FOOD POLITICS - HOW THE FOOD INDUSTRY INFLUENCES NUTRITION AND HEALTH

PART III - EXPLOITING KIDS, CORRUPTING SCHOOLS

During the twentieth century, the nutritional health of American children improved dramatically in some ways—but not in others. Early in the century, many children died from the complications of infectious diseases made worse by diets limited in calories and nutrients. As scientists learned more about how diets could protect against disease, they introduced measures that virtually eliminated classic signs of severe undernutrition among American children. Fortification of foods with iron, for example, helped reduce rates of iron-deficiency anemia to their present low levels, and school lunch programs kept many children from going hungry. These accomplishments count among the greatest achievements of twentieth-century public health.

Today, the health consequences of undernutrition—illnesses due to deficiencies of vitamins, minerals, protein, or calories—are rarely observed except among children who are ill from other causes or those from households with the lowest income. Income is a major factor in children’s nutrition. For example, the Public Health Service’s 2000 review of national health data, Healthy People 2010, demonstrates that anemia due to iron deficiency is almost twice as common among 2-year-old children from families with incomes barely at the poverty level than it is among those from higher-income families (12% compared to 7%). Growth retardation (height-for-age below the 5th percentile for age and sex) affects 8% of low-income children under age 5. Thus poverty continues to be the single most important danger signal for nutritional deficiencies in American children.1 Although nearly 90% of American households with children were “food secure” in 1999 (that is, they consistently obtained enough food for all members to maintain active, healthy lives), just 37% of households with below-poverty incomes are in this category—an improvement since 1900, but still well below what should be expected in such a wealthy country.2

Too little food, however, is only part of the problem. For all children, wealthy and poor alike, the principal nutritional concerns are eating too much of the wrong kinds of foods in particular, and consuming too many calories in general. Obesity, as we saw in the Introduction, is now the most serious dietary problem affecting the health of American children. Although many factors influence childhood obesity, the quality and quantity of the foods consumed are major contributors. Thus efforts to market food products directly to children deserve close scrutiny. As I explain in Chapter 8, food companies spend enormous creative energy and huge sums of money to entice children to buy their products or demand that their parents do so. Despite claims to the contrary, such efforts have little to do with good nutrition and everything to do with promoting food sales. The blatant exploitation by food companies of even the youngest children raises questions about the degree to which society at large needs to be responsible for protecting children’s health in a free-market economy.

We shall see in these chapters that the creativity of food industry marketing extends beyond such standard channels of communication as television, magazines, billboards, store displays, and the Internet. It also targets schools. As described in Chapter 8, many American schools have been co-opted into a variety of partnerships that serve the interests of the food industry far more than they do children’s health. Chapter 9 provides a detailed examination of a particularly disturbing example: “pouring rights” contract agreements between schools and soft drink companies.

Chapter 8

STARTING EARLY - UNDERAGE CONSUMERS

Whereas concerns about children’s nutrition once focused on dietary insufficiency, the most serious dietary issue affecting today’s American children is obesity—the result of eating more food than is needed, rather than too little. Obesity rates are rising rapidly among children and adolescents, especially those who are African-American or Hispanic. By the early 1990s, for example, 23% of white girls aged 6–11 were overweight, compared to 29% of Mexican-American girls and 31% of black girls.1 Pediatricians report seeing children with high levels of serum cholesterol, high blood pressure, and “adult”-onset diabetes at earlier and earlier ages—all consequences of excessive caloric intake. Because obesity tends to persist into adulthood, this condition may well predispose overweight and obese children to cardiovascular and other chronic disease risks later in life.

The increasing prevalence of childhood obesity results from complex interactions of societal, economic, demographic, and environmental changes that not only encourage people to eat more food than needed to meet their energy requirements but also encourage people to make less healthful food choices and act as barriers to physical activity. In part as a result of the overabundance of food in the United States and the consequences of overabundance for the food industry, the diets of most American children do not come close to meeting nutritional recommendations. In 1997 American children obtained a whopping 50% of their calories from added fat and sugar (35% and 15%, respectively), and only 1% of them regularly ate diets that resemble the proportions of the Food Pyramid. The diets of nearly half (45%) of all U.S. children failed to meet any of the serving numbers recommended in the Pyramid—not even one of them.2 A survey the following year found that only 2% of teenagers in California met diet and activity recommendations.3 As might be expected, children whose dietary patterns least resemble the Pyramid are most lacking in intake of essential nutrients, in part because they consume more soft drinks and other high-calorie, low-nutrient foods. Indeed, American children eat one out of every three meals outside the home, where foods are demonstrably higher in calories, fat, saturated fat, and salt as well as lower in more desirable nutrients.4

Such discouraging findings suggest the need for attention to the dietary habits of children and to the ways in which our society influences the quality and quantity of the foods they eat. Food marketing is only one of those influences, but it raises issues of special concern, especially when it is deliberately targeted to the youngest and most impressionable children. As this chapter explains, the marketing of foods to children is big business—in the home, in fast-food outlets, and in schools.

TARGETING CHILDREN

Marketers have long known that children make attractive customers, but attention to this group (and to younger and younger members within it) has increased sharply in recent years. The reasons are easy to understand: children control increasing amounts of money, and society has granted them increasing responsibility for purchasing decisions. It is difficult to know exactly how much money children now control as a result of allowances, gifts, and jobs, but even small amounts add up to very large numbers when computed across the entire population. Studies in the late 1980s reported that children spent an average of $4.42 per week each, for a combined total of more than $6 billion a year, and that they influenced annual family spending decisions involving another $132 billion. More recent studies have found that children as young as 3–5 years accounted for $1.5 billion in discretionary spending and influenced $15 billion more, that those aged 4–12 had a combined discretionary income greater than $27 billion, and that children in general influenced parental spending worth $188 billion.5 The amounts controlled by children increase with age; children aged 7–12 have been reported to control $8.9 billion in spending money, and teenagers $119 billion, a figure that was expected to rise to $136 billion by 2001. Overall, children aged 6–19 years were thought to have influenced a staggering $485 billion in purchase decisions in 1999.6

The astonishing rise in children’s purchasing power and influence can be attributed to a variety of societal trends. The decreasing size of families permits parents to devote more attention to individual children. Older parents are wealthier and can be more indulgent. Working and single parents delegate more responsibility to children by necessity. Putting these trends in old-fashioned terms, children these days appear more “spoiled.” In other ways, however, they are less independent. Concerns about neighborhood safety mean that fewer children walk to school, play in parks, ride bicycles, or explore cities on their own. In the New York City of the 1940s and 1950s, my friends and I were permitted to take subways and explore the city from the time we were 8 years old—a freedom of action now utterly unthinkable for such young children. Changes in society discourage out-of-home activities and encourage television, video games, and Internet surfing. And, of course, these activities not only keep children sedentary but also expose them to countless advertisements for purchasable products.

Furthermore, increasing pressure from advertising messages reaches even the youngest children. At earlier and earlier ages, children are aware of advertised brands and establish firm preferences for them. Even very young children can identify stores that sell desired items, distinguish one product from another, and understand sales messages, the goals of retailers, and the purpose of money. By the age of 7 or 8, most children are sophisticated shoppers; they can shop independently, ask for information about what they want, and show off what they have bought to other children.7

Beyond the absolute amounts involved, discretionary spending by children establishes buying preferences and patterns that can be expected to last a lifetime. Given the importance of sound nutrition for good health, establishing appropriate preferences and patterns is especially important for foods. The development of lifetime loyalties to early purchases is well documented for foods and beverages,1 and these products rank third in spending by teenagers, behind clothes and entertainment. In 1997 children spent nearly $8 billion of their own money on food and beverages, of which $1 billion each went for sweets and soft drinks. The amounts spent on food increase with age; in 1997, children aged 7–12 spent $2.3 billion of discretionary money on snacks and beverages, teenagers $58 billion.5

What do children choose to buy? Table 19 gives the percentages of children aged 7–9 and 10–12 who reported buying foods and beverages with their own money during the previous month. Half chose candy, more than one-third chose soft drinks and ice cream, and about one-fourth bought fast food. Children also influence a substantial proportion of the total annual sales of certain foods: 25% of the total amount of salty snacks, 30% of soft drinks, 40% of frozen pizza, 50% of cold cereals, and 60% of canned pasta, for example.5

From such figures alone, it is easy to understand why children of any age present an irresistible marketing opportunity and why food companies spare no effort to reach them. Soft drink companies unapologetically name 8- to 12-year-olds as marketing targets. Advertisers encourage marketing directed to 9-year-olds as a logical consequence of the fact that children—and girls in particular—are maturing earlier. McDonald’s produces commercials, advertisements, and a Web site aimed specifically at children aged 8–13. Other fast-food companies also are developing campaigns for preteens, and Campbell Soup views “appealing to children [as] one prong of a new effort to lift sales.”8 In January 2000 Quaker Oats began a $15 million, 5-month campaign devoted entirely to promoting sales of its heavily sugared Cap’n Crunch cereal to children. What is most remarkable about these practices is how sensible they appear to marketers: “Kids are a growing demographic and [the companies] are trying to get in on the ground floor.”9

MARKETING TO YOUNG TASTES

To reach children of any age, food marketers employ a variety of methods, all highly successful. Advertising—on television and on the Internet—is only the most visible of these methods, for food companies also reach children by less obvious means, both in and out of school. The amount of money spent on marketing directed to children and their parents rose from $6.9 billion in 1992 to $12.7 billion in 1997.10 Some of these funds pay for market research that is simply breathtaking in its comprehensiveness, level of detail, and undisguised cynicism. Anyone with access to a library can discover in a minute how best to exploit current trends and family dynamics to get children to buy or demand products.

Market researchers have defined the basic elements of advertising—package design, typefaces, pictures, content—most likely to get boys or girls of varying ages to want to purchase products. Most remarkable, they justify the results of this research as a public service: “Advertising to children . . . is nothing less than primary education in commercial life; the provision, in effect, of free and elementary instruction in social economics—a passport to street wisdom. Far from being further restricted, as many suggest, this education course should in fact be supported, encouraged, and enlarged.”11

Food companies defend their targeting of children in a variety of ways, not all of them equally convincing. They rationalize their use of advertising to children as an expression of freedom of speech. They argue that advertised foods are not inherently unhealthful (recall the mantra “All foods can be part of healthful diets”) and that advertising encourages children to eat breakfast or healthier food products. They maintain that no one food contributes to obesity more than any other and emphasize that exercise—not diet—is the key to weight control.

Paradoxically, despite their spending of billions of dollars on advertising directed at children, food marketers complain that this method isn’t particularly effective: “In reality, there is no evidence that advertising is a major influence on children’s food choices; at the same time, there is substantial evidence that it is not a major influence, and that other factors—notably inherent taste preferences and parents—are a much stronger influence.”12

Given this alleged lack of influence, it is also paradoxical that food marketers claim that advertising contributes to nutrition education and argue that the primary responsibility for determining dietary intake rests with parents and caretakers who plan meals. Finally, food marketers propose that what’s good for business is good for America: “. . . the idea that commercialism in general is evil is very misguided. It is the engine that drives our economy.”13

What raises skepticism about these arguments, however, is the fact that food marketing to children is big business aimed at uncritical minds. Thus psychologists, among others, deplore this “unfair and conflict-ridden manipulation of the young” and urge restrictions on the use of psychological research by advertisers of foods and other products aimed at children.14 But perhaps such critics are overreacting. Does advertising really sell non-nutritious food to children? Researchers who have examined this question answer it with a resounding “yes!”15

Indeed, it is so easy to demonstrate that advertising influences brand preferences that even children can prove it, as shown by two Oregon eighth-graders in a winning science fair project. The 13-year-old researchers asked their sixth- to eighth-grade classmates to state whether they preferred to drink Coca-Cola, Pepsi-Cola, or a nonadvertised store brand of cola. All respondents mentioned either Coke or Pepsi; none chose the store brand. The investigators then asked their classmates to rank the taste of coded samples of the three colas that could not be identified visually. The results: 73% of the respondents were not able to identify their preferred cola by taste, and 27% ranked the unpopular store brand as best in taste. They concluded, “Most of the people we tested said they liked Coke and Pepsi before the taste test because they’re the original, popular cola brands. The reason they chose Coke or Pepsi had nothing to do with taste. . . . [We] think the advertising media targets their advertisements to appeal to teenagers because . . . [that’s when you] develop buying habits and that’s when you have more pressure to drink the brand that’s cool.”16 One could hardly ask for better documentation of the reasons why businesses commit billions of dollars in efforts to reach underage consumers. Let us now take a look at how food companies marshal such efforts.

