Congress And Food Policy-- The Good, The Bad, The Ugly

The stated mission of Tom Colicchio's group, Food Policy Action, is to highlight the importance of food policy and to promote policies that support healthy diets, reduce hunger at home and abroad, improve food access and affordability, uphold the rights and dignity of food and farm workers, increase transparency, improve public health, reduce the risk of food-borne illness, support local and regional food systems, protect and maintain sustainable fisheries, treat farm animals humanely and reduce the environmental impact of farming and food production. This week they put out their 3rd annual scorecard to highlight how members of Congress have been voting on food-related issues.

Among the many bills they focused on were these dozen with very specific aims:

• H.R. 1284- Directs EPA to suspend registration of certain pesticides until they can be proven safe for bees, and to conduct research on the health of bees and bee mortality.
• S. 1332- Gives USDA the authority to issue mandatory recall of contaminated meat and poultry products.
• H.R. 913 and  S. 511- Amends the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act to prohibit the sale of food that has been genetically engineered or contains genetically engineered ingredients, unless that information is clearly disclosed.
• H.R. 1061 and  S. 569- Increases annual mandatory Farm to School funding from $5 million to $15 million and increases the maximum grant award to $200,000. Expands the program scope to include pre-schools, summer food service programs, and after-school programs. Creates incentives for beginning, veteran and socially-disadvantaged farmers and ranchers to participate in the program.
• H.R. 1728 and S. 613- Expands eligibility for summer food service, increases the number of reimbursable meals, and establishes a competitive grant program for solutions to limited transportation to congregate summer food sites.
• H.R. 2627- Requires USDA to establish and implement a plan to increase the use of salad bars in schools, including through a competitive grant program.
• H.R. 3164 and S. 1832- Raises the minimum wage to $15 per hour for most workers by 2020, and provides a formula for an annual increase after that.
• H.R. 3316 and S. 540 - Authorizes USDA loan guarantee program for school kitchen infrastructure improvements, and authorizes targeted grants for infrastructure and training and technical assistance.
• H.R. 704- Eliminates the Renewable Fuel Standard’s corn-based ethanol requirement, caps the ethanol blend amount into gas at 10%, and requires EPA to cap cellulosic biofuels levels at current production levels.
• S. 190- Authorizes FDA program for inspection of imported seafood, and amends the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act to prohibit the importation of any seafood from a foreign country unless the country complies with U.S. standards for seafood manufacturing, processing, and holding.

They singled out six congressmen as "Food Policy Failures," Tom Graves (R-GA), Jim Bridenstine (R-OK), Buddy Carter (R-GA), Jason Chaffetz (R-UT), Gregg Harper (R-MS) and Kenny Marchant (R-TX). Most Democrats did well and most Republicans did poorly. But... there were some exceptions. Democrats with failing grades included this batch of shit-heads:

• Collin Peterson (Blue Dpg-MN)- 41%
• Henry Cuellar (Blue Dog-TX)- 43%
• Jim Costa (Blue Dog-CA)- 50%
• Kurt Schrader (Blue Dog)- 53%
• Kyrsten Sinema (Blue Dog)- 56%
• Brad Ashford (Blue Dog-NE)- 60%
• Sanford Bishop (Blue Dog-GA)- 60%
• Jim Cooper (Blue Dog-TN)- 63%
• Bennie Thompson (D-MS)- 64%
• David Scott (Blue Dog-GA)- 65%
• Cedrick Richmond (New Dem-LA)- 67%
• Terri Sewell (New Dem-AL)- 67%
• Tim Walz (D-MN)- 67%
• Jim Clyburn (D-SC)- 69%
• Cheri Bustos (Blue Dog-IL)- 69%
• George Butterfield (D-NC)- 69%
• Filemon Vela (Blue Dog-TX)- 71%
• Gwen Graham (Blue Dog-FL)- 71%

Ironically, the last name on the list, Gwen Graham, was elected as Food Policy Action's first big success. They helped oust reactionary Republican Steve Southerland in a close, hard-fought race in 2014. Graham has turned out to be

a- better than Southerland
b- worse than almost any Democrat in Congress
c- pretty bad on Food Policy Action's issues

They probably need to get a little more sophisticated about understanding that not all Democrats are any good and that the worst thing anyone with a progressive agenda can ever do, is take advice from the creeps at the DCCC, DSCC and DNC, likely where lots of the board members, Colicchio included, have friendly contacts. Stick with them and you wind up wasting your money and efforts promoting garbage candidates like Gwen Graham. There 6 House endorsements this year come straight from the DCCC and include 2 California candidates who might turn out to be good-- Michael Eggman and Emilio Huerta-- and three who will turn out to be as bad or worse than Graham: "ex"-Republican Monica Vernon (IA), and two grotesque Wall Street-oriented Blue Dogs, Brad Schneider (IL) and Josh Gottheimer (NJ), who will eventually have all the Food Policy Action folks sitting around in a circle weeping and cursing. (The 6th endorsee, Anna Throne-Holst, Steve Israel's Suffolk County girlfriend, is going to lose badly, so it isn't worth speculating about how bad she would wind up being on food issues in Congress.)

