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Nov. 4th, 2013 10:05 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conulyIn Hungary, Anti-Semitism Rises Again
http://nyti.ms/19P3lqg
ARLINGTON, Virginia — My father, Aladar Szegedy-Maszak, a Hungarian diplomat, dined with Adolf Hitler three times.
And then he went to the concentration camp at Dachau.
As secretary to the Hungarian ambassador to Germany from 1932 to 1937, my father watched the rise of the Führer. He encountered him socially at a reception and two dinners — the first time on Feb. 10, 1933, at Hitler’s first speech as chancellor. He remembered how sweat poured from Hitler’s face, soaking his uniform. The speech left my father cold, but also deeply unsettled by the rhapsodic reactions of the audience. “This was my first personal experience that we were dealing with a quasi-religious mass movement,” he wrote, “or perhaps more accurately, a mass psychosis.”
My father knew how devastating Nazi rule would be for the Jews. Hungarian Jews came to his office in droves, imploring him for advice as to how they could help themselves as property was seized and small businesses destroyed.
He met movie directors and actresses; small-business owners; a landlord who owned a block of houses in a workingmen’s neighborhood of Berlin who was told that if he didn’t leave, he would be charged with molesting women. There was nothing he could do.
The hardy perennial of anti-Semitism has made a dramatic comeback in Central Europe. Germany has recently reiterated its friendship with Israel, in response to recent anti-Jewish activity. Far-right political parties in France and Austria have gained force. In Hungary, a virulently anti-Semitic party, Jobbik, is now the third-largest in Parliament. One party official has called for a list of all Jewish legislators, to assess their loyalty — a move that even the right-wing government condemned. (Earlier this month, the government pledged, in the face of global criticism, to crack down on anti-Semitism.)
This all would have been troubling yet familiar to my father and other relatives of his generation. They came of age in a country that was a stew of anti-Semitism. After World War I, Communists ruled for more than four months, and since most of those in power were Jews, the link between Communism and Judaism was forged in many minds. For many Hungarians, to be anti-Communist meant being anti-Semitic.
My father was not a convinced anti-Semite, but as a Hungarian Christian from a strong family tradition of support for the monarchy, he flirted with anti-Semitism as a young man — a fact he was ashamed of his entire life. The experiences in Berlin, he wrote, “extinguished the last, minimal remnants of anti-Semitism that I had had as a teenager during the counterrevolution.” His years in Berlin, and his two other encounters with Hitler, were antidotes to any vestiges of anti-Semitism he had once harbored.
At a diplomatic reception in September 1934 before the Nuremberg rally that Leni Riefenstahl famously memorialized in “Triumph of the Will,” my father could not reconcile the old-fashioned, modest, almost shy Hitler with the raving lunatic he had seen at rallies.
The final time he met Hitler was June 7, 1942. The prime minister of Hungary was invited on an official visit to the Führer’s wartime headquarters in East Prussia and asked my father — now deputy head of the political division in the Foreign Ministry — to go with him. They ate in Hitler’s dining car and my father saw what he later referred to as “the Satanic nature of his character.”
Hungary was an ally of Germany, but an extremely unreliable one. Its officials refused to deport Jews to concentration camps. My father, known for his opposition to Nazism, had attempted to organize an effort to negotiate a separate peace with the Allies, an effort that failed and led to his arrest after the Germans invaded Hungary, on March 19, 1944.
After a regime of Hungarian Nazis took over in October 1944, voices of moderation were jailed or killed. Some 440,000 Jews were deported. Members of the gendarmerie were enthusiastic participants in the process. Ultimately some 600,000 Hungarian Jews were murdered.
If anti-Communism represented one side of hatred for Jews, anticapitalism represented another. My mother’s family, the highly assimilated children and grandchildren of the Hungarian Jewish industrialist Manfred Weiss, fell into the latter category.
My maternal grandfather was transported to the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria after the invasion of Hungary, but he was lucky. He and his family were granted safe passage to Portugal after making, in effect, a deal with Heinrich Himmler for freedom in exchange for their property.
Before this deal was made, my maternal grandmother had disguised herself as a Hungarian peasant during the Nazi occupation. She met the wife of the anti-Semitic former prime minister (and Nazi collaborator) Bela Imredy, with whom my mother’s family had once socialized (albeit not with great closeness). My grandmother asked if there was anything Mrs. Imredy could do to save my grandfather. Mrs. Imredy replied that she couldn’t. And as they parted she turned and said, ominously and elliptically, “Now it’s our turn.”
My parents married at the end of 1945, after my father was liberated at the war’s end. He later became the Hungarian ambassador to the United States. He resigned in 1947, after the Communist takeover. He and my mother managed to remain in America. My father died in 1988, my mother in 2002.
I wonder what they would make of Hungary today. The same stereotypes of the past — the association of Jews with Communism and capitalism — fuel the support for Jobbik today.
Into this caldron has stepped the great conductor Ivan Fischer, himself a Hungarian Jew. He recently composed and performed an opera entitled “Red Heifer” that chronicles the story of a small group of Jews in the 19th century who were wrongly accused of the murder of a Hungarian girl from the countryside. It is a true story, one that uses the distant past to illuminate a dark time in the present.
Of course it is unlikely to change any minds. But the simple fact of it is an affirmation of the power of art to accomplish what decent politicians cannot. It is also an example the terrible persistence of a state of mind, a kind of psychopathy that did not begin with Hitler and, tragically, did not end with him.
An Opera Fights Hungary’s Rising Anti-Semitism
http://nyti.ms/1d8AGQE
BUDAPEST — Ivan Fischer is best known as a first-class conductor whose Budapest Festival Orchestra has entranced audiences worldwide. Last week, Mr. Fischer took on a new role — social critic — when the orchestra gave the premiere of an opera he had composed as a rebuke to what he and others see as growing tolerance for anti-Semitism in today’s Hungary.
Based on an infamous 19th-century case in which a group of Jews were wrongly accused in the death of a Hungarian peasant girl, Mr. Fischer’s opera, “The Red Heifer,” is a vivid display of how cultural figures have emerged as some of the most vocal critics of Hungary’s rightward and authoritarian drift under Prime Minister Viktor Orban.
At a time when the traditional left-wing political opposition is hobbled by corruption scandals and its Communist past, Mr. Fischer is among a growing group of artists challenging a government that has tested the ideals of the European Union. The others include the pianist Andras Schiff and a popular theater director, Robert Alfoldi, who was ridiculed by right-wing politicians for his homosexuality.
The tensions in Hungary come as many right-wing parties are on the rise across the Continent and cultural figures from France to Greece to Eastern Europe are starting to respond. At the same time, many former Soviet countries are wrestling with their identities, pulled between the market and social forces of the West and deeply rooted national tendencies.
But in few places are cultural figures taking as strong a part in the debate as they are in Hungary. Since coming to power in 2010, Mr. Orban’s government has changed the constitution to limit the power of the judiciary and restrict press freedom, civil liberties groups say. More troubling, the far-right Jobbik party controls about 12 percent of Parliament, with a nationalistic, anti-Semitic and anti-immigrant platform unthinkable in most of Europe.
“The Red Heifer” is based on a blood libel from 1882 that divided the country much as the Dreyfus affair later did in France. His ambitious composition uses both a full orchestra and a Gypsy band, with references to music from Klezmer to rap to Mozart. The production, featuring adults and children, is set in the 19th century but includes pointed contemporary references.
Onstage, a red papier-mâché cow stomps on the peasant girl’s foot. Another scene features lively folk dancing by the same crowd that later turns into soccer hooligans blowing vuvuzelas, waving Hungarian flags and calling for retribution against the Jews. After that, the 19th-century Hungarian statesman Lajos Kossuth arrives out of the past, singing in a deep bass-baritone: “I am ashamed by the anti-Semitic agitation; as a Hungarian, I feel repentant toward it, as a patriot, I scorn it.”
In an interview this month, Mr. Fischer said that he had long wanted to write an opera based on the case, but it was the rise of Jobbik that spurred him to action.
“In the last one or two years, it came up to me, and I thought, ‘Now I have to write it,’ ” Mr. Fischer said as he sat in the study of his airy home here, near a grand piano and a wall of books in many languages — an island of cosmopolitanism in a country increasingly turning inward.
“Culture shouldn’t be interested in day-to-day politics,” said Mr. Fischer, who has also been the principal conductor of the Washington National Symphony Orchestra. “We want to be valid next year and the year after. But I think culture has a strong responsibility to find the essence, the real concealed truth which lies behind the day to day.”
Today, that picture shows Mr. Orban subtly courting voters on the far right, hoping to preserve his majority in elections scheduled for next spring. This has contributed to a climate in which, as part of more generalized criticism against foreign forces — especially the European Union and the International Monetary Fund — it has become acceptable public discourse to blame Jews for the country’s economic problems. Last year, Imre Kertesz, Hungary’s Nobel Laureate novelist, compared Mr. Orban to the Pied Piper and said democracy had never fully taken root in Hungary. That same year, Mr. Schiff, a renowned pianist, stirred debate when he said he would not set foot in his native Hungary while Mr. Orban was still in power.
Mr. Fischer, who is Jewish, said he doesn’t feel the same way and is dedicated to the Budapest Festival Orchestra, which receives funds from the government. Still, he has moved his family to Berlin, commuting to remain part of the conversation in Hungary.
The blood libel, known as the Tiszaeszlár (tea-sa-ESS-lar) affair, after the eastern Hungarian town where it took place, is well known in Hungary. Last year, a member of Parliament from Jobbik urged lawmakers to reopen the case, in which the Jews were eventually acquitted of the girl’s death.
He was roundly condemned. Indeed, the Orban government has taken pains to separate itself from Jobbik. “There is no cooperation or partnership with Jobbik, and its support is not required for any decision in Parliament,” a government spokesman, Ferenc Kumin, wrote in an e-mail.
The rise of the far right also comes amid a significant Jewish revival in Hungary since the fall of the Berlin Wall. This month, Hungary’s deputy prime minister said in Parliament that Hungarians must accept responsibility for the Holocaust. Next year, Hungary plans to dedicate millions of dollars for programs commemorating the 70th anniversary of the deportation of Hungarian Jews.
Mr. Fischer said he welcomed the steps but wished the government would go further, “to isolate themselves from everything that the far-right does.” As part of a family-values campaign, in the past two years, Jobbik politicians have publicly ridiculed Mr. Alfoldi in Parliament for being gay. He was ousted as director of the National Theater last summer, replaced by a director closer to the government.
While Mr. Fischer is better known abroad than at home, Mr. Alfoldi has become something of a national hero. Before his ouster, Mr. Alfoldi’s productions, from revamped Hungarian classics to Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America,” had been so popular that people camped out all night for tickets. He is now starring on television in the Hungarian version of “The X-Factor,” which he said averages 2.5 million viewers in a country of 10 million.