Television Advertising

The impact of television advertising on children’s health, emotional state, and dietary habits has long been a cause of concern for at least three reasons: children watch television for so many hours, commercials are numerous and endlessly repeated, and children lack the critical facility to distinguish commercials from program content. In 1989 a Nielsen report found that the average child in the United States spent more time—at least 22 hours weekly—watching television than doing anything else except sleeping.17 Today children are watching less television; in 1996, viewing among children 2–11 years old had declined 18% from a decade before. Children aged 2–7 now watch about 11 hours of television each week, but those aged 8–18 still watch about 22 hours. Unfortunately, the drop in television viewing does not mean that children have become more active and are expending more calories. On the contrary, they more than compensate by using computers to surf the Internet or play video games. Together, these sedentary visual activities amount to an average of 38 hours per week for the average child aged 2–18.18

One recent trend is an increase in viewing of programs designed especially for the youngest children. Because no child is too young to be targeted by television food marketers, many of these programs are linked directly to commercial products. Teletubbies, the public television program for toddlers, for example, was sponsored first by Burger King and later by McDonald’s; McDonald’s distributed toys representing the four characters. In the late 1990s, the Nickolodeon channel, designed for somewhat older children, was in 63 million homes, accounted for more than half of children’s viewing time, and was one of the three most profitable networks in television. The children’s television-advertising market, once considered “soft” because it accounted for just $750 million in 1998, quickly hardened: it accounted for about $1 billion just a year later.19

Not surprisingly, these expenditures of money on television advertising are richly rewarded. Research indicates that children respond best to commercials designed to appeal to desires for sensual gratification—play, fun, friends, and nurturance (in that order)—and, to a lesser extent, to concerns about achievement, overcoming opposition, and resisting undue influence. Moreover, prior to the age of 9 or 10, children do not readily understand the difference between commercials and programs. After that age, most children grasp the purpose of commercials, but there is still substantial blurring of the distinction. Even high school students have difficulty distinguishing between commercials and programming when confronted with sales messages cloaked as entertainment, information, or public service announcements. Apparently, many children do not see commercials as fundamentally different from any other form of television program content.7

The rising frequency of commercials is alone sufficient to raise questions about impact, especially those aired on Saturday mornings during prime-time children’s programming. Despite differences in the ways that studies have been conducted over the years, they demonstrate a sharp increase in commercial bombardment. In 1987 researchers counted 225 commercials on major network channels during Saturday morning hours; the number increased to 433 in 1992 and to 997 in 1994. Of these commercials, 160 (71%), 264 (61%), and 564 (57%), respectively, advertised foods and beverages of dubious nutritional value: presweetened breakfast cereals, candy, fast food, sodas, cookies, chips. Researchers counted not a single commercial for fruits, vegetables, bread, or fish.20 The percentage of commercials for foods may have declined, but the absolute number more than tripled, which means that children are subjected to far more frequent advertising of foods of low nutritional quality.19

That televised commercials influence the food choices, preferences, and demands of children—particularly younger children—has been well understood since the early 1970s. Researchers consistently have linked snack choices and food requests to televised commercials, especially to those repeated frequently. The conclusion from such studies seems inescapable: television advertising works well and is especially effective for the most frequently aired commercials such as those for sugared cereals, candy bars, and soft drinks.21

Many studies also have described how television viewing affects the caloric intake, health, fitness, and social outlook of American children. Children who watch the most commercials tend to consume more calories, a finding consistent with the well-documented connection between hours spent watching television and obesity.22 Researchers, impressed by the strong correlation between television watching and blood cholesterol levels, have concluded that questions about viewing habits convey more precise information about early risk for heart disease than conventional questions about family history. Given such observations, it is not surprising that at least one study has found turning off the television set to be a promising approach to prevention of childhood obesity.23

Particularly distressing are reports that food commercials stimulate “antisocial” behavior in children, not just inappropriate demands for advertised products. Beer commercials, for example, influence fifth- and sixth-graders to have more favorable beliefs about drinking, greater knowledge of beer brands and slogans, and more strongly stated intentions to drink beer as adults.24 Most troubling, researchers classify food commercials aimed at children as “high emotional/low analytic” and as overly dependent on “socially negative” material: violence (observed in 62% of the commercials), conflict (41%), trickery (20%), or some combination of these three features (64%):

"Upon reflection, it may not be a mystery that advertisers relied so heavily on these individual or combined themes, because conflict and violence are central to so much of children’s TV programming. . . . The violence and conflict seen in food ad stories may simply present children with familiar themes. . . . [F]orms of deception are practiced by children as young as 2 and 3 years of age . . . so they might have little trouble appreciating its implications in food ad stories."25

Such disturbing findings, among others, have prompted organizations such as the American Academy of Pediatrics to recommend limits on television viewing, promotion of critical viewing skills, and controls over the content of programs and commercials directed toward children.17 The academy recognized that the ultimate control of children’s television viewing rests with parents and caretakers, but it also called on industry and government to take responsibility for what gets aired. In 1999 the American Public Health Association joined other health groups to sponsor “Healthy Kids: Campaign for Less TV” and National TV-Turnoff Weeks to encourage children and adults to replace television viewing with other activities likely to be more constructive, rewarding, and conducive to health. Such campaigns, useful as they are, assign responsibility for controlling television viewing to individual consumers, parents, and caretakers and do not necessarily target food companies, television stations, or government regulators.

Beyond Television

The advantage of television as a marketing device is its wide reach, but today’s children have replaced at least some commercial programming with videos and video games. For younger children, another source of the decline in television watching turns out to be day care. Day care centers tend to keep televisions turned off during the day except to show selected videos. Thus marketers realize that “to reach kids, you have to be in a lot of different places. . . . [N]ew technologies and other activities are beginning to take them away.”26 One such place is the Internet; by the late 1990s, one-third of American households had personal computers, a development that has created a huge market for online advertising to children as well as adults. About 12 million children aged 2–12 (25%) were online in 2000, and their numbers were expected to grow to 32 million just within the next few years.27

Places to advertise to children are limited only by the marketer’s imagination. Food companies put their logos on toys, games, clothing, and school supplies. They produce magazines, sponsor clubs, distribute coupons, buy product placements in movies, obtain celebrity endorsements, and even add their logos to baby bottles and Macy’s Thanksgiving Day balloons. The M&M candy company, for example, offers an entire catalog of logo items (such as toys, caps, jackets, watches, key chains, magnets, playing cards, and cups) and has opened stores all over the world to sell them. McDonald’s offers cups, toys, placemats, movie coupons, special toys and mugs, and logo-labeled items for holidays, birthdays, and celebrations, and it does so in its outlets throughout the world.

Several companies license counting books for young children that require the purchase and use of brand-name candies, cookies, and sugar-sweetened cereals. These books thoroughly undermine any instruction not to play with food. They teach children to count by using candy, cereal, or cookies as tokens and placing the foods on designated parts of the pages or in cutout spaces. They also teach children to “need” those foods. The books come with a convenient discount coupon, and the product is pictured on every page. Despite their obvious commercial purpose, the books sell well; more than 1.2 million copies of the Cheerios version were purchased just from 1998 to 2000. The books are popular with teachers and parents, even those who are uncomfortable about promoting top-of-the-Pyramid foods in this way. Listen to this teacher’s explanation: “You hate to always use food, but it is such a hit with the kids because they can count them and then it is so rewarding for them to eat them.”28 No food marketer could possibly ask for more.29

Soft drink companies are especially comprehensive in their approach to young consumers. Coca-Cola puts its logo on so many items that it runs a chain of stores to sell them; it even has stores at international airports. At least 15 books catalog the company’s toy delivery trucks, Olympic pins, and other such collectibles.

The attention to detail involved in marketing soft drinks to teenagers is especially impressive. The Coca-Cola company, for example, sends multiple copies of “Coke cards” to “teen influentials”—school officers, cheerleaders, and sports participants—expecting that they will pass the extras along to their network of friends. And they do; one of the Portland science fair winners told me that she had received six Coke cards and shared five with friends, precisely as the company intended. In exchange for soda purchases, the cards provide discounts for such activities as sports, video rentals, fast food, candy, haircuts, and voice-mail. The cards are specific to geographic location; the company issues more than 300 different versions for teenagers all over the country. Coke’s main competitor, Pepsi-Cola, has organized grassroots marketing programs, an entertainment Web site, and a national promotion through MTV, the music cable-television channel, to convince elementary school children that its soft drinks are “cool.”

TABLE 20

Examples of methods used by soft drink companies to market their products to children outside of school and at school

Marketing methods that target children outside of school

Television advertising
Internet advertising
Magazine advertising
Internet interactive computer games
Toys, clothing, and other items with logos
Discount cards, coupons
Telephone cards
Celebrity endorsements of products
Product placements in movies
Supermarket placements
Fast-food chain tie-ins
Prizes

Marketing methods that target children at school

Channel One (required television watching, with commercials)
Soft drink “pouring-rights” agreements
Logos on vending machines, supplies, and sports facilities
Hallway advertising
Advertisements on free book covers
Advertisements on school buses
Sports uniforms, scoreboards
Contests
Free samples
Coupons for fast food
Club and activity sponsorship
Product placements in teaching materials

Do prizes, premiums, games, and Coke cards induce children to request the products? Of course they do. Children love such items, and food marketers explicitly reinforce such desires. Because “kids and families will be the next source for new and future customers,” Nabisco publishes a guide to restaurant owners to explain how to use its Oreo cookies as a marketing tool. This book explains the fundamental elements of successful marketing to young children: entertainment, fast and friendly service, immediate gratification, familiar brand names, fun-to-eat desserts, and an environment that gives “mom and dad” comfort, reasonable prices, value, and quality time. Its suggestions are specific: keep the kids busy with crayons and placemats, provide premiums, and give kids cups to take home—all with Oreo logos. It also encourages businesses to use public service as a marketing tool by dispensing Oreo premiums to reward Little League teams or as prizes for school or community events.30 No marketer could afford to pass up such opportunities.

FOCUSING ON SCHOOLS

Not all families own television sets or computers, but most American children attend school. Given their purchasing power, numbers, potential as future customers, and captive status, it is no wonder that food companies view schoolchildren as an unparalleled marketing opportunity. A General Accounting Office investigation found it difficult to distinguish commercial from noncommercial activities in schools because such intrusion into everyday life is so intrinsic to U.S. society. The study noted that many commercial activities, such as those listed in Table 20, produced no tangible benefits for the schools, although the benefits to advertisers were quite evident.31

It may well be true that corporations have genuine concerns about the state of education in this country. It is also the case that in exchange for advertising, corporations contribute resources desperately needed by financially strapped school systems. But in this exchange, the line between philanthropy and exploitation is very fine indeed. Marketing executives are well aware of the line they are crossing: “In the past, there was maybe more of a feeling that shameless promotion in school wasn’t right. . . . I think in today’s business climate, that’s definitely beginning to change.”32

Although, as discussed in the next chapter, many school districts actively seek industry partnerships, some school officials remain unconvinced that advertising in schools is good for either children or society:

"It must be the dream of marketing executives. The law requires your future customers to come to a place 180 days a year where they must watch and listen to your advertising messages exclusively. Your competitors are not allowed access to the market. The most important public institution in the lives of children and families gives its implied endorsement to your products. The police and schools enforce the requirement that the customers show up and stay for the show. The disturbing implications . . . are numerous and profound."33

Channel One and More

The most prominent, most scrutinized, and most vilified intrusion of commercialism into school life surely is Channel One, the 12-minute television program beamed into 12,000 schools throughout the United States and viewed daily by 8.3 million students. Two minutes out of every program are devoted to commercials. The private company responsible for Channel One provides, for the entire school, television sets and installation hardware estimated to be worth about $17,000. In exchange, the company requires students in 80% of the classrooms to watch the program on 90% of school days. The commercials pay for the programming; in the mid-1990s, a 30-second commercial cost $200,000, thus enabling the company to earn an annual profit of $30 million. The cost of advertising on Channel One and other school venues must be worth the investment, because about 12,000 companies do so.34 Food companies are particularly prominent among school advertisers, and it is difficult to imagine a food or beverage that is not marketed in schools. Table 21 gives selected examples of food companies that advertised in schools in the early 1990s.

