ACRES U.S.A. You were originally trained as a registered dietician. How did that influence everything else you're involved in?
Melinda Hemmelgarn: When I was in college I was fascinated by nutrition in particular. I love the relationship between what we eat and our health, I love the fact that diseases can be cured and prevented with nutrients or nutrition - the total diet approach, in other words. I found it fascinating then and I'm still fascinated. I was fascinated with clinical dietetics, which is that angle of preventing disease and treating disease through diet. The course that was put in front of me was: you become a dietician, and then you work in a hospital with patients to help them get better. I thought, great, this is the track I want to take. In order to work in a hospital or in a public health clinic as a registered dietician, the credential requires 75 hours of continuing education every five years, and there are opportunities to take advanced courses and certificate programs. There's a tremendous amount of science. I remember an entire summer I spent understanding how different minerals influence cellular pathways.
ACRES U.S.A.: How did you end up in the middle of Missouri?
Hemmelgarn: When I got done with my training I moved to the Midwest. I absolutely love living here for a number of reasons, but it's been a real education. I started working at a veteran's hospital, and that was the best learning experience I could have had. I worked there for four years as a clinical dietician. I saw the ravages of poverty and injustice and poor diet and poor health habits. I saw young people who were dying from horrible things - lymphomas, brain tumors, and the ravages of smoking and drinking too much. I also learned that people were self-medicating. I worked with people who were for the large part of low income. They had been to war, and they had seen some horrific things, and they were just trying to cope. I grew up in a very compassionate home, and my Mother always taught me to put myself in other people's shoes, but the beauty of working in that veterans' hospital was I got to see first-hand the pain and suffering that goes along with not only poverty but also poor diet. Then I went back to school at the University of Missouri, and I took a master's in food nutrition and food systems. I realized then that people got their information not one-on-one from a dietician, but mostly from the media. So I started doing work in the media.
ACRES U.S.A. : Before we talk about your work in that area, does the world of medical and hospital dieticians deal with the corporate influences that are evident in other professional circles?
Hemmelgarn: The American Dietetic Association is not alone in that.
The American Family Physicians group based in Kansas City just created a partnership
with Coca-Cola, and I actually ended up writing them a letter and encouraging them not to do so based on what has happened with the American Dietetic Association. It can be troubling when organizations take money from other organizations or, more importantly, corporations that seem to be out of step or out of line with the philosophy - we're teaching people how to eat well, why on earth would we have a partnership with a corporation that works against what we're trying to teach? In the American Dietetic Association there is a practice group called the "Hunger and Environmental Nutrition Practice Group." We are 1,400 members strong. There are 65,000 registered dieticians in the United States, and out of that larger membership, 1,400 of us and growing are very much focused on the sustainability component of a healthy diet. I am a member of that practice group. We question and try to hold accountable our larger association when it comes to these partnerships. We are having a steady dialogue about how we might be able to fund our organization and do the things we want to do without taking money that appears to be tainted.
ACRES U.S.A.: Has the mainstream of dietetics been sensitive in the past not only to the chemical content of food, but also the sources of food, the quality
of the food?
Hemmelgarn: When I was going through my training about 30 years ago, really there was only one nutritionist - I don't even think she's an R.D. - and that would be Joan Gussow. She was way ahead of her time. Many of us looked up to her as a mentor in helping us think, as I like to say, beyond the plate. She was light years ahead on all the sustainability issues within nutrition today. She was truly the leader. Some dietetic programs now are really starting to embrace sustainability issues, but 30 years ago nobody questioned where the food came from, and there was probably somewhat less reason to do so, because we didn't really have the level of confinement or industrial agriculture back then that we do now. I think that today it is absolutely critical for us to ask a series of questions, and I've actually developed such a series to promote what I call "Food System Literacy." The questions are: Where does my food come from and who produced it? Under what conditions? Who owns and profits from technology that might have been used? What's in my food or what's not in my food? We think about what's in it, but I think equally so we have to ask what's not in it. Highly processed foods, for example, are missing a lot of the whole nutrients that were in the original food before it went through processing.
