Chambliss, Harkin partake in polite food fight
U.S. Sen. Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga.
I needed to put my 3-D glasses on to make out the partisan divide between Sen. Saxby Chambliss and Sen. Tom Harkin at a hearing that ended just a few minutes ago at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Clifton Road in DeKalb.
The point of the Agriculture Committee hearing was hard to argue with: “Benefits of Farm-to-School Projects, Healthy Eating and Physical Activity for School Children.” Real Mom and apple-pie stuff. Or at least, Mom and apple.
Harkin, an Iowa Democrat who chairs the committee, and Chambliss, the Georgia Republican who’s the ranking minority member, came down from D.C. to hear the testimony of two prominent public health experts, a U.S. Department of Agriculture child nutrition expert, and a man who runs a farmers’ coop that sells local produce to school districts.
As is customary for such events, both senators began by praising each other and lauding their great friendship. In other words, they disagree with each other on just about everything.
Early on in hearing, Bill Dietz, director of the CDC’s division of nutrition, physical activity and obesity, noted that childhood obesity has been deemed by public health experts to be an “epidemic” — and that isn’t being addressed effectively. “We’re about where tobacco was in the 1960s,” Dietz said.
You just know that’s the kind of talk that drives a conservative crazy: calling obesity a “disease,” suggesting that unhealthy foods be treated somewhat like cigarettes. If Neal Boortz had been listening, he would have blown a fuse.
But Chambliss is a politician. And the audience here was stocked with school nutritionists, small-time produce farmers, and advocates for fresh food, organic farms and local farm-to-school programs.
It’s not surprising then that, rather than take anyone on directly, Chambliss kind of danced around the implications of what Dietz and others were saying: “This problem really starts at home,” he noted — the point being that healthy food is the parents’ responsibility more than it is the schools’.
He also praised the coop operator, Glyen Holmes of Marianna, Fla., as well as another witness, former U.S. Surgeon General Satcher, who’s involved with a private non-profit that advocates healthy diets for kids, for doing their work “without any help from the federal government … and you don’t have to have the federal government watch over your shoulder. … You’re not looking for the federal government to tell you what to do.” Subtext: We don’t need the government involved in this problem because the private sector can handle it.
Harkin — and a lot of the public health and local food advocates in the room — want to see some federal muscle to help counter the slide toward soft drinks, packaged snacks and other processed foods that are contributing toward skyrocketing childhood obesity rates. Chambliss — a big recipient of agribusiness and food-processors’ campaign contributions — may be the committee’s leading voice against such efforts.
The divide could really be seen (but still you needed the 3-D glasses) late in the two-hour hearing, once Harkin got to talking about his longstanding personal crusade to get soft-drinks out the schools.
“If the school is in the [federal] lunch program ,” he said, then the Agriculture Department ought to have “the authority to regulate all the food in school.” For the first time since the start of the event, the audience broke into heavy applause.
Chambliss listened to Harkin, while tapping a pencil on the table. Then, he said: “We’re gonna have to wind up.”
I was looking at the neatly trimmed fellow in the nice dark suit who was furiously Blackberrying. Hmmm, I wonder if that was the lobbyist from Coca-Cola.
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