Stuffed: An Insider's Look at Who's (Really) Making America Fat

preface

Ever have a day that you consider to be a life-changing experience? Mine was on May 15, 1995. As I waited outside the Atlanta Cancer Clinic in my car, I read—again—the notes my physician had shared with me leading up to this moment:

Date: April 20, 1995

The patient has a CD-10 elevation and very high levels.

This is linked to a type of leukemia.

Date: May 8, 1995

The patient’s CALLA is up. We need to do a bone marrow.

Leukemia. Bone marrow. Not words you want to appear on your medical chart.

How did things get to this point? It had started about five months earlier, on a sunny January morning. I couldn’t get out of bed. I felt weak and ached all over. I was absolutely miserable. I did the usual self-diagnosis. Maybe it’s just a bad case of the flu. I babied myself for a week, but the flu didn’t go away. Maybe it’s mono, since I had had it in high school. But this was no mono.

This was Beyond Crud.

I called my doctor and was soon functioning as the proverbial pincushion, going through a battery of tests. Initial findings revealed nothing unusual. Sessions of antibiotics and traditional medicines proved ineffective.

After weeks of curling up on my living room couch watching, zombie-like, as the O. J. Simpson drama unfolded on CNN, I thought I would try a different approach. I’d find a doctor who practiced complementary medicine, who looked at the complete picture and not just the symptoms. I wanted a physician who could probe deep into my lifestyle and look beyond the typical symptoms.

I found such a doctor, and learned early on I could trust him. Most core test results like heart, lung, and kidney function were normal. Interestingly enough, however, he discovered a wide range of nutritional anomalies. Nutrients like magnesium (necessary for energy and helping to prevent restless sleep) were woefully deficient. Some more vanguard assessments showed a slow liver function, but he felt this could be dealt with by adjusting my diet.

You can imagine how surprised I was when two test results came back with a positive (that means bad) signal on leukemia.

Here I sat in my car, in another Atlanta office parking lot so familiarly fenced in by the perennially green southern pines, mulling over my future or what little was perhaps left of it. I was suddenly faced with the reality of a worst-case scenario. I ran a little how-did-it-happen review. Was I about to pay the price for years of poor eating habits? Or burning the candle at both ends? Or was it just a matter of chance? I was only in my forties, and I accepted that anything can happen to anyone, at any time. Nobody is promised tomorrow’s wake-up call.

Thinking about my upcoming appointment, I felt there would likely be one of two possible outcomes: Everything’s okay. You’re fine. Or Bad news, you’ve got twelve to eighteen months to live. As I reflected on the second one, my anxiety, fear, and tension began to ebb. The more I thought about my possible condition, the more a quiet, serene feeling came over me. One never knows how one will react to bad news. Was there trepidation? Sure. But somehow, that feeling dissipated and was replaced by the knowledge that this situation could result in something positive.

Okay, there’s no way you can negate the truly inevitable, so if the clock was ticking dreadfully fast, the least I could do was to try to help others facing similar situations to live longer, healthier lives.

I was no longer thinking as a business executive. Market share, revenues, the bottom line, suddenly had no relevance at this moment. Being a part of the human community (and beyond) took hold, and it felt so natural—so effortless—to commit to the preservation and extension of life.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but I had just crossed my personal Rubicon.

It was time for my appointment. I was ushered into a nicely appointed room with pleasant wood furnishings. Much nicer than the stereotypical cold, sterile doctor’s office, I thought. Dr. Cooper stepped in and introduced himself. He mentioned that he had reviewed my doctor’s notes and wanted to first take a look at me before proceeding to extract a bone marrow sample. After a brief examination, he shook his head and said, Something’s up, but I’m not sure what it is. I want to look at your blood first before we go through the bone marrow procedure. Sounded like a good idea to me. Anything to keep me intact a little bit longer.