A speech he delivered this month in Vienna about the role of culture in a democracy was widely republished and debated in the Hungarian press.
In an interview here, Mr. Alfoldi touched on its themes. “I am not what the government thinks a Hungarian citizen ought to be,” he said. “According to them, a good citizen ought to be Christian, heterosexual, have more than one kid; he should not have a critical attitude and should believe in the past.”
He added: “A citizen should not ask questions either. But I think it is the job of a theater director, especially the job of the director of the National Theater, to ask questions, and to ask questions that are important for the whole society,”
Hungary has a vocal civil society. Since 2011, thousands have taken to the streets to protest the government’s changes to the constitution and its new media law. Journalists and analysts say that the changes have not stifled free speech but are a potential threat — a weapon the government could use if it decided to. The result has been self-censorship. (The government denies that the law represses free speech.)
After the performance of “The Red Heifer,” audience members debated its impact. “If 700 or 800 people see this opera, it will have no effect,” said Josef Janos. A friend, Katalin Patkos, chimed in. “We shouldn’t be so pessimistic,” she said. “It’s a contribution. How effective a contribution, that isn’t Fischer’s problem.”
Protecting Children From Toxic Stress
http://nyti.ms/HfbRF8
Imagine if scientists discovered a toxic substance that increased the risks of cancer, diabetes and heart, lung and liver disease for millions of people. Something that also increased one’s risks for smoking, drug abuse, suicide, teen pregnancy, sexually transmitted disease, domestic violence and depression — and simultaneously reduced the chances of succeeding in school, performing well on a job and maintaining stable relationships? It would be comparable to hazards like lead paint, tobacco smoke and mercury. We would do everything in our power to contain it and keep it far away from children. Right?
Well, there is such a thing, but it’s not a substance. It’s been called “toxic stress.” For more than a decade, researchers have understood that frequent or continual stress on young children who lack adequate protection and support from adults, is strongly associated with increases in the risks of lifelong health and social problems, including all those listed above.
In the late 1990s, Vincent Felitti and Robert Anda conducted a landmark study that examined the effects of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) — including abuse, neglect, domestic violence and family dysfunction — on 17,000 mainly white, predominately well-educated, middle class people in San Diego. They found a powerful connection between the level of adversity faced and the incidence of many health and social problems. They also discovered that ACEs were more common than they had expected. (About 40 percent of respondents reported two or more ACEs, and 25 percent reported three or more.) Since then, similar surveys have been conducted in several states, with consistent findings.
In the years since, advances in biology, neuroscience, epigenetics and other fields have shed light on the mechanisms behind this phenomenon. “What the science is telling us now is how experience gets into the brain as it’s developing its basic architecture and how it gets into the cardiovascular system and the immune system,” explains Jack P. Shonkoff, director of the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University, where the term toxic stress was coined. “These insights provide an opportunity to think about new ways we might try to reduce the academic achievement gap and health disparities — and not just do the same old things.”
First, it’s important to note that toxic stress is not a determinant, but a risk factor. And while prevention is best, it’s never too late to mitigate its effects. It’s also critical to distinguish between “toxic stress” and normal stress. In the context of a reasonably safe environment where children have protective relationships with adults, Shonkoff explains, childhood stress is not a problem. In fact, it promotes healthy growth, coping skills and resilience. It becomes harmful when it is prolonged and when adults do not interact in ways that make children feel safe and emotionally connected.
This distinction is critical, because it opens the way to new opportunities to prevent a cascade of health problems. It is exceedingly difficult to alter the environments that produce major stress for families, particularly poverty. However, children can be shielded from the most damaging effects of stress if their parents are taught how to respond appropriately. “One thing that is highly protective is the quality of the relationship between the parent and the child,” explains Darcy Lowell, an associate clinical professor at Yale University School of Medicine and the founder of Child First, a program based in Shelton, Conn., that has marshaled strong evidence demonstrating the ability to intervene early, at relatively low cost, to reduce the harm caused by childhood stress in extremely high-need families. “Early relationships, where adults are responsive and attentive, are able to buffer the damaging effects on the brain and body,” she says.
Child First, initially developed at Bridgeport Hospital in Connecticut, now works in partnership with community-based agencies in 15 locations across the state, where staff members deliver its program of home-based parent guidance and child-parent psychotherapy. In a well-controlled study, children served by Child First were compared with those receiving usual social services and were found to be significantly less likely to have language problems and aggressive and defiant behaviors. Their mothers had markedly less depression and mental health problems, and the families were less likely to be involved with child protective services even three years later.
Consider Ana Sophia, who is 5 years old. Her mother, Ana Patricia, emigrated to the United States from Guatemala to escape domestic violence. (Their surnames have been omitted.)
When Ana Sophia was 2, she was sexually abused by the husband of her child care provider. Before, she had been a “pleasant and affectionate child,” her mother said. After, she began having frequent outbursts of rage. “She would explode into tantrums, throwing chairs, throwing her cot, screaming, crying,” recalled Ana Patricia, who works as a housekeeper. She didn’t know what to do. She felt hurt and guilty; her instinct was to allow the tantrums and hug Ana Sophia. But the tantrums also triggered her own feelings of helplessness and fear and she would often react angrily.
This is the kind of pattern that, if uninterrupted, would have only gotten worse. And although problems like this are common, clinical services targeting young children remain few and far between. Indeed, Ana Sophia’s experience needs to be considered in the context of the epidemic of preschool expulsions in the United States today, which studies have found to be three to 13 times as commonplace as K-12 expulsions.
And they can be prevented. At the Village for Families and Children, a social service agency in Hartford, 25 percent of the 100 families with a preschooler being served by Child First had a child who had been expelled from a preschool or was at imminent risk of being expelled, observed Kimberly Martini-Carvell, senior director at the agency. “Since Child First began working with those families, we’ve seen a dramatic reduction in expulsions,” she added, with only two children being expelled.
“Ana Patricia was allowing her daughter to do what she wanted to do,” explained Loretto Lacayo, a mental health and developmental clinician who delivers the Child First program. “That doesn’t feel safe to a child, especially after the loss of control of being abused.” Lacayo and her team partner, Sarah Rendon, helped Ana Patricia learn how to interact with her daughter in a sensitive but protective manner.
Through her work with Child First, Ana Patricia said she has learned how to recognize how Ana Sophia is feeling, and listen to her better, and this has helped her daughter control her strong emotions and express her feelings without hurting people. “I was taught that it was embarrassing to talk about feelings,” she said. “This is very different from what my mother did.”
By developing the ability to read a child’s cues, and by being emotionally available on a daily basis, parents can provide buffers that reduce the harmful physiological effects of high stress. “I feel like I enjoy my daughter more now,” Ana Patricia said. “And she enjoys me as a mother.”
Child First, whose funders include the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Connecticut Department of Children and Families and the United States Department of Health and Human Services’ home visitation program, attributes its success to a number of factors. It is preventive, focusing on children under the age of 6. It works through teams, bringing a mental health professional into the home alongside a care coordinator who helps the family gain access to basic services.
Both pieces are necessary. Lowell recalled an ‘aha moment’ years before she started Child First in 2001 when she was consulting with an agency about a child who had a language delay. “The family didn’t come to a speech therapy appointment,” she recalled. “When we investigated, we found out Mom didn’t bring her out in the winter because she had no shoes for the child. It made me realize that we have to look at problems in the context of the whole family and their challenges.”
Child First teams visit families once a week for six to 12 months, or longer, with the goal of stabilizing the family. They begin by establishing trust, listening and understanding the family’s priorities. If the first thing a mother says is, “I want beds for my children,” then that’s step one. The engagement is guided by an evidence-based methodology called Child-Parent Psychotherapy, which is grounded in collaborative problem solving.
In this process, “the therapist does not present herself as the expert, but as a partner in seeking solutions together,” explains Alicia Lieberman, director of the Child Trauma Research Program at the University of California, San Francisco, who led the development of this practice. It’s essential that the therapist responds in a caring and nonjudgmental manner. “Many parents worry that something is basically wrong with them,” says Lieberman. “It brings tremendous relief to hear that they are not ‘bad.’ And when they see the therapist believing in them and joining in their efforts to overcome problems, a different attitude gets established about themselves and their child.”
Almost all of the parents that Child First works with (mostly single mothers, but sometimes fathers or grandparents) have experienced trauma themselves. They’ve grown up with limited models for understanding their children’s behavior. “What often gets missed,” observes Judy Adel, one of Child First’s clinical directors, “is that every mother says, ‘I want something better for my children.’ They just don’t know what it looks like.”
A big goal is to help parents develop “reflective capacity” so they can respond with greater awareness about – and bring more wonder to – the meaning of their children’s behavior every day. Another is to help parents become more effective problem solvers – exercising their “executive functioning” capabilities, which can be impaired by traumatic childhood experiences.
Teams do this by asking respectful questions that guide parents to their own insights, rather than imposing solutions. They also use video to capture the power of everyday moments. One time, for instance, a team was with a mother and her child in a mall with a play space. The baby started crawling through a tunnel and the mother said, “I bet I can get through that.”
“Later, the video showed how the baby squealed with excitement at the interaction,” recalled Judy Adel. “It was like her brain went on fire.” For a mother with a history of loss, trauma or neglect, seeing how much she matters to her baby can be an “aha moment,” explains Lowell. “Many mothers don’t feel that what they do has any impact on their child’s development or that their child even loves them. So seeing a child’s delight when they look up at their mother’s face is a very powerful communication. It can begin to change the trajectory of the relationship.”
“There are millions of times that children are doing things that parents are missing or misreading,” she adds, “and there’s no joy or delight in their parenting. We want delight! Delight is protective. When a child feels loved and valued by a parent, it buffers the circumstances. We can’t fix poverty but we can buffer the stresses.”
Child First has struck a chord. It has received invitations to bring its model to 24 states. Among high-risk families, the need is dramatic. But the science around toxic stress has much bigger implications. With the growing knowledge about the effects of ACEs, there are implications for pediatricians, day care policies, public schools, the justice system – just about anyone who engages with children, youths or adults with behavior problems. One big take-away is to change the question from: What’s wrong with the person? To: What happened to the person? And: What’s the best response? (Hint: punishment is usually not.)
“This new knowledge calls for a population-based public health response — like what was done for smoking, seatbelts and drunk driving,” notes Kristin B. Schubert, a former health policy analyst who directs the Vulnerable Populations program at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
The stakes? “To my mind,” comments Robert Anda, “it’s the most important opportunity for the prevention of health and social problems and disease and disability that has ever been seen.”
In my next column, I’ll look at how the research on ACEs and toxic stress is being used around the country to improve the way different systems work.
