Saving Gotham

by Tom Farley

  Paterson’s tax proposal the year before had caught the soda companies by surprise, too. But they had recovered quickly, spending the time between legislative sessions trying to strangle the idea. In September 2009, Coke and its largest bottler said they were running advertising campaigns in seven key markets to kill soda tax proposals. “Clearly, the threat of a soft drink tax demonstrates the need to better educate our consumers on what we’re doing to be part of the solution to the obesity problem,” a spokeswoman said. Ten days later an op-ed appeared in The Wall Street Journal under the byline Muhtar Kent, the CEO of Coca-Cola. He argued that sugary drinks accounted for only 5.5 percent of calories in the average American diet, that obesity is “also about calories out,” and that a soda tax would hurt the poor without changing people’s soda habits. Soon afterward we noticed ads appearing from Coke under the slogan “Live positively,” in which they touted how they were “doing our part” to fight obesity with “portion control options, choice, and innovation.”

  When Paterson proposed the new tax, the soda companies turned for help in the battle to Goddard Claussen, the “issue advocacy” public relations company behind the “Harry and Louise” ad had that helped kill Bill Clinton’s health care reform plan. Under its new name Goddard Gunster, the agency today calls itself “the most sought-after guns for hire,” which is proud to be “among the first to apply aggressive political campaign strategies to issue advocacy efforts.” Its website explains its technique: “Through facts and research, we define the parameters of the public debate and align consumer, corporate, and government interests.”

  Goddard Claussen created an Astroturf group called New Yorkers Against Unfair Taxes and fired back with an ad campaign of its own. One ad featured a Bronx grocer calling the soda tax “just another way to get into our pockets.” “They talk about a penny here, a penny there, but you know what? In our type of community, it all adds up. . . . New Yorkers cannot afford another tax.” In another, a woman unloading groceries tells the viewer, “Making ends meet is a constant struggle for families like ours. . . . Instead of cutting out-of-control spending in Albany, [Governor Paterson would] tax families. . . . Tell Albany to trim their budget fat, and leave our grocery budgets alone.”

  The ads, though, were just the visible part of the battle. The serious combat took place in back rooms. In 2009, after the first soda tax proposals in New York State and then in Washington, Coke, Pepsi, and the American Beverage Association increased their federal lobbying spending eightfold, from $4.7 to $40.3 million. In New York State in 2009, the ABA increased its donations to state legislators from nothing to $900,000, and the two soda companies increased their state lobbying spending to $3 million. That included $36,000 that was channeled to State Senator Jeff Klein, who then switched from being a soda tax supporter to one who was, according to an inside source for the Daily News, “instrumental in getting the soda tax off the table.”

  After Paterson’s 2010 proposal, Coke and Pepsi sent workers to meet with the governor. The tax would kill their jobs, they told him. The companies also claimed that as they passed on the cost of tax to customers, they couldn’t create a price difference between sugary drinks and diet drinks, which would defeat the tax’s obesity-prevention purpose. They brought in the Teamsters, whose members drive soda delivery trucks, to pressure union-friendly legislators. To make sure those legislators heeded their arguments, the ABA opened its wallet further, spending nearly $13 million, which put it atop the list of lobbyists for any issue in 2010. And as part of a behind-the-scenes charm offensive, both Coke’s CEO Muhtar Kent and PepsiCo’s CEO Indra Nooyi contacted Bloomberg, offering to work with us on pilot projects in the city.

  The legislators in Albany listened. In March 2010, about six weeks after Paterson released his budget, I drove to the capitol and met with several representatives, to whom I handed out one-pagers with facts on the obesity crisis and the benefits of a soda tax. The legislators were cordial, but all except for a few were dead set against it. When I spoke to State Senator Ruth Hassell-Thompson, a nurse who was otherwise strong on health issues, she cut me off. There was no way she could support the tax, she said. I knew that PepsiCo’s headquarters was not far from her district in Westchester County. Dean Skelos, the ranking Republican senator, listened politely but asked rhetorically, “When has a tax ever changed behavior?” I wasn’t quick enough to answer by talking about the cigarette tax. A week later all the state’s Republican senators, and enough of the chamber’s Democrats to form a majority, were publicly opposed to the tax.