After a nurse collected the blood, Dr. Cooper said, Come with me. Let’s go sit down with the lab biologists and see what they find. When we arrived, a young woman in a white lab coat was already busy at work, her eyes glued to a microscope. Mmmmm. Huh! She didn’t sound very encouraging, I thought. Ummm…, she purred. What do you see? I asked. She continued to manipulate the controls on the instrument, then finally she peered over the side of the microscope and said, Look here, surrendering her seat to me. These are your blood cells. They sure look like they’ve been through a war—beaten up, I would say—can’t tell you for sure. Then she said the magic words: But I see no blast cells or other evidence of leukemia. Not today.

Breathe out. That’s what you do. You just exhale.

It’s been over a dozen years since that indelible day in May. The road traveled is not the one I had originally mapped out. But somehow, it’s more real and more purposeful.

For nearly twenty years before meeting Dr. Cooper, I had served as an executive and adviser to some of the largest food and beverage corporations in the world. My focus centered on what you might expect of a consumer products marketer—building your brand, improving the bottom line, getting the consumer to buy more of your products. These are the things you think about. That’s what you’re paid to do. And much as in most businesses, that’s how you get promoted, by delivering the goods.

It turned out that what was wrong with me was not cancer, but chronic fatigue syndrome, and this diagnosis meant that I could no longer eat whatever I wanted and burn the candle at both ends.

After my personal health crisis, I came to a realization about my role in the food industry. Not only did my own nutrition need to change, my purpose needed to change. I could no longer advocate products and practices that contributed negatively to consumers’ health the way that I once did. My work, like my life, was in need of a new direction, and with that in mind, I set off to do my part to reenvision how the food industry dealt with health.

Most of the folks I have come across in the food industry have been well intentioned. When you look at the passion a brand manager has for his or her product, you realize that the brand becomes their baby. And what parent wouldn’t do everything to ensure the nurturing and growth of their child—even at the expense of others?

But historically, to achieve a company’s objectives, the well-being of the customer has not been a deciding factor. This doesn’t mean that companies don’t care about those who purchase their products and services. If they’re smart, they do. It just means that when it comes to delivering the bottom line, they’ll do what’s best for themselves financially. And sometimes, more than most of us would like to admit, that has been at the expense of the consumer.

In the decades leading up to the turn of the twenty-first century, there was less need to be concerned, because the consumers’ increasing weight problems hadn’t fully surfaced. It wasn’t a big issue among food purveyors. Let them eat, we said—and that was precisely what they did. But as times changed, the food industry marketing model has not kept pace. In matters of health, it has either remained static, or regressed in some very harmful ways. The conventional methods of marketing are increasingly out of sync with the long-term needs of the consumer. More is no longer better.

Unfortunately, at the moment only a small cadre of companies is truly committed to making a difference in the long-term health of their purchasers. The vast majority of producers and retailers in the food chain are slow to accept that they must take custodianship of their customers’ well-being first while they make their money more responsibly.

You will note in the following pages that sometimes I am harsh on the food industry—and myself—for some of the questionable practices that have been the industry standard for far too long. However, I do not intend to join the ranks of those who attack the food industry as if it were the Evil Empire. I want to be very clear that the food industry is by no means alone in contributing to our nation’s ever-growing obesity crisis. In fact, a number of great forces are complicit in creating and sustaining this crisis, whether they contribute knowingly or not. Simply put, there are many people responsible for making us stuffed.

Have we witnessed any government programs and regulations that have proven to lower the rates of obesity in this country? Do the activist groups demonstrate that they understand banning or taxing certain foods not only hurts industry, but also hurts the consumer? Can they acknowledge that all of us live in a market-based economy and companies must make a profit to stay in business, pay their employees, and feed the nation?

And where does the consumer weigh in? Is there not some shared responsibility to take care of one’s health? Do we really believe that the vast majority of consumers can be counted on to suddenly implement healthier eating and lifestyle programs?