Two much better endorsements-- but not ones the DCCC or Pelosi would have ever told them about would be Tom Wakely, the progressive Democrat running against House Science Committee chairman, Lamar Smith, and DuWayne Gregory, the progressive Democrat running against GOP hack Peter King-- in other words, against two reactionary Trumpists who failed the Food Policy Action scorecard with miserable scores. "With Lamar Smith and this insane brand of conservatism," Wakely told us, "it's all about the bottom dollar. He doesn't care if pesticides make you ill. He doesn't care if you want to know where your meat is sourced. Smith and his cronies only care about promoting enterprise at any cost, and unfortunately the cost is usually the well-being of our citizens. This is becoming taxation without representation. We're paying the salaries of congressmen like Lamar Smith so they can be stewards of everything but the people they were elected to represent. When I'm elected I'll always vote in a manner so that the people will have a right to know how their food was prepared. It's simply common decency."

And DuWayne went through the Food Policy Action scorecard report on King and told us that the Long Island congressman "has an abysmal 31% record when it comes to food safety. Voting against common sense measures to ensure our food supply is healthy to consume shouldn't be complicated. I understand the importance of dangerous chemicals being restricted from our food supply and hold those accountable with strict regulations. We need members of Congress that will fight for the people and not loosen laws for violators."

 

What Do Politicians Eat-- Aside From Bribes From Food Conglomerates?

On his MSNBC show Friday, Chris Hayes, talked with socially conscious celebrity chef Tom Colicchio about the new food guidelines from the U.S.D.A. (above). Does anyone care what the U.S.D.A. suggests? Or, is there a way to implement their guidelines as part of social policy? As a society, for example, we eat way too much sugar. Hundreds of thousands of Americans died every year because over sugar over-consumption. Diabetes and cancer are rampant. As many as two-thirds of Americans are obese now. Social policy is based on bribes to corrupt politicians-- both parties, like Florida Republican Senator Marco Rubio and DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz-- who make sure the multibillion dollar sugar empire of their benefactors are subsidized with taxpayer funds and protected from competition from cheap foreign-grown sugar. It seems like poor social policy that we spend $180 billion annually in healthcare costs related to bad diet. But the lobbyists are working this full-time and the politicians are lined up to line their pockets and fill their campaign war chests with their bribes.

Some local governments are trying soda taxes, the idea being to make the worst carrier of sugary death, more expensive. Not easy to do. Over 5 million people have watched this sugar documentary by Dr. Robert Lustig, Sugar: The Bitter Truth. How much impact will it have in changing public policy?



Yesterday, Steve Kornacki, also on MSNBC, interviewed another celebrity chef, Rocco DiSpirito, to talk about how some of our politicians eat. They focuses on two especially obese GOP fatties-- Jeb Bush and Chris Christie-- who decided they had to lose some serious poundage in order to run for president. DiSpirito: "I think you can draw an inference from how the candidates conduct themselves in their diet to how they lead. I don't think it's unfair to say that a candidate who's thinking and actually conscious about what he consumes is more likely to be conscious about other things... How well you preserve yourself is an indication of how well you might try to preserve our nation."

How Arkansas Extremist Tom Cotton Pissed Off Top Chef Tom Colicchio

With Steve Israel's policy of never targeting GOP leaders, policy makers and committee chairman keeping the DCCC out of the MN-02 race that pits progressive Mike Obermueller against reactionary incumbent John Kline-- chair of the powerful and destructive House Committee of Education and the Workforce-- Blue America was over the moon that Bill Maher has stepped into the breach. Maher is bashing Kline up but good and bringing his repulsive anti-family record to the attention of voters in southeast Minnesota. This was a Maher tweet from early Thursday morning:

Blue America is working the positive side of the street (for a change), talking about why Obermueller is a better candidate than Kline from a policy perspective and what a natural district MN-02 would be to flip, despite Steve Israel's intent on protecting Kline again. (Obama won the district against McCain by 10,000 votes and beat Romney in a squeaker by around 300 votes!) Al Franken is on the ballot this year and he's substantially ahead of disreputable bankster/GOP crackpot Mike McFadden who is struggling in the polls to get to 40%. (You can help Obermueller's grassroots campaign here.)

