Authors: Michael Moss
Mudd had risen through Kraft’s corporate affairs office to become a company spokesman and much more. He tracked how consumers viewed the company generally, watched for signs of trouble from regulators, and helped guide the company’s rapid response to any significant threats, like the tempest that had arisen a few years earlier over trans fats. He was deeply attuned to public sentiment, a seasoned fixer highly skilled in dealing with critics. His insights had garnered so much respect that—at least in the view of other senior Kraft officials—Mudd became something of a consigliere
to the company’s chief executives, the adviser whose whisperings helped guide the boss’s every move. As he stood on the stage that evening, the CEOs in the audience knew that it was in their interest to listen.
“I very much appreciate this opportunity to talk to you about childhood obesity and the growing challenge it presents for us all,” Mudd began. “Let me say right at the start, this is not an easy subject. There are no easy answers—for what the public health community must do to bring this problem under control. Or for what the industry should do as others seek to hold it accountable for what has happened. But this much is clear: For those of us who’ve looked hard at this issue, whether they’re public health professionals or staff specialists in your own companies, we feel sure that the one thing we shouldn’t do is nothing.”
As he spoke, Mudd clicked through a deck of slides—114 in all—that were projected on a large screen behind him. This would be straight-up, in-your-face talk, no sugar-coating on his part. The headlines and phrases and figures were nothing short of staggering.
More than half of American adults were now considered overweight, with nearly one-quarter of the population—40 million adults—carrying so many extra pounds that they were clinically defined as obese. Among children, the rates had more than doubled since 1980, the year when the fat line on the charts began angling up, and the number of kids considered obese had shot past 12 million. (It was still only 1999; the nation’s obesity rates would climb much higher.)
“Massive social costs estimated as high as $40–$100 billion a year,” announced one of Mudd’s slides in bright, bold lettering.
Then came the specifics: diabetes, heart disease, hypertension, gallbladder disease, osteoarthritis, three types of cancer—breast, colon, and that of the uterus lining—all on the rise. To varying degrees, the executives were told, obesity was being cited as one of the causes for each of these health crises. To drive the point home, they were shown how to calculate obesity using the body mass index, a simple ratio of height to weight, and given a few moments to determine their own BMIs with the formula that flashed up on the screen. (On this count, most of the men in the room
could rest easy. They had personal trainers, gym memberships, and enough nutritional awareness to avoid diets that were heavy in the foods they manufactured.)
Mudd then brought them back to the reality as experienced by their middle-class customers, who were spending their gym time working a second job to make ends meet and not thinking too hard about their own diets. The media were having a field day with these people, he said, churning out front-page stories on obesity and the industry’s role in fostering overconsumption. Up on the screen, he played a snippet from a new PBS
Frontline
report called “Fat,” which featured the chair of Harvard’s Department of Nutrition, Walter Willett, pointing the finger directly at the food companies. “The transition of food to being an industrial product really has been a fundamental problem,” Willett said. “First, the actual processing has stripped away the nutritional value of the food. Most of the grains have been converted to starches. We have sugar in concentrated form, and many of the fats have been concentrated and then, worst of all, hydrogenated, which creates trans-fatty acids with very adverse effects on health.”
Food manufacturers were getting heat not only from powerful critics at Harvard, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the American Heart Association, and the Cancer Society, Mudd said. They were now losing key allies. The secretary of agriculture, over whom the industry had long held sway, had recently called obesity a “national epidemic.” And it didn’t take much effort to see why the USDA chief felt compelled to bite the hand that feeds. The agency promoted healthy eating through its food pyramid, with grains at the base and far smaller quantities of sweets and fat squeezed into the top. Their companies, Mudd told the executives, were promoting the
opposite
habits. “If you mapped categories of food advertising, especially advertising to kids, against the Food Guide Pyramid, it would turn the pyramid on its head,” he said. “We cannot pretend food isn’t part of the obesity problem. No credible expert will attribute the rise in obesity solely to decreased physical activity.”