The health crisis as it relates to nutrition is a profoundly complex matter that doesn’t offer easy answers and solutions. If solving the obesity crisis were simple, almost all of us would already be svelte and happy, and there would be no need for books like this. But inscrutable as it may first appear, I don’t believe in my heart that this problem is intractable. Just because it’s hard to find our way to a permanent national transformation doesn’t mean we shouldn’t explore new ideas. We must take some risks. We must change the way we prepare and sell our food. Our children’s future depends on it; of this I’m certain.

Stuffed is an outgrowth of my professional experiences and personal commitment to ensure that all of us remain healthy longer. Just as I did in my own health crisis, I will ask you to join me in looking beyond the symptoms. I will offer a view of the issues through a slightly different prism, since I have been on the inside as the issue has festered and unfolded. I will help you see how and why decisions are made that affect the way you eat. You’ll understand how the siren song of perceived value seduces you to buy more, and subsequently eat more. You’ll meet spin doctors on both sides of the obesity debate and learn how they might be attempting to manipulate you to believe many things that are only partly true, or not true at all.

My hope here is to try to explain rather than blame. Pointing the fickle finger of fat responsibility at any one group is ultimately futile and will do little to solve the problem. I’m not here to harangue. I’m here to invite and persuade. My goal is to help people in the food industry and their customers understand why we consume what we consume and how we must change the model so we don’t all eat ourselves to death. Ultimately, I firmly believe the only way we can fix the obesity mess is to begin with the food industry itself—not because it is the only one to blame, but because it’s the only one that can truly make a difference.

1

a boxcar full of turkeys

It all started with a turkey. Well, actually, not one turkey but many turkeys. The year was 1953. Thanksgiving had passed, the economy was booming, and Christmas shoppers around the country were getting ready to throw down some of their hard-earned cash for a little bit of Christmas cheer.

But the mood wasn’t so great at C. A. Swanson & Sons, an Omaha-based frozen food company. Somehow, Swanson had overestimated America’s hunger for turkey that Thanksgiving, and they found themselves with more than half a million pounds of unsold turkeys. This would have been a lot of food in any era, but back then it was astronomical. Not to mention that Swanson didn’t have enough refrigerated warehouse space to keep the turkeys from spoiling. Facing the prospect of having to write off all these birds as a huge loss, Swanson piled the turkeys into refrigerated boxcars while they searched for a buyer. As the boxcars traveled back and forth from Nebraska to the East Coast, the company’s owners looked for a solution that would save them millions of dollars.

As the legend goes, one of their salesmen, Gerry Thomas, had been in Pittsburgh, checking out the catering kitchens of Pan American World Airways when he heard about the company’s problem. On the flight home, he began doodling, thinking about the hot tray the airline used to keep food warm. Why not use it to keep food cold, he wondered. In his sketches, Thomas ended up designing a three-compartment tray—a sort of takeoff on the old army mess kits, but also something that drew upon the airline’s reliance on serving different foods steaming hot. The food in these trays would be kept in the freezer until it was ready to be eaten, at which point it would be heated up and served. In a matter of minutes dinner could be served with little to no preparation.

Initially, nobody at Swanson’s headquarters was bowled over by the idea, and they produced only 5,000 of the meals. But eventually they warmed to the concept. They initiated Operation Smash, a national marketing campaign consisting of a blitz of television and print ads. Two headlines read: Swanson’s fixed it for you! Complete turkey dinner on a tray. My boys are crazy about Swanson TV Dinners.

Soon enough consumers responded with a demand that far outpaced the supply. The company was blindsided by the fact that Americans seemed fascinated by the prospect of eating this new, convenient meal in front of their televisions. And just like that, the TV dinner was born.

Though Swanson did not invent the frozen food concept, its multiple compartments and use of leftover food changed the way the food industry made money and the way America ate its meals. Almost overnight, it seemed that millions of kids were plopped in front of the black-and-white televisions with the aluminum pan in front of them. A few slices of bland turkey in gravy with some cornbread stuffing, sweet potatoes, and perhaps the sorriest-tasting—certainly the sorriest-looking—peas on the planet. It wasn’t very appealing, but it was convenient, and the postwar generation quickly and steadily bought into this new concept of convenience foods. Mom and Dad had the evening out, and the babysitter stood in as cook and waitress. In its first full year, more than 25 million tins were served in living rooms and kitchens across the nation. A phenomenon was born, and in one single moment, the face of food in this country began to shift.

