Farewell, French Fries! Hello, Sliced Apples!

From the start, Mayor Bloomberg muscled his way into the city’s restaurants on a health platform. He banned smoking in bars and small restaurants. (Lighting up in restaurants with more than 35 seats had already been outlawed.) More recently, he shot down trans fat, forced large restaurant chains to post calorie counts and took on a cutting-edge culinary technique called sous vide.
The mayor’s raucous takeover of the public school system in 2002 led to a culinary bonus for the city’s 1.1 million school children. They now have an executive chef, whole wheat bread, salad bars and little plastic bags of sliced New York state apples. Even before the very public rat infestations and a string of high-profile closings, health inspectors were already making about 15,000 more restaurants visits annually than they did four years ago. In January and February, the health department closed 147 restaurants, double the number for the same two months last year.
And the Mayor has now turned his attention to hunger and poverty, working with the City Council to get more people to sign up for food stamps and looking with renewed vigor at how to get healthy food to people who live in neighborhoods with no grocery stores.
Perhaps the biggest statement Mayor Bloomberg has made about food policy came in the form of a hire. In January, Benjamin Thomases, 31, a New Yorker who holds an MBA from Columbia University, became the first official charged with coordinating the city’s policies on food.

Still, people engaged in agricultural reform, anti-hunger workers and even the average food-obsessed New Yorker wonder whether the Mayor is actually leading the city’s current food revolution or merely walking in front of a social change that was well under way before he took office.

“On food issues they’re very peculiar, this Bloomberg administration,” said Toni Liquori, an educator who has worked on food and public health projects in New York City for more than 20 years, including administering a $2 million Kellogg Foundation grant to improve the eating habits and health of New York City school children.

“What ends up happening is that one issue will pierce through and someone will charge with it, like trans fats or school meals,” she said. “But you also have a sense that it’s not like the administration is driving anything full tilt. It’s not as if they have embraced the full connection on food.”

Anti-hunger advocates, who have long been skeptical of Mayor Bloomberg’s commitment to the poor, credit the Mayor for taking a more serious interest in food as it relates to poverty this term.

“The tools are now all in place to achieve significant progress, but it depends on whether the city decides to use the tools,” said Joel Berg, executive director of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger and former member of the Clinton administration.

In many American cities, agricultural politics are being argued at the bar and alpha moms are organizing to take back school cafeterias. Chefs are making heroes out of cattle ranchers and the obesity crisis has prompted a new look at how and what to feed the poor. In an effort to build a cohesive public policy that brings all those food-related movements together, a handful of cities began forming food policy councils in the late 1990s.

The organizations, which are in part designed to advise governments on matters of food, usually include anyone who might have a stake in an urban diet. The councils with the most power are seated in city or state health departments, and might include farmers, food bank managers, school principals, backyard gardeners, grocers, chefs, labor leaders and clergy.

Both Berkeley and San Francisco have played with the model, as have Hartford, Conn., Toronto and Portland, Ore. Last week, New York state agricultural officials announced that the state would soon have its first food-policy council.

The nearest thing New York city government has now is Mr. Thomases, the food czar, who works deep inside the enormous collection of city departments called Health and Human Services. In an interview, however, he said that his job is not to set policy or offer vision.

And while organizations like food councils and positions like Mr. Thomases’ are a start, no major American city has yet established a Department of Food, in the way New York has a Department of Cultural Affairs or a Department of Environmental Protection. Although Gavin Newsom, the mayor of San Francisco, recently weighed in on the 2007 Farm Bill and many mayors have taken up the anti-obesity cause, no mayor of a large urban city has stood up and become, in essence, the Alice Waters of city food politics.

Mayor Bloomberg, who has donated millions to the Johns Hopkins school of public health that bears his name, brought in the antismoking, TB-fighting Dr. Frieden early on. Though he’s been labeled both a zealot and a revolutionary, Dr. Frieden doesn’t see himself as either. And he doesn’t see the changes in how New York eats as part of any larger foodie revolution.

The city, he points out, has had a long history of making people healthier by controlling food. In 1918, the Board of Health condemned oyster beds in the East River because they were contaminated with typhoid. Today, typhoid isn’t killing New Yorkers. Heart disease is.

“Obesity and diabetes are now the only health problems in the United States getting worse,” Dr. Frieden said. In light of the epidemic, Mayor Bloomberg’s hand in changing New York’s diet “has been relatively restrained,” he said.

Dr. Frieden, who has a runner’s body even though he swears he can’t lay off desserts, said it took a little bit of convincing to get the mayor behind the trans fat ban. But in the end, as with the smoking ban, it all came down to one question. The mayor asked, “Are you certain this is going to save lives?”

Not all of Dr. Freiden’s efforts to alter New York’s food landscape have been successful.

He realizes that a law forcing large restaurant chains to post calorie counts as prominently as menu prices might face a court challenge. And although the department often trots out its Healthy Bodegas Initiative as an example of innovative food policy work, the project has not gotten very far.

The idea was to encourage bodegas in neighborhoods with poverty and health problems to sell more nutritious food. An effort to get more 1 percent milk into some stores worked, but an attempt to persuade 60 bodegas in East Harlem and the South Bronx to sell packages of sliced New York apples and carrots didn’t take off.

Bush Splits With Congress and States on Emissions

By FELICITY BARRINGER and WILLIAM YARDLEY

Published: April 4, 2007

WASHINGTON, April 3 — A day after the Supreme Court ruled that the federal government had the authority to regulate heat-trapping gases, President Bush said he thought that the measures he had taken so far were sufficient.

But the court’s ruling was being welcomed by Congress and the states, which are already using the decision to speed their own efforts to regulate the gases that contribute to global climate change. As a result, Congress and state legislatures are almost certain to be the arenas for far-reaching and bruising lobbying battles.