  By May, Paterson was flailing. He suggested exempting diet soda from the state’s sales tax in return for keeping his soda tax. Then state health commissioner Richard Daines called me to suggest the tax apply in New York City only, with all the revenue flowing to the state government and none going to the city. Neither idea made headway.

  By July, reporters were writing postmortems. The soda tax “was pretty much a nonstarter, politically,” said Deputy Mayor Howard Wolfson later. Wolfson, who had run communications for Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign, was now the mayor’s top adviser on political strategy and communications. In his conversations with legislators, the idea was “DOA. Not gonna happen.” Michael Nutter, the mayor of Philadelphia who had himself failed to pass a 2-cents-an-ounce soda tax, summed up the soda company tactics: “They’re successful the old-fashioned way. They pay for it.” “We were outgunned,” said the political director of the hospital workers’ union. Coke and Pepsi had shown that they were stronger than a governor, a mayor, and the state’s health commissioners, hospitals, and most powerful union combined.

  The failure of the tax certainly wasn’t caused by the legislature being antitax or concerned with the impact on the poor. Although the soda companies said the legislators killed the soda tax because it was regressive, the lawmakers instead passed a 4 percent sales tax on clothing, which was far less fair: people have to buy clothes, but they don’t have to buy soda. At the same time, without any pressure from health groups that I know of, the legislators took Paterson’s dollar-per-pack cigarette tax increase proposal 60 cents further, increasing the total state tax on a pack of cigarettes from $2.75 to $4.35. With the federal tax of $1.01 and the city’s tax of $1.50 per pack, the total tax on a pack of cigarettes sold in New York City was now $6.86, bringing the price to about $11, the highest in the nation. The shot we had fired at soda landed on cigarettes instead.

  13

  “Would you like us to say, ‘That’s not our responsibility’?”

  In April 2010 we were finally ready to announce the names of companies that had promised to cut the amount of salt they put in food. It had been three years since Mary Bassett, Lynn Silver, and Sonia Angell had first presented the idea to Tom Frieden, and eighteen months since the Salt Summit at Gracie Mansion. During that time, their team had built momentum with health organizations. What we now called the National Salt Reduction Initiative (NSRI) stretched across the country, boasting six city health departments, fifteen state health departments, and seventeen national organizations, including the American Medical Association, the American Heart Association, and Consumers Union.

  The nation’s food companies weren’t so enthusiastic. In the months since the Salt Summit, Angell and Christine Curtis had held more than one hundred meetings with the food giants. The companies complained that the targets were too stringent, the deadlines too near, the technical problems too overwhelming, and the customers too wedded to the salty taste. Technical experts at some companies told our staff privately that the targets were not hard to hit, even as other representatives were complaining how tough they were. But so far it had all been vague talk. Until the commitments came in, we had no idea whether most of the U.S. food industry would sign on or ignore us.

  We had released the targets three months earlier. They applied to sixty-one packaged-food categories, including “French toast, pancakes, and waffles,” “Frozen and refrigerated meat substitutes,” processed che
ese, “Salsa, dips, and dipping sauce,” “Frozen and refrigerated pizza,” canned soup, and crackers. After haggling, ketchup was now embedded in “Barbecue sauce, ketchup, marinades, and steak sauce.” The restaurants had targets for twenty-five categories, including hamburgers, cheeseburgers, sandwiches, burritos, and French fries. Each category had an easier target for 2012 and a stricter one for 2014. The 2014 targets would cut salt by an average of 25 percent, but the cuts in the different food categories ranged from 10 to 35 percent.

