Washington Insider--Thursday

The Kitchen War Expands

Here's a quick monitor of Washington farm and trade policy issues from DTN's well-placed observer.

Despite Potential Snags, House Plans to Vote Today on 2016 Budget Conference

House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., say he plans to go ahead today with a floor vote on the fiscal 2016 budget conference report, even though the Senate conferees had not yet signed off on the report. One of those conferees, Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., said he still wanted language in the final resolution that would tighten restrictions on a tactic used by appropriators to provide funding for agencies above budgetary limits.

It remained unclear late Tuesday if Corker was the only one of the 12 Senate conferees yet to sign the conference report.

Republicans in both chambers say they expect final votes on the budget this week. In the Senate, Democrats would be unable to prevent it coming to the floor, where it would have a maximum of 10 hours debate. If Congress approves the budget measure, it would mark the fastest start to the annual appropriations process since 1974, according to McCarthy.

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Vilsack Warns About Department's Continued Budget, Personnel Cuts

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack this week voiced concern over the year-after-year budget and personnel cuts that Congress has imposed on USDA. "We have made those reductions every year for six years and there comes a point where you begin to have a real strain on people," the secretary said at a luncheon speech before the North American Agricultural Journalists.

Vilsack noted that there were 105,000 people working for USDA six years ago and only about 85,000 now, a cut of more than 25%. "Congress can't continue to cut and still expect us to deliver the level of service that people in the countryside expect of us," he said.

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Of course, where the employees are cut is generally more important than the raw number cut. Various administrations, going back at least to Richard Nixon and his agriculture secretary, Earl Butz, have been trying to reduce the number of county USDA offices and employees by combining activities at more centralized offices. These efforts have not met with much success, largely due to repeated interventions by members of Congress.

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Washington Insider: The Kitchen War Expands

There has been a food war going on for a long, long time with competitors fighting for space in the media to push their favorite diets, or other health nostrums. Now that fight seems to have burst anew into the big time. There are many, many such commentators and the result of this "all is fair" approach to food policy commentary is beginning to seep into public consciousness.

In addition, a really startling fact is beginning to circulate. It seems that reliable poll numbers show that less than 40% of Americans believe genetically modified organisms are safe but, upwards of 90% of scientists do.

So, how did so many Americans get this idea that so many scientists think is wrong? Well, they are being hammered with such ideas, apparently. A recent Associated Press story comments on one such example: a blogger who has millions of readers but who is often accused of overstating health risks — and, who doesn't have any scientific background for her ideas.

The blogger is Vani Hari of the Food Babe blog. AP says that since starting her blog in 2011, she's taken many extreme positions and made mistakes that have brought her critical attention. "I think she means well, but I wish she would pick more important issues and pay closer attention to the science," Marion Nestle, a nutrition, food studies and public health professor at New York University recently told the press.

Hari said her views get attention "because we're winning." But Dr. Steven Novella, a clinical neurologist and assistant professor at Yale University's school of medicine, has a more complicated view, AP says. He has a podcast and blogs and is one of Hari's most vocal foes. "It's almost like she's a food terrorist," he said. "She will target some benign ingredient that has a scary sounding name. Her criteria are if she can't pronounce it then it's scary."

Still, Hari gets nearly 5 million blog readers a month along with occasional death threats. In fact, she has banned so many people from her blogs that they now have their own page on Facebook.

She calls the criticism she faces a "distraction" and says her purpose is to get people healthier. Her critics have only criticism as a purpose, she argues.

Still, they point to a trail of errors. The AP elaborated on a clunker that occurred in her early days and now has been deleted and acknowledged. In August 2011, she criticized air quality on planes as "being mixed with up to 50% nitrogen." The earth's atmosphere (outside of airplane cabins) itself is more than three-fourths nitrogen.

But beyond her more egregious examples, critics say Hari's mainstay tactics include overstating health risks and linking artificial ingredients with their non-edible uses. Last summer, for example, she took issue with Anheuser-Busch and MillerCoors over a foam stabilizer and several other ingredients that are not actually in Budweiser or Miller Lite (the companies posted in response to Hari) though both are allowed by U.S. regulators.

So it seems that the foodies of the world are now under pressure to push back on the most extreme of the extremists in their ranks. But, who knows? There may be enough of an audience for all. For example, scare tactics are nothing new in salesmanship or politics — there are still stories circulating about politicians who warned — "warned, I say" — about colleges where students, "boys and girls together" — were required to show the faculty their "THESIS," and won elections that way.

So, are science and logic more important to food than to politics? There is some evidence that at least some of the urban dailies are digging deeper into food issues, and finding a good bit of hocus pocus afoot. Such revelations are long overdue, lest the nation risk constraints on important technologies in the face of population and demand pressures that will be painful to deny, Washington Insider believes.


Want to keep up with events in Washington and elsewhere throughout the day? See DTN Top Stories, our frequently updated summary of news developments of interest to producers. You can find DTN Top Stories in DTN Ag News, which is on the Main Menu on classic DTN products and on the News and Analysis Menu of DTN's Professional and Producer products. DTN Top Stories is also on the home page and news home page of online.dtn.com. Subscribers of MyDTN.com should check out the U.S. Ag Policy, U.S. Farm Bill and DTN Ag News sections on their News Homepage.

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(GH/CZ)

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