Channel One elicits particularly pointed criticism, not only of its commercial intrusion, but also of the mind-numbing “stupidity” of its news programming and the hidden costs of the time it wastes, which are estimated at $1.8 billion a year.35 The New York Times quoted one critic explaining that “there’s no money passing hands, but to give up that hour a week of school time makes these the most expensive TV sets you ever laid eyes on. . . . That school time was purchased by taxpayers. If you watch Channel One for 90 percent of the school days, it adds up to 31 hours a year. . . . This is required commercial television. We have an obesity crisis with adolescents in this country, and here we have government schools telling children to eat Snickers and drink Pepsi.”36 Critics also are troubled by studies showing that children do not readily distinguish Channel One’s commercials from its entertainment, news, and public service programs and that they are confused about such distinctions. Children say, for example, that they believe Channel One advertisers such as Pepsi-Cola are “deeply committed to helping them cope with their emotional and psychological problems.”15

.
Channel One’s privileged position in schools has been reported to be the result of an intense and expensive lobbying effort in Washington and even more so in states like New York that bar the company from public schools. Given this effort, it is difficult to imagine that this statement from a Channel One executive could be anything but disingenuous: “The reality is the sponsors of Channel One News are playing a tremendous, important role in getting this free and independent journalism to the kids. . . . The same people who have gripes about Channel One point an identical finger at ‘Sesame Street’ and the Girl Scouts for commercializing kids. We’re perfectly happy to be in that company.”36

Beyond Channel One, at least 13 firms are devoted specifically to helping companies market products to children in schools. They help food advertisers place logos or samples on book covers, videos and curriculum guides, guides to nutrition, mathematics educational materials, and reading software. No fewer that 75 food-related corporations or groups offer teaching materials to schools.37 Such materials are remarkable for their attitude, as Consumers Union terms it, of “NIMF—Not In My Food.”38 Thus Kellogg’s materials emphasize fat (not sugar) as a concern, the Egg Board’s materials minimize cholesterol, and Nabisco’s materials emphasize concerns about saturated (but not total) fat. Among the more widely used materials are those produced by the National Dairy Council; as noted in Chapter 3, its nutrition guides display the dairy food group first, recommend more daily servings than the Pyramid’s, and do not necessarily promote low-fat products.

Corporate-sponsored teaching materials invariably give prominence to their own products in pictures, if not in words. A Consumers Union review of such materials—many of them prepared in collaboration with academic-sounding organizations—concluded that most were commercial, incomplete, biased, and oversimplified. For example, mathematics educational materials sponsored by Mars, Inc., and developed by Scholastic, Inc., were judged “incomplete, biased, and commercial.” The reviewers were concerned that the materials listed candy only as an energy-producing food, made such statements as “Eating SNICKERS is a good way to get quick energy that will keep you kicking all day long,” and contained the Team SNICKERS logo on every page.38

These kinds of partnerships enable food companies to advertise in schools under the guise of education. Since 1973, for example, Campbell Soups has offered a program called “Labels for Education” that has encouraged 50 million children in thousands of schools to redeem soup labels for basketballs, computers, and minivans. Because food products—no matter how sweet, salty, or high in calories—are claimed by their makers to be benign, school boards readily permit companies to promote them without giving the arrangements anywhere near the degree of scrutiny that would be applied to similar proposals from a cigarette company, for example.

Opposition to school commercialism is unlikely to come from financially strapped school officials grateful for whatever help they can get, from parent–teacher associations, or, regrettably, from nutritionists. A recent survey reported 70–80% of nutritionists to believe that school-based marketing programs are beneficial and that food companies should be permitted to offer teaching materials to children; just 40% thought that food companies were inappropriate sponsors of teaching materials.39

Other groups, however, do recognize the problem. Industry publications and those of advocates feature nearly identical articles—“Schools for Sale” and “Students for Sale”—arguing that school commercialism has gone too far.40 Filling the gap are organizations such as the Center for Commercial-Free Public Education (Oakland, California) and the Center for Analysis of Commercialism in Education (University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee). These groups publicize the most blatant conflicts of interest in books and articles, file petitions with state legislatures, encourage lawmakers to ask for investigations and to introduce bills restricting commercial activities in schools, and demand that marketers stop advertising on Channel One. By 2001, their efforts were gaining increasing publicity and support.

Corporate Takeovers

A somewhat different form of commercialism is the relatively recent corporate takeover of school food service operations. Understanding why this particular aspect of commercial intrusion deserves attention requires a brief review of the history of school breakfast and lunch programs. School meal programs began during the Great Depression of the 1930s. From the outset, they had two purposes: to help dispose of surplus agricultural commodities owned by the government as a result of price-support agreements with farmers, and to help prevent nutritional deficiencies among low-income schoolchildren.41 Because chronic disease risk factors were not an issue at that time, the rules specified meals that used surplus commodities and were higher in fat, saturated fat, sugar, and salt—and lower in fiber—than recommended in later years.

Since 1946, the government has supported a program, administered by the USDA, to provide free or reduced-price breakfasts and lunches to schoolchildren from low-income families. The USDA reimburses schools at a fixed rate for the cost of the meals and for administrative and technical support; it also gives schools more than a billion pounds of surplus agricultural commodities annually. In 1999 federally supported meal programs served nearly 27 million children in 97,000 schools at a cost to taxpayers of $7.3 billion.42

The school meal programs have long been caught in a no-win situation. On the one hand, advocates argue that all children—regardless of family income—should have access to “universal” free meals. On the other, reformers object to the notoriously poor taste, appearance, and nutritional quality of the meals served in many schools and to the waste and low participation rates (58% of eligible children) that occur as a consequence. Over time, with increasing recognition of the need to promote diets that would reduce the risk of chronic diseases as well as nutrient deficiencies, advocates have increasingly demanded improvements in the nutritional quality of school meals.43

In 1994 Congress required the USDA to bring school meals into compliance with the Dietary Guidelines, which meant that the agency would need to propose new rules to reduce the amounts of fat and sugar in school meals—and therefore in the use of foods that contain them. Table 22 lists the amounts of some food commodities used in school lunches in 1993 and indicates the anticipated effect of the proposals on food purchases and, by implication, on revenues to producers. Although the USDA tried to show that the changes would have minimal impact on commodity purchases (except butter, which, in any case, was supplied through government surpluses), the new rules meant that schools were likely to buy smaller amounts of meat, cheese, and frying potatoes, but larger amounts of poultry, fruit, vegetables, and nuts. Indeed, USDA economists estimated that the proposed changes would “displace” as much as 55 million pounds of butter, 90 million pounds of cheese, and 126 million pounds of beef annually.44

As might be expected, commodity groups likely to lose market share opposed the proposals, but so did school food service groups who thought them too difficult to achieve without increased funding. Advocacy groups also complained that the resulting meals were not nutritionally adequate for low-income children. The proposals were enacted over such protests but quickly amended to grant significant concessions to the food industry. For example, although federal surveys indicated that 50% of children’s fat intake comes from whole milk,2 the former rules required school lunches to offer it and the dairy industry was able to block any change in that rule. Soft drink producers also blocked proposed restrictions on sales from vending machines, and fast-food companies won the right to continue selling items that had to meet nutritional standards only if they were sold as part of reimbursable school meals.45

Legal loopholes permitting the sale of high-profit items encouraged large food service corporations to move into the school meal business. In 1994–1995, about 8% of schools participating in federal meal programs had contracted with companies such as Marriott, Aramark, and Daka to run their food service operations, a doubling since 1987–1988. By 1996 about 1,000 of the 15,000 school districts in the United States had arrangements with such companies. Marriott, for example, ran food service operations in 3,500 schools in 350 districts, and Aramark was in 330 districts with 2,300 schools. Districts favoring such contracts tend to be those with lower participation rates in the federal programs (and, therefore, lower reimbursements). They move their programs to management companies in the hope that costs will decline and revenues increase. Indeed, the companies have improved student satisfaction, reduced food waste, and saved money in some—but not all—schools.46

Management companies are required to serve meals that meet all federal nutrition standards, but their need to profit from the enterprise makes critics wonder whether nutritional quality is sacrificed to cost considerations, especially when the companies introduce food courts. Food courts are popular because they sell the heavily advertised fast foods that students consider “cool.” The increasing use of brand-name fast foods by school meal programs adds to concerns about nutritional quality. In 1990–1991 only 2% of schools offered brand-name food items, but 13% did so in 1995–1996. In 1995 Pizza Hut sold products in about 5,000 schools, a 20% increase in four years, and Taco Bell served about 2,000 schools in 1995 (both companies are PepsiCo subsidiaries).47 In 1997, 30% of public high schools sold fast foods from one or another of nine chains. At least one high school is actually licensed as a fast-food franchise; it pays royalties to the parent company and keeps the profits, which are said to be $100,000 annually. The philosophy of this type of franchising is quite straightforward: “You get the customers what they want, where they want it, and when they want it.”48 For the companies, meal programs offer an additional advantage beyond income: “We want to get the brand out in front of kids. . . . [I]f they have a good experience in the cafeteria, we hope they’ll buy it on weekends.”49 Even schools that keep fast foods to a minimum occasionally hold “brand days” when they offer well-advertised foods in rotation with regular offerings, despite concerns about nutritional quality.

It is easy to understand why schools might welcome corporate takeovers. With a big company in charge, they no longer have to deal with the consequences of serving foods that kids don’t like or with any other aspect of the complicated, messy, and expensive food service business. When management companies take over, the students return to the cafeteria, the operation stops losing money, and the workers keep their jobs and enjoy them more. Schools pay more for fast foods, but they also can add a higher markup and clear a larger profit. In the late 1990s, students might be charged 40 cents for a reduced-cost federal meal, but a fast-food meal could be sold for $2 to $3. The nutritional issues and the fact that only a few fast-food items meet the USDA’s nutritional guidelines (and are not, therefore, eligible for federal reimbursement) were of little concern to some school food managers. As one manager explained, “I’m not here to address all the ills of society in our cafeteria.”49

Because the higher costs of fast-food lunches put them out of the reach of low-income children, some schools do not permit them. The rare administrators of such schools are concerned about financial issues but even more concerned about social implications: “We’ll try to keep the kids from buying your sodas, your chips, your candy and your shoes and jackets that can cause conflicts among children. We’ll stand up for the children. They’re not for sale.”33 Participating schools, however, deny that they are selling out to corporate interests and contributing to children’s obsessions with brand names. “The kids need something to eat . . . and we want to make it as pleasant for them as we can.”49 In such discussions, nutrition hardly ever emerges as an issue.

MARKETING TO CHILDREN: IMPLICATIONS

Among the many disturbing aspects of food marketing to children is its barely disguised cynicism. Marketers will do whatever they can to encourage even the youngest children to ask for advertised products in the hope of enticing young people to become lifetime consumers. In doing so, food companies have enormously increased the burden on caretakers to control television viewing, resist requests for food purchases, and teach critical thinking to children whose analytical abilities are not yet developed. Most parents of my acquaintance tell me that they are constantly arguing with their children over food choices. Parents vary in the ways they deal with children’s demands for advertised foods, but many prefer to reserve family arguments about setting limits for dealing with aspects of behavior that they consider more important. Food marketers depend on caretakers to be too busy to want to deny requests for fast-food meals or snack foods, whether or not consuming such foods inappropriately raises caloric intake.

Schools constitute a logical extension of this cynicism in action. The simplicity of contracting out food service, the potential financial rewards, and the ease of getting children to eat fast foods constitute much of the rationale for schools’ having given up responsibility for what kids eat, whether or not they teach nutrition in the classroom. Thus the quality of school meals cuts to the heart of issues of social responsibility in our society. Even when parents promote good dietary practices at home, they may be too busy to pay attention to what their children eat at school. Whether school officials like it or not, they have been delegated the responsibility for teaching children about appropriate food choices and setting an example in practice.

