So, I have finally finished Kelly Brownell and Katherine Battle Horgen's "Food Fight: The Inside Story of the Food Industry, America's Obesity Crisis & What We Can Do About It". In all fairness, this book is about five years old, so it should come as no surprise that I felt like it was nothing I hadn't heard before. Still, I wanted to read it because Brownell is the director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale (http://www.yaleruddcenter.org).While the book touched on many relevant topics, my chief complaint is that it felt too choppy, and sometimes repetitive. Almost every page had a bold heading, sometimes two or three. It doesn't seem to have a flow, and that makes it very easy to put down for long periods of time. Say, for months. Which is what I wound up doing, as I kept getting distracted by school work or a gripping novel. The upside is that it is easy to breeze through and find something you liked to reference again.
I am also not convinced that there is much hope for drawing parallels between tobacco and big food. I see the similarities, of course, but I think it's an awfully large leap to get people to vilify big food in the way that was possible with big tobacco. Big tobacco had one product. It was a known killer. It was addictive. Do I wish we could convince people to believe that fast food, soft drinks, and salty, high fat snack foods are as detrimental to your health, that eating this way will make you sick in myriad ways and potentially ruin your health? Sure. I just think trying to get people to look at Big Food as the same as (or even similar to) Big Tobacco is not the way to do it and relegates the whole food movement to a position that is untenable and un-winnable. Obviously, big food's primary interest is profit, not health. I know they can't be trusted to put the nation's health first (see Marion Nestle's discussion of the "Smart Choices" front of pack labeling program-disappointing and, sadly, unsurprising: www.foodpolitics.com/2009/08/smart-choices-44-sugar-calories/). Personally, I just don't think we can get critical mass on this point. It's hard to unravel the tangled web of Big Food and decide WHO, precisely, is the bad guy when the same company feeding you oatmeal is also selling you sugary sodas (that'd be Pepsi serving you up Quaker Oats). There's a way forward, but I don't think this is it. However, I plan to read Brownell's article "The Perils of Ignoring History: Big Tobacco Played Dirty and Millions Died. How Similar Is Big Food?" and let you know if I feel differently afterwards.
Overall though, the book had tons of great nuggets and succinctly described numerous studies and various successful or deceitful health programs (guess who sponsored those?). The section on the economics of eating and the discussion on taxing foods were both excellent and I will go back to them over and over again.
A similar book that I found more readable was Greg Critser's "Fat Land: How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World". This book came out about the same time as "Food Fight" and reads more easily. It is a brief and entertaining introduction to and history of American food policy, an explanation of the cultural changes that have occurred in the past thirty years, and it discusses many landmark studies in a way that is both easy to digest and keeps the story moving. It's a book that even those NOT obsessed with food and food policy can enjoy.
Next Up: "The End of Overeating" by David Kessler, MD