  Once we circulated those targets, the press had a chance to size up the initiative. Despite the fears of Bloomberg’s press officer Stu Loeser, the papers liked the plan. The Daily News featured a medical assistant from Brooklyn whose diet of bacon-and-egg sandwiches, ham sandwiches, hot dogs, and chicken nuggets fed her more than three times the recommendations. The Times put the story on the front page, calling salt a “health scourge.” But the “campaign is in some ways more ambitious and less certain of success than the ones it waged against smoking and obesity. . . . For one thing, the changes it prescribes require cooperation on a national scale.” The Wall Street Journal wrote, “Decreasing salt is one of the thorniest challenges in food science,” and quoted a food scientist saying that salt replacements were “never cheaper than sodium chloride, unfortunately.”

  When reporters asked Bloomberg if taking on salt was overreaching, he snapped, “We’re not controlling how much salt [people eat]. . . . We’re trying to extend the lives and improve the lives of people that live in this City. And the health department has that responsibility. Would you like us to stop if there was asbestos in the air in your building or in the place your child goes to school? Would you like us to say, ‘That’s not our responsibility’? I don’t think so.”

  The Times’s personal health columnist Jane Brody wrote a glowing piece. “If the mayor has his way,” she wrote, “this could well be the year when salt, once a form of legal tender, is finally devalued as a prized condiment in the American diet.” She cited a well-timed study estimating that a half-teaspoon less salt intake per day would save 44,000 to 92,000 lives a year. “That, dear reader, would be a very big bang for a relatively small buck.”

  When Sylvia Birnbaum, the woman who failed to escape hypertension, heard about the initiative, she thought it was a great idea. But she asked a poignant question: “Why haven’t they thought about that years ago?” It seems she wasn’t alone. A month later, when the Quinnipiac Polling Institute asked New Yorkers, “Do you think the Bloomberg administration is correct to encourage New York City restaurants to use less salt in food preparation?,” 77 percent said yes. And when it asked, “When it comes to trying to improve people’s health habits, do you think the Bloomberg administration’s policies have gone too far, not far enough, or they are about right?,” 55 percent said “about right” and another 17 percent said “not far enough.” “There’s been some grumbling about ‘nanny government’ by Mayor Michael Bloomberg,” Quinnipiac’s polling director said, “but voters are eating it up. . . . City Hall’s menu of food initiatives gets three stars from voters.”

  But the food industry pushed back, and the federal government seemed to be wilting. The Grocery Manufacturers Association issued familiar complaints about the NSRI. Cutting sodium would run into “regulatory, human capital, and technical barriers” and would alter “taste, texture, appearance, shelf-life, or price” in a way that “may not be acceptable to consumers.” And the initiative should be led by the federal government, not by New York City. The National Restaurant Association was even more abrupt. It was simply “opposed to a Federal, state, or local mandate on specific nutrients or ingredients.”

  At first, we had hoped to get the FDA and the CDC to endorse the National Salt Reduction Initiative. Then FDA staff said an endorsement of a voluntary initiative wouldn’t be “appropriate” for a regulatory agency. We asked instead for supportive statements from the two agencies to fold into our press release. That didn’t happen either. Finally, the CDC issued its own feeble statement that it “supports efforts to reduce the sodium content of manufactured and restaurant foods,” without mentioning the NSRI by name. Someone high up in the federal government, I figured, someone above Tom Frieden and above the FDA, must be stonewalling.

  A month after we released the targets, Michael Alderman, a doctor who served for many years on an advisory committee to the industry’s Salt Institute, published an opinion piece in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The studies on salt didn’t meet the standard of proof, he claimed. Cutting salt levels in food was a “rash route” that might actually increase deaths. We needed massive, multiyear studies, and in the meantime “the prudent course of action may well be caution.” It was a well-worn argument for paralysis. JAMA’s publishing it, unfortunately, gave it legitimacy.