What is especially disturbing about the commercial takeover of school meals is that it is so unnecessary. For many years, it has been evident that schools are perfectly capable of producing nutritionally sound lunches that taste just fine and are enthusiastically consumed by students as well as teachers.50 From my own observations, a healthy (in every sense of the word) school meals program requires just three elements: a committed food service director, a supportive principal, and interested parents. Children deserve a learning environment in which each of these elements is firmly in place. Once school meals get taken over by companies concerned about market share, profit, and stockholders, nutritional considerations inevitably are assigned a lower priority.

Nowhere are these kinds of issues brought into sharper focus than in the debates about the snacks and soft drinks served outside the school meal programs and, therefore, in competition with them. Of particular concern are exclusive contracts between companies that produce soft drinks—forbidden in school lunch programs—and school districts. Because so much money is involved, and because the nutritional implications are so profound, the next chapter focuses on the development and significance of soft drink “pouring rights” contracts.

PUSHING SOFT DRINKS - “POURING RIGHTS”

I had never heard of "pouring rights" until late in 1998 when I received a telephone call from a representative of the New York State School Food Service Association, inviting me to comment on that topic at its next meeting. She explained that the term referred to a recent development in food marketing: large payments from soft drink companies to school districts in return for the right to sell that company’s products—and only those products—in every one of the district’s schools. I was aware that colleges and universities had negotiated vending contracts with soft drink companies, and I knew that nutritionists and school food service directors had long been concerned that soft drinks and other top-of-the-Pyramid foods were sold in competition with the more nutritious foods provided by federally supported school meal programs. Although these contracts seemed to raise special concerns about their effects on children’s diets, I had not heard debates about their health implications at professional meetings, nor had I heard discussions of their potential for fostering an environment that might actively promote soft drink consumption at the expense of more appropriate food choices. As I soon learned, the loudest protests against these contracts were coming instead from competing soft drink companies. These companies objected to restraints on their trade and on consumers’ “freedom of choice” in the marketplace. As this chapter explains, soft drinks raise nutritional issues that place them at the forefront of present-day dietary concerns. For this reason, pouring-rights contracts illustrate some of the more disturbing consequences of “eat more” marketing imperatives.

WHY CARE ABOUT SOFT DRINKS?

For the purposes of this discussion, a soft drink is a soda made from carbonated water, added sugar, and flavors. Diet sodas substitute artificial sweeteners for the sugar but are not consumed by children to any great extent. By this definition, a soft drink is the quintessential “junk food”—high in calories but low in nutrients. A 12-ounce can contains about 1.5 ounces of sugar and 160 calories, but so little else of nutritional value that the Center for Science in the Public Interest rightfully refers to soft drinks as “liquid candy.”1 From a nutritional standpoint, water or almost any other beverage is a better option. As shown in Table 23, a 12-ounce glass of orange juice—even that reconstituted from cans—provides substantial amounts of vitamin A, folic acid, potassium, and other vitamins and minerals along with its sugar and calories, as does an equivalent amount of 1% low-fat milk. Worse, soft drinks are the single greatest source of caffeine in children’s diets; a 12-ounce can of cola contains about 45 milligrams but the amounts in more potent soft drinks can exceed 100 milligrams—a level approaching that found in coffee.2

If soft drinks were occasional treats, no nutritionist would be the slightest bit concerned about them. But they are produced and consumed in vast quantities. As shown in Table 24, soft drinks have replaced milk in the diets of many American children as well as adults. School purchases reflect such trends. From 1985 to 1997, school districts decreased the amounts of milk they bought by nearly 30% and increased their purchases of carbonated sodas by an impressive 1,100%.3 From 1970 to 1997, the production of sugar-sweetened sodas increased from 22 to 41 gallons per person per year. These volumes require translation; they mean that the yearly per person supply of 12-ounce soft drinks in the United States is equivalent to 442 regular and 124 diet drinks (total 556). On average, enough regular soda is produced to supply every American adult, child, and infant with 1.2 daily 12-ounce drinks, or nearly 200 calories per day from this source alone. The production of diet sodas also rose during this period, from 2 to nearly 12 gallons per person per year.

I must emphasize that these are production figures that for the most part overestimate consumption; they do not necessarily reflect the amounts people actually drink. Surveys of actual dietary intake, on the other hand, tend to underestimate consumption, but they too indicate increasing intake of soft drinks by children, and especially by teenagers. As shown in Table 25, children begin drinking these beverages very early in life and steadily increase the amounts they consume through adolescence and young adulthood. One national survey reported that children aged 2–17 increased their average daily intake of sugar-sweetened soft drinks from just under 7 ounces to nearly 10 ounces just from the early to mid-1990s.4 USDA data from 1994–1995 indicated that girls aged 12–19 drank 12 ounces of regular soda (160 calories) on average, and boys drank 21 ounces (280 calories). Diet sodas barely enter into this picture; on an average day, girls were drinking an additional 2 ounces per day of diet soda, and boys 1 additional ounce.5 For children at the higher levels of intake, soft drinks can contribute hundreds of empty calories. One analysis suggests that one-fourth of adolescents drink 26 or more ounces of soft drinks per day (a minimum of 325 calories); these heavy users take in 600 daily calories more from all sources than nonusers, and they drink much less milk and fruit juice.6

The extra calories from soft drinks replace calories from more nutritious foods and are more than sufficient to account for rising rates of obesity and related risk factors among American schoolchildren. Indeed, the relationship between soft drink consumption and body weight is so strong that researchers calculate that for each additional soda consumed, the risk of obesity increases 1.6 times.7 Consumption of soft drinks is well known to contribute to tooth decay especially when it is sipped throughout the day, and adolescents who consume soft drinks display a risk of bone fractures three- to four-fold higher than those who do not.8 Parents of teenagers tell me that their children deliberately use caffeine-containing soft drinks to stay awake in school. These parents are concerned about the effects of caffeine on their children’s behavior and about the potential for “addiction,” especially because companies deliberately market caffeinated sodas to children as young as age 9.2

MARKETING SOFT DRINKS TO KIDS

Carbonated soft drinks are big business in the United States; they generated more than $50 billion in annual sales just in this country in the late 1990s. Sales are dominated by two companies, Coca-Cola and PepsiCo, whose relentless competition for market share is known as the “Cola Wars.” In 1999 Coca-Cola sold 160 brands of soft drinks in 200 countries for worldwide sales of nearly $19.8 billion, on which it earned $2.4 billion in profit, less than in previous years. In the United States alone, Coca-Cola held a 44% market share worth $7.5 billion in 1999 sales.9 PepsiCo is distinctly number 2, holding a roughly 30% share of the U.S. market. Both companies were doing well, but the market for soft drinks grew so rapidly in the late 1990s—four times as fast as that for any other food or beverage—that all companies were seeking to expand.10

To expand its sales base, Coca-Cola’s explicit strategy is to put a can of Coke within arm’s reach of as many people in the world as possible. The company’s most evident marketing strategy is advertising. Coca-Cola’s global advertising budget exceeded $1.6 billion in the late 1990s. In 1999 the company spent $867 million for advertising in the United States alone—$174.4 million for Coca-Cola beverages, $68.4 million for Sprite, $41.4 million for Minute Maid, and $17.6 million for Powerade.9 In addition, Coca-Cola places its logo where it is most likely to be seen by large numbers of people. The company has supported the Olympic games since 1928 and sponsors numerous local sporting events. Its foundation gives away more than $12 million annually for scholarships and educational programs particularly aimed at helping minorities and women.11 Over the years, these combinations of activities have firmly established Coca-Cola as an American icon.

Because it is difficult to compete with icons, PepsiCo spends even more on advertising. Its total domestic advertising budget was $1.31 billion in 1999—$165 million for Pepsi beverages, $37.7 million for Mountain Dew, and most of the remainder for Doritos, Tostitos, Cheetos, and FritoLay snack foods. The huge costs of the Cola Wars, and increasing competition from sweetened juice drinks, have forced soft drink companies to seek new markets. Both companies, for example, aggressively target African-American and Hispanic consumers with “guerrilla-marketing tactics” to distribute products in urban neighborhoods.9

As part of this effort, soft drink companies seek consumers among younger and younger children. They approach this task quite systematically through the methods described in Chapter 8. Because the overall strategy is to establish brand loyalty as early in a consumer’s life as possible, marketing efforts begin with the parents of young infants. Some soft drink companies go so far as to license their logos to makers of infant-feeding bottles. The manufacturer of the bottle shown in Figure 19 (Chapter 8) justifies its use in historical terms; he recalls that soft drink bottles were routinely used to feed milk or formula during the Depression. The company’s public relations materials explain that the logo-labeled bottles are “designed to be fun and enjoyable . . . [such that] the positive effects of the bonding experience will be increased for both parent and child.”12 It may indeed seem like fun to feed infant formula to a baby in a Pepsi or other soft drink bottle, but studies show that parents who buy such bottles are much more likely to feed soft drinks to their children than those who do not buy them.13 Moving up in age targets, PepsiCo states explicitly that its strategy is to expand soft drink consumption among children aged 6–11.14

POURING-RIGHTS CONTRACTS: THE LOGICAL NEXT STEP

An obvious way to reach this younger age group is through schools. In the early 1990s, having sold their products for many years through vending machines on school and college campuses, soft drink companies increased their efforts to reach the student market, at first focusing on colleges and universities but later turning to elementary, middle, and high schools. Pouring-rights contracts emerged as a particularly effective marketing strategy. These contracts usually involve large lump-sum payments to school districts and additional payments over 5 to 10 years in return for exclusive sales of one company’s products in vending machines and at all school events. According to the General Accounting Office, about 200 school districts in the United States were participating in such agreements by 2000.15

For soft drink companies, a stable base of sales in schools is only the most evident benefit of pouring-rights contracts; the agreements also result in constant advertising through display of company logos on vending machines, cups, sportswear, brochures, and school buildings. In this manner, all students in the school, even those too young or too difficult to reach by conventional advertising methods, receive constant exposure to the logos and products. The use of a single brand is designed to create loyalty among young people who have a lifetime of soft drink purchases ahead of them.

Furthermore, the financial advantages to soft drink companies are substantial. For one thing, sugars and water are inexpensive ingredients. For another, the earlier contracts typically called for a charge of $1.00 for a drink purchased from vending machines, or $24 for a case of 12-ounce cans. In 1999, for example, the wholesale cost of a case was $4.99—half the retail price charged by my local Manhattan convenience store, but still leaving $19.01 to cover supply, labor, overhead, and funds donated to the school district. Even taking the large initial lump-sum payments and sales taxes into consideration, soft drink companies were unlikely to lose money on those deals.