Broccoli’s Extreme Makeover
http://nyti.ms/1ag3S16
The ad agency Victors & Spoils has created campaigns for some of the biggest brands in the food industry — Coca-Cola, Quiznos and General Mills among them. Until now, what they’d never done was try to figure out how to sell broccoli. Or any vegetables or fruits of any kind. This of course is not unique to Victors & Spoils. Major American advertising agencies tend not to get hired by produce growers to help them market fresh fruits and vegetables. They are hired by large companies making huge profits from processed foods to reach into whatever crannies of the American (or global) public they have not yet connected with. Victors & Spoils is exceedingly good at doing just that. The agency’s “Smile Back” campaign for Coca-Cola, which was released this summer, has been hailed as an ingenious use of a kind of guerrilla advertising, albeit with very slick production, composed of footage of grinning, attractive ambassadors for Coca-Cola pedaling through cities and rural areas around the globe, handing out free Cokes to anyone who smiled back.
But there is some change in the air when it comes to marketing healthful food in America, and in anticipation of that, I posed a challenge to the firm: How would you get people to want to buy and eat broccoli? What would your campaign look like? What would the message be? What would you do that all the well-intentioned government-funded campaigns have failed to do for generations?
Now two dozen associates of the firm sat stymied in a room filled with responses they received from people they surveyed in order to get a handle on exactly what the public felt about broccoli. One wall was draped with sheets of paper upon which various first impressions were scrawled: “Overcooked, soggy.” “Hiding under cheese.” “Told not to leave the table until I eat it.”
The team had also asked that same crowd to write tombstone epitaphs for broccoli, as a way of eliciting possible tender feelings toward the product. The results weren’t especially heartwarming. “Goodbye, poor friend,” read one. “I hardly spent time with you, mainly because I didn’t like you.” A third wall contained a dozen snapshots of open refrigerators, an attempt to visualize the space broccoli occupied in people’s real dietary lives. The space it held, at least on this wall, was . . . nowhere. It was nonexistent in the photos.
Earlier in the day, the ad team visited an elementary school in Boulder, Colo., to get a better sense of what children thought about broccoli. This was a progressive school, certainly as far as food was concerned. The school district’s director of food services, Ann Cooper, was imported from Berkeley, Calif., where she once worked with Alice Waters; on the school’s grounds there was a garden where various fruits and vegetables were grown, to inspire the students to be connected to the source of their food. The team was encouraged when it heard that the students had generally positive feelings — until Cooper reminded them that children were only one part of the challenge and that the parents who actually bought the groceries were, by and large, part of a generation that viewed broccoli as “brown, squishy and smelly.”
Sara Brito, the ad team’s strategy director, summed up the information they’d gathered — and the predicament of trying to sell something that was drowning in negatives: “It’s overlooked and left behind,” she said. “It doesn’t matter in our culture. It has lost its confidence, succumbed to bullying and pressure. It’s content being on the sidelines.”
Something she said reminded me of the successful ad campaign started in the ‘70s to sell Life cereal (“He likes it! Hey, Mikey!”) and the challenge that ad team had in trying to take on the more popular sugary cereals it was competing against. Brito nodded her head. Yes, she said. “Where is our Mikey moment?”
Ari Levi, one of the team’s associate creative directors, suggested that the canniest strategy might be to embrace broccoli’s negatives. “Maybe there’s something cool in not being cool,” he said. “Accepting broccoli for what it is.”
Andy Nathan, the agency’s chief marketing officer, offered gently: “It is a flower.”
“You could give someone broccoli bouquets,” said another of the associate creative directors, Marco Merced, a Miami native who made clear he likes his broccoli best when it is smothered in cheese soup. “Is it a bro-quet?”
They had a long way to go.
As of 2010, diet surpassed smoking as the No. 1 risk factor for disease and death in America. One in three children is on track to develop diabetes, joining one in three adults who are already clinically obese. The resulting medical costs total tens of billions of dollars a year. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — not to mention common sense — a diet rich in produce can help fend off an array of chronic diseases, from heart disease to some cancers.
And yet a 2010 assessment published jointly by the Departments of Agriculture and Health and Human Services, which produce the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, revealed that only 5 percent of Americans younger than 50 are getting the recommended amounts of vegetables, with only 10 to 25 percent of older adults achieving this goal. A majority of Americans, on average, are eating half as many vegetables as they should. We eat less than half the recommended amount of fruits. Moreover, more than half the fruit consumed by children comes from juice, which packs so many sugary calories into so little bulk (the fiber that makes whole fruit healthful) that nutritionists now consider juice in the same category as soda and urge children to avoid excess.
For those who do consume the recommended amounts of fruits and vegetables, the science is overwhelmingly in their favor. According to Harvard University’s long-running Nurses’ Health Study and Health Professionals’ Follow-up Study, people who eat at least five servings of produce a day had a 28 percent lower risk of heart disease than those who ate fewer than one and a half servings. Likewise, in the federal trial called DASH (Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension), those who went heavy on the vegetables achieved a similar reduction in blood pressure as others who took medication. And the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute’s Family Heart Study, published in 2004, showed that high vegetable and fruit consumption (four or more servings a day) resulted in significantly lower levels of the bad cholesterol known as LDL.
Less definitive but suggestive research also shows that produce has a buffering effect on cancer. A review of the highest-quality studies, undertaken by a panel of experts under the auspices of the World Cancer Research Fund and the American Institute for Cancer Research, found in 2007 that nonstarchy vegetables and fruits “probably” protect against cancers of the mouth, larynx, pharynx, esophagus and stomach. Fruits also appear to help protect against lung cancer, while the onion-family vegetables appear to aid in keeping stomach cancer at bay. The cancer review also found “limited” evidence that carrots stave off cervical cancer.
For all the evidence piling up on behalf of the benefits of eating more produce, it has become clear that neither children nor adults will do so unless they want to, and preaching about health benefits doesn’t make people want to do anything. Health messages are simply overwhelmed, in volume and in effectiveness, by junk-food ads that often deploy celebrities or cartoon characters to great effect. We may know that eating fruits and vegetables is good for us, but the preponderance of the signals we get — and especially the signals children get — push us in the direction of junk food. The appeal of the packaging, the grab-and-go portability, the everlasting preservatives, the low cost. It also may be undeniable that the crunch of a piece of broccoli is never going to be as satisfying as what food-industry scientists refer to as the “mouth-feel” of a potato chip.
It’s understandable, then, in the face of all that, that produce growers and sellers and the various government agencies trying to get Americans to eat better fall back on promoting the health benefits, because it’s apparently the only advantage they can successfully exploit in the battle against junk food.
There are signs that this may be changing, though. In September, at the first White House meeting on marketing food to children, Michelle Obama said, “The average child watches thousands of food advertisements each year, and 86 percent of these ads are for products loaded with sugar, fat, salt.” She applauded efforts by produce companies to emulate the processed-food industry’s techniques (for instance, Birds Eye started a marketing campaign featuring characters from the show “iCarly” last year, and its sales jumped 20 percent in two months), and she urged more of the same.
Not long after the White House conference, Jeffrey Dunn, a former president of Coca-Cola who now markets baby carrots, told a crowd of more than 1,000 at the Produce Marketing Association convention: “We must change the game. We can help solve the obesity crisis by stealing junk food’s playbook, by creating passion for produce, by becoming demand creators, not just growers and processors.”
The group’s president and chief executive, Bryan Silbermann, told me last month that Dunn’s speech was galvanizing and that the organization will soon announce plans for a new marketing campaign aimed at children. “We thought that if we talked for a long-enough time about people needing to eat more healthfully, they would miraculously change their eating habits,” Silbermann said. “But the way you get there is what Jeff talked about, using mainstream marketing techniques to get people to behave in a healthful way without knowing it. The processed-food marketers manipulate the public. We haven’t spent nearly enough time in the produce industry adopting those techniques and thinking about what really motivates people.”
The problem is not just one of demand, however. Even if it is possible to increase Americans’ desire for produce, little is being done to bring prices down to the point where selecting produce over processed food is a clear choice for millions of Americans. Blueberries that cost $5 a pint stack up poorly against the frozen pizza that can feed the whole family for the same cost. Yet the agricultural system offers precious little incentive to farmers wanting to grow more of the crops that would be better for us. From direct subsidy payments, to insurance when crops get blown away by bad weather, to research dollars for increasing yield and profitability, the deck is stacked against produce farmers.
In July, I traveled to upstate New York to meet Brian Reeves, a fourth-generation farmer with 1,500 acres, on part of which he grows a range of produce that he sells locally. As a general rule, Reeves said, he does not let visitors onto his farm before 10 a.m. during harvest season. The wisdom of that was made plain when I arrived. At 9 a.m., the place was a madhouse. Local grocers had placed orders for 12,000 pounds of tomatoes, blueberries and other produce to be delivered to 52 stores within 100 miles. But one of Reeves’s trucks had a flat. And a driver had loaded another truck with the wrong stuff, costing his crew a time-consuming reshuffle. On top of which, 117 boxes of squash were scheduled to be on the loading dock for delivery, but the golden zucchini was still in his fields, on the vines, being picked.
“It’s like that T-shirt says: ‘It’s not the heat, it’s the stupidity,’ ” Reeves said when he, in turn, couldn’t remember the errand he wanted one of his drivers to run on the way back to the farm. And these were just the everyday glitches to contend with. Earlier this year, a freakish chill wiped out his entire crop of early cucumbers. Then his plans to pass on the running of the farm to his stepson, Jeffrey Reeves — home from Iraq and initially excited to become the fifth-generation Reeves to operate the farm — backfired when Jeffrey realized just how little time he would have for a social life. “Part of my reservation about being here is my happiness,” Jeffrey said, watching his stepfather work his way through the morning delivery, two phones and a clipboard in hand. “I can’t just be a machine.” (Not long after I visited the farm, Jeffrey left to get a degree in social work.)
It was perhaps not the best moment to be asking Reeves the question that brought me here: What would it take to get him to grow more? To till more land, buy more seed, run more irrigation lines, fight more pests, apply more fertilizer, endure more inspections, fix more old tractors, fill out more paperwork, miss more summer-leisure fun and generally wear himself further down in order to grow more produce so people could eat better.
The paradox of this last point was not lost on him. His own meals, especially during the summer months, were a wreck: coffee for breakfast, Mountain Dew for lunch, baked beans for dinner eaten straight from the can to save time for sleep — though he does get to snack on his crops. But Reeves is in many ways perfectly qualified to ponder the problems of increased production. The farm that he runs with his three brothers and one of their sons is an example of the kind of nonindustrial farm that’s necessary in a revamped vision of American food production and consumption. Last year, Reeves turned out 420,000 pounds of tomatoes, 65,000 pounds of strawberries and 2.4 million ears of sweet corn. And while they have a nice little farm stand just outside the small town of Baldwinsville, with a quaint patch of pick-your-own organic blueberries behind the sales shed, they mostly sell their crops to big grocers, including Tops, Price Chopper, Wegmans and, biggest of all, Walmart.