ACRES U.S.A : Are the dieticians of America alarmed over the spread of an untested technology in the food supply, or is there general acceptance of it?
Hemmelgarn: Most of us, and I'm including dieticians with the larger
group of citizens in our country, don't question where our food comes from. If I were to generalize, I would say the larger proportion of dieticians probably haven't thought that much about it.
ACRES U.S.A.: One of your recent pieces mentioned educational food providers. Could you expand on that?
Hemmelgarn: I went to a meeting at Purdue for college food service workers, food service managers, dietary managers - people who cook lunch, people who
order things for the C-stores, the convenience stores on campus. We sat down to
breakfast, and I think I was the only one who questioned where the sausage came from. I don't want to eat meat that comes from an industrial farm because I think we are looking at some very serious consequences from that type of agriculture. Look at antibiotic resistance.
ACRES U.S.A.: Did the university food service managers respond to what you said?
Hemmelgarn: No, it didn't launch a discussion at the table. Sometimes it's easier or more comfortable not to ask those questions and not to think about it. It's really unfortunate, because nobody wants to make another person feel uncomfortable - I think this is one of the issues we face as communicators. How do we talk about these issues so we don't pass judgment, so we don't sound preachy, so we don't make people feel badly about their choices, but instead help them along the continuum of making better choices every day and under with both as a dietician and a journalist.
ACRES U.S.A.: Was that a major emphasis at the Nutrition Communications Center you started at the University of Missouri?
Hemmelgarn: The Nutrition Communications Center is no longer there. I started that center when I was at the university for 15 years, and in 2002 I lost my job. There were massive budget cuts, and I was on hard money, as they say - I wasn't bringing in any grant dollars. I could have been bringing in a lot of money, but I didn't think like that. Many very good people have lost their jobs - it's a very difficult thing - but actually it was a blessing in disguise for me, because I ended up applying for a Food and Society Policy Fellowship, started my own consulting business, and realized that I really liked working for myself, working and devoting my time and energy to the things I was passionate about. It was a Food and Society Policy Fellowship that was a turning point for me in helping me understand the importance of sustainable agriculture.
ACRES U.S.A.: Did the fellowship trigger your interest in media literacy?
Hemmelgarn: Before that I had already become interested in media - media messages directed towards kids, especially. I thought it was wrong to target
children with messages for foods that were not in their best interests. I wanted to find a way to help children navigate those messages, so I became involved with media literacy, helping people think about who owns the messages, in other words, and trying to understand what kind of persuasive techniques might be used, to help people see media messages and say, "This message is what's presented, but what's missing from the message?" Then I asked kids to look at what the hidden sell might be. A really good example of that is Mountain Dew. If you look at a Mountain Dew ad, the obvious sell is a soda, but the hidden messages in Mountain Dew ads are messages like being wild and crazy or being adventurous, being a risk-taker. That really is very appealing to a teenage audience. I helped kids see how messages about their food were influencing them, unbeknownst to them. Then I helped them try to figure out if a message is true or not - how do you do that? How do you find out who owns messages?
ACRES U.S.A.: The rise of the Internet is supposed to have made that task easier. Do you agree?
Hemmelgarn: Actually, over the years it's really become more and more difficult. We value transparency, but sometimes it's very difficult to get to the bottom of things. There are a whole group of organizations that sound really good on the surface, but in reality are funded by industrial players. I started to take a look at media literacy before I left the university, and once I got involved with the Food and Society Policy Fellowship and learned about the benefits of sustainable agriculture, I was able to start applying those media literacy concepts to agriculture and the larger food system. It's been a lot of fun and very exciting. I love the work, and then I also do freelance writing and speaking.
ACRES U.S.A. : What age levels do you concentrate on? Do you vary your approach for the age level of the children you're teaching?
Hemmelgarn: Absolutely. What I typically do is do more of a train-the trainer type of workshop. I might work with health educators or I might work with teachers in a classroom. I have done workshops with kids. I was involved in a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Healthy Eating By Design grant shortly after I left the university. That was working with fifth graders, and it was fabulous. These were 10 - and 11- year-olds. They were in a low-income pocket of the community, which is really where I prefer to focus my efforts.
ACRES U.S.A.: How do you start a course like that, and where do you end up?
Hemmelgarn: We started out looking at beverages. We taught the kids the basic, core concepts of media literacy. It was really important for us to help them see how messages are constructed, how everything is scripted. I'll give an example. We worked with a wonderful African American teacher looking at an ad of an African American dad playing with his child during the day - there was sunlight coming through the window. The teacher said, "How do you know this is for a luxury product?" And the kids were sitting there thinking, and the teacher said, "Well, when's the last time you got to play with your Dad in the middle of the afternoon?" And the kids got to see how the idea of luxury was kind of hinted at in ads without coming right out and saying it. The teacher was great - she had already been teaching media literacy from a historical perspective. I asked the kids, "Look at magazines the next time you go to a drug store or you're out shopping and see how many faces on the magazine covers look like you. Is that representative of the population?" I showed them pictures of people in kitchens, really fancy kitchens, and you never saw an African American in one of these modern kitchens. It was always a tall slender white woman, generally blonde. We talked about how different people were selectively chosen to sell different products. Michael Jordan was another example, selling sports drinks.
ACRES U.S.A.: How did the concept of media literacy first come to your attention?
Hemmelgarn: There's a professor here in education whose name is Roy Fox, who wrote a book called Harvesting Minds about how television commercials influence kids. I read an article about him, and I met with him and told him I was really fascinated with his work. He went into schools that had Channel One pumped in - Channel One is a fluff news program that schools get free of charge, they get a monitor, a TV screen. It's got some commercial messages. You can go online to and see some of the programming and how some of the things are advertised.
ACRES U.S.A.: This is Chris Whittle's venture?
Hemmelgarn: Yes, exactly. It is extremely successful. So anyway, this guy Roy Fox, he went into the classrooms in rural Missouri, economically struggling communities, and he saw the effects of commercials on kids, so one of the questions he asked the kids was, "Why do you think Michael Jordan advertises this product?" The responses were so surprising. The kids said things like, "It makes him more popular with his friends." They don't think about the fact that people are paid to do this. So we talked about that. We talked about why certain people are chosen to sell certain products, how they're paid to do it, how actors are paid to use tobacco products in movies, and how production companies receive money by placing products in their movies. If you remember E.T., the little alien liked Reese's Pieces.
ACRES U.S.A.: Only because M&M turned them down, and regretted doing so for many years. Another great example is the Tom Hanks movie based on
Robinson Crusoe that was essentially a partnership with Federal Express.
Hemmelgarn: And people don't realize the effect that that has on them. What media does is serve as both a mirror of our culture as well as the creator of the culture. It crafts and influences what we accept as being normal and natural, what is accepted.
ACRES U.S.A.: How do children respond when they find out that some of their heroes are really just doing things for the cash?
Hemmelgarn:The ultimate bottom line from this project is that kids don't like to be duped. Nobody likes to be duped, but kids have an innate sense of justice, and when they see how they've been manipulated, they're not really happy about it. The other part of what we did with these kids was to have them look at beverages. We talked about Ronald McDonald and how the original Ronald McDonald was actually overweight.
ACRES U.S.A.: Willard Scott?
Hemmelgarn: Yes. Of course that could not be allowed, so Ronald McDonald is now lean and trim and does a lot of exercise, as if you could possibly exercise enough to burn off a super-sized Value Meal. There aren't enough hours in the day. That was some something we helped the kids see. We also did a beverage thing with them which was great. We had them learn how to read a label. You have a nutrition label and you're a dietician for so long you think everybody knows how to read a nutrition label - wrong! They are very complicated, and they actually require people to do math in some cases. We showed them a 20-ounce bottle of any soda - Coke, Pepsi, Mountain Dew, whatever - and we had them calculate the grams of sugar. Not only that, but we asked them to transfer grams to teaspoons of sugar, and then had them count out the number of teaspoons of sugar that was going to be in this 20-ounce bottle. Then we had them create media because that's part of media literacy, having kids create media. They did this little sugar counting experiment and created a video for their friends in the lower grades to see. They were the big-shot fifth graders - they were going to be graduating. We had an assembly, and we also showed their video production in the movie theater downtown. They taught the younger kids and they were so proud of what they did, rightfully so. They were just so wonderful to work with, and it worked. When you do not shake your finger and tell them what to do, but instead help them think critically and draw their own conclusions, then that's truly empowering them. The little girl measuring out the sugar at one point said, "Gosh, there's a lot of sugar in here." It was tiring to measure out 17 teaspoons of sugar.
ACRES U.S.A.: How do parents and administrators feel about teaching children to take apart the marketing culture?
Hemmelgarn: Some of the parents said, "We always used to go to McDonald's after church and now my kids are saying they don't want to go."
ACRES U.S.A.: Don't the fast food companies counter these efforts with their own schemes?
Hemmelgarn: Yes, and I'll give you an example, McTeacher's Nights. On a slow weeknight like a Tuesday or Wednesday, McDonald's offers school districts the "opportunity" to come into one of their franchises, and the teachers typically do
some of the work behind the counter. I spoke to one teacher just this month who said she was just frying French fries at their school's McTeacher's Night. The kids are encouraged to come out with their classmates, sometimes there are incentives - for example, the class that has the most kids at McDonald's that night may get a prize - but what ultimately happens is then the school is given a percentage of the sales, and the percentage varies. Now, when you're talking about underfunded public education, what we do is unfairly put that school between a rock and a hard place. I've spoken to teachers in school districts who say, "Thank goodness for that McTeacher's Night because we wouldn't have been able to have our new playground without it, and yet . . ."
ACRES U.S.A.: Does McDonald's pay people to attend?
Hemmelgarn: No, you buy your meal and then McDonald's gives the school a percentage of the sales. So your kid's school is going to have a McTeacher's
Night, and you're able to bring in, say, 300 kids that night - whatever they order, out of the total sales from that school's purchases, a certain percentage then goes to the school. It's not the majority, the majority is going to stay with McDonald's, but the school - I'll just draw a typical figure out of the hat - might receive 20 percent of sales. There are other programs that are similar. Pizza Hut has a program where kids get pizza coupons if they read books. Well, OK, so Johnny comes home, he's done his reading, that's great, and he gets a coupon to go to Pizza Hut and get a free pizza. Of course, chances are Johnny isn't going to go to Pizza Hut by himself, he's going to go with his family, and the whole family is going to eat at Pizza Hut that night. You walk away and you might say, "Isn't that great, isn't that nice that they're giving my child a coupon for a free pizza for reading a book?" I try to explain to people that if you think this is philanthropy, you really have to think twice about it. If it was true philanthropy, the organization would make an anonymous donation, right?
ACRES U.S.A.: Or they would fund a reading program or something like that to encourage reading.
Hemmelgarn: With no strings attached.
ACRES U.S.A.: Have you encountered the term "consumer trainees?" Sociologists applied it to teenagers at least 30 years ago.
Hemmelgarn: No, I haven't heard that term - but it's a really good one. I would say that within maybe the last 20 years, consumer trainees have been started at ever-younger ages, today probably down to 2-year-olds. There are two books that I highly recommend. One is called Born to Buy by Juliet Schor, she's a sociologist, and the other is Consuming Kids by Susan Linn. Both of those books address how our kids are entering into being consumer trainees from a younger and younger age. I guess the reason I feel so strongly about this area is because consumerism robs our children of their innocence. It makes them want products more than the things that are really valuable in life like relationships and spending time in nature. I try to leave my teachers and workshop participants with the message that we really need to be trading screen time for green time. There's a great book also about the value of kids being in nature titledLast Child in the Woods by Richard Louv. If I could recommend to parents a few books that they should read when they leave the hospital with their new baby, they would definitely be Last Child in the Woods and either Born to Buy or Consuming Kids. Consuming Kids is more of an accessible consumer read, and the Juliet Schor book is a little more of a rigorous critique.
ACRES U.S.A.: Are there organizations engaged in working against this kind of thing?
Hemmelgarn: There's a wonderful organization called the "Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood." You have to see their last video on Disney. If you go to their website, the story is posted there, and they also talk about other projects they've worked on in the past. One was a report card down in Florida that they wanted to put McDonald's logos on, and a parent stepped up, and they corrected that. But what's really going on now is an agricultural program I discovered from the Mid America CropLife Association, called the CropLife Ambassador Network. It's a pesticide group, and they have a slide series called The War on Weeds,where they teach kids why pesticides are so good.
ACRES U.S.A.: How do they make it attractive to schools?
Hemmelgarn: The material is free, the curriculum is free. In fact, you can be a "CropLife Ambassador" and bring this program into the school so the teachers don't have to do anything. Somebody is going to come into your classroom, maybe give the teacher a little time to grade papers or whatever, and present this program to kids. It's teaching them the power of chemical herbicides, telling them that if we didn't have herbicides, 55 million teens would have to be weeding - do you want to spend your summer weeding? This is literally right from one of their slides - how many teens would
it take to replace herbicides?
ACRES U.S.A.: There's a technical term for that which refers to animal waste, or you could just call it propaganda. It's breathtaking that someone would shovel something that insane at young people.
Hemmelgarn: This is the kind of stuff that's getting into classrooms, and we have to be very careful."Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom ," as Thomas Jefferson said, and nothing could be more true today. You know maybe you can get a six-pack and a video and get comfortable for one evening, but then you've got to get right back to work. We have to protect our kids and their environment, and that's just my humble opinion.
ACRES U.S.A.: That's such breathtaking audacity - that really takes my breath away, the weeding thing.
Hemmelgarn: Oh! You and me both. Do you know you can go to their website and you can find out how many schools participate - you can get a list of the schools. Granted, once I start talking about this and/or we start publishing it, I'm sure they'll make access more difficult, they'll go remove some of that transparency, but right now the last time I checked you could go in and see which schools had received the training.
ACRES U.S.A.: Do you work something into your media literacy training about corporate education?
Hemmelgarn: I do.
ACRES U.S.A.: That could cause some trouble.
Hemmelgarn: Right. We have to look at all of the ways in which we are influenced through media. I have another slide that I show of a billboard that was in Missouri. It shows a white farmer and a Saudi Arabian man - at least he looked Saudi because he's got the headdress on and he's got darker skin and looks like he's Middle Eastern - and the billboard says, "Who would you rather buy your gas from?" That billboard is a story in itself in that it created quite a stir - those billboards are no longer up, but you can imagine that the Muslim community in St. Louis didn't think too much of them because they further contributed to this us-versus-them mentality and the whole nationalism that was especially strong right after 9/11. If you think about the world as a community, especially with regard to climate change and world peace and things that you and I believe would make a better world for our kids, then we have to look at this billboard from that perspective and ask, "Is this billboard contributing to environmental protection, is it contributing to world peace and having a better understanding?" And the answer of course would be no.
ACRES U.S.A.: Is media literacy rare in America's public schools, or is it picking up steam? Does it depend on people like yourself launching pilot projects?