I could not obtain reliable sales figures, but school food service directors laughed at the suggestion that students might consume an average of one case (24 12-ounce sodas) per year; they thought one soda per day was more realistic, at least for high school students. The quoted comments of a marketing consultant hired by 63 school systems to negotiate such contracts support this higher estimate.16 An official of a school district in New York state told me that his students drink so many sodas that the biggest problem is keeping the vending machines stocked, and teachers of my acquaintance give similar accounts. If just half the students in a district of 10,000 students consumed one soda per day, gross sales should have been more than $25,000 per week. To such figures must be added sales of drinks at sports and community events. Yet in one New York state contract, the amount that Coca-Cola guaranteed to the district over the entire 10-year period came to a total of just $15 for each student. These comparative figures explain why a PepsiCo official described such contracts in 1998 as “a pretty high stakes business development,” and a Coca-Cola official said that his company would “continue to be very aggressive and proactive in getting our share of the school business.”17

It must be noted that more recent contracts deal with larger amounts of soda. By 2001, soft drink companies were routinely placing 20-ounce sodas in vending machines, and pricing them at $1.00–1.50. The larger sodas clearly encourage “eat more.” They provide 250 calories each and are a better value (5.0–7.5 cents per ounce compared to 8.3 cents per ounce for the 12-ounce can). In addition, they are vended in portable screw-top plastic bottles that permit sipping throughout the day rather than downing in one gulp. This last feature particularly distresses dental groups alarmed about how the sugar and acid in soft drinks so easily dissolve tooth enamel.8

Nevertheless, it is not difficult to understand why administrators of financially strapped school districts would find these contracts irresistible. As the American population has aged, as the gap between rich and poor has widened, and as the proportion of low-income school children has increased, the tax base for public schools has consistently eroded. Schools barely manage to provide for basic educational needs, let alone activities that might appear as frills. It is easy to understand why school districts in Colorado, Ohio, and Texas would contract with Coca-Cola, Pepsi, or Dr Pepper for pouring rights worth millions of dollars, why larger school districts would auction their rights to the highest bidder, and why school districts would hire consultants to help them negotiate the best possible deals. The Center for Commercial-Free Public Education, an advocacy organization in Oakland, California, announced that nearly 200 school districts in 33 states had entered into such contracts by early 2000, a four-fold increase in just 2 years.18 In the contract that set the standard, a 53-school Colorado district relinquished its Pepsi vending machines when it signed an $8 million, 10-year agreement with Coca-Cola that included cash bonuses for exceeding sales targets and incentives such as a new car for a senior with perfect attendance and high grades.19

Even smaller contracts might provide sports, arts, or computer facilities not otherwise available from state or local resources. The 1998 contract between the North Syracuse Central School District in New York state and Coca-Cola, for example, is a 10-year agreement that requires all 10 of the district’s schools and preschool programs—with a combined population of 10,100 students—to use Coca-Cola products exclusively in all vending machines, and at all athletic contests, booster club activities, and school-sponsored community events. The contract calls for the company to install, maintain, and stock at least 135 vending machines in schools throughout the district, for which it guarantees a payment of $1.53 million—$900,000 upon signing and the rest distributed in annual installments of $70,000. The contract stipulates that the company is to pay additional commissions on purchases that exceed target amounts and is to donate 150 free cases of Fruitopia drinks, provide drinks to fundraising groups for resale, and also include software, coupons, or other premiums for each vending machine placed.20 With the assistance of a powerful state legislator, the district was able to leverage this contract to obtain state aid for a $6.5 million sports facility for the high school. These terms were considered so favorable that the New York State Education Department used them to develop a prototype contract. In 1999, the 18-school district in Albany, the state capital, negotiated a contract with Coca-Cola worth just $667,000 but only for five years, because the school board wanted to retain some flexibility in the marketplace.21

The most questionable aspect of these contracts is that they link returns to the companies and to the schools to amounts that students drink. At first glance, the financial advantages to the schools may seem impressive, especially because a significant part of the funding comes in an immediate lump sum that is not tied to sales. Most schools use the funds for sports facilities—scoreboards seem to be a particular favorite—but some buy furniture, sound systems, or computers; support student employment; and occasionally pay for scholarships. But because the contracts provide additional benefits for consumption levels that surpass quotas, school administrators are placed in the position of pushing soft drinks to faculty, staff, and students. Not that they necessarily mind doing so. In a letter widely circulated on the Internet and reprinted in a national magazine, a Colorado district administrator who signed himself “The Coke Dude” announced payments of $3,000, $15,000, and $25,000, respectively, to his elementary, middle, and high school principals—along with some ground rules:

"We must sell 70,000 cases of product . . . at least once during the first three years of the contract. If we reach this goal, your school allotments will be guaranteed for the next seven years. . . . If 35,439 staff and students buy one Coke product every other day for a school year, we will double the required quota. Here is how we can do it. . . . Allow students to purchase and consume vended products throughout the day. . . . I know this is “just one more thing from downtown,” but the long-term benefits are worth it."22

Given the financial benefits of such contracts, it is understandable why many school administrators might resist thinking about, let alone dealing with, the agreements’ ethical implications or health consequences. School officials justify the contracts as breaking no new ground: soft drink vending machines already exist in schools, soft drinks already pervade American culture, children are not forced to drink sodas, and contracts can be written to safeguard students’ rights to drink other brands. From this standpoint, the benefits of soft drink contracts appear to outweigh any nutritional or other concerns they might raise. On this precise issue, the administrator of an Ohio school district with a new PepsiCo contract wrote,

"We have worried about whether we’re forcing students to pay for their education through the purchase of soft drinks. In the end, though, we have decided that is not the case, because each student has the option to buy or not to buy. . . . Americans drink 13.15 billion gallons of carbonated drinks every year—which means somebody is making a lot of money. Why shouldn’t schools get their share? In the end, everyone wins: the students, the schools, the community. And for once, even taxpayers get a break."23

Early in 1999, at the New York State conference I attended, the participating school food service directors expressed strong disagreement with such views. They were deeply troubled by a broad range of issues related to the length, exclusivity, and financial terms of the contracts, to the lack of adequate federal oversight of foods sold in competition with school meals, and to the widespread failure of schools to enforce even the weak rules that do exist. In particular, they worried about the consequences of pouring-rights contracts for the economic viability of school food service operations and the integrity of the schools’ educational mission—all for good reason.

The typical pouring-rights contract period greatly exceeds the tenure of most school boards; boards cannot be held accountable when schools are locked into contracts that may prove unfavorable—financially or otherwise—in later years. Not surprisingly, the exclusivity feature frustrates competing soft drink companies that would like to sell their products to school children. A representative of one such company told conference participants that publicly supported schools have no right to dictate what students eat, when parents and children might want something else. Only in prisons, he said, are brands forced upon populations in this manner.

Indeed, the exclusivity of the contracts leads to situations so patently absurd as to elicit nationwide media attention. In one incident, a high school in Georgia suspended a senior student because he wore a shirt sporting a Pepsi logo to a “Coke Day” rally sponsored by the student government. To avoid such embarrassing attention, New York State Education Department contracts include a noteworthy clause that explicitly permits students, employees, and guests to drink and wear products that bear competing logos on school grounds.20

A critical question is whether the contracts encourage greater consumption of soft drinks. People who track trends in pouring-rights contracts think that is exactly what they do: “What we have seen in just about every exclusive contract around the country is a resulting increase in the amount of soda consumed by students. . . . There’s almost always an increase in the number of vending machines, and they’re put into schools that previously didn’t have them. . . . They’re also putting machines in schools with younger children.”24 If children are drinking soft drinks, they are less likely to be eating more nutritious foods, especially those offered in school meal programs. This brings us to the issue of competition with school meals. As we shall see, pouring-rights contracts affect federal regulations for competitive foods, and we must now turn to a discussion of this otherwise obscure area of federal policy.

COMPETING FOR STUDENTS’ COINS AND APPETITES

Soft drinks have long concerned federal regulators. In 1914, for example, Harvey Wiley, then head of the forerunner of today’s Food and Drug Administration, said of such products, “While the miscellaneous bottled soft drinks on the market with the exception of those bearing habit-forming drugs, such as Coca-Cola (caffeine), cannot be said to be absolutely injurious, they represent to my mind second grade products of miscellaneous composition which does not recommend them for consumption by the young. . . . Why give your child [these] . . . when you can always obtain . . . pure fruit juices obtained direct from the lime, the berry, the orange or lemon?”25

Sales of soft drinks in schools, however, are permitted as a result of amendments to the Child Nutrition Act of 1966, which in turn amended provisions of the National School Lunch Act of 1946. As outlined in Table 26, the history of regulations dealing with sales of soft drinks and other “junk foods” (graciously defined by Congress as “foods of minimal nutritional value”) is part of a 50-year saga of nearly annual tinkering with the rules that govern the school lunch and school breakfast programs. The regulations for sales of soft drinks and other “competitive” foods—foods that children might buy instead of federally supported meals in the school cafeteria—constitute a minuscule part of the saga, but they illustrate the way commercial interests dominate congressional decisions about matters that affect the health of children.

For more than 30 years, in efforts to protect the nutritional and economic integrity of federally subsidized school meal programs, groups such as school food service officials, nutritionists, and advocates for children’s health sought regulations to restrict sales of competitive foods in public schools. For decades, soft drink companies—often joined by principals, school boards, and state education departments—opposed any “time-and-place” restrictions on when or where soft drinks and other competitive foods might be sold. The results of this historical conflict readily reveal why advocates view the current regulations as promoting the commercial interests of soft drink companies far more than they do children’s health.

By the late 1960s, coin-operated vending machines selling soft drinks and snacks were already well established in schools. Parents, school officials, health authorities, and even Congress could recognize as “an obvious fact of life” that sales of such foods directly competed with federally supported meal programs “for the children’s coins and appetites.”26 Congress, therefore, asked the USDA secretary “to take a hard look at some of the competition to the balanced meal offered within schools . . . [at] the availability of candy bars, soft drinks and a snack line in the school cafeterias.”27 In 1970 Congress passed amendments that allowed the USDA to block sales of competitive foods in the school cafeteria during lunch periods but permitted any food ever served as part of a school lunch to be sold on cafeteria snack lines. This arcane distinction meant that cake could be sold but soft drinks and candies could not.28 These foods could, however, be sold at other times and places.

TABLE 26.

Selected events in the history of regulations governing sales of soft drinks and other competitive foods of “minimal nutritional value” in elementary and secondary schools

1946
National School Lunch Act passed to promote use of surplus agricultural commodities in school meals as a way to improve the nutritional status of low-income children.
1966
Child Nutrition Act requires USDA to develop regulations governing nutritional aspects of school meal programs.
1970
Amendments to 1966 Act ban sales of sodas and candies in or near school cafeterias during mealtimes but allow individual foods served in school meals to be sold competitively at other times and places when funds support school food service operations.
1972
Amendments permit sales of competitive foods during mealtimes if proceeds benefit schools or school groups, and transfer authority to regulate competitive foods from USDA to state and local boards of education.
1977
Amendments restore USDA’s authority to regulate competitive foods.
1978
USDA proposes rules restricting sales of foods of “minimal nutritional value”—soft drinks, water ices, chewing gum, certain candies—from the beginning of the school day until after the last lunch period; withdraws proposal in response to comments.
1979
USDA again proposes rules; PepsiCo organizes letter-writing campaign opposing USDA authority.
1980
USDA issues final rules similar to those proposed in 1978. National Soft Drink Association sues to overturn regulations; loses, appeals, and wins in 1983.
1983
U.S. Appeals Court rules that USDA cannot impose “time-and-place” restrictions on sales of competitive foods.
1985
USDA revises rules; prohibits sales of competitive foods of minimal nutritional value only during lunch periods in cafeterias; permits such sales at all other times and places, with no restrictions on allocation of revenues.
1990
Citizens Commission on School Nutrition recommends restrictions on availability of non-nutritious foods in schools.
1991
American Dietetic Association and American School Food Service Association recommend restricting or banning sales of competitive foods in schools.
1994
Senate introduces bill to restrict or ban school sales of soft drinks and other foods of minimal nutritional value. Congress reaffirms 1985 rules but permits USDA to propose “model language” recommending time-and-place restrictions on sales in elementary schools.
1995
Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) petitions USDA to require competitive foods to meet standards for good nutrition.
1998
CSPI publishes Liquid Candy: How Soft Drinks Are Harming Americans’ Health; urges schools to stop selling soft drinks.
1999
USDA places soft drinks at the “eat less” tip of its Food Guide Pyramid for children aged 2–6.
2000
Public Health Service calls for an improvement in the dietary quality of meals and snacks served in schools. Text of Dietary Guidelines suggests reducing intake of added sugars by limiting use of soft drinks. General Accounting Office issues report on school commercialism.