Reeves is particularly proud of being Walmart’s first farm supplier in the area, even if that adds significantly to his workload, from filling huge orders to enduring their painstaking food-safety audits. Only a fraction of his output is organic, but more would qualify with minor adjustments in his already-cautious use of pesticides and fertilizers. “I’m a personnel manager, bookkeeper, salesperson, computer guy, logistician and food-safety expert,” he said. “I didn’t sign up for that. I signed up for the sunshine, to grow crops and get my hands dirty. And that’s why I’m not as happy as I used to be. But I want this farm to be successful.”
What’s most telling about Reeves’s farm, though, when it comes to the question of produce supply and price structures, is that more than half of the land he owns, about 800 acres, is rented to farmers who grow soybeans and field corn, the type that’s used to make animal feed or corn syrup for soda and cookies or is turned into ethanol. The abundance of corn on Reeves’s land reflects its dominance nationwide. Ninety-seven million acres are planted with corn that goes toward syrup, cattle feed and ethanol, compared with the 240,000 acres planted for spinach, broccoli and cabbage.
Reeves said he could convert his corn land into produce if some basics were covered. He’d need more labor, already harder to secure, or even better, some of the expensive mechanization employed regularly for field corn: machines that could harvest broccoli, for instance, without damaging the heads. He’d also need more irrigation lines, because leafy vegetables can’t rely just on rainfall the way field corn can. But corn has become so dominant in American agriculture that it has spawned its own separate industry, with a host of incentives that sometimes tempt him to give up produce altogether. Field-corn farmers get turnkey service from agribusiness companies, including one-stop financing, supplies and technical aid. They spend about six weeks planting and six weeks harvesting, with much of the summer freed up to do other farm work. And when they do work the crop, they typically ride in tractors and combines, many with air-conditioning and stereos. “You can never overstate the desire of farmers to sit on their butts,” Reeves said. “We’re human, too.”
There are also huge financial supports for corn. A spokesman for the National Corn Growers Association told me that they conservatively estimate that two of the largest seed producers, Monsanto and DuPont Pioneer, together spend $2 billion a year on research and development for corn. This is the lab and genetics work that has driven yields upward by 1 percent each year. (Monsanto does spend some money on vegetable research — $181 million for 22 separate crops.) Government spending mirrors the private sector. Greens and leafy vegetables, for example, together get only $13 million from the government in research funding; corn receives $121 million.
Vast opportunities to increase production — and therefore lower the price — of produce are being lost. A few years ago, Reeves experimented with planting broccoli, most of which is still grown in California. Expanding produce production in the rest of the country would not only boost supplies but would also give consumers access to fresher, local fare. But he lost his entire crop when the heads suddenly bolted, bursting the green florets into yellowish petals. This is the kind of problem that could be addressed if there were more research money available to develop different strains; at the moment, the only money available for that is a tiny $3.2 million grant from the Department of Agriculture.
Corn growers also benefit from a U.S.D.A. program known as commodity checkoffs, which involves levying producers in order to fund a kitty that then pays for marketing. Two of the corn industry’s biggest customers — livestock and dairy — have annual marketing budgets that add up to some $300 million, which has spawned a series of campaigns, with help from some of the biggest ad firms in the country, that continue to shape much of our diet: “Got Milk?” for dairy farmers; “Beef: It’s What’s for Dinner” for cattlemen; as well as partnerships with Domino’s and other restaurant chains that have helped triple our consumption of cheese. Back in the 1970s, Iowa corn growers started their own checkoff — at one-tenth of a cent per bushel — which raised the marketing funds to help persuade Pepsi and Coca-Cola to use high-fructose corn syrup instead of sugar in their sodas.
A few fruits and vegetables, notably avocados and Florida citrus, have started successful campaigns using funds from their own checkoffs. Most, however, like blueberries and watermelons, are too small to pay for the kind of marketing that can boost consumption. Since 1991, produce growers and handlers have teamed up with federal agencies to conduct collective marketing — using first the slogan “5 a Day for Better Health” and, more recently, “More Matters,” but this effort also suffers from meager funds.
In 2009, the produce industry weighed a proposal to create a much bigger kitty, a $30 million annual fund that would require a minuscule 0.047 percent levy on their crops. The farmers rejected the plan for various reasons, including the worry that it still paled by comparison with the livestock and dairy industries’ $300 million. But the nature of advertising is changing, and Silbermann believes that spending tens of millions of dollars in television ads is no longer the only way to influence Americans’ buying habits. Substantial gains in sales, he says, can be accomplished with far smaller sums, through ingenious campaigns and the use of crowdsourcing and social media.
This summer, when I began talking to people in the advertising industry as well as growers and marketers of produce about what might be done to encourage Americans to eat better, the universal response was to stop sending the message that this is something dutiful you have to do for your health and start advertising more creatively. I approached Victors & Spoils because I was aware that some of their most successful campaigns for processed-food giants had been built on comparatively low-budget, crowdsourced approaches. They were instantly excited by the challenge of devising a campaign on behalf of broccoli and agreed to do it for The Times at no cost. (As Chris Cima, the creative director, put it: “We sell Pepsi and Coke, and it’s like, this is promoting something that can make the world a better place.”)
One day in August, the team went to stand in a broccoli field belonging to a farmer named Jason Condon. Sara Brito asked Condon how he would feel if overnight the demand for broccoli disappeared. He shrugged and said he’d just swap in one of the 80 other things he grows. “I like broccoli,” he said. “It’s dependable, heavy, middle-of-the-road in requiring labor. But I always tell my employees: ‘Don’t fall in love with vegetables. It’s a business.’ I would like to see more broccoli grown, because it’s good for us but not really as a farmer.”
They went to a local farm-to-table restaurant to talk to the chef about the role broccoli plays in his menu planning. (He said that broccoli tends to be thought of not even as a food but as the divider in the display case between meat and fish.) They looked through various food and cooking magazines to get a sense of broccoli’s place in foodie culture. (In one recent issue of Bon Appétit, a long feature on the “vegetable revolution” contained a timeline of 10 different vegetables’ “it” moments. Broccoli did not make the list.) Finally, they began to riff on possible avenues to explore in the campaign. What can we do with the color green? Is there some packaging we could make? Is there a ritual with broccoli? If not, can we create one? Maybe we could literally change the name to something else? Or the pronunciation? It sounds American but comes from Italy. Maybe we could have some Italians pronounce it.
Their aha moment finally came as they were perusing a bland report on broccoli sales data. Ranked 20th among vegetables, broccoli wasn’t a star, but it was doing far better than kale, in 47th place, despite kale’s sudden rocketing to fame on T-shirts and cookbook covers and in the kitchens of hipster foodies across the land. (Of kale, that same issue of Bon Appétit said, “This is the green that conquered menus.”)
“Let’s pick a fight with kale,” Cima said, voicing the whole group’s thinking.
Thus was born the fictitious Broccoli Commission of America, whose slogans include: “Broccoli: Now 43 Percent Less Pretentious Than Kale” and “What Came First, Kale or the Bandwagon?” and “Eat Fad Free: Broccoli v. Kale.” Picking on kale — rather than on, say, French fries — was especially brilliant because it mimicked the Great Soda War between Pepsi and Coca-Cola, an entirely bloodless battle that greatly enhanced the bottom lines of both companies. While consumers assumed Coke and Pepsi were in some sort of zero-sum game, the marketing reality was that the idea of a soda war, and the ads created to perpetuate it, brought many more consumers to both companies.
That was Phase 1, the campaign that they would take to the streets of Brooklyn and Portland and so on. But they also wanted to reach a much broader crowd that didn’t necessarily shop at Whole Foods or spend their Saturdays at farmers’ markets or invest much time or energy (or money) thinking about the food movement. They needed to give broccoli “a new attitude,” as Ari Levi put it, something that said, “I’m tired of being pushed around.”
They called this second campaign the Alpha Vegetable and mocked up billboards that exclaimed “Goes Great With a Side of Steak” and “Melts Butter” and “Never Gets Creamed.” They imagined that alpha broccoli could endorse a Nascar entry or be served in various forms from food trucks. They even imagined a stunt in which they lifted it by helicopter over a volcano and roasted it, to demonstrate “Extreme Brocking.”
When the ad team formalized this campaign into a presentation, the most important people in the room listening to the marketing pitch were not treating it like a joke. Jeffrey Dunn, the former Coca-Cola president, was there, along with his former colleague Todd Putman. They both now work for Bolthouse Farms, a baby-carrot producer that used some of the people now working for Victors & Spoils to design a campaign that rocketed sales in the test markets where it was introduced: “Baby Carrots: Eat ‘Em Like Junk Food.”
The agency estimated that the total cost of their campaign would be between $3 million and $7 million, including advertising fees, if they were to execute it for real — well within the proposed budget for the produce industry. When the presentation was over, Putman said, “You could put this in the marketplace, and sales would go up.” Whether that’s true is debatable, because who can know in advance whether an ad campaign will strike the right nerve? What’s not debatable is that the messaging that has been tried for years has not moved the needle in terms of Americans’ eating habits. What the Victors & Spoils team was proposing at least made it seem as if produce could get into the game. What effect that might have on all the other factors that determine consumers’ habits and farmers’ incentives and U.S. agriculture policy was at least something to be optimistically considered.
The Produce Marketing Association recently elected Dunn to its board. It also made Putman the head of a task force charged with finding the best marketing ploys. Late last month, Bryan Silbermann, the association’s president, told me that they soon would announce their new initiative. “We have a unique opportunity now, when the stars have aligned and public opinion is starting to show signs of change in dietary habits,” he said. “This is a real tipping point.”
http://nyti.ms/19P3lqg
ARLINGTON, Virginia — My father, Aladar Szegedy-Maszak, a Hungarian diplomat, dined with Adolf Hitler three times.
And then he went to the concentration camp at Dachau.
As secretary to the Hungarian ambassador to Germany from 1932 to 1937, my father watched the rise of the Führer. He encountered him socially at a reception and two dinners — the first time on Feb. 10, 1933, at Hitler’s first speech as chancellor. He remembered how sweat poured from Hitler’s face, soaking his uniform. The speech left my father cold, but also deeply unsettled by the rhapsodic reactions of the audience. “This was my first personal experience that we were dealing with a quasi-religious mass movement,” he wrote, “or perhaps more accurately, a mass psychosis.”
