Size Matters: Why We Love to Hate Big Food

By Charlie Arnot

Despite food being safer, more affordable and more available than at any time in human history, consumers are increasingly skeptical and critical of today’s food system. In Size Matters, Charlie Arnot provides thought provoking insight into how the food system lost consumer trust, what can be done to restore it, and the remarkable changes taking place on farms and in food companies, supermarkets and restaurants every day as technology and consumer demand drive radical change. The very systems and technologies that are mistrusted by consumers are driving a revolution that empowers individual consumers to find the perfect recipe of taste and nutrition to meet their specific needs and desires. Size Matters pulls back the curtain to examine the irony, competing priorities and new realities that shape today’s food system.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Copernicus
• Release date: Jul 16, 2018
• ISBN: 9783319764665

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© Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature 2018

Charlie ArnotSize Matters: Why We Love to Hate Big Foodhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76466-5_1

1. Sowing the Seeds of Distrust

Charlie Arnot¹ 

(1)

Center for Food Integrity and Look East, Kansas City, MO, USA

Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio, our nation turns its lonely eyes to you?

Simon and Garfunkel

A Pivotal Year

The United States emerged from World War II with a strong sense of optimism about the future and a cohesive vision that as long as we pulled together, we could accomplish anything. The Allied victory had demonstrated the effectiveness of American might. Bigger really was better. The shared sacrifices of The Greatest Generation united the country.

By the time the 1960s rolled around, that enthusiasm began to fade and a cultural shift was taking place. Cultural change came to a head in 1968, a watershed year that TIME Magazine declared, The year that shaped a generation.¹

The dramatic events of 1968 marked the end of an era, and with it the historical trust Americans had in institutions.

In 1968, the Vietnam War was raging and the Cold War was icy. In January, North Korea captured the American surveillance ship USS Pueblo. In an exchange of gunfire, the North Koreans killed one crewman and boarded the ship. The surviving crew members were held in a POW camp, tortured and starved by their captors. After months of negotiations, the United States publicly announced that the Pueblo had been spying and North Korea released the crew. Immediately, the U.S. recanted the spying claims.

The Pueblo was an embarrassing episode for the military and the situation would soon get worse. On Jan. 30, the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese launched the Tet offensive. The attack on 36 major cities and towns in South Vietnam caught U.S. forces by surprise and revealed that the war would not be easily won.²

On the home front, the turn of events discouraged a war-weary public. Protests became commonplace, first on college campuses, then in more visible venues. The Democratic National Convention was held in Chicago in August 1968. The party was fractured over the war and fights broke out on the convention floor, with delegates and reporters beaten and knocked to the ground. Outside the convention hall, thousands opposed to the Vietnam War converged on Chicago to protest. Mayor Richard Daley charged police to maintain order at all costs and they beat and gassed protesters.³

More than a foreign war shattered peace that year. On April 4, venerated civil rights leader The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. stepped onto the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis and was shot and killed. Just 2 months later, Bobby Kennedy was gunned down by Sirhan Sirhan in a Los Angeles hotel.

Even the Olympics, which traditionally united the nation in pride and celebration, were impacted by conflict. Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their fists to protest discrimination and racial injustice during the playing of the U.S. national anthem at the summer games in Mexico City.

And on Christmas Eve 1968, three astronauts in Apollo 8 circled the moon and took a photograph of the Earth rising behind it. For the very first time, the human race saw itself from outer space. This iconic image of the blue planet brought a new recognition that the resources we all share are limited.

This year – 1968 – was the year that we began to lose trust in institutions and that, in turn, set the stage for why we began to lose trust in our food. Perhaps if 1968 had been an exception, we might have recovered. But the years that followed brought a disturbing cascade of violations of public trust in virtually every sector of society.

Watergate Becomes an Icon

At the time, few recognized that the arrest of burglars at the Democratic National Committee offices in the Watergate Hotel in 1972 was such an egregious violation of public trust that today, pundits routinely refer to any scandal as a …-Gate.

The investigation ultimately linked the burglars, who were attempting to wiretap phones and steal documents, to President Richard Nixon’s reelection campaign. In January 1973, the scandal took on new life when two of Nixon’s aides were convicted. In April, the Senate Watergate Committee began formal hearings. The country was shocked to learn that some of the nation’s top political leaders were involved in cover-ups and illegal activity.

As the probe reached closer to the Oval Office, Americans began to question the integrity of their president, whom they had reelected the year before in a landslide. Nixon’s famous declaration, I’m not a crook, quickly became a punch line for an increasingly cynical public.

The entire federal government was consumed by the scandal. The Supreme Court ordered Nixon to turn over tapes of conversations in his office to the House Judiciary Committee. The committee passed articles of impeachment against Nixon and on Aug. 8, 1974, he became the only U.S. President to resign from office.⁴

Nixon’s resignation shook confidence in our democracy to its very core. Those were dark days for America. We wondered if elected officials could be trusted. Did the democratic process even work anymore?

The republic did survive, but it was forever changed. Watergate is now part of our vocabulary and today we are routinely skeptical of the intentions and integrity of political leaders.