As a result of these rules, soft drink companies lost revenue, but so did the schools. To protect the ongoing income they derived from sales of snack foods, school officials joined soft drink companies in pressuring Congress to allow competitive foods to be sold at any time and place (again, this meant in the cafeteria during lunch periods), provided that the proceeds went to the schools or to approved student organizations. They also induced Congress to remove the USDA’s authority to regulate sales of competitive foods and, instead, to delegate decisions about such sales to state and local boards of education. These decisions effectively deregulated competitive foods, leading critics to charge that “profit had triumphed over nutrition.”26 After 1972, sales from vending machines and other competing venues increased in many schools. In 1977, during the more liberal Carter administration, Congress viewed sales of competitive foods as an abuse of the school meal programs and restored the USDA’s regulatory authority. Yet in doing so, Congress demanded and received assurances from the USDA that the agency would not actually ban competitive foods but would only restrict sales of soft drinks and other foods of minimal nutritional value that “did not make a positive contribution to children’s diets.”29

With its newly regained authority, the USDA then attempted to ban sales of foods of minimal nutritional value just until after the end of the last lunch period. Because this plan provoked a deluge of angry public comments, the USDA withdrew it and solicited additional input. Some 4,200 comments were submitted in response, filling a 15,000-page record. In 1979 the USDA again proposed this idea, this time defining foods of minimal nutritional value as those containing less than 5% of the Recommended Dietary Allowances for eight nutrients (protein, vitamin A, ascorbic acid, niacin, riboflavin, thiamin, calcium, and iron) per 100 calories or per serving. This definition meant that the restrictions would apply only to carbonated soft drinks, water ices, certain candies, and chewing gum. Even this revised proposal elicited more than 3,000 comments, of which 562 could be traced to a PepsiCo directive to its employees suggesting that they tell the USDA that its health objectives would be better achieved through nutrition education. Despite these pressures, the USDA held firm; its 1980 final rules continued to ban vending of soft drinks until the end of the school lunch period.30

In the early 1980s, encouraged by the election of a more conservative administration, soft drink producers tried a more aggressive tactic. They took the USDA to court, charging that its regulations were “arbitrary, capricious, and an abuse of discretion . . . and in excess of statutory jurisdiction.” The District Court dismissed the complaint, stating that “it is an obvious fact of life that a . . . vending machine, no matter where located, can act as a magnet for any child who inclines to the non-nutritious.”26 Soft drink producers appealed the decision and won. The Appeals Court ruled that the intent of Congress was simply to control sales of “junk foods” during meal service and that the USDA had no right to otherwise restrict the time and place of sales of competitive foods—even those of minimal nutritional value. The court did allow one exception: Competitive foods other than those of minimal nutritional value could be sold in the cafeteria during meal service if the proceeds went to approved student groups. In practice, this decision meant that the USDA could prohibit the selling of soft drinks only in the cafeteria during meal service periods and had to allow sales of sodas at any other time or place.31

As might be expected, this ruling stimulated sales of competitive foods (with the equally predictable result that school food service operations lost revenue) leading advocacy groups to renew their efforts to restrict such sales. They encouraged Senator Patrick Leahy (Dem-VT), then chair of the Senate Agriculture Committee, to introduce a bill to reinstate a complete ban on sales of soft drinks and other competitive foods of minimal nutritional value until the end of the last lunch period. Predictably, Coca-Cola opposed the bill and organized a letter-writing campaign among school principals, superintendents, and coaches who feared losing revenues generated by vending machines. The New York Times quoted Senator Leahy as complaining that “the company puts profit ahead of children’s health. . . . [K]ids have no money, no political clout, no political action committees. . . . If Coke wins, children lose.”32 In hearings on his bill, the senator charged that “some local officials were being misled by Coca-Cola or other bottlers into believing that they had to allow soda machines in their schools.” Congress, he said, should put the health of children above corporate profits.33

According to the New York Times, a spokesman for Coca-Cola argued that his company makes “no nutritional claims for soft drinks . . . but they can be part of a balanced diet. Our strategy is ubiquity. We want to put soft drinks within arm’s reach of desire . . . [and] schools are one channel we want to make them available in.” A lobbyist for the soft drink industry explained to a reporter, “You have no evidence that the consumption of soft drinks is in any way harmful.”34 This same lobbyist told a Senate committee, “We question whether there is a need for ‘Big Brother’ in the form of USDA injecting itself into . . . decisions when it comes to refreshment choices.”33 School principals also opposed the bill on the grounds that it would interfere with their ability to bring in revenue for discretionary activities.

Such objections convinced Congress to retain the permissive regulations. In discussions of amendments to the School Lunch Act passed in 1994, a Senate committee suggested that the USDA should instead develop “model language” to restrict sales of soft drinks and other such foods in elementary schools before the end of the last lunch period, but it left the decision about whether to adopt that language to the discretion of state and local school authorities. Congress advised the USDA to send a letter to secondary schools reminding them that federal laws restricted profit-making sales of soft drinks in food service areas during lunch periods.35 When advocacy groups called on the USDA to impose tighter controls on vended and competitive foods, officials explained that Congress had given the agency no authority to regulate the sale of foods outside the food service area.36

As had been the case since 1972, the 1994 amendments explicitly invited state and local school authorities to impose more stringent restrictions on sales of competitive foods, and several have done so. New York State regulations enacted in 1987, for example, follow the earlier, more restrictive USDA proposals: “From the beginning of the school day until the end of the last scheduled meal period, no sweetened soda water, no chewing gum, no candy including hard candy, jellies, gums, marshmallow candies, fondant, licorice, spun candy and candy coated popcorn, and no water ices except those which contain fruit or fruit juices, shall be sold in any public school within the state.”37

Although reliable data on compliance are difficult to obtain, advocates, teachers, and school officials tell me that state and federal rules are routinely ignored. To begin with, soft drink companies circumvent the rules by donating sodas to schools for free distribution during school meal periods, a development that prompted Senator Leahy to introduce additional legislation to stop such practices: “Nutrition doesn’t go better with Coke or Pepsi at lunchtime . . . [T]his is a loophole—big enough to drive a truck through—that hurts our children . . . not unlike the old days when the tobacco companies would hand out free cigarettes to kids.”38 Furthermore, the companies developed sweetened fruit “drinks” that can be sold on lunch lines; these contain just barely enough juice (5%) to get around being defined as a food of minimal nutritional value.

Some evidence, limited though it may be, suggests the ubiquity of rule breaking. A survey of 55 Minnesota high schools found that 95% of the schools that had vending machines left them unlocked and thus accessible during some school hours, 29% left them unlocked all day, and 15% left them open during the lunch period—despite state regulations that discourage sales of soft drinks during lunch periods. The same survey also found that 60% of the vending machines were located in cafeterias and that another 33% were near the cafeterias.39 A nationwide survey by the General Accounting Office found that 20% of U.S. schools gave students access to vended snacks and drinks during lunch periods and that two-thirds allowed other competitive foods to be sold during lunchtimes.40 A more recent USDA survey reported that about one-fourth of all schools had vending machines located in or near the cafeteria.41 If nothing else, these studies prove that opportunities for violating regulations are readily available.

On this basis, advocates in New York City organized a class-action suit against the board of education, the chancellor of education, and five school principals to enforce a universally ignored city regulation that flatly prohibits “the sale of non-nutritious food, either directly or through vending machines” in public schools. Noting that the money for competitive junk foods in schools “comes from the poorest section of New York City—public school parents—who can least afford it,” the suit argued that officials are obligated to comply with existing laws.42 After a two-year delay, the court ruled that the Board of Education must comply with the law and stop selling foods of minimal nutritional value until after the last lunch period. If schools wanted to sell foods such as sweetened soft drinks during lunch periods, they would have to ask the head of the city’s school food service operations for permission. Whether schools will comply with these directives, which carry no penalties, remains to be seen.

UNDERMINING NUTRITIONAL GOALS

Advocates maintain that if schools are doing their job properly, school meals should contribute to healthful eating habits, should be fully integrated into educational activities, and should receive adequate financial support. They believe such purposes would be best served if food service departments managed sales of all food in schools, rather than administrators or sports officials for whom nutrition and health are not necessarily high priorities. Advocates especially fear that competitive foods jeopardize the economic viability of school meal programs, because these programs are expected to be self-supporting with federal reimbursements and must have adequate sales volume to survive. The short time devoted to lunch periods in many schools also discourages students from eating full meals and encourages the purchase of competitive foods that can be eaten on the run.

This combination of circumstances has forced school food service departments to put substantial effort into recruiting participants through development of in-house food brands, restaurant-type menus, food courts, food carts, and new food items that can be purchased separately from meals. They also are forced to seek ways to improve the image of school meals, stimulate demand for more healthful food choices, and involve students in decisions about how to make school meals more appealing. All of these actions make excellent sense from a business standpoint, but only some of them reinforce the schools’ educational mission. 43 The dilemma is best illustrated by beverage purchases. In the 1990s, milk and other dairy products accounted for nearly one-fourth of the food costs incurred by schools. Perhaps to reduce such costs, school purchases of sweetened fruit drinks increased by 180%. Fruit drinks cost less than milk, and although they are only marginally more nutritious than sodas, they may be served on lunch lines under the regulations. Using them saves money for the schools.3

That soft drink companies deliberately compete with school meals seems quite evident from testimony at congressional hearings. During hearings for the 1994 School Lunch amendments, for example, a high school food service director testified that when Coca-Cola distributed free 20-ounce bottles of soda, participation in the lunch program declined by half; children drank soda instead. She reported that Coca-Cola had provided her school with cash incentives, bicycles, computers, and catered events and that it would be difficult for her principal to give up such perquisites. She concluded, “Without government regulations, Coca-Cola will always win.”33 Soft drink industry lobbyists, however, consistently argue that no evidence links the sale of their products to poor nutrition, to any other health problems, or to low participation rates in school lunch programs. Others, however, state frankly that the preferred placement for vending machines is near the cafeteria, just where the Minnesota survey found them to be.

As a side issue, it should be noted that pouring-rights contracts have economic implications beyond school meal service. Because they affect the sales of milk, the contracts also affect the livelihood of community dairy farmers. Milk used to be the only beverage provided to schoolchildren. Once sodas were permitted, milk sales declined. As shown in Table 24, this change has contributed to the overall decline in the annual production of milk in the United States from 31 gallons per capita in 1970 to 24 gallons in 1997.

From its inception, the purpose of the school lunch program was to improve the nutritional status of children, while providing an outlet for surplus agricultural commodities. Figuring out how to use school meals to promote nutritional goals has not been easy, however, and has occupied Congress since 1966. In implementing the provisions of the 1994 School Lunch amendments, the USDA accepted improved nutrition as a goal when it recognized that school meals could establish “childhood eating patterns that influence lifelong habits” and specified reductions in the fat, sugar, and salt content of the lunches to bring them into compliance with federal Dietary Guidelines.44

In doing so, the school meal programs also were brought into compliance with Public Health Service 10-year plans to improve the health of Americans. Since 1980, the plans have called for information about healthful dietary patterns to be included as part of comprehensive health education curricula in elementary, junior high, and senior high schools. Part of the reason for paying attention to school nutrition education is that it has been demonstrably effective, especially when supported by meals served in school cafeterias. Participants in school meal programs have been shown to consume better diets than nonparticipants. If students replace school meals with competitive foods of minimal nutritional value, the quality of their diets can be expected to deteriorate.45

One goal of the 10-year plan released in 2000 is to increase the percentage of children and adolescents aged 6 to 19 years whose intake of meals and snacks at schools contributes appropriate proportions of nutrients and calories. The plan specifically recognizes that students today have “increased food options” at school. Thus, creating an environment supportive of healthful diets would help schools promote health as well as learning readiness.46 Because this goal applies to foods served in snack bars, school stores, and vending machines, improving the nutritional quality of competitive foods has now been incorporated as a formal component of national nutrition policy. It is as yet uncertain whether and how government agencies will implement this policy.

PRESERVING “THAT BRIEF SHINING OASIS”

The attention that soft drink companies have recently focused on children in grades K–12 can be seen as part of the increasing intrusiveness of commercial interests into American schools. Companies routinely market food products to children in and out of school; these activities are now so common as to be taken for granted and accepted with minimal debate. The companies—and the school officials who contract with them—implicitly assume that soft drinks are appropriate fare for school-age children, rather than milk, juice, or water, any of which would be a better nutritional choice.

