When it comes to making people feel good about a brand, no one does it more skillfully than Coca-Cola. Picture a perfectly multicultural, sun-dappled chorus wanting to teach the world to sing. Or “Mean Joe Green” tossing his jersey to a young boy who offered him a Coke. The company circulates videos of its vending [...]
Food Day is a nationwide celebration and a movement toward more healthy, affordable, and sustainable food. Created by the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), it is powered by a diverse coalition of food movement leaders, organizations, and people from all walks of life. Food Day takes place annually on October 24 to [...]
Pink slime was a wake-up call. Americans were mortified to see news footage of slabs of fat traveling along a conveyer belt, destined for a spin in a centrifuge and a spritz of ammonia before being mixed into fatty ground beef. The resulting “lean finely-textured beef” (the euphemism for the slime) is safe, but the [...]
Think of all the things that food manufacturers could be doing to improve the nation’s health. They could reduce the amount of salt in packaged foods to help prevent blood pressure from rising. They could make healthier foods for school lunches. And they could use their billions of advertising dollars to encourage children (and their [...]
In case you haven’t already heard the news, Food Day 2011 was a huge success! With over 2300 events in all 50 states, we were thrilled that so many organizers joined the movement for “real food” across the country on October 24. Mark your calendars for Food Day 2012, which will again take place on [...]
The “Big Gulp.” Free Refills. 20-ounce single servings. 2 liters for 99 cents. Soda vending machines just about everywhere. During the past 40 years or so we’ve opened the spigot of sugary drinks, roughly doubling our consumption. It shows in our bulging waistlines and widening bottoms, but equally so in the health care and economic [...]
Cue the music; the gauzy, soft-focus ads; and the focus-grouped fridge magnets: Coca-Cola turns 125 this week. Never a slouch in the self-promotion department, high-flying CEO Muhtar Kent had himself serenaded by a red-shirted “Coca-Cola 125th Anniversary Young People’s Chorus” to celebrate. Photos of the occasion have a vaguely authoritarian hue, as if the world’s [...]
“April 15” fills many Americans with anxiety as tax returns become due (though this year Uncle Sam has given us until April 18th). I recently remembered that April 15 has another grim association: the opening, 56 years ago, of Ray Kroc’s first McDonald’s franchise in Des Plaines, IL. (Now is as good a time as [...]
It’s time to fix our broken food system. Over the course of the next six months, we hope to create what will be a huge grassroots mobilization for changing what Americans eat—and what the food industry produces—for the better. Let me introduce you to Food Day, which will be celebrated on October 24.
Food marketers have long had a special knack for euphemism. (If you didn’t believe me I’d offer you a Rocky Mountain oyster.) But even as someone who has watched the food industry closely for 40 years, sometimes even I can get taken by surprise. One such case is an innocent-sounding ingredient that appears on Coca-Cola, [...]
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