Food Policy with Senator Tom Harkin

In this episode of Repast, Michael Roberts interviews Senator Tom Harkin on his years in Congress and his significant impact on food policy, the Harkin Institute and its focus on wellness and nutrition--including the Institute's upcoming symposium on food as medicine--and the opportunities Senator Harkin sees for food policy with the Biden administration .

Michael T. Roberts is the Executive Director of the Resnick Center for Food Law & Policy at UCLA Law.

Senator Tom Harkin represented Iowa in the United States Congress for more than four decades.  He served Iowa’s 5th Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1975 to 1985, and was a U.S. Senator from 1985 to 2015.

You can read about and register for the 2021 Harkin on Wellness Symposium on March 8-9, 2021 here.

Music by Ike Winters.

Transcript

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Michael Roberts 0:07

Hello. Welcome to Repast, a food law and policy podcast from the Resnick Center for Food Law and Policy at UCLA Law. I'm Michael Roberts, the Executive Director of the Resnick Center.

Diana Winters 0:19

And I'm Diana Winters, the Assistant Director of the Center. The Resnick Center performs cutting-edge legal research and scholarship in food law and policy to improve health and quality of life for humans and the planet.

Michael Roberts 0:33

Each month we'll bring you an interview with thought leaders transforming food law and policy. Senator Harkin has served on the Resnick Advisory Board, outside advisory board since its inception, roughly seven years going on, eight years now. And Senator Harkin has a long, illustrious career in public service that I would like to just touch on for a minute before we turn to the questions for you, Senator, if you don't mind. Senator Harkin represented Iowa in the United States Congress for more than four decades. He served as Iowa's fifth congressional district in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1975 to 1985, and as U.S. Senator from 1985 to 2015. His connection with food is profound. He was the Senate Agriculture Committee Chair from 2007 to 2009 and the Health Committee Chair from 2009 to 2015. Senator Harkin also ran for the presidency in 1992, which I remember distinctly watching that election unfold. Senator Harkin has authored some of the major pieces of legislation involving food, but he's perhaps best known for his 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act that has affected and has had a positive impact on society after all these years. In terms of food, in 2002, Senator Harkin authored or played a key role in three different food acts that I'll just mention here quickly. One is the 2002 Farm Bill Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Program, which is a landmark policy aimed at providing more fresh fruits and vegetables to low-income children in schools. Secondly, is the 2009 Menu Labeling Act. And third is the 2010 Healthy Hunger Free Kids Act, which reformed the school lunch program. These are major landmarks. And quite honestly, in looking back on the history of your term, Senator Harkin, I can't think of anyone else in Congress who has done more for food legislation than Senator Harkin. Now, as I as I also look back on your career in Congress and in public service, it made sense to me in representing Iowa that you would represent agriculture. But you also represented health and health policy. And I've been reading lately on the history of John Boyd Orr, of the front runner and first director general of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. And early on, he advocated this connection between agriculture and health. And it strikes me that you did so as well, perhaps inadvertently, but nevertheless, you made this connection between agriculture and health in your public service. And I'd like to ask you as a first question, what attracted you to health in relation to agriculture? And what kind of connections did you see then and do you see now?

Senator Tom Harkin 3:59

Well, Michael, first of all, it's uh good to be with you again, even though not quite in person. Hopefully that'll happen again here pretty soon, as soon as COVID gets by. And uh to join you on this podcast. It's uh it's been great working with you through all these years on food policy. You asked a question uh about how I first made these connections or something. Well, as you pointed out, I I I sort of uh was on the ag committee for 10 years in the house, and I never really thought much about that connection there, except in one way. I I grew up basically in a cornfield. My the house I still live in is the house I was born in in a small town in Iowa, and my backyard was always either a corn or a soybean field, literally. And um so I grew up in the heart of agriculture watching watching that. But an interesting thing, all the time I was growing up, my mother, who was an immigrant from uh from Slovenia, we always had a garden and we grew fresh fruits and vegetables, and we had a big orchard, and uh she would do all this canning. So, as poor as we were, and we were quite poor, we always had good food to eat. And it was good food, it was healthy food, it was uh food without pesticides and herbicides and things like that. But again, I never thought about that until later on when I noticed so many people around my small town cousins and others getting cancer and dying of cancer, beyond really what was sort of normal. And sometime in the 80s, more and more information came out about the connection between a lot of herbicides and pesticides and things like that and uh and cancer. Agent Orange, we all know about Agent Orange, what happened in Vietnam? Well, Agent Orange basically was a herbicide. And then I got in the Senate and I got on the health committee. So now I'm on both the Ag Committee and the Health Committee, and um the two just started coming together. I started seeing more and more that uh this connection between not only what we eat, but how we grow it, that impacts our health both individually and uh collectively. And so it just kind of that's just kind of the way it came about.

Michael Roberts 6:29

Almost a holistic approach to production, eating, and good health.

Senator Tom Harkin 6:34

Yeah, one of my great friends that when I was a congressman, I represented really rural Iowa, Western Iowa is all very rural. Uh, one of my friends there, early supporter, uh Ron Roseman, in those days basically started organic farming. It was almost unheard of. This was really a niche. And it also was really interesting that once he got certified as organic, he was getting more money for his soybeans and his corn and and his uh hogs, his pigs, and and things like that than his fellow farmers. So he was actually growing healthy food and making more money at it. I thought, way, this ought to be the way of the future.

Michael Roberts 7:20

That's interesting. I first met you when I was on the law faculty and involved with the agriculture and food law programs at the University of Arkansas. And uh Neil Hamilton from Drake, longtime uh ag law professor there, introduced me to you. And I've always been impressed with uh your tremendous energy and drive. So I I suppose uh it's no surprise that once you left the Senate, you really didn't retire. And and here you are with an institute now, the Harkin Institute, uh in Des Moines, Iowa. Would you like to let us know what what this institute is all about and what you're doing these days in relation to it or anything else you're doing in life that's interesting?

Senator Tom Harkin 8:02

Well, Michael, we started the institute because I wanted to continue to work in developing good public policy. And I just thought that that so often politicians, especially in Washington, operate sort of away from people and no one really understands the processes. And so I thought, well, I want to establish an institute that was not political, not not a political type institute, but one that would help develop good public policy on a nonpartisan basis, but policy that would be fact-based, high quality, that would uh basically involve cutting across different sectors, cutting across political lines. And I guess it was summed up sort of in our founding statement document, it went like this good public policy is best achieved when policymakers have access to high-quality information, when the political processes are open and well understood, and when citizens are informed and active participants. So that's why we called it the Harkin Institute on for public policy and citizen engagement, to try to get citizens to understand and get involved in the development of public policy.

Michael Roberts 9:28

It seems like of all things, that food ought to be nonpartisan, doesn't it?

Senator Tom Harkin 9:34

Should be, yes. Uh, but then it gets all wrapped up in economics and uh don't tell me what I can grow and don't tell me how to grow it, and uh don't tell me what to eat. We went all we went through this a long time ago when I was in the house in the 1970s, when the uh FTC started to come out with regulations on advertising to kids. And that's the first time I got involved in this effort, but I remember the Hue and Cry came up, the nanny state. That if you were for that, let the parents take care of the nanny state. Well, parents don't have control over a lot of the advertising that comes out and what their kids see. So there's always been that kind of tug between good public policy and this idea that don't tell me what to do and don't tell me what to eat, kind of thing.

Michael Roberts 10:28

The FTC is the Federal Trade Commission. I think you're referring to the uh where the FTC attempted to regulate advertising of sugary products uh because of concerns over tooth decay. You're absolutely right. Today, of course, the concern is a little different. Oh, it's still tooth decay, but uh it's uh obesity and diabetes and so forth. But that was quite a quite an experience the FTC went through.

Senator Tom Harkin 10:52

Well, as a matter of fact, we still never got it corrected. I tried all those years, we never could. It's I always tell audiences today that you know the Federal Trade Commission has jurisdiction over advertising, it has more jurisdiction over advertising to adults than it does to children.

Michael Roberts 11:10

Right.

Senator Tom Harkin 11:10

It's amazing.

Michael Roberts 11:12

Yeah, it is it certainly is. Lots of contradictions when it comes to food policy. You you you mentioned the nanny state, and I one of the the issues that that I deal with and with my law classes at UCLA is this tension between personal responsibility and government regulation. And oftentimes we don't talk about corporate responsibility when we when we talk about that tension, but it's another factor, it seems to me. But that balance is difficult to achieve sometimes, isn't it?

Senator Tom Harkin 11:45

Sure is. It always, Michael, it always kind of bemused me that in law, in US law, corporation, a corporation is treated as a person, right? A corporation is treated as a person. However, when it comes to personal responsibility, they're no longer a person. There's something else. So if we're going to talk about individual personal responsibility, well, that'd adhere to a corporation as well as to you and me and any other individual. But uh that's just something that we've not been able to crack a lot of. But although I gotta tell you, in in the last 30 years, more and more I think people realize that they need information on which to base their decisions, for example, on what to eat. You you mentioned the Menu Labeling Act in your introduction to me. Okay. In 2002, the Center for Science and the Public Interest first started advocating this. The first state was Maine and then California and then a couple of other states. And in 2003, Congresswoman Rosa Delora from Connecticut and I in the Senate introduced a bill for menu labeling. That was 2003. Well, we could never get anywhere with it. But by the time the Affordable Care Act or Obamacare came through, the National Restaurant Association and who else was the grocers, the GMA, Grocers Men, Grocer Manager. Yeah, that group. All of a sudden they appeared on our doorstep saying, Can we get a menu labeling bill through? And this that blew me away. Well, till my staff advised me, well, what they want is preemption, because all these states were passing menu labeling law, and they were different. And so chain restaurants, uh, McDonald's and others said, wait a minute, better we have one national menu labeling law than 50 different ones. And so Rosa Delore and I were able to get it in the Affordable Care Act, uh, and the rest is history. But you know what we found, of course, it wasn't fully implemented right away. It was supposed to go in in 2015, it wasn't fully implemented until 2018, but but bits and pieces of it people picked up and started doing it. And um people liked it. They liked to be able to look at something and say, match whether how much calories in one or how much calories in another, how much fat in one another. And and then the uh it informed the uh informed the restaurants and and the chains what people really wanted. And so they were able to respond to that in due course. So again, uh you mentioned that tug between uh between uh people not being told what to do and stuff, but people do want information, they want accurate information, right?

Michael Roberts 14:50

So they can make better choices, of course.

Senator Tom Harkin 14:52

Yeah, healthy choices.

Michael Roberts 14:54

Yeah. Getting back to the Harkin Institute, you release an annual wellness report. And I have two questions for you. One, what's the connection between the concept of wellness and food and what you do? And secondly, what is the report?

Senator Tom Harkin 15:09

Well, we do one of the sectors in the Harkin Institute is wellness and nutrition, something that I've been involved in, as you pointed out, for a long, long time. And uh going back to my fresh fruit and vegetables program and other things. So we wanted a place in the institute to really develop policy and inform citizens on wellness and nutrition. So every year we issue a Harkin on Wellness report, and we do different sectors. The first one was 2018. We had gotten a very nice grant from uh Stuart and Linda Resnick to establish a wellness and nutrition part of the institute. Uh, we hired a full-time PhD nutritionist, Lindy Buckingham Shutt. And so we began to develop this. And uh the first report was on 2018, and every report every year is geared towards some sector to show what it's doing. I think that I'm searching my memory here. 2018 was on different organizations, different groups that were doing things to inform citizens on wellness and nutrition. 2019, I know we highlighted, I think 10 or maybe an even dozen community-based organizations that were doing things in communities. 2020, well, 2020 was a lost year. We didn't we didn't have our meetings, and so we didn't issue a report for 2020 because of COVID-19. Now, 2021, I just want to mention our our annual symposium. So we have an annual report, we have an annual symposium, and that's going to be on March the 8th and the 9th. It's going to be virtual, of course. Anyone who's interested, just go to Harkin Institute, just Google or Safari or whatever your search engine is. Go and go to Harkin Institute, go to Wellness and Nutrition, and you can register for it. There's no cost or anything like that, it's all free. Our first keynote speaker is Darius Masifarian from the Freedman School, whom you know, I know Michael, at uh Tufts University. But it's a two-day symposium where people exchange ideas and make suggestions on what policy ought to be. And the theme this year is food is medicine. So our report this year will be focused on different entities and people around the country that are focused on food as medicine.

Michael Roberts 17:46

Now let's let's just talk about that food as medicine concept, because that's an interesting idea. And I know that's one that that uh that Tufts has been promoting for some time now. But what explain to our audience what how is food medicine and how does it work, and why is that an important coupling of these two words?

Senator Tom Harkin 18:05

I suppose I should, in answer to that question, go back to Hippocrates, the father of medicine or modern medicine, uh back in ancient Greece, uh, who penned this these words. Let medicine be your food, let food be your medicine. Even then he recognized uh that what we eat affects our bodies and how healthy we are. Now we all know that as kind of intuitive, Michael. I mean, if if you uh ate uh high sugared things all your life, what are you what's gonna happen to you? You're gonna come down with type 2 diabetes. If uh if you um eat uh foods that are that are not conducive to to good digestion, you can have all kinds of stomach problems. We know that eating too much red meat on and on and on is uh is one of the indicators of cancer, of stomach cancer and other kinds of cancers. So we know that. We know that now. And so food is medicine. We ought to think about healthy, a healthy diet, eating good nutritious food can be a a deterrent to disease and illness. It can also be a restorative, it can it can restore your health better if you are ill, if you have good, healthy, nutritious food. That's what we mean by food is medicine.

Michael Roberts 19:37

In in law, as you know, uh there's great pains that are taken to distinguish food from medicine, or food from drugs at least, not wanting to merge the two for purposes of making false claims. But what you're talking about is is a is a framing of healthy eating and thinking about food, not just in terms of pleasure, but in terms of of doing something with your body that makes sense and uh and is a form of uh medical care or health care, if you will.

Senator Tom Harkin 20:10

Sure. You know, uh that old statement about uh an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Well, it was good in our grandparents' time. It's it's even more important now, I think, that uh that eating healthy food, and I I'm kind of going back to my first answer to your question about thinking about this. I think part of the fact that we were so healthy is we ate good food when we grew up. We didn't eat manufactured or processed food, we ate food from our garden, maybe it was canned for the winter time, and uh it was just healthy, good food. We ate fresh veg fresh foods all the time. Well, summer, and then we canned them for the winter. But uh we ate very little processed foods when I was growing up.

Michael Roberts 20:56

Yeah, it's interesting. So the connection between agriculture and food, at least based on your experiences, is like you said earlier, it's it's also about the production of food. And what you're really talking about is a very tight connection. So the space between producing food and eating is very small. Uh, it gets bigger the more we process. But uh, and I think that's very consistent with your lifelong work and making sure we got fresh fruits and vegetables on our plates.

Senator Tom Harkin 21:24

Right, and for our for our kids in school. Um it was amazing how when I got that through in 2001, in the 2002 Farm Bill. By the way, I was also chair of the ag committee in 2001-2002. I made a note when you said that. But it was just a brief one and a half years, but it was long enough that I was able to get the fresh fruit and vegetable program started. And and I it's amazing the hearings we had, I had on that, and uh school superintendents and stuff saying it'll be a mess, kids will make a mess, and this. And that. But we just went ahead with it. And uh you'd be amazed. I used to go to different schools. We started it in four states: uh, Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, and Iowa. So in the early days, I went and visited some of those schools, it's a hundred schools in the pilot program. Kids loved that fresh fruit. They loved eating it and even fresh vegetables. Just the difference in the taste and the texture and stuff. And so I knew right away that that they weren't going to waste it. And it turned out to be a great program. Now it's nationwide in every in every state.

Michael Roberts 22:37

That's great. So if somebody is uh visiting Des Moines, Iowa, and how do they find your institute? Where is it located and and uh where is it housed and who works there?

Senator Tom Harkin 22:50

Well, if you go to the Harkin Institute website, uh you can see a picture of it. As a matter, it's on University Avenue, right across from the Coles Library of Drake University. So we are with Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, where, as you know, our mutual friend Neil Hamilton taught for so many years uh in the law school. Uh we just completed a new building. Uh, it's not quite open yet because of COVID-19 and everything. Our first function in the Harkin Institute building was it's a site for vaccinations now for uh for COVID-19 vaccinations. But here's the deal about the building. I believe it is, or when it's open this year, sometime, I hope, uh, it will be the most accessible building in America for persons with disabilities. It was designed from the very beginning to be fully accessible. In fact, our architect uh is a person with a physical disability. And uh in designing and building this building, they actually came up with a handbook for other architects and designers and contractors to use to know how to build from the very beginning accessible structures, accessible buildings. I think people will come from a long way away uh to look at it just to see how they can incorporate that into new buildings.

Michael Roberts 24:20

That's very interesting. I look forward to it. Let's look ahead to the uh Biden administration, although it's here now, so it's not really looking too much ahead. But what do you uh what do you expect from the Biden administration on all of these issues we've talked about? Nutrition, wellness, the connection of agriculture and health. And uh what hopes do you have for uh for policy moving forward?

Senator Tom Harkin 24:46

Well, let me put it this way. Uh I was very thrilled when uh Biden picked our our friend, uh former governor of Iowa, Tom Vilsack, to be Secretary of Agriculture. Now he was secretary under Obama, and now he's coming back again. Well, you mentioned earlier on your induction of the Healthy Hunger Free Kids Act, which was my bill, which again we incorporated in the legislation. And then Vilsack, Tom Vilsack, as secretary, then was charged with the responsibility of developing the regulations, implementing it for the school lunch program. He did a great job on that. He was just great. Now, when the Trump administration came in, we started backpedaling with the uh Secretary of Agriculture Purdue at that time. I won't get into all that. But uh I talked to Tom Vilsack after he was uh uh picked by Biden, and uh and then I watched his uh appearance before the Ag Committee, uh the Senate Ag Committee to uh you know for his nomination. And right away when he speaks of food policy, he uses one key word that's never been used all the time before, nutritious food policy. When he talks about food insecurity, about low-income food insecurity, especially in in food deserts and inner cities, he talks about nutritious food insecurity. I also believe that uh Tom Vilsack is going to be sort of the point person in the administration on infusing this concept of nutritious food in both our health policy, our uh regulatory policy, even as far as perhaps even tax policy goes, to infuse nutrition in all aspects of government. Oh, and I might add one other thing I forgot, uh Department of Defense, and making sure that they buy a lot of food uh here and abroad, uh, making sure that their first cut is always purchasing wholesome, nutritious food for Department of Defense. So, yeah, I think the next four years could see a really a kind of a leap, a kind of a big, big move forward uh in um not only stimulating agriculturally, as I meant, as we mentioned earlier, the production of healthy food. Well, that's another thing. Tom Bilsack was very instrumental in expanding farmers' markets all over the country. People go to farmers markets, they love these farmers markets. We go every Saturday, and even in the wintertime, people want that fresh, wholesome food that's not processed, and they want to buy it from people that grow it locally. Uh, so this is this has all been promoted by by Tom Vilsack. So I I think we're gonna see some pretty good things ahead in the Biden administration as as long as uh as long as uh the president gives uh Vilsack the the platform and the sort of the tap on the shoulder in in in when they have their um uh department meetings, when they have a cabinet meeting. And if the president says to all his cabinet secretaries, hey, Vilsack's our point person on nutrition, uh I want to know what he wants you to do. Uh that's that's what I envision.

Michael Roberts 28:24

It does seem that you know, in a post-COVID era as we move into it, that's uh everything I've read seems to indicate that our health has suffered. Uh we're we're we're not especially with children because they're not moving around as much. But certainly getting back into school, having healthy food, those are things that that may really open the door for this kind of focus.

Senator Tom Harkin 28:47

And there's another connection, Michael. We know that people who got who suffered the worst effects of COVID-19 and died were people with underlying health conditions, bad health conditions. What were those underlying health conditions? Diabetes, heart disease, COPD, uh lung problems, things that uh obesity, all things that are what? Preventable, preventable, if people have good nutritious food. But a lot of these poor people, especially African Americans in our society, have been cut out because of, I think, systemic racism, because of where they live, uh they've been cut out of getting these healthy foods. So looking ahead, if we're going to have other, and we are gonna have other viruses come down the pipe, the best thing we can do to prepare for it is make sure that the production, distribution, pricing, and consumption of healthy food is equitable across all demographic and economic lines in the United States.

Michael Roberts 30:01

I'm glad you mentioned that. And that certainly is a concern. And it's interesting how simple the concept is nutritious, healthy food, we grow it, we should eat it, but how how many complicated social issues that it can help resolve? Everything from health disparity to having uh you know healthier bodies when another pandemic hits. And certainly it ties into that concept that you referenced earlier with food food is medicine. I have uh one last question here for you. As you know, here at UCLA Law School, we we work with students and we teach and we train and we have hope for the future because of these very bright students. And I know students all over the country are interested in food policy. It's it's amazing to me how many inquiries we get at UCLA from young people, not even in law school, who are writing reports or are thinking about this and that or just want to get involved. Uh, where where should they be targeting their energy? If you were had a group of young people interested in what you're talking about today, what do they do about it?

Senator Tom Harkin 31:09

Well, first, I would um determine their interest in climate change. And that's like 100% of the youth today. Thank goodness. They're really focusing on what's happening to climate change and how it's going to affect their lives 30, 40, 50 years from now. Uh, and here's an opportunity where you can not only affect climate change for the better, uh, but you can also work to make sure people are healthier simply in, as I said, the production, how we produce food, uh, how we distribute food, and how we price it. So that eating good, healthy food promotes good agricultural practices. And we know we can do that with organic farming and and small farms that produce this food. We know we can do that. Uh, so you you you you positively affect climate change, uh, and you also positively affect the health of people. So, you know, and there's so many different avenues in food uh that you can pursue. As I said, there's the production end of it, distribution, how food is distributed. I mentioned pricing. You know, it's it's not really just a free market out there in terms of food, like it used to be maybe 100 or 200 years ago, but but the pricing of food. Now you say, well, how can we afford affect pricing? Look, I've given his speech so many times I can't I I can't count that that Michael Pollan, we all know Michael, one time went in a grocery store and he wanted to find out why uh poor people were buying all these starches, fats, and sugars, which made them obese and gave them bad health. Well, he said they were the cheapest. Well, why are they the cheapest? Because that's what's the most subsidized by the federal government. And we've been doing it since World War II. So we subsidize, you know, corn and beans and starchy foods and sugars and things like that. And so because they're subsidized and are supported in that way, it's cheaper. What if we had a what if we just turned that topsy turvy and had that kind of support for fresh fruits and fresh vegetables and for organic farming and uh and also our our our tax laws to make sure that that if you were locally producing healthy food, uh that you have tax benefits that normally occur to big corporations, to Walmarts and people like that that distribute a lot of food, you should have uh those same kind of tax benefits. So I would say to young people look, you can affect the climate and you can make people healthy by getting involved in in this whole area of food and healthy food, nutritious food.

Michael Roberts 34:18

And and also helping peoples of color in communities where they don't have access. I think young people especially that that's a big one.

Senator Tom Harkin 34:25

As I said, uh I talked to Tom Vilsack about this, and um and he's on it, that people of color uh have because of systemic racism, let's get down to it, have been cut out of the healthy food chain in America. We can change that. This is not an insoluble problem, it can be changed.

Michael Roberts 34:46

Senator Harkin, this has been a delight. I really appreciate you taking time out of your day to visit with me. And I want to to again remind our audience uh of the uh Harkin Institute Symposium on March the 8th and 9th. And they can find out more about it by going to the Harkin Institute website and uh register for free, right? Yes and take advantage of uh a wonderful uh symposium with lots of uh food for thought.

Senator Tom Harkin 35:16

That's pretty good. Food for thought. Thank you. And we know that healthy food makes you think better, too.

Michael Roberts 35:22

That's exactly right. Speaking of that, I'm gonna let you go. So I'm gonna grab some healthy lunch. But anyway, thank you again for your time.

Senator Tom Harkin 35:31

Well, Michael, thank you very much. And it's been a pleasure to work with you and to be on the resonant board uh with you out uh out at UCLA. Let's keep working together and hopefully in the next four years make some really significant changes uh along the direction you and I have just been talking about.

Michael Roberts 35:47

I agree. That sounds great. Take care, Senator. Thanks, Michael. Bye bye.