Here too, the level of cynicism is especially disturbing. What are we to make of the comments of a PepsiCo official who casually mentions that “marketing to the 8- to 12-year-old set is a priority,” as though it were unquestionably appropriate for a soft drink company to direct sales efforts to such young children?14 And how are we to take the following comment attributed to a consultant who helps schools obtain contracts? He says that pouring-rights contracts make schools more realistic for children: “If you have no advertising in schools at all, it doesn’t give our young people an accurate picture of our society.”16

Pouring-rights agreements clearly teach students that school officials are willing to compromise nutritional principles for financial reasons, even when the linking of payments to higher-consumption goals puts them in the position of advocates for soft drink consumption. When a school administrator tells a reporter that “the nutrition aspect is important, but I’m ambivalent about it,” he reveals his priorities; such ambivalence contributes to student attitudes that nutrition and health are not important concerns.47 All too rare is the school administrator who is brave enough to say, “Matters involving money properly stop at the schoolhouse door” or to insist that “education and marketing are like oil and water.”48 All too few newspapers are willing to admit discomfort with the deals schools make with soda companies, and to argue that “the more things in a school that are for sale . . . the less the school can claim to offer that brief shining oasis” from the rampant commercialism aimed at children everywhere else.49

The well-financed promotion in schools of soft drinks and other foods of poor nutritional quality directly undermines federal efforts to improve the dietary intake of children and to reduce rates of childhood obesity. Even though colleges (and now entire cities, such as Huntington Beach, California) have become advertising vehicles for soft drink companies, elementary and secondary school students surely deserve some protection against commercial interests that contribute to poor nutrition outside of school, as well as within.

Soft drinks, of course, constitute just one example of industry marketing to children, but the health effects of this product are becoming increasingly well documented. Thus a good starting place for nutrition advocacy for children is to encourage consumption of water, juices, and low-fat milk but to discourage consumption of sodas and sweetened fruit drinks, except as occasional desserts. In what must be considered a courageous move in this direction, the USDA braved the wrath of the soft drink industry when it pictured “soda pop” at the tip of its 1999 Food Guide Pyramid for children aged 2–6.50

Anticommercialism advocates urge students to identify and resist school marketing, communities and states to require firm adherence to existing regulations, and school boards to disallow exclusivity agreements and pouring-rights contracts altogether. By the end of 2000, more than 30 school districts in California, Tennessee, and Wisconsin, for example, had refused such deals after protests by parents, students, and school officials. Philadelphia refused an offer from Coca-Cola for $43 million over a 10-year period, and Michigan turned down a contract that would have covered 110 school districts encompassing nearly half a million students.18 At the national level, advocates are lobbying for federal regulations to restrict sales of competitive foods in general, and those of minimal nutritional value in particular, and to expand the definition of such foods to include the new “juice” products and other such foods. Others are considering a range of pricing, tax, and other “environmental” strategies to improve the diets of schoolchildren, similar to those that I and others have proposed to address current trends in obesity.51

By 2001, such advocacy was beginning to have an effect. Days before the inauguration of President George W. Bush, the USDA asked Congress to “strengthen the statutory language to ensure that all foods sold or served anywhere in the school during the school day meet nutrition standards.” 52 Soon after, Senator Leahy introduced a new bill to require the USDA to ban or limit the sale of soft drinks and other competitive “junk foods” before the end of the lunch period on the basis that “schoolchildren are a captive market for soda vendors . . . [and] our kids pay the price when we give soft drink companies free reign to market their products in school.”53 In Minnesota, a state senator introduced a bill to ban sales of soda pop while school is in session, but it “failed in the committee BIG TIME” under pressure from lobbyists for soft drink companies and school boards.54

Despite such victories, but surely in response to the threat of legal intervention, Coca-Cola announced that it would no longer require exclusivity in school contracts. Advocates, however, viewed this “retreat” as a corporate decision that would enable the company to remain in schools, and business analysts thought it would have little financial effect on the company, since school beverage sales “only” accounted for 1% of its $20 billion in annual revenue.55

Although pouring-rights contracts are only one component of an arsenal of food company marketing techniques, issues related to societal inequities are central to the significance of these contracts as a public health concern. Congressional reluctance to favor children’s health above the rights of soft drink producers is a direct result of election laws that require legislators to obtain corporate funding for their campaigns. Like most corporations, soft drink companies donate funds to local and national candidates. More rational campaign financing laws might permit Congress to take positions based on public good rather than private greed.

Similarly, if American public schools were funded adequately, the blatant commercialism inherent in pouring-rights contracts and other marketing efforts in schools would almost certainly be subjected to debate, and departments of education, school boards, principals, and coaches would be less likely to enter into such agreements without far more public discussion than now occurs. As one San Francisco school board official explained, “Education cannot be funded by potato chip contracts. . . . [C]ome back and talk to me about nothing being wrong with these contracts when there are Coca-Cola banners in the House of Representatives and members of the U.S. Senate can only have a TV set if they watch Channel One for 15 minutes a day.”56 Pouring-rights contracts may solve immediate problems of school funding, but their social cost is high, not least because they erode efforts to establish adequate federal, state, and local funding for public education. These contracts, therefore, point to the need for much greater public attention to overall commercial pressures on children and for a much greater level of critical scrutiny of such pressures by school officials, legislators, health professionals, and the public.

In these chapters, I have focused on the ways in which food companies use advertising and marketing methods to expand their base of consumers by targeting young people. In the next section, we move on to an even more powerful strategy: resistance to regulation. Part IV examines the ways in which food companies—in this case, those that sell dietary supplements—were able to obtain almost complete deregulation of their products and, in the process, weaken the ability of the Food and Drug Administration to regulate foods, as well.

NOTES

PART III. EXPLOITING KIDS/CORRUPTING SCHOOLS

Portions of Part III appeared previously as Nestle M. Soft drink “pouring rights”: marketing empty calories. Public Health Reports 2000;115:308–319 (With permission of Oxford University Press)
1. DHHS. Healthy People 2010: Understanding and Improving Health. Washington, DC, 2000. Online: http://www.health.gov/healthypeople.
2. Andrew M, Nord M, Bickel G, Carlson S. Household Food Security in the United States, 1999. Washington, DC: USDA/ERS, 2000. Online: http://www.ers.usda.gov.

CHAPTER 8. STARTING EARLY: UNDERAGE CONSUMERS

1. Troiano RP, Flegal KM, Kuczmarski RJ, et al. Overweight prevalence and trends for children and adolescents. Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine 1995;149:1085–1091.
2. Muñoz KA, Krebs-Smith SM, Ballard-Barbash R, Cleveland LE. Food intakes of US children and adolescents compared with recommendations. Pediatrics 1997;100:323–329.
3. Marquis J. Eating habits put teens at risk, study says. Los Angeles Times September 26, 2000:A1,A16.
4. Cavadini C, Siega-Riz AM, Popkin BM. US adolescent food intake trends from 1965 to 1996. Archives of Disease in Childhood 2000;83:18–24. Lin B-H, Guthrie J, Frazão E. Quality of children’s diets at and away from home: 1994–1996. FoodReview January–April 1999:1–10.
5. McNeal JU. The Kids Market: Myths and Realities. Ithaca, NY: Paramount Publishing, 1999.
6. McNeal JU. Kids as Customers: A Handbook of Marketing to Children. New York: Lexington Books, 1992. Stipp H. New ways to reach children. Am Demographics 1993;15:51–56.
7. McNeal JU. Children as Consumers. Austin: University of Texas Bureau of Business Research, 1964.
8. Hays CL. Advertising: Campbell Soup hopes a new campaign aimed at children will help bolster sagging sales. New York Times May 20, 1998:D6. Also see: Hays CL. Bridging a “Generation Next” Gap. New York Times January 31, 1999:C2.
9. Kramer L. McD’s tweaks “tween” marketing campaign. Advertising Age February 8, 1999:4,73.
10. Lauro PW. Coaxing the smile that sells. New York Times November 1, 1999:C1,C20.
11. Stanbrook L. The politics of advertising to children. In: Smith G, ed. Children’s Food: Marketing and Innovation. London: Blackie Academic & Professional, 1997:94–118.
12. Barwise TP. How much does food and drink advertising influence children’s diet? In: Smith G, ed. Children’s Food: Marketing and Innovation. London: Blackie Academic & Professional, 1997:126–151.
13. Teinowitz I. Nader’s commercial alert fires first at telemarketing. Advertising Age September 21, 1998:44.
14. Hays CL. Advertising: a call for restrictions on psychological research by advertisers into products for children. New York Times October 22, 1999:C6.
15. Fox G. Harvesting Minds: How TV Commercials Control Kids. Westport, CN: Praeger, 1996.
16. Jackson C, Peifer M. The cola wars: does the media influence your choice of cola and can you taste the difference between different brands? Science fair project, St. Ignatius elementary school, Portland, Oregon, May 25, 1999. The project won first prize. Quoted with permission.
17. American Academy of Pediatrics. Children, adolescents, and television. Pediatrics 1990;85:1119–1120.
18. Mifflin L. A growth spurt is transforming TV for children. New York Times April 19, 1999:A1,A21. Diaz A-CP. Kids use media nearly 40 hours a week: study. Advertising Age November 29, 1999:28.
19. Center for Science in the Public Interest. Survey of advertising on children’s TV, press release, July 1, 1992.
20. Cotugna N. TV ads on Saturday morning children’s programming— what’s new? J Nutrition Education 1988;20:125–127. Kotz K, Story M. Food advertisements during children’s Saturday morning television programming: are they consistent with dietary recommendations? J Am Diet Assoc 1994;94: 1296–1300.
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23. Goldsmith MF. Youngsters dialing up cholesterol levels? JAMA 1990; 263:2976.
24. Grube JW, Wallack L. Television beer advertising and drinking knowledge, beliefs, and intentions among schoolchildren. Am J Public Health 1994;84: 254–259.
25. Rajecki DW, McTavish DG, Rasmussen JL, et al. Violence, conflict, trickery, and other story themes in TV ads for food for children. J Applied Social Psychology 1994;24:1685–1700.
26. Fabricant G. The young and restless audience. New York Times April 8, 1996:D1,D8.
27. Thompson S. Cereal makers entice online kids. Advertising Age July 3, 2000:20,22.
28. Kirkpatrick DD. Snack foods become stars of books for children. New York Times September 22, 2000:A1,C17.
29. The Oreo Cookie Counting Book. New York: Little Simon, 2000. The other book is McGrath BB. Kellogg’s Froot Loops! Counting Fun Book. New York: HarperFestival, 2000. Both books were priced at $5.99 in early 2001.
30. Oreo. ABCs of marketing to kids. Parsippany, NJ: Nabisco, 1998.
31. General Accounting Office. Public Education: Commercial Activities in Schools (GAO/HEHS-00–156). Washington, DC, September 2000.
32. Stead D. Corporations, classrooms and commercialism: some say business has gone too far. New York Times Education Life January 5, 1997:30–47.
33. Wynns J. Yes: selling students to advertisers sends the wrong message in the classroom. Advertising Age June 7, 1999:26. The author is identified as commissioner of the San Francisco Unified School District Board of Education. A companion piece, by J. Kane, is entitled “No: Ad dollars can provide needed funds to buy computers and train teachers.”
34. Hoynes W. News for a captive audience: an analysis of Channel One. Extra! May/June 1997: 11–17.
35. Miller MC. How to be stupid: the lessons of Channel One. Extra! May/June 1997:18–23. Sawicky MB, Molnar A. The hidden costs of Channel One: estimates for the fifty states. Milwaukee, WI: University of Wisconsin, Center for the Analysis of Commercialism in Education, April 1, 1998.
36. Hays CL. Channel One’s mixed grades in schools. New York Times December 5, 1999:C1,C14,C15.
37. Jacobson M, Maxwell B. Corporations invade the classroom: have schools become the last great marketing frontier? Rethinking Schools 1994;9(2):3,24. Molnar A. Giving Kids the Business: The Commercialization of America’s Schools. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996.
38. Consumers Union. Captive Kids: Commercial Pressures on Kids at School. Yonkers, NY: Consumers Union Educational Services, 1995.
39. Levine J, Gussow JD. Nutrition professionals’ knowledge of and attitudes toward the food industry’s education and marketing programs in elementary schools. J Am Diet Assoc 1999;99:973–976.
40. Farber PJ. Schools for sale. Advertising Age October 25, 1999:22–26. Manning S. Students for sale: how corporations are buying their way into America’s classrooms. The Nation September 27, 1999:11–18. New outcry raised against Channel One. New York Times June 11, 2001:C13.
41. Poppendieck J. Breadlines Knee-Deep in Wheat: Food Assistance in the Great Depression. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1986.
42. Oliveira V. Decline in nutrition assistance expenditures continued in 1999. FoodReview 2000;23(2):35–43.
43. Citizens’ Commission on School Nutrition. White Paper on School-Lunch Nutrition. Center for Science in the Public Interest, December 1990. Olson CM. Joint position of Society for Nutrition Education (SNE), the American Dietetic Association (ADA), and American School Food Service Association (ASFSA): school-based nutrition programs and services. J Nutrition Education 1995;27:58–61.
44. USDA. National school lunch program and school breakfast program: nutrition objectives for school meals; proposed rule. Federal Register 59: 30218–30251, June 10, 1994.
45. USDA. School meals initiative for healthy children. Alexandria, VA, June 1994. For recent information, see: http://www.usda.gov/.
46. US General Accounting Office. School Lunch Program: Role and Impacts of Private Food Service Companies (GAO/RCED-96–217). Washington, DC, August 1996.
47. Price C, Kuhn B. Public and private efforts for the National School Lunch Program. FoodReview 1996;19(2):51–57.
48. Morse D. School cafeterias are enrolling fast-food franchisees. Wall Street J July 28, 1998:B2.
49. Lee L. School’s back, and so are the marketers. Wall Street J September 15, 1997:B1,B6.
50. Sheraton M. School lunch utopia: no impossible dream. New York Times May 20, 1976:C32. Burros M. A school turns “yucks” into “yums” for new foods. New York Times May 4, 1994:C4.