  • • •

  We planned a splashy announcement to recognize the companies that pledged to meet our salt targets. As the event approached, the positive signals coming from the companies surprised us. Mars, a company with $7 billion in sales that was best known for its candy bars but that also makes Uncle Ben’s rice mixes, said it planned to sign on. Then three food giants made statements that sounded like real action. In March, Kraft Foods, a behemoth that sold $24 billion in food across twenty-three of our categories, from Oscar Mayer cold cuts to Philadelphia Cream Cheese, announced it would be cutting sodium by an average of 10 percent for all its North American products by 2012. That same month PepsiCo, which owned Frito-Lay and Quaker and had even more food sales than Kraft, declared that it would cut its average salt levels by 25 percent by 2015. Staff from both companies told us privately that we could expect letters committing to meet at least some of our salt targets. Unilever, a conglomerate making Wishbone salad dressing and Ragú pasta sauces, had already announced in 2009 that it was cutting salt in all 22,000 of its products. Now Unilever was telling us that it would meet several of our targets. And we even got word that some huge restaurant chains (including Subway and Starbucks) would sign on. I was so excited that I e-mailed Angell and Silver to say, “We’re changing the world!”

  For a moment, it even looked as if we might get the federal government to support the NSRI indirectly. Three agencies involved in nutrition—the CDC, the FDA, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture—were planning a Nutrition Summit in April entitled “Changing the Food Environment.” The conference objectives were so ambitious for the federal government that they could only have been written by Tom Frieden. They included promoting restaurant menu calorie labeling, reducing trans fats, and cutting salt levels in processed foods. We were negotiating to insert Mayor Bloomberg into the event for our announcement thanking the companies that promised to cut salt in their foods. That would not only give the companies even more good press but also imply that the big three federal agencies were in favor of what we were doing.

  But then, over just a few days, everything seemed to unravel. First, the big companies backed off. They claimed different reasons. Kraft’s lawyers were balking at the word commitment, Sonia Angell heard. PepsiCo wouldn’t jump in, Lynn Silver heard, unless it saw a commitment from at least one of the other big food companies—which it saw as ConAgra, Kraft, Unilever, and Campbell Soup. An employee of Unilever said that before promising anything, his company wanted to see an impending report on salt from the respected Institute of Medicine (IOM). We heard that the real obstacle was the Grocery Manufacturers Association, which was pressuring the companies to close ranks against us.

  Then the IOM ran away with the conversation. In 2008 Congress had asked it to develop recommendations for reducing sodium in the American diet. Angell was one of the fourteen members on the IOM committee, which was chaired by former FDA commissioner Jane Henney. Days before we were scheduled to announce our companies’ salt pledges, the committee issued an uncompromising report: it recommended that the FDA “set mandatory national standards” for salt consumption. Over the long term, the committee wrote, voluntary initiatives like our
s were bound to fail. “There needs to be a mandatory standard,” Dr. Henney told the Associated Press. “[H]aving one or two in the industry make strong attempts at this doesn’t give us that even playing field over time. It’s not sustainable.”

  Just as the IOM announced this pointed conclusion, The Washington­ Post ran a front-page story, quoting anonymous sources within the FDA, headlined “FDA READYING FIRST LEGAL LIMITS ON AMOUNT OF SALT IN FOODS.” Immediately Senator Tom Harkin and Representative Rosa DeLauro heartily endorsed the FDA’s regulating salt. To anyone reading the papers, it looked as if the federal government were going to force food companies to use less salt, and do so very soon.

  I would have been overjoyed if the FDA were set to regulate salt, but I knew it wasn’t going to happen. The FDA is too much under the thumb of the food corporations’ friends in Congress. Even when the agency does move, it takes years. And sure enough, the next day the FDA issued a statement calling the Post “mistaken.” “The FDA is not currently working on regulation nor have we made a decision to regulate sodium content of food at this time.” Still, I was worried that all this blunt talk about mandates and regulation might make the food companies hunker down instead of work with us.

  Then our hope for federal endorsement at the Nutrition Summit fell apart. The summit’s objectives were watered down—conference organizers told us that no new policies were going to be announced there. CDC staff told us that Bloomberg was welcome to make his announcement at their conference, but they would make clear that it was “a NYC event not a federal or summit event.” Furthermore, the CDC and the FDA wouldn’t make even vaguely supportive statements about our initiative. The FDA wouldn’t send a representative to our announcement, and although the CDC might send one, she would not say a word. Now that we were poised to accomplish something that the federal health agencies had been recommending for decades, those agencies were running and hiding. It was so sad that it was almost comical.