Inside D.C.

Foodies attack!

A group calling itself Food Policy Action (FPA), a coalition of unions, animal rights, environmental, organic and self-proclaimed consumer groups, has decided it will spend this last month before the mid-term elections spending lots of money to convince voters to consider “food policy” at the polls.

This is no rag-tag bunch.  FPA is chaired by Ken Cook, president of the Environmental Working Group (EWG), one of the richest and most politically savvy enviro groups in town.  FPA’s board is a who’s who of activist groups with money:  HSUS, Oxfam America, the United Food & Commercial Workers Union, Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI – “the food police”), the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and the Union of Concerned Scientists. Throw in groups like Bread for the World, a celebrity chef or two, a large New England organic dairy, and the head of the National Black Farmers Assn., among others, and there you have it.  A perfectly and politically balanced board of directors.  Check it out at http://foodpolicyaction.org/.

The group spent $30,000 in a 2014 primary battle between Rep. Mike Pompeo (R, KS), author of a bill to block GM labeling by the states supported by the ag/food world, and former House member Todd Tiahrt (D).   Tiahrt lost, but FPA says the food policy issue was “viable” in the election.  The new target is Rep. Steve Southerland (R, FL), marked for defeat because he unsuccessfully tried during the 2012-2014 Farm Bill debates to reimpose work requirements for federal food stamp recipients.  Southerland says his amendment was about greater efficiency in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), a federal entitlement serving 47 million people at a taxpayer cost of over $80 billion a year.  FPA says that’s a bad thing – I recall the word “cynical” was used – and is willing to spend $100,000 on a get-out-the-vote campaign against Southerland, including telephone banks, digital ads and social media.

The website rates each member of Congress through a “National Food Policy Scorecard.”  Says the site:  “The Scorecard reflects the consensus of top food policy experts…The scored food policy issues include domestic and international hunger, food safety, food access, farm subsidies, animal welfare, food and farm labor, nutrition, food additives, food transparency, local and regional food production, organic farming and the effects of food production on the environment.  The Scorecard lets you identify which legislators are working for sensible food policies.”  The experts aren’t named.

Far be it from me to accuse FPA of partisanship or betraying its own political bent, but when you scroll through the scorecard ratings, is it just happenstance most of those receiving 100% ratings from the group are urban Democrats and those sitting near the bottom of the ratings are Republicans or those whose constituents include workaday farmers and ranchers?  Why did FPA choose to target candidates to defeat rather than finding candidates to support and promote?  Is it because those candidates who benefit from FPA’s bank account are then expected to be beholden to the group?  Isn’t this just the birth and evolution of an urban Foodie SuperPAC?

Another interesting part of the website is the legislation section.  The “important” FPA bills just happen to be the legislative priorities several of the individual board members have pushed unsuccessfully – because of ag and food industry opposition – for the last several years.

FPA admits its 2014 campaign is practice for the 2016 presidential and congressional elections, and targeting Southerland will, it’s hoped, demonstrate which political tactics and messages work and which don’t.  The group focuses its messages on women and young people – those identified as caring the most about issues like hunger, antibiotics in meat and GM food labeling.

Should food policy issues be campaign issues?  Absolutely, but another our-way-or-the-highway group pushing impractical, expensive, divisive, subjective and trendy food “policy” is not the way to get to a better system.  Will FPA acknowledge the current “buy local, buy fresh, buy organic, buy free range” push by most foodie groups does nothing but exacerbate the two-tiered food system rapidly evolving in this country, split between the 3% of us who can afford to pay two or three times the cost of conventionally produced foods and the 97% who can’t?  That is, I guess, unless the federal government pitches in to either buy down production costs or bump up that SNAP spending.

The groups in FPA each enjoy multi-million-dollar annual budgets, but apparently and individually they aren’t quite getting the public’s attention.  It appears they believe there’s strength in number or perhaps it’s misery loves company.

This entire FPA effort conjures a quote attributed to Groucho Marx: “Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.”