Food sovereignty | Omni Cassidy, PhD | TEDxNYU Langone Health

Key Concepts

• Food Sovereignty: Shifting power over food from corporations back to communities.
• Pester Power: Children's ability to influence purchasing decisions through persistent requests, often driven by advertising.
• Food Environment: The sum of influences that shape our food choices, including availability, accessibility, and marketing.
• Food Messages: The information and narratives surrounding food, including advertising, cultural norms, and personal experiences.
• Community Values: Shared beliefs and principles within a community regarding health, well-being, and food.

Childhood Connection to Food

The speaker recounts a childhood spent in Mississippi, particularly summers with grandparents, Big Mama and Popo, who lived in a small town. Their lifestyle was deeply connected to the land, involving growing fruits and vegetables, raising livestock, and spending significant time outdoors. The speaker vividly remembers experiences like digging in the garden, snapping peas, making pies from wild berries, and drinking herbal tea. These experiences fostered a strong connection to the origin of food and instilled values of self-sufficiency and nourishment. The speaker emphasizes that these early experiences planted "seeds of power" – the power of knowing where food comes from, the right to eat healthily, and the ability to receive clear food messages.

The Modern Food Environment and Corporate Influence

In contrast to this idyllic childhood, the speaker describes the current food environment, especially within the communities they serve, as vastly different and challenging. This is particularly evident in the "new tech era." While working with families and young people, many from Black communities, seeking to improve eating habits, the speaker consistently heard about the difficulty of eating healthy.

• Pester Power and Sugary Cereals: A mother shared her feeling of powerlessness against cartoon characters promoting sugary cereals to her eight-year-old son, leading to constant demands ("I want that"). This phenomenon is identified as "pester power."
• Peer Pressure and Racial Bias in Healthy Eating: A teenage girl expressed fear of being teased by peers for eating healthy because the primary food messages she encountered featured only white individuals, implying a lack of representation and potential social exclusion.

The speaker attributes this shift to the decline of the connection to food sources and the rise of food and beverage corporations as primary sources of food messages.

Corporate Marketing and its Impact

The transcript highlights the significant influence of food and beverage corporations on consumer behavior, particularly among young people:

• Marketing Expenditure: Companies spend $14 billion annually on product promotion.
• Unhealthy Product Focus: 90% of these promoted products are considered unhealthy, being high in fat, sugar, and salt, and largely processed.
• Ad Exposure: Young people are estimated to see upwards of 20,000 food ads per year.
• Disproportionate Exposure for Black Youth: Black youth often see twice the number of ads compared to their white peers.
• Health Consequences: Exposure to these unhealthy food ads contributes to poor diets, excess weight gain, and increased risk of type two diabetes, high blood pressure, and certain cancers in young people.

The Role of Technology in Food Marketing

The speaker details how corporations are leveraging technological advancements to expand their marketing reach:

• New Platforms: Companies are partnering with tech companies to market on social media, gaming, streaming platforms, and even virtual reality.
• Data Collection and Analysis: These advancements enable companies to collect and analyze vast amounts of data on young people's purchasing habits (e.g., coffee shop orders, nearby fast-food locations) and social media comments about food preferences.
• Blurring Lines: Ads are becoming so integrated into society and technology that it's increasingly difficult for young people to differentiate between advertising and entertainment.

Reimagining the Future of Food Messaging and Sovereignty

The speaker pivots to envisioning a future where food messaging aligns with community values and promotes health, drawing on the concept of food sovereignty:

• Shifting Power: Food sovereignty aims to transfer power over food from corporations back to communities.
• Community-Centric Partnerships: The speaker proposes a future where tech companies partner with community farms to create food messages with reach and scale that align with community values around healthy eating and living.
• Community Accountability: A key idea is for companies to be accountable to communities, not just shareholders, and to seek approval from community councils on how food is advertised, or if it should be advertised at all.
• Nourishing Food Messages: The ultimate vision is a world bombarded with food messages that are genuinely nourishing and aligned with community values.
• "Pester Power" for Broccoli: A hopeful, albeit perhaps aspirational, example is children using their "pester power" to advocate for eating healthy foods like broccoli.

Conclusion and Call to Action

The speaker concludes by emphasizing that while their dreams for the future of food messaging may raise more questions than answers, the core idea is to leverage appropriate and comprehensive regulations on food and beverage corporations. This would allow for the redirection of resources, technology, and human ingenuity towards creating a food environment that genuinely supports the health of all. The speaker believes that by focusing on food sovereignty, they have planted a seed for a more equitable future of food messaging.