He flashed another slide up on the screen. “What’s driving the increase?” it asked. “Ubiquity of inexpensive, good-tasting, super-sized,
energy-dense foods.” In other words, the very foods on which these executives, along with their brethren in the fast food chains, had staked the success of their companies.
Having laid the blame for obesity at the feet of the CEOs, Mudd then did the unthinkable. He touched the third rail of the processed food industry, drawing a connection to the last thing in the world the CEOs wanted linked to their products: cigarettes. First came a quote from a Yale University professor of psychology and public health, Kelly Brownell, who had become an especially vocal proponent of the view that the processed food industry should be seen as a public health menace: “As a culture, we’ve become upset by the tobacco companies advertising to children, but we sit idly by while the food companies do the very same thing. And we could make a claim that the toll taken on the public health by a poor diet rivals that taken by tobacco.”
Mudd then flashed a big yellow caution sign with the words, “SLIPPERY SLOPE,” up on the screen. “If anyone in the food industry ever doubted there was a slippery slope out there, I imagine they are beginning to experience a distinct sliding sensation right about now,” he said. “We all know that the food and tobacco situations are not the same,” but the same trial lawyers who were flush with the spoils of tobacco litigation were now lurking, poised to strike the food industry as well. Moreover, the surgeon general—whose office had produced the landmark attack on cigarettes back in 1964—was preparing a report on obesity. In the hands of these lawyers and politicians, one aspect of the obesity crisis in particular would leave the food industry exposed: the public nature of overeating and its consequences. The sight of an overweight adult trudging down the grocery aisle or an overweight kid on the playground was galvanizing. “Obesity is an utterly visible problem,” Mudd said. “As its prevalence increases, it will be obvious to all.”
Then Mudd shifted gears. He stopped with the bad news and presented the plan he and the other industry insiders had devised to address the obesity problem. Merely getting the executives to acknowledge some culpability was an important first step, he knew, so his plan would start off
with a small but crucial move. The industry, he said, should take up the obesity crisis and use the expertise of scientists—its own and others—to gain a much deeper understanding of what exactly was driving Americans to overeat. Once this was achieved, the effort could unfold on several fronts. To be sure, there would be no getting around the role that packaged foods and drinks play in overconsumption. Some industry officials had already begun discussing the power of foods to create cravings and to overwhelm the best intentions of dieters. To diminish these cravings, they would have to pull back on their use of salt, sugar, and fat, perhaps by imposing industry-wide limits—not on the meager-selling low-fat or low-sugar items that companies put on the grocery shelf for dieters, but on the big-selling, mainline products themselves, which had a huge effect on the nation’s health. However, these three ingredients and their formulas were not the only tools the industry wielded to create the greatest possible allure for their products. The schemes they used to advertise and market their products were critical, too. In keeping with his desire to avoid alienating the executives entirely, Mudd emphasized this aspect of their trade. He proposed creating a “code to guide the nutritional aspects of food marketing, especially to children.”
He also suggested that they begin promoting the role of exercise in controlling weight, since no one could expect to get trim—or stay that way—sitting on the couch. This could include public service announcements, he said, or a powerful, full-blown advertising campaign like that deployed by the Partnership for a Drug-Free America, in which tobacco and pharmaceutical industries had joined forces to produce iconic ads like the 1987 commercial that showed a man cracking an egg into a frying pan while saying, “This is your brain on drugs.”
“I want to be very clear here,” Mudd said in closing, and he underlined words in his written presentation to make sure he hit the right notes. “In saying that the obesity problem will take a long time to solve, or even by using the word ‘solve,’ we are not for a moment suggesting that this program or the food industry alone can possibly solve the problem. Or that
that’s
the measure of success for this program. We
are
saying that the industry
should make a sincere effort to be
part
of the solution. And that by doing so, we can help to defuse the criticism that’s building against us. We don’t have to singlehandedly
solve
the obesity problem in order to address the criticism. But we have to make a sincere effort to be
part
of the solution if we expect to avoid being demonized.”