There are many people who trace the beginning of our national obesity epidemic to the start of the fast-food chain, to a man named Kroc and the Golden Arches that he started in Des Plaines, Illinois, in 1955. While I’m the first to admit that fast food and all of its offshoots played a big role in our current situation, for my money, the story of the Swanson TV dinner holds the real key to understanding why we’re so fat. The TV dinner marked a lot of firsts: the first time that we embraced en masse convenience over cuisine; the first time that it was better to be easy than to taste good; the first time that a preprepared (frozen) meal was served ready to heat and eat at home.

But of all these firsts, perhaps the most important, the one that has affected our waistlines and our taste buds the most, is that the Swanson TV dinner marked the first time that a food industry marketing gimmick seduced what might have been our better judgment. After all, the TV dinner was just a way to boost a company’s struggling bottom line and cut its losses. On the surface, from a food perspective, there appeared to be little benefit to the consumer. The taste was awful, the food unappealing, and the choices limited. I mean, seriously, who wants to eat frozen Thanksgiving turkey in February?

And yet it turned out that was exactly what a lot of people wanted, and they wanted to do it because of how it had been sold to them. They had been sold on the idea that the convenience of this product was their ticket to a happier life. It had nothing to do with the actual food, and everything to do with the image of the food that had been projected. It had to do with the convenience, the slick packaging, and the easy cleanup. Anytime, anywhere, you could have a meal that you knew. It might not have been a good meal, but at least it was familiar.

The Swanson TV dinner appeared at a moment when our culture was changing how it thought about food. Televisions were making their way into people’s homes, and food companies had begun to use this new medium to advertise their products, feeding consumers hungry for new ideas with spoonfuls of new ways to spend money on food. The idea that convenience trumped taste played right into the mind-set of that moment and it was all too infectious—from the boardrooms of the nation’s food consortiums to the glass doors of Madison Avenue. Food shopping, which up until then had been more of a local endeavor, started to become a national enterprise, and when people went to the store, there were certain brands they expected to see—the brands from the television commercials.

Swanson TV dinner was a turning point, not so much because of what it was, but because of what it represented: Our expectations for food were lowered. It proved that convenience was king. McDonald’s, Burger King, Stouffer’s, Wendy’s, the prepared food in your supermarket, takeout pizza, cheap Chinese food—none of these ideas could have taken off as they did if Swanson hadn’t paved the way with a simple equation that millions of Americans embraced: TV dinners = more free time. Who cared if it tasted bad? Who cared what was in it? It was easy to buy and even easier to make. It wasn’t gourmet, but hey, few things were.

The one upside to that first batch of Swanson TV dinners was that they were humble in their portion sizes. Although high in sodium, the classic roasted, carved turkey dinner weighed in at a modest 250 calories. There was no way that a nation gorging itself on TV dinners would become overweight. The servings of turkey and peas were not only foul tasting, they were anemic by any of today’s standards.

That was soon to end.

For over thirty years I held various executive posts at some of the country’s largest food and beverage corporations, and while I wasn’t there for Swanson’s revolution, I was certainly there for its wake. During the second half of the twentieth century, America ate like there was no tomorrow, consuming all manner of restaurant fare, prepared food, and packaged goods, and in the process making a handful of well-heeled, well-funded companies like Swanson incredibly profitable.

Every day during those thirty years, the ideas and methods we employed came straight from the example that Swanson had set, even if Swanson itself was not explicitly mentioned. The names of the game in the food business became convenience and marketing. With these two concepts employed in just the right way, you could sell almost anything. Swanson was never used as a case study and never spoken of as the definitive moment in food history that it was. In truth, it was a story that I’d heard passed around for years, but it was rare that people referred to it as a paradigm shift. Nevertheless, the lessons it represented and the implications it offered were clear to the entire industry. Cut losses and maximize profit through creative marketing and attractive packaging. If you can accomplish this, all else is secondary.