Hemmelgarn: It really depends on the teachers. I belong to the National Association for Media Literacy Education - NAMLE - and I can tell you that I'm probably the only dietician who goes to those meetings. Most of the people there are English teachers, history teachers- that's really where we see most of the media literacy education going on, in those classrooms. What has happened with No Child Left Behind and low funding is that schools tend to teach and then test subjects for which there is some sort of reimbursement. I'm not a teacher, so every district may be different and every state is probably different, but the problem is teachers have so much to cover, and how students do on those standardized tests is so critically important to those districts. What we're asking people to do with media literacy is to teach critical thinking - that's really what it is. I mean it's a fancy word for critical thinking.
ACRES U.S.A.: It doesn't fit into the testing mill easily.
Hemmelgarn: Exactly. It takes very creative teachers to do it right, and what happens, I think, is that you get much better citizens graduating from high school when they have been trained, when they have received a lot of media literacy education. But it takes the teacher being trained, it takes the teacher's willingness to incorporate it into the curriculum, seeing how it can work. Literacy is really going through a very interesting transition because it used to mean reading and writing, and understanding certainly, but now in the digital age, it's also viewing and interpreting
digital messages and digital images. That creates a whole different area that we have to bring into media literacy education, and we're looking at that.
ACRES U.S.A.:There's also a question of where you draw the line with deploying digital technology. NBC ran a story about kids who were outfitted with heart rate sensors that sent a wireless signal to a monitoring center. When their heart rate fell for a certain amount of time, they were automatically texted a message to the effect of "get off your butt, get moving, do something, get active, go outside and walk around." They interviewed a young woman and her mother, who both said it was good, that they have better quality time when they go outside and the daughter is starting to lose weight and so on. All very positive, and NBC completely ignored the thought that this is acclimating children to continuous surveillance.
Hemmelgarn: It's all connected. These are all issues we have to consider. I just went to a conference at the Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri. I was curious to learn about the new consumer of news, and there
was a guy there from Apple who said, "If you think you have privacy in this country,
you're wrong." I thought that was pretty significant coming from someone in the industry.
ACRES U.S.A.: Switching gears here, there is a glaring discrepancy between the quality of food offered to hospital patients and the mission of hospitals,
which obviously is to heal people. Feeding patients dubious food is counter - intuitive at best. Is this an issue in the world of the dieticians, or is it something people don't like to talk about?
Hemmelgarn: We do talk about it. We must talk about it because, again, everything is connected.
There is an organization and some dieticians, not all, belong to it. It's called Health Care Without Harm, and it has a food component, and part of that is Jamie Harvey. I interviewed him on Food Sleuth, a talk radio program - it's 30 minutes and I get to interview the most wonderful people, whomever I want if they'll grant me the interview. Jamie said that Health Care Without Harm is redesigning the contracts, because even if you've got the most enlightened food service director, money is the bottom line. If you've got a for-profit hospital or if you've got to maintain your own food service, how do you do it? Well, you used to order the cheapest food, and you tried to make a profit on it. Health Care Without Harm is writing or developing contracts that food service managers can use to make it easier to order from a local farmer rather than a big institutional provider.
ACRES U.S.A.: For farmers who live within a hundred miles or so of a hospital, Jamie Harvey is somebody they ought to know about.
Hemmelgarn: I would recommend that they go to the HealthCare Without Harm website, click on the Healthy Food Systems link, and that will open up a whole world of issues.
ACRES U.S.A.: What else would say to people who grow food and want to supply it to the health care sector?
Hemmelgarn: I would ask them to develop relationships with dieticians at the hospitals or with food service supervisors in the hospital because chances are the food service provider would like to find some better-quality food because there's more consumer and patient demand for it - but maybe they don't have a clue as to where to find it, so it's expanding those possibilities and helping those networks and relationships develop.
About the author
Melinda Hemmelgarn maintains a weblog at food-sleuth.blogspot.com, and her radio programs can be heard online at kopn.org. A book she co-authored aimed at helping children make healthful food choices, Treasure Hunt with the Munch Crunch Bunch, is published by Kid Well Enterprises.
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