Just a decade after Watergate, another president became embroiled in scandal. Ronald Reagan’s administration was implicated in a complicated, covert deal to trade weapons to Iran, then to divert the funds to Contra rebels in Nicaragua. Reagan initially denied such a trade had taken place, then retracted the statement a week later. Congress held hearings for 2 months that resulted in criminal charges for some involved.⁵

Twenty-five years after Watergate, when President Bill Clinton was confronted about his relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinsky, he insisted he did not have sexual relations with that woman. Americans responded with a collective eye roll. The great lengths to which Clinton went to try to cover up his misdeeds further jaded them.

In the years since, headlines of elected leaders caught in wrongdoing have flowed in a steady stream: Newt Gingrich had an affair while leading the charge against Clinton; Rep. Tom DeLay was convicted of money laundering; lobbyist Jack Abramoff entangled dozens of elected and appointed officials in a corruption scandal; Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich tried to sell a Senate seat; Alaska Senator Ted Stevens was accused of taking brides; Idaho Senator Larry Craig was arrested for soliciting sex in an airport restroom.

Scandals have become so routine that politicians are reaching new depths to break news. John Edwards had an affair while his wife battled breast cancer. Hard-hitting prosecutor Eliot Spitzer broke up prostitution rings while he hired prostitutes. South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford disappeared for 8 days only to be discovered in Argentina visiting his mistress.

The 2016 presidential election set a new low for divisive political discourse. The general election offered the country the option of a billionaire reality TV star who tried to dismiss his vulgar misogynistic musings as locker room talk, or an uninspiring policy wonk who many viewed as the representative of a corrupt establishment. The popular vote went to the policy wonk while the electoral college put the reality TV star in the White House, further polarizing an already deeply divided republic.

Sigh.

To say government has lost public trust is .... well, putting it mildly. Though the most obvious and most extensive violation of public trust may have occurred in the political realm, a long list of culprits and misdeeds caused us to lose faith and become skeptical.

An Epidemic of Scandal

In 1979, The China Syndrome, starring Jane Fonda, Jack Lemmon and Michael Douglas, told the story of a catastrophe at a nuclear power plant and a damaged reactor with the potential to melt the earth all the way to China.

Just 12 days after the film was released, the movie played out in real life when a safety valve failed in a cooling tower at the nuclear power plant on Three Mile Island. The reactor melted down, radioactive gas was released and the state of Pennsylvania, not to mention the nation, went into a panic. Some 140,000 people evacuated the area. The investigation pinned the responsibility on a combination of equipment malfunctions, design-related problems and human error.⁶

Despite the worst fears, no one in the area was exposed to harmful radiation. The energy sector, however, continues to deal with fallout from Three Mile Island. Nuclear power is well established as a safe, clean form of energy. Even risk-averse France derives 75 percent of its power from nuclear reactors and is the world’s largest exporter of electricity.⁷ The United States, in contrast, halted construction on all new nuclear power plants until 2013.⁸

At Three Mile Island, nuclear energy lost its social license and it has yet to fully recover. (Much more on social license to come in Chap. 5).

That was just one of several high-profile breaches of public trust for the energy sector. In 1989, the tanker Exxon-Valdez spilled one million gallons of crude oil into the remote, scenic Prince William Sound in Alaska. Photos of birds and sea otters coated in oil left a strong and lasting impression. At that time, the Exxon-Valdez was the largest oil spill in history – until 2010 when BP’s Deepwater Horizon offshore drill ruptured on the Gulf Coast. The three companies implicated in the spill appeared to spend more time pointing fingers and fixing blame than fixing the problem while the evening news showed tens of thousands of gallons of crude gush from the gaping pipe.

There’s no escape from violations of public trust, even in the national pastime.

Pete Rose, baseball’s likable all-time Major League hits leader, was banned from the game in 1989 for betting on games, some of them involving the Cincinnati Reds while he was playing and managing. Super Bowl XLIX was tainted by the Patriots and quarterback Tom Brady for allegedly arranging to have the footballs used by his team slightly deflated in an episode dubbed Deflate-Gate. Accusations of players using performance-enhancing drugs have become commonplace with renowned cyclist, cancer survivor and steroid user Lance Armstrong the poster child for broken trust.

Two of the most disturbing and tragic developments in the world of sports were tied to the sexual abuse of children. First, the discovery that Penn State football coach Jerry Sandusky had been sexually abusing children for decades. Second, the decades of sexual abuse by Larry Nassar, a once world-renowned sports physician who specialized in treating gymnasts. As troubling as the decades of abuse by both Sandusky and Nassar are the allegations of institutional cover-up by universities and athletic organizations charged with assuring the safety of the children who were victimized. Dozens of those who are accused of turning a blind eye to the abuse have been forced to resign and some have been criminally prosecuted for allegedly knowing and ignoring or actively covering up the abuse.

Even those in the pulpit are not exempt. Televangelists Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Bakker lived lavishly on gifts from viewers who sometimes pledged their last dollars before both were embroiled in sex scandals. Ted Haggard, mega-church pastor and president of the National Association of Evangelicals, paid a male prostitute for drugs and sex. The Catholic church around the globe is now paying millions in reparations to those who were victims of child sex abuse perpetrated by priests and covered up for decades.

With no holy ground remaining that’s above reproach, public skepticism is hardly surprising. It is at an epic level when it comes to big business, and it’s easy to understand why.

Consider WorldCom’s Bernie Ebbers, who turned the company into the nation’s second largest long-distance telephone carrier. He managed it by cooking the