My father knew how devastating Nazi rule would be for the Jews. Hungarian Jews came to his office in droves, imploring him for advice as to how they could help themselves as property was seized and small businesses destroyed.
He met movie directors and actresses; small-business owners; a landlord who owned a block of houses in a workingmen’s neighborhood of Berlin who was told that if he didn’t leave, he would be charged with molesting women. There was nothing he could do.
The hardy perennial of anti-Semitism has made a dramatic comeback in Central Europe. Germany has recently reiterated its friendship with Israel, in response to recent anti-Jewish activity. Far-right political parties in France and Austria have gained force. In Hungary, a virulently anti-Semitic party, Jobbik, is now the third-largest in Parliament. One party official has called for a list of all Jewish legislators, to assess their loyalty — a move that even the right-wing government condemned. (Earlier this month, the government pledged, in the face of global criticism, to crack down on anti-Semitism.)
This all would have been troubling yet familiar to my father and other relatives of his generation. They came of age in a country that was a stew of anti-Semitism. After World War I, Communists ruled for more than four months, and since most of those in power were Jews, the link between Communism and Judaism was forged in many minds. For many Hungarians, to be anti-Communist meant being anti-Semitic.
My father was not a convinced anti-Semite, but as a Hungarian Christian from a strong family tradition of support for the monarchy, he flirted with anti-Semitism as a young man — a fact he was ashamed of his entire life. The experiences in Berlin, he wrote, “extinguished the last, minimal remnants of anti-Semitism that I had had as a teenager during the counterrevolution.” His years in Berlin, and his two other encounters with Hitler, were antidotes to any vestiges of anti-Semitism he had once harbored.
At a diplomatic reception in September 1934 before the Nuremberg rally that Leni Riefenstahl famously memorialized in “Triumph of the Will,” my father could not reconcile the old-fashioned, modest, almost shy Hitler with the raving lunatic he had seen at rallies.
The final time he met Hitler was June 7, 1942. The prime minister of Hungary was invited on an official visit to the Führer’s wartime headquarters in East Prussia and asked my father — now deputy head of the political division in the Foreign Ministry — to go with him. They ate in Hitler’s dining car and my father saw what he later referred to as “the Satanic nature of his character.”
Hungary was an ally of Germany, but an extremely unreliable one. Its officials refused to deport Jews to concentration camps. My father, known for his opposition to Nazism, had attempted to organize an effort to negotiate a separate peace with the Allies, an effort that failed and led to his arrest after the Germans invaded Hungary, on March 19, 1944.
After a regime of Hungarian Nazis took over in October 1944, voices of moderation were jailed or killed. Some 440,000 Jews were deported. Members of the gendarmerie were enthusiastic participants in the process. Ultimately some 600,000 Hungarian Jews were murdered.
If anti-Communism represented one side of hatred for Jews, anticapitalism represented another. My mother’s family, the highly assimilated children and grandchildren of the Hungarian Jewish industrialist Manfred Weiss, fell into the latter category.
My maternal grandfather was transported to the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria after the invasion of Hungary, but he was lucky. He and his family were granted safe passage to Portugal after making, in effect, a deal with Heinrich Himmler for freedom in exchange for their property.
Before this deal was made, my maternal grandmother had disguised herself as a Hungarian peasant during the Nazi occupation. She met the wife of the anti-Semitic former prime minister (and Nazi collaborator) Bela Imredy, with whom my mother’s family had once socialized (albeit not with great closeness). My grandmother asked if there was anything Mrs. Imredy could do to save my grandfather. Mrs. Imredy replied that she couldn’t. And as they parted she turned and said, ominously and elliptically, “Now it’s our turn.”
My parents married at the end of 1945, after my father was liberated at the war’s end. He later became the Hungarian ambassador to the United States. He resigned in 1947, after the Communist takeover. He and my mother managed to remain in America. My father died in 1988, my mother in 2002.
I wonder what they would make of Hungary today. The same stereotypes of the past — the association of Jews with Communism and capitalism — fuel the support for Jobbik today.
Into this caldron has stepped the great conductor Ivan Fischer, himself a Hungarian Jew. He recently composed and performed an opera entitled “Red Heifer” that chronicles the story of a small group of Jews in the 19th century who were wrongly accused of the murder of a Hungarian girl from the countryside. It is a true story, one that uses the distant past to illuminate a dark time in the present.
Of course it is unlikely to change any minds. But the simple fact of it is an affirmation of the power of art to accomplish what decent politicians cannot. It is also an example the terrible persistence of a state of mind, a kind of psychopathy that did not begin with Hitler and, tragically, did not end with him.
An Opera Fights Hungary’s Rising Anti-Semitism
http://nyti.ms/1d8AGQE
BUDAPEST — Ivan Fischer is best known as a first-class conductor whose Budapest Festival Orchestra has entranced audiences worldwide. Last week, Mr. Fischer took on a new role — social critic — when the orchestra gave the premiere of an opera he had composed as a rebuke to what he and others see as growing tolerance for anti-Semitism in today’s Hungary.
Based on an infamous 19th-century case in which a group of Jews were wrongly accused in the death of a Hungarian peasant girl, Mr. Fischer’s opera, “The Red Heifer,” is a vivid display of how cultural figures have emerged as some of the most vocal critics of Hungary’s rightward and authoritarian drift under Prime Minister Viktor Orban.
At a time when the traditional left-wing political opposition is hobbled by corruption scandals and its Communist past, Mr. Fischer is among a growing group of artists challenging a government that has tested the ideals of the European Union. The others include the pianist Andras Schiff and a popular theater director, Robert Alfoldi, who was ridiculed by right-wing politicians for his homosexuality.
The tensions in Hungary come as many right-wing parties are on the rise across the Continent and cultural figures from France to Greece to Eastern Europe are starting to respond. At the same time, many former Soviet countries are wrestling with their identities, pulled between the market and social forces of the West and deeply rooted national tendencies.
But in few places are cultural figures taking as strong a part in the debate as they are in Hungary. Since coming to power in 2010, Mr. Orban’s government has changed the constitution to limit the power of the judiciary and restrict press freedom, civil liberties groups say. More troubling, the far-right Jobbik party controls about 12 percent of Parliament, with a nationalistic, anti-Semitic and anti-immigrant platform unthinkable in most of Europe.
“The Red Heifer” is based on a blood libel from 1882 that divided the country much as the Dreyfus affair later did in France. His ambitious composition uses both a full orchestra and a Gypsy band, with references to music from Klezmer to rap to Mozart. The production, featuring adults and children, is set in the 19th century but includes pointed contemporary references.
Onstage, a red papier-mâché cow stomps on the peasant girl’s foot. Another scene features lively folk dancing by the same crowd that later turns into soccer hooligans blowing vuvuzelas, waving Hungarian flags and calling for retribution against the Jews. After that, the 19th-century Hungarian statesman Lajos Kossuth arrives out of the past, singing in a deep bass-baritone: “I am ashamed by the anti-Semitic agitation; as a Hungarian, I feel repentant toward it, as a patriot, I scorn it.”
In an interview this month, Mr. Fischer said that he had long wanted to write an opera based on the case, but it was the rise of Jobbik that spurred him to action.
“In the last one or two years, it came up to me, and I thought, ‘Now I have to write it,’ ” Mr. Fischer said as he sat in the study of his airy home here, near a grand piano and a wall of books in many languages — an island of cosmopolitanism in a country increasingly turning inward.
“Culture shouldn’t be interested in day-to-day politics,” said Mr. Fischer, who has also been the principal conductor of the Washington National Symphony Orchestra. “We want to be valid next year and the year after. But I think culture has a strong responsibility to find the essence, the real concealed truth which lies behind the day to day.”
Today, that picture shows Mr. Orban subtly courting voters on the far right, hoping to preserve his majority in elections scheduled for next spring. This has contributed to a climate in which, as part of more generalized criticism against foreign forces — especially the European Union and the International Monetary Fund — it has become acceptable public discourse to blame Jews for the country’s economic problems. Last year, Imre Kertesz, Hungary’s Nobel Laureate novelist, compared Mr. Orban to the Pied Piper and said democracy had never fully taken root in Hungary. That same year, Mr. Schiff, a renowned pianist, stirred debate when he said he would not set foot in his native Hungary while Mr. Orban was still in power.
Mr. Fischer, who is Jewish, said he doesn’t feel the same way and is dedicated to the Budapest Festival Orchestra, which receives funds from the government. Still, he has moved his family to Berlin, commuting to remain part of the conversation in Hungary.
The blood libel, known as the Tiszaeszlár (tea-sa-ESS-lar) affair, after the eastern Hungarian town where it took place, is well known in Hungary. Last year, a member of Parliament from Jobbik urged lawmakers to reopen the case, in which the Jews were eventually acquitted of the girl’s death.
He was roundly condemned. Indeed, the Orban government has taken pains to separate itself from Jobbik. “There is no cooperation or partnership with Jobbik, and its support is not required for any decision in Parliament,” a government spokesman, Ferenc Kumin, wrote in an e-mail.
The rise of the far right also comes amid a significant Jewish revival in Hungary since the fall of the Berlin Wall. This month, Hungary’s deputy prime minister said in Parliament that Hungarians must accept responsibility for the Holocaust. Next year, Hungary plans to dedicate millions of dollars for programs commemorating the 70th anniversary of the deportation of Hungarian Jews.
Mr. Fischer said he welcomed the steps but wished the government would go further, “to isolate themselves from everything that the far-right does.” As part of a family-values campaign, in the past two years, Jobbik politicians have publicly ridiculed Mr. Alfoldi in Parliament for being gay. He was ousted as director of the National Theater last summer, replaced by a director closer to the government.
While Mr. Fischer is better known abroad than at home, Mr. Alfoldi has become something of a national hero. Before his ouster, Mr. Alfoldi’s productions, from revamped Hungarian classics to Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America,” had been so popular that people camped out all night for tickets. He is now starring on television in the Hungarian version of “The X-Factor,” which he said averages 2.5 million viewers in a country of 10 million.
A speech he delivered this month in Vienna about the role of culture in a democracy was widely republished and debated in the Hungarian press.
In an interview here, Mr. Alfoldi touched on its themes. “I am not what the government thinks a Hungarian citizen ought to be,” he said. “According to them, a good citizen ought to be Christian, heterosexual, have more than one kid; he should not have a critical attitude and should believe in the past.”
He added: “A citizen should not ask questions either. But I think it is the job of a theater director, especially the job of the director of the National Theater, to ask questions, and to ask questions that are important for the whole society,”
Hungary has a vocal civil society. Since 2011, thousands have taken to the streets to protest the government’s changes to the constitution and its new media law. Journalists and analysts say that the changes have not stifled free speech but are a potential threat — a weapon the government could use if it decided to. The result has been self-censorship. (The government denies that the law represses free speech.)
