consider food and diet issues. We wanted to see Big Tobacco simply go out of business. That is not an option for the food industry. There was nothing of redeeming social value coming from Big Tobacco, other than jobs - not a trivial matter. That’s not the case with the food industry. There are often bad players, such as companies purveying foods high in fat, salt, and sugar with poor nutritional value. But the food companies could be good players and be a part of the solution. Rather than doing battle with a bad citizen (Big Tobacco), we will have to work with a lot of corporate players and many other segments of institutions and society-at-large.

Once upon a time, oranges were primarily seasonal foods, and almost considered delicacies outside of Florida and Southern California. A partnership between marketing and technology brought about not only increased orange consumption, but made orange juice a staple breakfast food in American culture. This is a perfect model of joining corporate interests with improving the public’s health.

What we need is for health promoters to collaborate with entrepreneurs to find ways to do for healthy eating what was done for oranges. Can we change society so that healthy eating is normal, just like OJ at breakfast is normal?

Extracting tobacco from our national life will not change much beyond people not smoking. Changing obesity patterns will fundamentally change life as we know it. This means that we have much more to learn in terms of prevention science, and it will be a long time before the population will look like a bell curve: small portions of very thin and very fat people at the far ends, with most people in the normal middle. In the meantime, health promotion must find more and more ways to partner with food companies, to promote the public’s good. Big Food doesn’t have to be Bad Food, at least not all the time.