And, of course, Maher isn't the only celebrity out talking sense about midterm races this cycle. Up top is an excellent segment from Chris Hayes' Wednesday night show featuring Top Chef Tom Colicchio. TV viewers may know him as the positive, no-nonsense head judge on every season of Bravo's Top Chef, and foodies know him as the founder and executive chef of the Gramercy Tavern (NYC) and founder of Craft (NYC, L.A., Dallas, Las Vegas, San Francisco) and the winner of 5 James Beard awards. But he's also been one of the most stalwart political fighters for healthy and sustainable food policies in America. Wednesday night he was on with Hayes explaining why Tom Cotten is a terrible choice for the Arkansas Senate seat currently held by Mark Pryor. It made me wonder if other celebrity chefs are politically active.

I would bet that a dick like Robert Irvine is a Republican but he's a Brit so there's no way to be sure. He did make a bunch of bogus claims that you would generally expect from conservatives, not normal people-- being a Knight Commander of the Royal Victorian Order, receiving a Scottish castle from the Queen, being a White House chef and making Princess Di's wedding cake, all false-- and cheating investors out of their money, another very right-wing move. The one actual Republican among the celebrity chefs I could find was Texas meat cooker Tim Love. I wouldn't eat in a restaurant associated with him anyone-- nor with Irvine. Celebrity chefs who have been supportive of Democrats, besides Colicchio, include Alice Waters, Rachel Ray, Elizabeth Falkner, Bobby Flay, Marcus Samuelsson, Mario Batali, Jean-Georges Vongerichten (a major Obama bundler) and Daniel Boulud.

Remember, the best chance the Democrats have to keep conservative Mark Pryor in and neo-fascist closet case Tom Cotton out seems to rest with making Arkansas voters wonder why the rest of their congressional delegation-- 4 Republicans and Pryor-- voted for the Farm Bill while Cotton joined extreme right-wing ideologues from other states to oppose it. So who was right, voters are supposed to wonder, Senators Boozman and Pryor and Congressmen Womack, Griffin and Crawford… or a Tom Cotton who's happy to see taxpayer money flow into the coffers of his own family farm while voting no on a Farm Bill that everyone else in Arkansas sees as a reasonable compromise?

The most recent legitimate poll, from Suffolk University last week, shows Pryor leading 45-43%., even though 37.4% of respondents admitted their most trusted source of news is Fox. The polling analysis memo offered an interesting word association question for Cotton in which the top scoring words were "dishonest," "untrustworthy," "crook" and "dislike him." They didn't test for closet case or gay. Pryor's #1 word association, by far, was "like him."

This was Colicchio's OpEd for Food Policy Action:

The food that feeds our families and supports our agriculture industry is affected every day by the decisions that elected officials make in Washington. Members of Congress regularly vote on policies that affect the quality, availability, and sustainability of our food supply. And yet, there has been very little attention to bringing transparency and accountability to that discussion.

As someone who has spent his life in the food business, I firmly believe that when citizens enter the voting booth, they need to be as informed about food policy as they are about a candidate’s views on job creation, foreign policy, and social issues. Unfortunately, in Arkansas right now, we have a classic example of what’s wrong with the political discourse around food in this country.

U.S. Rep. Tom Cotton, who is running for Senate, released a campaign ad that misleads voters and misconstrues the facts about the Farm Bill. The Farm Bill is a critically important law that shapes food production, determines nutrition assistance, and supports farmers, among other things. Sadly, Rep. Cotton’s ad wrongfully accuses President Obama of “hijacking the farm bill and turning it into a food stamp bill,” which simply isn’t true.

But don’t take my word for it. the Washington Post called the ad’s claims “invented history,” and the non-partisan fact-checker Politifact gave the dubious ad its “Pants On Fire” rating, which is the equivalent of an “F” on a high school report card. The truth is, SNAP (a.k.a. food stamps) first became a part of the Farm Bill during the Great Depression, and has been included in every Farm Bill that has become law since 1973. It has been supported by Members from both sides of the aisle for decades.

Today’s voters deserve better. We’ll never be able to improve food policies in this country if our leaders distort and distract instead of discuss and debate. Voters need information, which is why I co-founded Food Policy Action, a non-partisan organization dedicated to bringing light and accountability to the food debate.

Every year, Food Policy Action puts together a Legislative Scorecard to help voters get the information they need to know exactly how their elected officials vote on these important issues. You can find more information about the scorecard at www.foodpolicyaction.org.

Last year, Rep. Tom Cotton scored a 0% on the Legislative Scorecard. In other words, on every single vote that touched upon sensible food policy, Rep. Cotton voted the wrong way. In light of this score and his blatantly false ad, I know this much to be true: the public deserves better. It’s up to voters to make sure Rep. Cotton gets the message.