Tuesday, February 24, 2009

How the Food Industry Influences Food Policy

Simple - they're invited to the table and once there they're able to extend their considerable influence and spin on the proceedings (how many public citizens, scientists, doctors or dietitians have teams of PR folks and scientists helping craft their messages?).

I've blogged about this a great deal in the past and commented on how bad an idea it is to bring people with a vested interest in national food policy to the table when trying to develop new national food policies.

Rather than go through all that again I strongly encourage you to spend 6 minutes of your morning watching the following video. It does a great job covering just who it is who attends and gets involved in the consultations surrounding national food policy development.

While this particular video deals with American school lunch programs, rest assured this video could have been filmed at every "public" consultation surrounding Canada's Food Guide and of course the non-public, stakeholder invited consultations as well.



(Thanks to Marion Nestle for featuring the video on her blog)