CHAPTER 9. PUSHING SOFT DRINKS: “POURING RIGHTS”

1. Jacobson MF. Liquid Candy: How Soft Drinks are Harming America’s Health. Washington, DC: Center for Science in the Public Interest, 1998.
2. Ellison RC, Singer MR, Moore LL, et al. Current caffeine intake of young children: amount and sources. J Am Diet Assoc 1995;95:802–804. Barboza D. More hip, higher hop: caffeinated drinks catering to excitable boys and girls. New York Times August 22, 1997:D1,D5.
3. Daft L, Arcos A, Hallawell A, et al. School Food Purchase Study: Final Report. Washington, DC: USDA, October 1998.
4. Morton JF, Guthrie JF. Changes in children’s total fat intakes and their food group sources of fat, 1989–1991 versus 1994–1995: implications for diet quality. Family Economics Nutrition Review 1998;11(3):44–57.
5. Wilson JWS, Enns CW, Goldman JD, et al. Data tables: combined results from USDA’s 1994 and 1995 Continuing Survey of Food Intakes by Individuals and 1994 and 1995 Diet and Health Knowledge Survey, June 1997. Online: http://www.barc.usda.gov/bhnrc/foodsurvey/.
6. Harnack L, Stang J, Story M. Soft drink consumption among U.S. children and adolescents: nutritional consequences. J Am Diet Assoc 1999;99:436–441.
7. Ludwig DS, Peterson KE, Gortmaker SL. Relation between consumption of sugar-sweetened drinks and childhood obesity: a prospective, observational analysis. Lancet 2001;357:505–508.
8. Ismail AI, Burt BA, Eklund SA. The cariogenicity of soft drinks in the United States. J Am Dental Association 1984;109:241–245. Minnesota Dental Association. Sip all day, get decay. St. Paul, MN: 2000. Online: http://www.mndental.org. Wyshak G. Teenaged girls, carbonated beverage consumption, and bone fractures. Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine 2000;154:610–613.
9. Endicott CR. 100 leading national advertisers, 43rd annual report. Advertising Age September 28, 1998 (suppl):s3–s50. The 45th annual report appeared September 25, 2000:s1–s58. Chura H. Pepsi plans biggest-ever urban push. Advertising Age April 9, 2001:1,38.
10. The biggest change in the American diet in the ‘90s? . . . would you believe soft drinks! Yahoo Finance March 2, 1998. Online: http://finance.yahoo.com/. The fastest-growing foods were soft drinks, presweetened cereals, bagels, toaster pastries, and pizza, in that order.
11. Coca-Cola Company. Online: http://www.cocacola.com/.
12. Diet Pepsi, 100% uh huh. On the Fridge. Washington Post August 4, 1993:C2. The bottles are manufactured by the Munchkin Bottling Co, Los Angeles, CA.
13. Siener K, Rothman D, Farrar J. Soft drink logos on baby bottles: do they influence what is fed to children? J Dentistry for Children 1997;64:55–60.
14. Hays CL. Bridging a “generation next” gap. New York Times January 31, 1999:C2.
15. General Accounting Office. Public Education: Commercial Activities in Schools (GAO/HEHS-00–156). Washington, DC: September, 2000. Also see: Gross D. Pepsi-State. University Business March/April 1998:35–40.
16. Hays CL. Today’s lesson: soda rights: consultant helps schools sell themselves to vendors. New York Times May 21, 1999:C1,C9.
17. Cherkassky I. Getting the exclusive. Beverage World October 1998: 97–101.
18. The Center for Commercial-Free Public Education, 1714 Franklin Street, #100–306, Oakland CA 94612. Online: www.ibiblio.org/commercialfree/index.html.
19. Hays CL. Be true to your cola, rah! rah! Battle for soft-drink loyalties moves to public schools. New York Times March 10,1998:D1,D4.
20. North Syracuse Central School District. Agreement with the Coca-Cola Bottling Company of New York, Inc., July 1, 1998.
21. Nolan M. Public to have say on cola deal. Post Standard (Syracuse, NY), December 14, 1998:B1. Cermak M. Coke, school district ink deal. Times Union (Albany, NY), June 3, 1999.
22. Bushey J. District 11’s Coke problem. Harper’s Magazine February 1999:26–27.
23. Zorn RL. The great cola wars: how one district profits from the competition for vending machines. Am School Board J 1999(2):31–33.
24. Kaufman M. Pop culture: health advocates sound alarm as schools strike deals with Coke and Pepsi. Washington Post Health March 23, 1999:12,15,16,19.
25. Wiley HW. 1001 Tests of Foods, Beverages and Toilet Accessories Good and Otherwise: Why They Are So. New York: Hearst’s International Library, 1914:19.
26. National Soft Drink Association, Appellant, v. J.R. Block, Secretary, Department of Agriculture, et al. 721 F. 2d 1348 (U.S. Court of Appeals, D.C. Circuit. 1983). The judge’s opinion contains a pithy summary of the history prior to 1983.
27. Legislative history, Public Law 91–248. School lunch program—expansion. House report No. 91–81, March 17, 1969. U.S. Code Congressional and Administrative News, 1970:3014.
28. School Lunch Program—Expansion. Public Law 91–248, 84 Stat. 214, May 14, 1970. USDA.
29. Legislative history, Public Law 95–166 (National School Lunch Act . . . of 1977). U.S. Code Congressional and Administrative News, 1977:3573.
30. USDA. National School Lunch Program and School Breakfast Program. Proposed rule. Federal Register 44:40004–40014, July 6, 1979. Also see: Final rule. Federal Register 45:6758–6772, January 29, 1980.
31. USDA. National School Lunch Program and School Breakfast Program: Competitive Foods. Final rule. Federal Register 50:20545–20547, May 17, 1985. Also see: Code of Federal Regulations. USDA 7 CFR § 210 et seq., January 1, 1986.
32. Pear R. Senator, promoting student nutrition, battles Coca-Cola. New York Times April 26, 1994:A20.
33. U.S. Senate. Report 103–300. Better Nutrition and Health for Children Act of 1994. 103rd Congress, 2nd Session. July 1, 1994.
34. Pear R. Soda industry tries to avert a school ban. New York Times May 17, 1994:A15.
35. Legislative history, Senate Report 103–300, § 203. Competitive foods of minimal nutritional value. U.S. Code Congressional and Administrative News, 1994:3718. Also see: Healthy Meals for Healthy Americans Act of 1994. Public Law 103–448 § 203, 108 Stat. 4699 and 4738.
36. USDA. National School Lunch Program and School Breakfast Program: School Meals Initiative for Healthy Children: Final Rule. Federal Register 60:31187–31222, June 13, 1995. Quotation: p. 31203.
37. New York State Education Law. Sale of certain sweetened food in schools—prohibition. Chapter 674, § 915. August 6, 1987.
38. Lawmakers are ready to enlist in the Cola wars. Nutrition Week May 14, 1999:6. Senator Leahy introduced the Better Nutrition for School Children Act of 1999 (106th Congress, 1st Session).
39. Story M, Hayes M, Kalina B. Availability of foods in high schools: is there cause for concern? J Am Diet Assoc 1996;96:123–126.
40. General Accounting Office. School lunch program: role and impacts of private food service companies (GAO/RCED-96–217). Washington, DC, August 1996.
41. Fox MK, Crepinsek MK, Connor P, Battaglia M. School Nutrition Dietary Assessment Study-II. Washington, DC: USDA, 2001.
42. Community Food Resource Center. Nonprofit group sues board of education for illegally selling non-nutritious foods (press release). New York, April 22, 1999. The Center is a New York City-based advocacy group for school meal programs; it filed its case, Morales, Jimenez, Silver, et al. v. New York Board of Education, in the U.S. Eastern District Court, Kings County, April 13, 1999. The press release quoted a letter that I and others signed in support of the suit.
43. Caldwell D, Nestle M, Rogers W. School nutrition services. In: Marx E, Wooley SF, eds. Health Is Academic: A Guide to Coordinated School Health Problems. New York: Teachers College Press, 1998:195–223.
44. USDA. National school lunch program and school breakfast program: nutrition objectives for school meals; proposed rule. Federal Register 59:30218–30251, June 10, 1994.
45. Contento I, Balch GI, Bronner YL, et al. The effectiveness of nutrition education and implications for nutrition education policy, programs, and research: a review of research. IV. Nutrition education for school-aged children. J Nutrition Education 1995;27:298–311. Wildey MB, Pampalone SZ, Pelletier RL, et al. Fat and sugar levels are high in snacks purchased from student stores in middle schools. J Am Diet Assoc 2000;100:319–322.
46. DHHS. Healthy People 2010. Washington, DC, 2000.
47. Flaherty J. With schools the battleground, a new kind of cola war breaks out. New York Times February 3, 1999:B10.
48. It’s about money (editorial). The Patent Trader (Northern Westchester, NY), November 25, 1998:A34. Sheehan J. Why I said no to Coca-Cola. Rethinking Schools 1999;14:Winter, 1999. Online: http://www.rethinkingschools.org/.
49. Wood F. Soda deals are too sweet for schools to pass up. Newark Star-Ledger January 3, 1999:3.
50. USDA. Tips for Using the Food Guide Pyramid for Young Children 2 to 6 Years Old (Program Aid 1647). Washington, DC, 1999.
51. Nestle M, Jacobson MF. Halting the obesity epidemic: a public health policy approach. Public Health Reports 2000;115:12–24.
52. USDA. Foods Sold in Competition with USDA School Meal Programs: A Report to Congress. January 12, 2001. Online: http://www.fns.usda.gov.
53. Hard line on soft drinks. Nutrition Week April 13, 2001:1–2. Leahy P, et al. The Better Nutrition for School Children Act of 2001, April 6, 2001. Online: http://thomas.loc.gov (S. 745, 107th Congress, 1st Session).
54. Lourey B. Minnesota soda pop bill: Where do we go from here? Presentation to the University of Minnesota’s Symposium on “Soft Drinks in Schools: Exploring the Issues,” June 7, 2001. Representatives of the Minnesota Soft Drink Association attended that meeting (at which I spoke) and distributed a press release notable for its strong defense of pouring rights contracts (“Soft drink companies have had successful local business partnerships with schools for decades,” “A sedentary lifestyle is the leading cause of obesity,” “Many factors contribute to tooth decay, including the types of foods that are consumed”) and its citation of favorable research, much of it funded by the industry.
55. Zernike K. Coke to dilute push in schools for its products. New York Times March 14, 2001:A14. King P. New Coca-Cola marketing pours it on for education. Advertising Age March 26, 2001:20.
56. Wynns J. Yes: selling students to advertisers sends the wrong message in the classroom. Advertising Age June 7, 1999:26.

By Marion Nestle in "Food Politics - How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health" University of California Press, USA, 2013, excerpts Part III. Digitized, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa