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.”

$500 Million Pledged to Fight Childhood Obesity

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation plans to spend more than $500 million over the next five years to reverse the increase in childhood obesity. It is one of the largest public health initiatives ever tried by a private philanthropy.
“This is an epidemic that is going to cost the country in terms of morbidity and mortality and economically,” said Dr. Risa Lavizzo-Mourey, the foundation’s president and chief executive. “The younger generation is going to live sicker and die younger than their parents because of obesity.”
The foundation estimates that roughly 25 million children 17 and under are obese or overweight, nearly a third of the 74 million in that age group, according to Census Bureau data and a 2006 study published in The Journal of the American Medical Association.
Many of those children are poor and live in neighborhoods where outdoor play is unsafe and access to fresh fruits and vegetables is limited. “In many cases, the environment makes it almost impossible for them to choose healthy lifestyles,” Dr. Lavizzo-Mourey said. “We’re going to try to change that.”
The foundation plans to invest in programs to improve access to healthy food, encourage the development of safe play spaces, increase research to enhance understanding of obesity and prod governments into adopting policies to address the problem, among other things.
Philanthropy has long fueled improvements in health, from John D. Rockefeller, whose money produced a yellow fever vaccine, to Bill and Melinda Gates, who are underwriting new health technologies and vaccines to address a variety of global problems. (lack of gov. fund)
Several states have mandated changes in school menus, increased physical education requirements and begun reporting students’ body mass index scores to parents.

Shackles on the AIDS Program

An expert committee has found that the Bush administration’s ambitious program to combat AIDS abroad is off to a good start but warns that restrictions imposed by Congress or by the administration are hampering efforts to slow the spread of the epidemic. These inflexible barriers are often imposed for ideological, not health reasons.
The midcourse evaluation of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or Pepfar, was delivered to Congress last week by a panel of experts assembled by the Institute of Medicine, a unit of the National Academy of Sciences. The program assists more than 120 countries in all, but concentrates its resources in 15 countries, mostly in Africa.
Programs to prevent the spread of H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS, are perhaps the most important tool in that long-term fight. Yet Congress specified that only 20 percent of the money could be spent on prevention, and one-third of that had to be used to promote abstinence until marriage. More money has been spent in that area than on other prevention activities, including distribution of condoms and blocking mother-to-child transmission.
Another restriction that existed even before the creation of Pepfar (President's Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief) forbids the use of taxpayer money to give clean needles to injecting addicts, while a third requires that all antiretroviral medications be approved by the FDA, even those already approved by the WHO.
These restrictions needlessly hamper a program with great potential. Congress should eliminate them and let health professionals devise the most effective strategies.

Taking Aim at All Those Plastic Bags

By a 10-1 Board of Supervisors’ vote, San Francisco became the first major American city to ban the use of non-biodegradable plastic bags by supermarkets, drug stores and other large retailers.
The paper-or-plastic question has long been a vexing one. Paper bags, of course, are biodegradable and recyclable, and are made from trees, a renewable resource. But the production of paper bags generates significantly more air and water pollution; manufacturing and recycling them requires more energy than their plastic cousins do, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
Paper bags also take up comparatively more space in landfills, where they are slow to degrade, like most everything in a landfill. A study for the American Forest and Paper Association estimated that about seven billion paper bags were used in the United States in 2003.
On the other hand, plastic bags made of polyethylene, which dominate the market, are non-biodegradable and are made from crude oil and natural gas, both nonrenewable resources. They can be recycled, but are mostly discarded.
The E.P.A. estimated that only 5.2 percent of the plastic bags and sacks in the municipal waste stream in 2005 were recycled, compared with 21 percent of paper bags and sacks. And there are also horror stories about animals swallowing them and starving to death.
Plastic bags have virtually taken over the grocery market since they were first put at check-out stands in 1977. Ninety percent of all grocery bags are now plastic, according to the Progressive Bag Alliance, an industry group of plastic bag manufacturers. Estimates of the number of plastic bags used around the world each year vary wildly — from 100 billion to as many as one trillion.
Whatever the number, it’s a lot. And that has made for a lot of plastic bag litter — which, the E.P.A. says, can take 1,000 years to decompose.
One reason for the abundance of plastic bags is economic. A standard plastic grocery bag costs about a penny to produce, according to the plastics industry, compared with 4 cents to 5 cents for a paper bag. Compostable plastic bags would cost from 8 cents to a dime, the industry says, although supporters of the San Francisco action say the cost would drop as more local governments require them.
Because of a tax, Ireland has cut the use of plastic bags by 90 percent, according to the Irish government.
Ikea, the Swedish home furnishings and accessories chain, has just begun charging customers 5 cents per plastic bag in the United States, which it donates to American Forests, a conservation group. On average, its United States stores have gone through about 70 million a year. In Britain, Ikea says, it has seen a 95 percent drop in plastic bag use since it began charging for them there last spring.
Yet another alternative is to sell consumers reusable bags.
“The paper versus plastics question takes us off the issue, which is consumption,” says Vincent Cobb, who offers reusable bags and containers on the Internet. He admits to using plastic bags, which he calls a “fantastic product,” but not as many as in the past.
“Getting into the habit of bringing your own shopping bag,” he says, “can slash this problem across the board.”

Poor Nations to Bear Brunt as World Warms

The world’s richest countries, which have contributed by far the most to the atmospheric changes linked to global warming, are already spending billions of dollars to limit their own risks from its worst consequences, like drought and rising seas.
In its fourth assessment of global warming, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change used its strongest language yet in drawing a link between human activity and recent warming.
Do rich nations have an obligation to help poorer ones prepare for potential changes caused by global warming?
But despite longstanding treaty commitments to help poor countries deal with warming, these industrial powers are spending just tens of millions of dollars on ways to limit climate and coastal hazards in the world’s most vulnerable regions — most of them close to the equator and overwhelmingly poor.
Next Friday, a new report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations body that since 1990 has been assessing global warming, will underline this growing climate divide, according to scientists involved in writing it — with wealthy nations far from the equator not only experiencing fewer effects but also better able to withstand them.
Two-thirds of the atmospheric buildup of carbon dioxide, a heat-trapping greenhouse gas that can persist in the air for centuries, has come in nearly equal proportions from the United States and Western European countries.
In contrast, Africa accounts for less than 3 percent of the global emissions of carbon dioxide from fuel burning since 1900, yet its 840 million people face some of the biggest risks from drought and disrupted water supplies, according to new scientific assessments.
Scientists say it has become increasingly clear that worldwide precipitation is shifting away from the equator and toward the poles. That will nourish crops in warming regions like Canada and Siberia while parching countries — like Malawi in sub-Saharan Africa — which are already prone to drought.
Many other experts insist this is not an either-or situation. They say that cutting the vulnerability of poor regions needs much more attention, but add that unless emissions are curbed, there will be centuries of warming and rising seas that will threaten ecosystems, water supplies, and resources from the poles to the equator, harming rich and poor.
There are some hints that wealthier countries are beginning to shift their focus toward fostering adaptation to warming outside their own borders. Relief organizations including Oxfam and the International Red Cross, foreseeing a world of worsening climate-driven disasters, are turning some of their attention toward projects like expanding mangrove forests as a buffer against storm surges, planting trees on slopes to prevent landslides, or building shelters on high ground.
Some officials from the United States, Britain and Japan say foreign-aid spending can be directed at easing the risks from climate change.
Industrialized countries bound by the Kyoto Protocol, the climate pact rejected by the Bush administration, project that hundreds of millions of dollars will soon flow via that treaty into a climate adaptation fund.
The lack of climate aid persists even though nearly all the world’s industrialized nations, including the United States under the first President Bush, pledged to help when they signed the first global warming treaty, the Framework Convention on Climate Change, in 1992.
A $3 billion Global Environmental Facility fund maintained by contributions from developed countries has nearly $1 billion set aside for projects in poorer countries that limit emissions of greenhouse gases. But critics say those projects often do not have direct local benefits, and many are happening in the large fast-industrializing developing countries — not the poorest ones.
Technology also aids farmers in the north.
Robert O. Mendelsohn, an economist at Yale focused on climate, said that in the face of warming, it might be necessary to abandon the longstanding notion that all places might someday feed themselves. Poor regions reliant on unpredictable rainfall, he said, should be encouraged to shift people out of farming and into urban areas and import their food from northern countries.
Another option, experts say, is helping poor regions do a better job of forecasting weather. In parts of India, farmers still rely more on astrologers for monsoon predictions than government meteorologists.

Patents Over Patients

WE could make faster progress against cancer by changing the way drugs are developed. In the current system, if a promising compound can’t be patented, it is highly unlikely ever to make it to market — no matter how well it performs in the laboratory. The development of new cancer drugs is crippled as a result.
The reason for this problem is that bringing a new drug to market is extremely expensive. In 2001, the estimated cost was $802 million; today it is approximately $1 billion. To ensure a healthy return on such staggering investments, drug companies seek to formulate new drugs in a way that guarantees watertight patents. In the meantime, cancer patients miss out on treatments that may be highly effective and less expensive to boot.
In 2004, Johns Hopkins researchers discovered that an off-the-shelf compound called 3-bromopyruvate could arrest the growth of liver cancer in rats. The results were dramatic; moreover, the investigators estimated that the cost to treat patients would be around 70 cents per day. Yet, three years later, no major drug company has shown interest in developing this drug for human use.
Early this year, another readily available industrial chemical, dichloroacetate, was found by researchers at the University of Alberta to shrink tumors in laboratory animals by up to 75 percent. However, as a university news release explained, dichloroacetate is not patentable, and the lead researcher is concerned that it may be difficult to find funding from private investors to test the chemical. So the university is soliciting public donations to finance a clinical trial.
Potential anticancer drugs should be judged on their scientific merit, not on their patentability. One solution might be for the government to enlarge the FDA's “orphan drug” program, which subsidizes the development of drugs for rare diseases. The definition of orphan drug could be expanded to include unpatentable agents that are scorned as unprofitable by pharmaceutical companies.

Truth in College Lending

By rights, a student who calls a college financial aid office should reach one of the college’s aid officers. But that is often not the case, as a front-page article by Jonathan Glater of The Times pointed out last week. Many colleges route student calls to representatives of loan companies who pretend to work for the college but who actually have a vested interest in selling the costliest possible loans.
Colleges portray this as a harmless, cost-saving convenience that allows them to serve students without hiring more staff members. But it is part of a troubling — and possibly illegal — process that finds colleges steering students to “preferred lenders” in exchange for kickbacks based on volume.
Some financial aid officers argue that students are getting the best possible loan rates. That seems dubious, given that “preferred lender” agreements uncovered by prosecutors are based on the payments made to the colleges and make no mention of the interest rates the students will be charged. Deceptive packaging is also a problem. Some lenders name their loans after colleges and universities and use college mascots and logos on Internet sites and correspondence.

The Answer Is Inside

The great variety of cancers reflects the fundamental mechanism by which the disease arises: the different combinations of genetic variations that cause normal cells to grow excessively and behave badly. These cancer-causing mutations may be inherited or, more commonly, incurred after birth, and our ability to describe them offers entry to a world in which cancer can be better controlled. We already know a few hundred of the genes that are mutated in various cancers, and we are poised to discover virtually all of them through a new kind of “genome project” that is just beginning.
An obvious application of genetic knowledge about specific cancers is the development of drugs and antibodies that reverse the effects of the mutations in those cancers. Some success in this difficult endeavor has already been achieved — in the clinic, not just the laboratory. But new genetic knowledge can also be used to assess an individual’s inherited risk of developing certain kinds of cancer or to predict the likely behavior of any identified tumor.
Hereditary risks of developing cancer can now be determined by examining about 30 different genes that can cause changes associated with certain cancers. This information can be enormously beneficial by encouraging early screening or preventive surgery. But it can also create anxieties about genetic discrimination, upset families and raise disturbing questions about who should be tested and when. Most of the known mutations are so uncommon in the population and so expensive to find by DNA testing that it is not yet justified to examine people who aren’t from cancer-prone families.
Moreover, depending on the mutant gene, the risks that it will actually cause cancer can vary, from slightly above average to nearly 100 percent. And the absence of an inherited mutation, while reducing risk, does not preclude the cancer. In addition, there are doubtless more inherited variant genes to be discovered, especially variants that confer relatively weak risks of cancer. These features complicate genetic assessment of cancer risk, but I believe that the approach, on balance, can benefit affected individuals and public health.
These predictions will be especially important when tumors are found at very early stages. While not yet perfect, such tests are welcome harbingers of a more rational basis for making crucial decisions about treatment.

Being Nice to the Bacon, Before You Bring It Home

Thus was one meat consumer introduced to the culture of meat producers.
When Burger King announced last week that it would favor producers who treated their animals more humanely it was welcome news to animal welfare advocates. But it also served to remind the rest of us that if we are meat eaters, we are slaughterers, too. At least by proxy.
To farmers and ranchers who raise animals for food, the feeding, housing and killing of livestock is an unbroken continuum that delivers a product to people far removed from its production — city folk who work in advertising, or whatever it is that city people do.
Animals are for petting, not killing. Meat, unrelated, is for eating.
Beginning in the 1990s, animal welfare advocates like People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) began virtually force-feeding the consuming public on certain realities of so-called factory farming.
For the sake of production efficiencies and a low-cost food supply, they explained, cows, pigs and poultry are often condemned to sunless, sometimes squalid lives, only to die with needless cruelty. These advocates led protests against the largest hamburger chains, beneficiaries of the factory system.
After initial resistance, in 2001 the chains agreed to some improvements. McDonald’s and Burger King imposed some guidelines for their meat and egg suppliers: extra water, wing-room and fresh air for egg-laying hens; mandatory electric-shock stunning of pigs and cattle before slaughter.
Retailers clearly see advantages in appealing to the demographic of kinder and gentler meat-eaters, according to Ron Paul, president of Technomic, a Chicago-based research and consulting firm for food suppliers. “There is a growing realization that the humane movement is a long-term movement,” he said. “It’s not going to go away.”
It might seem hypocritical to address the quality of life of a creature being raised exclusively to be killed for food. Mr. Waldau, who has degrees in law, religion and philosophy, said that the issue was not meat eating per se, but one’s responsibility for one’s choices as a consumer. Whether to eat the meat of animals treated abysmally during their lifetimes or to buy so-called blood diamonds or clothing made in sweatshops, become parallel questions, he said.