After the performance of “The Red Heifer,” audience members debated its impact. “If 700 or 800 people see this opera, it will have no effect,” said Josef Janos. A friend, Katalin Patkos, chimed in. “We shouldn’t be so pessimistic,” she said. “It’s a contribution. How effective a contribution, that isn’t Fischer’s problem.”
Protecting Children From Toxic Stress
http://nyti.ms/HfbRF8
Imagine if scientists discovered a toxic substance that increased the risks of cancer, diabetes and heart, lung and liver disease for millions of people. Something that also increased one’s risks for smoking, drug abuse, suicide, teen pregnancy, sexually transmitted disease, domestic violence and depression — and simultaneously reduced the chances of succeeding in school, performing well on a job and maintaining stable relationships? It would be comparable to hazards like lead paint, tobacco smoke and mercury. We would do everything in our power to contain it and keep it far away from children. Right?
Well, there is such a thing, but it’s not a substance. It’s been called “toxic stress.” For more than a decade, researchers have understood that frequent or continual stress on young children who lack adequate protection and support from adults, is strongly associated with increases in the risks of lifelong health and social problems, including all those listed above.
In the late 1990s, Vincent Felitti and Robert Anda conducted a landmark study that examined the effects of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) — including abuse, neglect, domestic violence and family dysfunction — on 17,000 mainly white, predominately well-educated, middle class people in San Diego. They found a powerful connection between the level of adversity faced and the incidence of many health and social problems. They also discovered that ACEs were more common than they had expected. (About 40 percent of respondents reported two or more ACEs, and 25 percent reported three or more.) Since then, similar surveys have been conducted in several states, with consistent findings.
In the years since, advances in biology, neuroscience, epigenetics and other fields have shed light on the mechanisms behind this phenomenon. “What the science is telling us now is how experience gets into the brain as it’s developing its basic architecture and how it gets into the cardiovascular system and the immune system,” explains Jack P. Shonkoff, director of the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University, where the term toxic stress was coined. “These insights provide an opportunity to think about new ways we might try to reduce the academic achievement gap and health disparities — and not just do the same old things.”
First, it’s important to note that toxic stress is not a determinant, but a risk factor. And while prevention is best, it’s never too late to mitigate its effects. It’s also critical to distinguish between “toxic stress” and normal stress. In the context of a reasonably safe environment where children have protective relationships with adults, Shonkoff explains, childhood stress is not a problem. In fact, it promotes healthy growth, coping skills and resilience. It becomes harmful when it is prolonged and when adults do not interact in ways that make children feel safe and emotionally connected.
This distinction is critical, because it opens the way to new opportunities to prevent a cascade of health problems. It is exceedingly difficult to alter the environments that produce major stress for families, particularly poverty. However, children can be shielded from the most damaging effects of stress if their parents are taught how to respond appropriately. “One thing that is highly protective is the quality of the relationship between the parent and the child,” explains Darcy Lowell, an associate clinical professor at Yale University School of Medicine and the founder of Child First, a program based in Shelton, Conn., that has marshaled strong evidence demonstrating the ability to intervene early, at relatively low cost, to reduce the harm caused by childhood stress in extremely high-need families. “Early relationships, where adults are responsive and attentive, are able to buffer the damaging effects on the brain and body,” she says.
Child First, initially developed at Bridgeport Hospital in Connecticut, now works in partnership with community-based agencies in 15 locations across the state, where staff members deliver its program of home-based parent guidance and child-parent psychotherapy. In a well-controlled study, children served by Child First were compared with those receiving usual social services and were found to be significantly less likely to have language problems and aggressive and defiant behaviors. Their mothers had markedly less depression and mental health problems, and the families were less likely to be involved with child protective services even three years later.
Consider Ana Sophia, who is 5 years old. Her mother, Ana Patricia, emigrated to the United States from Guatemala to escape domestic violence. (Their surnames have been omitted.)
When Ana Sophia was 2, she was sexually abused by the husband of her child care provider. Before, she had been a “pleasant and affectionate child,” her mother said. After, she began having frequent outbursts of rage. “She would explode into tantrums, throwing chairs, throwing her cot, screaming, crying,” recalled Ana Patricia, who works as a housekeeper. She didn’t know what to do. She felt hurt and guilty; her instinct was to allow the tantrums and hug Ana Sophia. But the tantrums also triggered her own feelings of helplessness and fear and she would often react angrily.
This is the kind of pattern that, if uninterrupted, would have only gotten worse. And although problems like this are common, clinical services targeting young children remain few and far between. Indeed, Ana Sophia’s experience needs to be considered in the context of the epidemic of preschool expulsions in the United States today, which studies have found to be three to 13 times as commonplace as K-12 expulsions.
And they can be prevented. At the Village for Families and Children, a social service agency in Hartford, 25 percent of the 100 families with a preschooler being served by Child First had a child who had been expelled from a preschool or was at imminent risk of being expelled, observed Kimberly Martini-Carvell, senior director at the agency. “Since Child First began working with those families, we’ve seen a dramatic reduction in expulsions,” she added, with only two children being expelled.
“Ana Patricia was allowing her daughter to do what she wanted to do,” explained Loretto Lacayo, a mental health and developmental clinician who delivers the Child First program. “That doesn’t feel safe to a child, especially after the loss of control of being abused.” Lacayo and her team partner, Sarah Rendon, helped Ana Patricia learn how to interact with her daughter in a sensitive but protective manner.
Through her work with Child First, Ana Patricia said she has learned how to recognize how Ana Sophia is feeling, and listen to her better, and this has helped her daughter control her strong emotions and express her feelings without hurting people. “I was taught that it was embarrassing to talk about feelings,” she said. “This is very different from what my mother did.”
By developing the ability to read a child’s cues, and by being emotionally available on a daily basis, parents can provide buffers that reduce the harmful physiological effects of high stress. “I feel like I enjoy my daughter more now,” Ana Patricia said. “And she enjoys me as a mother.”
Child First, whose funders include the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Connecticut Department of Children and Families and the United States Department of Health and Human Services’ home visitation program, attributes its success to a number of factors. It is preventive, focusing on children under the age of 6. It works through teams, bringing a mental health professional into the home alongside a care coordinator who helps the family gain access to basic services.
Both pieces are necessary. Lowell recalled an ‘aha moment’ years before she started Child First in 2001 when she was consulting with an agency about a child who had a language delay. “The family didn’t come to a speech therapy appointment,” she recalled. “When we investigated, we found out Mom didn’t bring her out in the winter because she had no shoes for the child. It made me realize that we have to look at problems in the context of the whole family and their challenges.”
Child First teams visit families once a week for six to 12 months, or longer, with the goal of stabilizing the family. They begin by establishing trust, listening and understanding the family’s priorities. If the first thing a mother says is, “I want beds for my children,” then that’s step one. The engagement is guided by an evidence-based methodology called Child-Parent Psychotherapy, which is grounded in collaborative problem solving.
In this process, “the therapist does not present herself as the expert, but as a partner in seeking solutions together,” explains Alicia Lieberman, director of the Child Trauma Research Program at the University of California, San Francisco, who led the development of this practice. It’s essential that the therapist responds in a caring and nonjudgmental manner. “Many parents worry that something is basically wrong with them,” says Lieberman. “It brings tremendous relief to hear that they are not ‘bad.’ And when they see the therapist believing in them and joining in their efforts to overcome problems, a different attitude gets established about themselves and their child.”
Almost all of the parents that Child First works with (mostly single mothers, but sometimes fathers or grandparents) have experienced trauma themselves. They’ve grown up with limited models for understanding their children’s behavior. “What often gets missed,” observes Judy Adel, one of Child First’s clinical directors, “is that every mother says, ‘I want something better for my children.’ They just don’t know what it looks like.”
A big goal is to help parents develop “reflective capacity” so they can respond with greater awareness about – and bring more wonder to – the meaning of their children’s behavior every day. Another is to help parents become more effective problem solvers – exercising their “executive functioning” capabilities, which can be impaired by traumatic childhood experiences.
Teams do this by asking respectful questions that guide parents to their own insights, rather than imposing solutions. They also use video to capture the power of everyday moments. One time, for instance, a team was with a mother and her child in a mall with a play space. The baby started crawling through a tunnel and the mother said, “I bet I can get through that.”
“Later, the video showed how the baby squealed with excitement at the interaction,” recalled Judy Adel. “It was like her brain went on fire.” For a mother with a history of loss, trauma or neglect, seeing how much she matters to her baby can be an “aha moment,” explains Lowell. “Many mothers don’t feel that what they do has any impact on their child’s development or that their child even loves them. So seeing a child’s delight when they look up at their mother’s face is a very powerful communication. It can begin to change the trajectory of the relationship.”
“There are millions of times that children are doing things that parents are missing or misreading,” she adds, “and there’s no joy or delight in their parenting. We want delight! Delight is protective. When a child feels loved and valued by a parent, it buffers the circumstances. We can’t fix poverty but we can buffer the stresses.”
Child First has struck a chord. It has received invitations to bring its model to 24 states. Among high-risk families, the need is dramatic. But the science around toxic stress has much bigger implications. With the growing knowledge about the effects of ACEs, there are implications for pediatricians, day care policies, public schools, the justice system – just about anyone who engages with children, youths or adults with behavior problems. One big take-away is to change the question from: What’s wrong with the person? To: What happened to the person? And: What’s the best response? (Hint: punishment is usually not.)
“This new knowledge calls for a population-based public health response — like what was done for smoking, seatbelts and drunk driving,” notes Kristin B. Schubert, a former health policy analyst who directs the Vulnerable Populations program at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
The stakes? “To my mind,” comments Robert Anda, “it’s the most important opportunity for the prevention of health and social problems and disease and disability that has ever been seen.”
In my next column, I’ll look at how the research on ACEs and toxic stress is being used around the country to improve the way different systems work.
Broccoli’s Extreme Makeover
http://nyti.ms/1ag3S16
The ad agency Victors & Spoils has created campaigns for some of the biggest brands in the food industry — Coca-Cola, Quiznos and General Mills among them. Until now, what they’d never done was try to figure out how to sell broccoli. Or any vegetables or fruits of any kind. This of course is not unique to Victors & Spoils. Major American advertising agencies tend not to get hired by produce growers to help them market fresh fruits and vegetables. They are hired by large companies making huge profits from processed foods to reach into whatever crannies of the American (or global) public they have not yet connected with. Victors & Spoils is exceedingly good at doing just that. The agency’s “Smile Back” campaign for Coca-Cola, which was released this summer, has been hailed as an ingenious use of a kind of guerrilla advertising, albeit with very slick production, composed of footage of grinning, attractive ambassadors for Coca-Cola pedaling through cities and rural areas around the globe, handing out free Cokes to anyone who smiled back.