Today these ideas of packaging and marketing don’t seem revolutionary, but at the time they were precisely that. Before Swanson, most meals were prepared in the home, not purchased in a ready-to-heat-and-eat form. That’s the way it was. Swanson set the stage for convenient meals at an acceptable price and passable taste. No longer would poor-tasting products be rejected out of hand.

Swanson inverted that tried-and-true thinking. They dropped product quality—and by extension, health—from the equation and found large-scale results. It paved the way for a whole new means of gauging consumer satisfaction when it came to eating habits. If the consumer demands bigger portions, you don’t raise the price; you use lower-grade ingredients and adjust the taste to a manageable level. If the consumer demands a lower price, you don’t sacrifice the product’s gimmick; you rejigger the recipe to compensate for shifts in palate. If you manage to make it taste good in the process, great. If not, leave it to the marketing department. It’s their job to come up with a way to make it sell.

At the time I joined the food industry and for almost twenty years after, no one in the business, myself included, anticipated how detrimental this strategy would be to our nation’s well-being. Obesity wasn’t even on the radar screen. We simply didn’t think about the future health consequences of our actions, and the few who did worry about them certainly didn’t worry too much. As a result, from the 1970s to the early 2000s, America’s caloric intake increased by 10 percent and American food production per capita went up by 20 percent. But none of that really mattered to most of us who worked in food. Ours became a party that would never end. All we had to do was keep our ingredient expenses down and our marketing innovation up. Invest in tasty new product design, not in healthful, quality ingredients that cost more—unless we could charge more for them.

Ultimately, these tactics worked well, far too well as it turned out. They worked so well that the food industry got addicted to the results, and sadly, America had little choice but to go along for the ride. We are now paying the price for that addiction. Our culture of excess consumption, poor-quality ingredients, unhealthy products, supersize burgers, party packs of potato chips, and 64-ounce Double Gulp soft drinks have catapulted us into the middle of a health and nutrition crisis. Two-thirds of Americans are overweight, and the nation’s enormous collective girth is getting larger and younger every day. Dr. Jeffrey M. Friedman, a Rockefeller University researcher, estimates that the nation has 4 billion pounds of excess baggage, a major factor leading to high levels of hypertension, heart disease, stroke, cancer, and other life-threatening illnesses. We’ve been feeding at the food industry’s all-you-can-eat buffet for over fifty years, and there is virtually no disagreement among health officials, doctors, nutritionists, and scientists that it’s been killing us slowly ever since we started.

We’ve all heard the scary statistics about America’s weight problem, but there is more than just shock value in the numbers. Every year there are countless studies commissioned and public health reports released, all of which warn us about the gravity of our current state of affairs. All these are well-intentioned, but oftentimes the white noise they create only obscures the important numbers that prove this obesity problem is shared by everyone in America—regardless of race, gender, location, income, or ethnic background.

People have long been eager to believe that their ethnic group, region, city, or income bracket is immune to serious problems of obesity. There was a point in time when I agreed with this sentiment, thinking that the national obesity crisis was driven strictly by money and class. If you were an immigrant or poor, or both, you were a leftover who lacked the means to afford a healthier lifestyle. If you were affluent you could easily pay for a healthy diet. But I was wrong, and this theory was far too provincial in its premise. Like many diseases, those related to bad diets and obesity are starkly ecumenical and apolitical in whom they attack. If you take a look at the long lines in the waiting room in a standard dialysis unit of any hospital, amid the grim faces you’ll see the mosaic of the American populace. Old and, yes, young, Caucasian and every other color of skin you can imagine. The people I’m describing defy categorization by demographic or ethnic origin.

What’s really alarming is how we’re mortgaging our future in the health care crisis. Obesity, especially among