What happened next was not written down. But according to three participants, when Mudd stopped talking, all eyes turned to the one CEO whose recent exploits in the grocery store had awed the rest of the industry. His name was Stephen Sanger, and he was also the person—as head of General Mills—who had the most to lose when it came to dealing with obesity. His $2 billion lineup of sugary cereals, from Count Chocula to Lucky Charms, was now drawing more fire from consumer advocates than soda. Under his leadership, General Mills had transformed entire sections of the grocery store, capitalizing on society’s hunger for faster, more convenient food.
Sanger had been sitting front and center, in a seat that reflected his position atop the pecking order. Now he stood, his body tense, to address Michael Mudd, and he did so visibly upset.
Sanger began by reminding the group that consumers were “fickle,” as were their ivory tower advocates. Their concerns about the health implications of packaged foods waxed and waned. Sometimes they worried about sugar, other times fat. But most often, he said, they bought what they liked, and they liked what tasted good. “Don’t talk to me about nutrition,” he said, taking on the voice of a typical consumer. “Talk to me about taste, and if this stuff tastes better, don’t run around trying to sell stuff that doesn’t taste good.”
Besides, Sanger said, the industry had always managed to ride things out—the trans fats panic, for instance, or the desire for more whole grains—by making adjustments. In fact, the industry had not only weathered these squalls, it had acted responsibly, to the public
and
to its shareholders. To go further, to react to the critics, would jeopardize the sanctity of the recipes that had made his products so successful. General Mills would not pull back, Sanger said. He would push his people onward, and he urged his peers to do the same. Then he sat down.
Not everyone at the meeting shared Sanger’s views. But his stance was so forceful, so persuasive and, yes, so comforting to the other executives that no one else sought to counter the position he voiced. Sanger’s response
effectively ended the meeting.
Years later, his words still stung. “What can I say,” Behnke said. “It didn’t work. These guys weren’t as receptive as we thought they would be.” Behnke chose his words slowly and deliberately, to paraphrase them as best he could. He wanted to be fair. “Sanger felt very strongly that, ‘Look, we fortify our cereals. We are very concerned about nutrition. We’ve got a big range of products. You know, you tell me what you’re interested in, and we’ve got a product that serves your needs. And so why should we adjust our sights and move the whole portfolio towards some lower calorie, lower sugar level, lower fat level kind of product line? There is no need to do that. We already have those alternatives. And we’re selling all of those things. You guys are overreacting.’
“Sanger,” Behnke added, “was trying to say, ‘Look, we’re not going to screw around with the company jewels here and change the formulations because a bunch of guys in white coats are worried about obesity.’ ”
And that was that. The executives got up and took the elevators to the 40th floor for dinner, where the talk was polite and insubstantial. Except for Kraft, all eleven of the major food manufacturers at the meeting spurned the idea of collectively down-formulating their products to ease their effects on Americans’ health. They even largely ignored Mudd’s request that they start fighting obesity by contributing to a modest $15 million fund for research and public education.
“I don’t think anything ever came of that as a group effort,” recalls John Cady, who was president of the National Food Processors Association, one of two trade organizations at the dinner.
Instead, America’s food companies charged into the new millennium.
Publicly, there would be some overtures toward better nutrition, especially when it came to reducing salt in their products. General Mills—eight years later, after intense public pressure—even began lowering the sugar loads in its cereals and later announced, in 2009, that it would take another half a
teaspoon of sugar out of the cereals it advertised to children, steps that some health advocates dismissed as late and disappointingly small. The reality was that behind the scenes, having resolved to ignore obesity, the CEOs and their companies picked up right where they had left off, using, in some cases, more salt, more sugar, and more fat to edge out the competition.