Mr. Bush made it clear in remarks on Tuesday that he thought his proposal to increase automobile fuel efficiency was sufficient for the moment; he gave no indication he would ask the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate emissions of heat-trapping gases.

“Whatever we do,” he said, “must be in concert with what happens internationally.” He added, “Unless there is an accord with China, China will produce greenhouse gases that will offset anything we do in a brief period of time.”

But with Congress and the states more determined than ever to act, some of the nation’s largest industries — including automobile manufacturers and the oil companies that make their gasoline, and electric utilities and the coal companies that fire many of their boilers — now face the increasingly certain prospect of expensive controls on emissions of carbon dioxide, the most common heat-trapping gas associated with climate change.

At least 300 bills have been filed in 40 states that address heat-trapping gases and climate change in some form, said Adela Flores-Brennan, a policy analyst with the National Conference of State Legislatures.

In Washington, Congress has already begun a process that would eventually apportion both the responsibility for cuts in emissions that could cost tens of billions of dollars and the benefits and incentives that could mean billions of dollars of new income.

“Obviously, nobody wants to bear a disproportionate share of the burden,” said Representative Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts and chairman of the newly created House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming. “It’s now going to be a multidimensional chess game with the planet’s future in the balance.”

The way legislation apportions emissions cuts among industries — and, as important, how the credits earned by companies that reduce emissions are allocated — will be the focus of the lobbying, said Mr. Markey and lobbyists for environmental groups and industry.

“It’s incumbent on everyone to roll their sleeves up, if they haven’t already, to deal seriously with this problem,” said Luke Popovich of the National Mining Association, the trade group for the coal mine operators who will be at the center of the lobbying. “If pain concentrates the mind, there will be more concentration on the issue now.”

Coal is the major source of electricity in more than half the states, and coal is the fuel most closely associated with high levels of emissions of carbon dioxide. And coal interests have a bipartisan audience. The United Mine Workers is a natural Democratic constituency, while the National Mining Association has been a reliable supporter of the Bush administration.

“There are differences within the industry,” Mr. Popovich said, “but we are allied in favor of a solution that preserves coal’s growth in the United States.”

Next to the electric-utility sector, which is responsible for about 40 percent of emissions of heat-trapping gases, Mr. Markey said, comes the transportation sector, which contributes roughly 30 percent.

The auto industry has long opposed increases in fuel-efficiency standards, which automatically mean a reduction in heat-trapping gases. The oil industry has resisted controls on carbon dioxide emissions. Until recently, the two industries, while occasionally sniping at each other, had avoided explicit endorsement of the regulation that was most feared by the other.

But, with the likelihood of Congressional action increasing, that informal nonaggression pact has ended. Executives of the Big Three auto companies testifying in the House last month explicitly supported regulation of carbon dioxide. And a senior oil industry executive earlier this year gave a speech advocating increases in fuel economy.

The Supreme Court found Monday that the Environmental Protection Agency had erred in justifying its decision not to regulate carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases. The court said that by providing nothing more than a “laundry list of reasons not to regulate,” the agency had defied the Clean Air Act’s “clear statutory command.” The ruling also said that the agency could not sidestep its authority to regulate heat-trapping gases unless it could provide a scientific basis for its refusal to do so.

In Congress, controls on automobile emissions remain a work in progress. In more than a dozen states, beginning with California in 2002, they have become a fact — although these laws have been stayed pending legal challenges. Those challenges were greatly weakened, however, by the Supreme Court ruling.

“States are not going to wait,” said Dennis McLerran, executive director of the Puget Sound Clean Air Agency, created by Washington State. “States are going to continue to act on this. If there is some confusion from this or if it creates greater pressure on Congress, then that’s all to the good.”

Washington is among more than a dozen states that have followed California’s lead in setting goals to restrict carbon dioxide emissions, and it is one of five Western states that have formed an alliance to combat climate change. States in the Northeast have formed a similar alliance.

Several environmental leaders said the court decision could persuade still other states to pass climate-change legislation.

California has been in the vanguard, first with its bill to regulate carbon dioxide emissions from vehicle tailpipes in 2002, and then with its landmark 2006 law requiring a 25 percent reduction in the state’s carbon dioxide emissions by 2020.

Arizona, New Mexico, Oregon and Washington have joined California to pursue a regional plan to cut emissions. The idea is to make it profitable for industries to pursue pollution reduction through cap-and-trade plans that would allow companies with emissions lower than the allowed caps to sell credits to companies that exceed them.

Most of the legislation in Congress follows the cap-and-trade model.

Outside the West and the Northeast, states are still finding their way. In North Carolina, government commissions are weighing measures like restricting auto emissions and establishing so-called renewable portfolios, which many states are proposing as a way to balance their energy supply between carbon-producing fuels like coal, oil and natural gas, and clean, renewable fuel sources like wind and solar power.

In Illinois, Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich has proposed restricting carbon emissions to 60 percent of 1990 levels by the year 2050, said Steve Frenkel, an aide to the governor.

“You’ve seen a lot of leadership coming out of the coasts,” Mr. Frenkel said. “Looking in the Midwest, where there’s a lot of coal and industrial pollution, how we handle this here is important for how we handle this nationally.”

With about half the states getting at least 50 percent of their electric power from coal, Congress will have to wrestle with the disproportionate impact that climate change legislation could have around the country.

“You’ve got 35 senators reliably for a pretty strong program,” said David Doniger, a lawyer with the Natural Resources Defense Council. “How do you get that to 50 or 60? You have to get senators who come from states where coal is important, autos are important and agriculture is important.”