But there is some change in the air when it comes to marketing healthful food in America, and in anticipation of that, I posed a challenge to the firm: How would you get people to want to buy and eat broccoli? What would your campaign look like? What would the message be? What would you do that all the well-intentioned government-funded campaigns have failed to do for generations?
Now two dozen associates of the firm sat stymied in a room filled with responses they received from people they surveyed in order to get a handle on exactly what the public felt about broccoli. One wall was draped with sheets of paper upon which various first impressions were scrawled: “Overcooked, soggy.” “Hiding under cheese.” “Told not to leave the table until I eat it.”
The team had also asked that same crowd to write tombstone epitaphs for broccoli, as a way of eliciting possible tender feelings toward the product. The results weren’t especially heartwarming. “Goodbye, poor friend,” read one. “I hardly spent time with you, mainly because I didn’t like you.” A third wall contained a dozen snapshots of open refrigerators, an attempt to visualize the space broccoli occupied in people’s real dietary lives. The space it held, at least on this wall, was . . . nowhere. It was nonexistent in the photos.
Earlier in the day, the ad team visited an elementary school in Boulder, Colo., to get a better sense of what children thought about broccoli. This was a progressive school, certainly as far as food was concerned. The school district’s director of food services, Ann Cooper, was imported from Berkeley, Calif., where she once worked with Alice Waters; on the school’s grounds there was a garden where various fruits and vegetables were grown, to inspire the students to be connected to the source of their food. The team was encouraged when it heard that the students had generally positive feelings — until Cooper reminded them that children were only one part of the challenge and that the parents who actually bought the groceries were, by and large, part of a generation that viewed broccoli as “brown, squishy and smelly.”
Sara Brito, the ad team’s strategy director, summed up the information they’d gathered — and the predicament of trying to sell something that was drowning in negatives: “It’s overlooked and left behind,” she said. “It doesn’t matter in our culture. It has lost its confidence, succumbed to bullying and pressure. It’s content being on the sidelines.”
Something she said reminded me of the successful ad campaign started in the ‘70s to sell Life cereal (“He likes it! Hey, Mikey!”) and the challenge that ad team had in trying to take on the more popular sugary cereals it was competing against. Brito nodded her head. Yes, she said. “Where is our Mikey moment?”
Ari Levi, one of the team’s associate creative directors, suggested that the canniest strategy might be to embrace broccoli’s negatives. “Maybe there’s something cool in not being cool,” he said. “Accepting broccoli for what it is.”
Andy Nathan, the agency’s chief marketing officer, offered gently: “It is a flower.”
“You could give someone broccoli bouquets,” said another of the associate creative directors, Marco Merced, a Miami native who made clear he likes his broccoli best when it is smothered in cheese soup. “Is it a bro-quet?”
They had a long way to go.
As of 2010, diet surpassed smoking as the No. 1 risk factor for disease and death in America. One in three children is on track to develop diabetes, joining one in three adults who are already clinically obese. The resulting medical costs total tens of billions of dollars a year. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — not to mention common sense — a diet rich in produce can help fend off an array of chronic diseases, from heart disease to some cancers.
And yet a 2010 assessment published jointly by the Departments of Agriculture and Health and Human Services, which produce the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, revealed that only 5 percent of Americans younger than 50 are getting the recommended amounts of vegetables, with only 10 to 25 percent of older adults achieving this goal. A majority of Americans, on average, are eating half as many vegetables as they should. We eat less than half the recommended amount of fruits. Moreover, more than half the fruit consumed by children comes from juice, which packs so many sugary calories into so little bulk (the fiber that makes whole fruit healthful) that nutritionists now consider juice in the same category as soda and urge children to avoid excess.
For those who do consume the recommended amounts of fruits and vegetables, the science is overwhelmingly in their favor. According to Harvard University’s long-running Nurses’ Health Study and Health Professionals’ Follow-up Study, people who eat at least five servings of produce a day had a 28 percent lower risk of heart disease than those who ate fewer than one and a half servings. Likewise, in the federal trial called DASH (Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension), those who went heavy on the vegetables achieved a similar reduction in blood pressure as others who took medication. And the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute’s Family Heart Study, published in 2004, showed that high vegetable and fruit consumption (four or more servings a day) resulted in significantly lower levels of the bad cholesterol known as LDL.
Less definitive but suggestive research also shows that produce has a buffering effect on cancer. A review of the highest-quality studies, undertaken by a panel of experts under the auspices of the World Cancer Research Fund and the American Institute for Cancer Research, found in 2007 that nonstarchy vegetables and fruits “probably” protect against cancers of the mouth, larynx, pharynx, esophagus and stomach. Fruits also appear to help protect against lung cancer, while the onion-family vegetables appear to aid in keeping stomach cancer at bay. The cancer review also found “limited” evidence that carrots stave off cervical cancer.
For all the evidence piling up on behalf of the benefits of eating more produce, it has become clear that neither children nor adults will do so unless they want to, and preaching about health benefits doesn’t make people want to do anything. Health messages are simply overwhelmed, in volume and in effectiveness, by junk-food ads that often deploy celebrities or cartoon characters to great effect. We may know that eating fruits and vegetables is good for us, but the preponderance of the signals we get — and especially the signals children get — push us in the direction of junk food. The appeal of the packaging, the grab-and-go portability, the everlasting preservatives, the low cost. It also may be undeniable that the crunch of a piece of broccoli is never going to be as satisfying as what food-industry scientists refer to as the “mouth-feel” of a potato chip.
It’s understandable, then, in the face of all that, that produce growers and sellers and the various government agencies trying to get Americans to eat better fall back on promoting the health benefits, because it’s apparently the only advantage they can successfully exploit in the battle against junk food.
There are signs that this may be changing, though. In September, at the first White House meeting on marketing food to children, Michelle Obama said, “The average child watches thousands of food advertisements each year, and 86 percent of these ads are for products loaded with sugar, fat, salt.” She applauded efforts by produce companies to emulate the processed-food industry’s techniques (for instance, Birds Eye started a marketing campaign featuring characters from the show “iCarly” last year, and its sales jumped 20 percent in two months), and she urged more of the same.
Not long after the White House conference, Jeffrey Dunn, a former president of Coca-Cola who now markets baby carrots, told a crowd of more than 1,000 at the Produce Marketing Association convention: “We must change the game. We can help solve the obesity crisis by stealing junk food’s playbook, by creating passion for produce, by becoming demand creators, not just growers and processors.”
The group’s president and chief executive, Bryan Silbermann, told me last month that Dunn’s speech was galvanizing and that the organization will soon announce plans for a new marketing campaign aimed at children. “We thought that if we talked for a long-enough time about people needing to eat more healthfully, they would miraculously change their eating habits,” Silbermann said. “But the way you get there is what Jeff talked about, using mainstream marketing techniques to get people to behave in a healthful way without knowing it. The processed-food marketers manipulate the public. We haven’t spent nearly enough time in the produce industry adopting those techniques and thinking about what really motivates people.”
The problem is not just one of demand, however. Even if it is possible to increase Americans’ desire for produce, little is being done to bring prices down to the point where selecting produce over processed food is a clear choice for millions of Americans. Blueberries that cost $5 a pint stack up poorly against the frozen pizza that can feed the whole family for the same cost. Yet the agricultural system offers precious little incentive to farmers wanting to grow more of the crops that would be better for us. From direct subsidy payments, to insurance when crops get blown away by bad weather, to research dollars for increasing yield and profitability, the deck is stacked against produce farmers.
In July, I traveled to upstate New York to meet Brian Reeves, a fourth-generation farmer with 1,500 acres, on part of which he grows a range of produce that he sells locally. As a general rule, Reeves said, he does not let visitors onto his farm before 10 a.m. during harvest season. The wisdom of that was made plain when I arrived. At 9 a.m., the place was a madhouse. Local grocers had placed orders for 12,000 pounds of tomatoes, blueberries and other produce to be delivered to 52 stores within 100 miles. But one of Reeves’s trucks had a flat. And a driver had loaded another truck with the wrong stuff, costing his crew a time-consuming reshuffle. On top of which, 117 boxes of squash were scheduled to be on the loading dock for delivery, but the golden zucchini was still in his fields, on the vines, being picked.
“It’s like that T-shirt says: ‘It’s not the heat, it’s the stupidity,’ ” Reeves said when he, in turn, couldn’t remember the errand he wanted one of his drivers to run on the way back to the farm. And these were just the everyday glitches to contend with. Earlier this year, a freakish chill wiped out his entire crop of early cucumbers. Then his plans to pass on the running of the farm to his stepson, Jeffrey Reeves — home from Iraq and initially excited to become the fifth-generation Reeves to operate the farm — backfired when Jeffrey realized just how little time he would have for a social life. “Part of my reservation about being here is my happiness,” Jeffrey said, watching his stepfather work his way through the morning delivery, two phones and a clipboard in hand. “I can’t just be a machine.” (Not long after I visited the farm, Jeffrey left to get a degree in social work.)
It was perhaps not the best moment to be asking Reeves the question that brought me here: What would it take to get him to grow more? To till more land, buy more seed, run more irrigation lines, fight more pests, apply more fertilizer, endure more inspections, fix more old tractors, fill out more paperwork, miss more summer-leisure fun and generally wear himself further down in order to grow more produce so people could eat better.
The paradox of this last point was not lost on him. His own meals, especially during the summer months, were a wreck: coffee for breakfast, Mountain Dew for lunch, baked beans for dinner eaten straight from the can to save time for sleep — though he does get to snack on his crops. But Reeves is in many ways perfectly qualified to ponder the problems of increased production. The farm that he runs with his three brothers and one of their sons is an example of the kind of nonindustrial farm that’s necessary in a revamped vision of American food production and consumption. Last year, Reeves turned out 420,000 pounds of tomatoes, 65,000 pounds of strawberries and 2.4 million ears of sweet corn. And while they have a nice little farm stand just outside the small town of Baldwinsville, with a quaint patch of pick-your-own organic blueberries behind the sales shed, they mostly sell their crops to big grocers, including Tops, Price Chopper, Wegmans and, biggest of all, Walmart.
Reeves is particularly proud of being Walmart’s first farm supplier in the area, even if that adds significantly to his workload, from filling huge orders to enduring their painstaking food-safety audits. Only a fraction of his output is organic, but more would qualify with minor adjustments in his already-cautious use of pesticides and fertilizers. “I’m a personnel manager, bookkeeper, salesperson, computer guy, logistician and food-safety expert,” he said. “I didn’t sign up for that. I signed up for the sunshine, to grow crops and get my hands dirty. And that’s why I’m not as happy as I used to be. But I want this farm to be successful.”
