Offering food policymakers a taste of public media 2.0

Last week, I took part in an animated conversation on the closing panel of the Consumer Federation of America's 32nd annual National Food Policy Conference, addressing the role that social media is playing in highly contested debates about food safety, children's nutrition, agricultural subsidies and other complex topics. The conference attendees represented an active public concerned with this constellation of issues; they included a mixture of industry reps, consumer advocates and academics. Of course, the government sector was also well represented—other speakers at the event included Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, Deputy Agriculture Secretary Kathleen Merrigan and Food and Drug Commissioner Margaret Hamburg.

The backstage details of food production have long been a popular topic for writers and documentarians. Upton Sinclair made his reputation as a crusading novelist with his excoriation of meatpacking practices in The Jungle, and as popular current-day food writer Michael Pollan noted in a recent article, in the 1970s authors such as Wendell Berry, Frances Moore Lappé, Barry Commoner and Joan Gussow helped to launch what he terms the "food movement." Such writers, notes Pollan, "are supreme dot-connectors, deeply skeptical of reductive science and far ahead not only in their grasp of the science of ecology but in their ability to think ecologically: to draw lines of connection between a hamburger and the price of oil, or between the vibrancy of life in the soil and the health of the plants, animals and people eating from that soil." Over the three decades since then, food has become increasingly mediated—labeled with both required nutritional information and often trumped-up attributes (All natural! Lowfat!), promoted by industry associations (Got milk?), and endlessly refined and dissected by "foodies" who (judging from the magazines available at my local Whole Foods) consume as many delectable words and sumptuously shot images as they do calories.

Web 2.0 and mobile tools have added yet another layer of information into this cacophonous system, from the personal (check out this Locavore app, which will tell you what foods are in season in your proximity) to the political (my fellow panelist, Dave Murphy, described his grassroots campaign for sustainable farming, conducted largely through social media tools.) At the conference, Sebelius unveiled a new food safety web site, Foodsafety.gov. A joint effort between HHS, the Department of Agriculture and the FDA, the site will track product recalls for worried consumers. Such efforts--which streamline and clarify breaking facts--are an invaluable part of the emerging public media 2.0 landscape. But not all food news is so clear-cut. Both the panelists and the audience focused on two recent media moments that brought debates about food, agriculture and health to a head.

A late August Time cover story, "The Real Cost of Cheap Food," set off a firestorm of protest among industrial food producers, leading to debates across both new and legacy media. Another campaign attached to a documentary film, Food, Inc., has taken the debate a few steps further, using both social media tools and organizing with allied nonprofits to move viewers to action. As a result, parents and advocates from 30 states came to D.C. in late June as part of a Healthy School Food Brigade to talk with legislators about the pending Child Nutrition Promotion and School Lunch Protection Act. Such coverage is succeeding in raising doubt about the current food system. In an interesting finding, marketing firm v-Fluence Interactive suggests that when consumers search for more information about the production of meat and dairy products, they now are more likely to find information from media and advocacy campaigns than from industry groups or major brands.

One audience member asked the panel what the point of such polarized public debates was, if both activists and industry representatives just predictably recapitulated their roles each time? The value, I suggested, was in the teachable moment that these clashes represent: each generates heat and light, attracting attention from partisan, mainstream and citizen media makers. Actions and reactions ripple out—the film is fact-checked, experts are consulted, investigation is called for. Sometimes there's a result—a corporation changes its practices, an agency hires more regulators, an individual switches to grass-fed beef. Sometimes not. But either way, an act of democracy has been committed.

Other conference-goers expressed discomfort with the noise and confusion that accompanies the opening up of our media environment. How, they asked, will busy consumers know what's right, who to trust? There are no simple answers to this question, but some provisional solutions are being hammered out, which we discuss in our whitepaper, Public Media 2.0: Dynamic, Engaged Publics. These include both automated and peer-driven ranking and reviewing of coverage and sources, the resourcing of independent fact-checking operations, and the establishment of ethical standards for documentary filmmakers and citizen journalists. And, after all, it's not as though the previous gatekeepers have disappeared entirely. Trusted news brands, scientists and other experts, educators, government agencies, foundations and community groups are all using the same social media tools as citizens to cover issues and communicate information. Navigating all of this will require ever-increasing levels of media literacy, as we note in a recent post in our public media 2.0 showcase.

The enthusiasm of the conference-goers for this panel discussion points to the need for a much larger, society-wide discussion about how publics can grapple with issues in the networked public sphere. As this summer's healthcare debate has revealed, our national discourse is ailing. Watch this space for more reporting on possible remedies.