How Lobbying Makes America Sick

Many of us eat at fast food venues because they’re cheap, fast and – let’s face it – they’re everywhere. What we’re not told about is the intense industry effort at the policy level to keep fast food cheap and ubiquitous.

Fast food transnationals have used a myriad of tactics to manipulate the policy process. They spend millions lobbying and supporting fast food-friendly politicians, but that’s only the tip of the iceberg. To keep public health legislation from being enacted, fast food giants have also filed lawsuits against local government and actively passed preemption laws at the state level across the country to prevent local communities from enacting locally relevant public health policies.

Back in 2008, when San Francisco passed their menu board labeling law, the California Restaurant Association (representing mostly chain restaurants like Burger King and Taco Bell), sued the city.[1] Last year, McDonald’s Corporation threatened to sue San Francisco for passing the Healthy Meals incentive (San Francisco expects the lawsuit by the end of this year). Both times, they said the city’s local public health policy violated their right to free speech, but their true goal may have been to drain the city’s resources with a drawn-out law suit.

Since 2002, the fast food industry in conjunction with ALEC (the American Legislative Exchange Council) has been pushing pre-emptive legislation in states across the country and in Congress to stop the public from suing them for the damage that their products cause.[2]

Just last year, after Santa Clara and San Francisco, CA passed groundbreaking local public health policy to incentivize better nutritional content in children’s meals, McDonald’s, their suppliers and ad agencies and the National Restaurant Association went to work to make sure other communities didn’t have the right to decide what was right for their own communities.

When a state senator in Nebraska introduced a similar bill, McDonald supplier, Con Agra, showed up in the form of the Grocery Manufacturers Association to flex their muscle. One month later, Arizona Representative Gowan, a member of the American Legislative Exchange Council introduced pre-emptive legislation that banned local communities from passing locally relevant public health policy. Florida followed suit with their own bill. These state sponsored bills are not only a slap in the face of local health departments, they put local governments in the untenable position of having to apply their existing laws differently to food retailers.

When industry insiders don’t have enough votes to squash public health legislation in states, counties and cities across the country, they work their connections to implement back-up strategies. After fighting menu-labeling legislation in over 30 states and municipalities, the restaurant industry inserted pre-emptive menu labeling legislation into Obama’s health care bill. In this case, industry caved to public health professionals and advocates around the country by endorsing national menu labeling, but at the same time they took away local municipalities like New York City’s right to sponsor their own locally relevant (and stronger) legislation.

Another favorite tactic of the food industry is to implement un-enforceable, “voluntary” standards and initiatives that they can make up themselves. For years, both the food and media industries have engaged in a concerted campaign to undermine public policy
efforts related to food marketing to children. At the same time, industry has attempted to distract policymakers and the general public with schemes of industry self-regulation. In the meantime, marketing to children has gone along unabated, with the childhood obesity epidemic and other chronic health problems only getting worse.

Most recently, when the Congress formed the Interagency Working Group on Food Marketing to Kids to propose science based, voluntary nutrition standards for food marketed to kids, the food industry flipped out. The National Restaurant Association proposed one set of “voluntary” standards written by the food industry. The Better Business Bureau and McDonald’s proposed another set. Big Food and McDonald’s suppliers formed the “Sensible Food Policy Coalition”, spending nearly $60 million on lobbying since the start of the Obama administration, all the sole purpose of derailing the Interagency Working Group effort.

1. City Attorney of San Francisco, “California Restaurant Association v. The City and County of San Francisco and The San Francisco Department of Public Health,” and accompanying press release, City of San Francisco, California, http://www.sfgov.org/site/cityattorney_index.asp (accessed August 30, 2008).

2. National Restaurant Association 2003, "National Restaurant Association Board Member Testifies Before Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Frivolous Lawsuits Against Restaurants," National Restaurant News, http://www.restaurant.org/pressroom/pressrelease.cfm?ID=747 (accessed August 30, 2008).

3. Press Release, "Senators Murkowski and Caper Introduce Bill to Help Americans Make Smart and Healthy Choices When Dining Out," Office of United States Senator Lisa Murkowski (September 24, 2008), http://murkowski.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=PressOffice.PressReleases&ContentRecord_id=9abf8846-00c3-43a3-2eee-958969254c8a (accessed December 8, 2008). 

4. Nation’s Restaurant News “Ga. legislature pre-empts county menu-labeling laws,” (April 7, 2008) Business Network,  http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m3190/is_14_42/ai_n25353775/pg_2?tag=content;col1 (accessed December 8, 2008).

Photo: http://pro.corbis.com/images/42-17255537.jpg?size=572&uid={98DD5B7A-8E78-4C55-B6B6-ED20430BADCA}