What’s most telling about Reeves’s farm, though, when it comes to the question of produce supply and price structures, is that more than half of the land he owns, about 800 acres, is rented to farmers who grow soybeans and field corn, the type that’s used to make animal feed or corn syrup for soda and cookies or is turned into ethanol. The abundance of corn on Reeves’s land reflects its dominance nationwide. Ninety-seven million acres are planted with corn that goes toward syrup, cattle feed and ethanol, compared with the 240,000 acres planted for spinach, broccoli and cabbage.
Reeves said he could convert his corn land into produce if some basics were covered. He’d need more labor, already harder to secure, or even better, some of the expensive mechanization employed regularly for field corn: machines that could harvest broccoli, for instance, without damaging the heads. He’d also need more irrigation lines, because leafy vegetables can’t rely just on rainfall the way field corn can. But corn has become so dominant in American agriculture that it has spawned its own separate industry, with a host of incentives that sometimes tempt him to give up produce altogether. Field-corn farmers get turnkey service from agribusiness companies, including one-stop financing, supplies and technical aid. They spend about six weeks planting and six weeks harvesting, with much of the summer freed up to do other farm work. And when they do work the crop, they typically ride in tractors and combines, many with air-conditioning and stereos. “You can never overstate the desire of farmers to sit on their butts,” Reeves said. “We’re human, too.”
There are also huge financial supports for corn. A spokesman for the National Corn Growers Association told me that they conservatively estimate that two of the largest seed producers, Monsanto and DuPont Pioneer, together spend $2 billion a year on research and development for corn. This is the lab and genetics work that has driven yields upward by 1 percent each year. (Monsanto does spend some money on vegetable research — $181 million for 22 separate crops.) Government spending mirrors the private sector. Greens and leafy vegetables, for example, together get only $13 million from the government in research funding; corn receives $121 million.
Vast opportunities to increase production — and therefore lower the price — of produce are being lost. A few years ago, Reeves experimented with planting broccoli, most of which is still grown in California. Expanding produce production in the rest of the country would not only boost supplies but would also give consumers access to fresher, local fare. But he lost his entire crop when the heads suddenly bolted, bursting the green florets into yellowish petals. This is the kind of problem that could be addressed if there were more research money available to develop different strains; at the moment, the only money available for that is a tiny $3.2 million grant from the Department of Agriculture.
Corn growers also benefit from a U.S.D.A. program known as commodity checkoffs, which involves levying producers in order to fund a kitty that then pays for marketing. Two of the corn industry’s biggest customers — livestock and dairy — have annual marketing budgets that add up to some $300 million, which has spawned a series of campaigns, with help from some of the biggest ad firms in the country, that continue to shape much of our diet: “Got Milk?” for dairy farmers; “Beef: It’s What’s for Dinner” for cattlemen; as well as partnerships with Domino’s and other restaurant chains that have helped triple our consumption of cheese. Back in the 1970s, Iowa corn growers started their own checkoff — at one-tenth of a cent per bushel — which raised the marketing funds to help persuade Pepsi and Coca-Cola to use high-fructose corn syrup instead of sugar in their sodas.
A few fruits and vegetables, notably avocados and Florida citrus, have started successful campaigns using funds from their own checkoffs. Most, however, like blueberries and watermelons, are too small to pay for the kind of marketing that can boost consumption. Since 1991, produce growers and handlers have teamed up with federal agencies to conduct collective marketing — using first the slogan “5 a Day for Better Health” and, more recently, “More Matters,” but this effort also suffers from meager funds.
In 2009, the produce industry weighed a proposal to create a much bigger kitty, a $30 million annual fund that would require a minuscule 0.047 percent levy on their crops. The farmers rejected the plan for various reasons, including the worry that it still paled by comparison with the livestock and dairy industries’ $300 million. But the nature of advertising is changing, and Silbermann believes that spending tens of millions of dollars in television ads is no longer the only way to influence Americans’ buying habits. Substantial gains in sales, he says, can be accomplished with far smaller sums, through ingenious campaigns and the use of crowdsourcing and social media.
This summer, when I began talking to people in the advertising industry as well as growers and marketers of produce about what might be done to encourage Americans to eat better, the universal response was to stop sending the message that this is something dutiful you have to do for your health and start advertising more creatively. I approached Victors & Spoils because I was aware that some of their most successful campaigns for processed-food giants had been built on comparatively low-budget, crowdsourced approaches. They were instantly excited by the challenge of devising a campaign on behalf of broccoli and agreed to do it for The Times at no cost. (As Chris Cima, the creative director, put it: “We sell Pepsi and Coke, and it’s like, this is promoting something that can make the world a better place.”)
One day in August, the team went to stand in a broccoli field belonging to a farmer named Jason Condon. Sara Brito asked Condon how he would feel if overnight the demand for broccoli disappeared. He shrugged and said he’d just swap in one of the 80 other things he grows. “I like broccoli,” he said. “It’s dependable, heavy, middle-of-the-road in requiring labor. But I always tell my employees: ‘Don’t fall in love with vegetables. It’s a business.’ I would like to see more broccoli grown, because it’s good for us but not really as a farmer.”
They went to a local farm-to-table restaurant to talk to the chef about the role broccoli plays in his menu planning. (He said that broccoli tends to be thought of not even as a food but as the divider in the display case between meat and fish.) They looked through various food and cooking magazines to get a sense of broccoli’s place in foodie culture. (In one recent issue of Bon Appétit, a long feature on the “vegetable revolution” contained a timeline of 10 different vegetables’ “it” moments. Broccoli did not make the list.) Finally, they began to riff on possible avenues to explore in the campaign. What can we do with the color green? Is there some packaging we could make? Is there a ritual with broccoli? If not, can we create one? Maybe we could literally change the name to something else? Or the pronunciation? It sounds American but comes from Italy. Maybe we could have some Italians pronounce it.
Their aha moment finally came as they were perusing a bland report on broccoli sales data. Ranked 20th among vegetables, broccoli wasn’t a star, but it was doing far better than kale, in 47th place, despite kale’s sudden rocketing to fame on T-shirts and cookbook covers and in the kitchens of hipster foodies across the land. (Of kale, that same issue of Bon Appétit said, “This is the green that conquered menus.”)
“Let’s pick a fight with kale,” Cima said, voicing the whole group’s thinking.
Thus was born the fictitious Broccoli Commission of America, whose slogans include: “Broccoli: Now 43 Percent Less Pretentious Than Kale” and “What Came First, Kale or the Bandwagon?” and “Eat Fad Free: Broccoli v. Kale.” Picking on kale — rather than on, say, French fries — was especially brilliant because it mimicked the Great Soda War between Pepsi and Coca-Cola, an entirely bloodless battle that greatly enhanced the bottom lines of both companies. While consumers assumed Coke and Pepsi were in some sort of zero-sum game, the marketing reality was that the idea of a soda war, and the ads created to perpetuate it, brought many more consumers to both companies.
That was Phase 1, the campaign that they would take to the streets of Brooklyn and Portland and so on. But they also wanted to reach a much broader crowd that didn’t necessarily shop at Whole Foods or spend their Saturdays at farmers’ markets or invest much time or energy (or money) thinking about the food movement. They needed to give broccoli “a new attitude,” as Ari Levi put it, something that said, “I’m tired of being pushed around.”
They called this second campaign the Alpha Vegetable and mocked up billboards that exclaimed “Goes Great With a Side of Steak” and “Melts Butter” and “Never Gets Creamed.” They imagined that alpha broccoli could endorse a Nascar entry or be served in various forms from food trucks. They even imagined a stunt in which they lifted it by helicopter over a volcano and roasted it, to demonstrate “Extreme Brocking.”
When the ad team formalized this campaign into a presentation, the most important people in the room listening to the marketing pitch were not treating it like a joke. Jeffrey Dunn, the former Coca-Cola president, was there, along with his former colleague Todd Putman. They both now work for Bolthouse Farms, a baby-carrot producer that used some of the people now working for Victors & Spoils to design a campaign that rocketed sales in the test markets where it was introduced: “Baby Carrots: Eat ‘Em Like Junk Food.”
The agency estimated that the total cost of their campaign would be between $3 million and $7 million, including advertising fees, if they were to execute it for real — well within the proposed budget for the produce industry. When the presentation was over, Putman said, “You could put this in the marketplace, and sales would go up.” Whether that’s true is debatable, because who can know in advance whether an ad campaign will strike the right nerve? What’s not debatable is that the messaging that has been tried for years has not moved the needle in terms of Americans’ eating habits. What the Victors & Spoils team was proposing at least made it seem as if produce could get into the game. What effect that might have on all the other factors that determine consumers’ habits and farmers’ incentives and U.S. agriculture policy was at least something to be optimistically considered.
The Produce Marketing Association recently elected Dunn to its board. It also made Putman the head of a task force charged with finding the best marketing ploys. Late last month, Bryan Silbermann, the association’s president, told me that they soon would announce their new initiative. “We have a unique opportunity now, when the stars have aligned and public opinion is starting to show signs of change in dietary habits,” he said. “This is a real tipping point.”
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Date: 2013-11-04 06:22 pm (UTC)Children LOVE broccoli! Children love all kinds of vegetables, including lima beans; they'll 'graze' the bean-patch bare - ha, and count yerself lucky to get a single pea, if they're foraging out there. The classic, sure-fire method of making enthusiastic lifelong veggie-eaters is to teach preschoolers how to grow food, and how to prepare what they grow - assuming they don't nom it down right there in the garden. There's nothing to touch the satisfaction of helping to make a delicious meal out of what one planted in the ground as a little seed, or went out to forage for in the Wild - even if "the Wild" is only a vacant lot - especially if it's accompanied by praise and celebration.
People who bitch about children eating junk food seem to forget that almost all of it is bought for them by the very people doing all the bitching. Hello; don't want your kids to eat crap? Stop buying it! Don't want your kids to watch TV, play video games, spend all their time texting? Don't pay for that! A kid needs only one electronic device in the bedroom, a simple clock/radio - no TV, no phone, no computer, no iPod, no XBox, no video player.
*shrugs* The hardest thing about bringing up one's child this way is dealing with all the veiled resentment and not-so-subtle undermining from parents who "know they *should*" Just Say No to a steady diet of processed crap and pop-culture pap for their children, but (since should always means 'not') aren't doing it. And yes, I'm kind of a bitch about it: I say, it is natural for children to love broccoli - if they don't, it's because their parents don't know how to cook it right, and/or because their palates have been so spoiled with a lot of junk-carb garbage that they don't know what's good.
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Date: 2013-11-04 08:06 pm (UTC)What about a light bulb? :p
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Date: 2013-11-04 11:21 pm (UTC)