Consumers Demand New Foods, New Policies

Several dynamic forces are converging to change American food consumption patterns. Forces include changes in prices, income, and work status, as well as important demographic determinants such as population growth rates and composition. A variety of lifestyle variables such as household type, educational level, access to information, and tastes and preferences in general also exert important effects on food consumption patterns.

Public policies can influence most of these forces. One important category of public information now shaping consumer food preferences is emerging knowledge of nutritional and food safety links to health. Although diet is only one among many determinants of health, many recent food consumption trends appear motivated by perceptions about nutrition and food safety. Yet apparent inconsistencies in consumption patterns reveal that health concerns are not the only factors driving the American diet. Good taste, product availability, price, convenience, variety, and quality are also important.

Despite the apparent paradoxes in American eating patterns, arguably an overall trend toward healthier eating exists. The change in composition of the American diet is striking. Americans now consume proportionately less red meat, whole milk, and eggs than they did twenty years ago, thus cutting down on animal-based fats and cholesterol.

On the other hand, total consumption of fats and oils has risen, though tipping the scales toward vegetable oils and away from animal-based fats and oils. Americans consume increased quantities of poultry, fish, and low-fat dairy products, a healthier trend. They also choose more fresh and frozen fruits and vegetables and fewer canned varieties in a continuing trend toward fresh and freshlike foods. On the other hand, Americans evince a seemingly insatiable demand for sugars, sweeteners, carbonated sodas, rich cheeses, and desserts. While proportionately less liquor is drunk, beer and wine have replaced liquor in some instances. Bottled water is another winner in the consumer choice category.

In a search for more convenience and service, Americans eat more food away from home than ever before and spend about 44 percent of their food dollar for these meals. They also purchase more prepared foods from grocery and other retail stores. "Grazing" for snacks replaces eating many traditional meals. To compensate or otherwise assure good nutrition, Americans take more vitamin or mineral supplements than ever before.

Changing American eating patterns portend significant consequences for American consumers, the economy, food producers, and marketers over the next two decades. For consumers, the quality and safety of the food supply and personal food choices are critical to nutritional status and influence overall health, economic status, and productivity. For the economy, the U.S. food marketing bill exceeds $470 billion annually and helps support over 18 percent of the U.S. labor force. For food producers and marketers, competition for the consumer's food dollar will determine who succeeds in the marketplace, as overall rates of food market growth continue to slow.

Choosing policies

Public policies that address agriculture and food marketing as well as nutrition and public health exert strong influences on the food system. They affect the availability, quantity, quality, safety, and price of American foods. Agricultural policies that support farmer incomes or agricultural prices strongly influence the type and quantities of agricultural commodities produced. Public policies related to grades and standards of food items shape incentives to producers to market particular types of products.

Similarly, policies governing the ways in which food items are labeled or advertised influence the amount and type of information consumers have in making food choices. Perhaps predictably, these diverse policies have sought to achieve divergent goals and have therefore produced contradictory results. One example is a dairy support and marketing system that has rewarded the production of whole milk at the same time that consumers have been counseled to drink low-fat milk. Dairy surpluses have represented a chronic strain on the federal budget, as well. With all the complex interrelationships between consumer demand, public policies, and the food market, understanding the forces driving American food purchases and their implications for the future is crucial for food system participants and policymakers alike.

Many current and emerging major American food policy issues center on the relationship between food and health. Three major factors explain this policy phenomenon. First, American society today has an increasing proportion of elderly persons with distinctive health concerns and needs, as well as newly identified pockets of the poor whose nutritional needs are not well met.

Second, the major public health and nutrition problems in the U.S. today are not acute malnutrition or the acute infectious diseases of earlier in the century, but rather the chronic diseases and inadequate nutritional patterns affecting people over many years. As more Americans live longer, chronic diseases are highlighted along with their diet dimensions. And as rising percentages of children grow up in poverty in the U.S., concerns over nutritional intake combine with concerns over housing and access to health care and education. Many of the chronic diseases, of which heart disease and cancers are important examples, are understood increasingly to have an important diet dimension.

Third, the high and growing cost of health care suggests that public policies to encourage disease-preventive measures, including good diet, can be cost-effective and should be encouraged. In the 1980s, price increases for foods were comparatively minor compared to those for nonfood items, as costs of medical care and shelter rose rapidly. The result has been a return of hunger in America, evident in the growing number of soup kitchens and food pantries. Because economic growth is uneven, income, housing, medical, and food problems will not disappear readily in coming years. Thus, a policy challenge exists to maintain adequate income and nutrition. Since lower-income consumers spend proportionately more of an increase in income on food, transferring or generating income for this group should have a positive impact on total food quantities taken, both domestically and internationally. This shift is especially important in an environment of low overall growth in food demand.

Low-income and elderly consumers

For low-income consumers, access to food will continue to present challenges to the food and welfare systems. Among certain of the vulnerable groups, the benefits of nutrition in promoting health are frequently linked to access to medical services and housing. Thus multiple bottlenecks to medical care, housing, and adequate food resources often exist. For low- or fixed-income consumers particularly, increases in prices of essential nonfood items such as shelter, heat, or medical care can lead to diminished expenditures on food.

The diets and nutritional requirements of the elderly, their eating and shopping practices, and their health status are all relatively poorly researched. Rather incredibly, older Americans have not been included in many national food-consumption studies or in nutritional and health-status sampling. In many areas of social and scientific research, the age category of those sixty-five and over has not been further broken down into subcategories. Thus we do not know very well what the elderly are currently eating or should be eating, or why. And even if we knew more about those who are currently elderly, it does not follow that tomorrow's elderly will behave the same way with respect to food consumption and demand. Gender, changing incomes, household arrangements, and tastes may affect tomorrow's food profile for this group.

Although many of today's elderly are not poor, a significant subgroup is poor. These elderly fail to use adequately the many food-assistance programs available, including food stamps. To restore their health, they may easily fall prey to nutritional or medical fraud. Future policies, both near- and long-term, for the older American food consumer must take into account the design and evaluation of marketing, protective, and assistance programs aimed specifically at the elderly poor.

Health and agricultural policies

As policymakers consider continuing support for agriculture, they will be increasingly called upon to examine linkages between policies that promote particular commodities or commodity characteristics and the place of these commodities in American health and diet. Tobacco provides an extreme example of a commodity supported by agricultural policies in order to protect farmer incomes, but not supported by public health authorities, who have discouraged its consumption for reasons of public health.

Other commodities are similarly treated. Milk and beef producers respond to price incentives for high butterfat and marbling, respectively, while consumers are told to reduce consumption of butter and animal fats. Further, pricing policies that result in low grain prices reduce the cost of feed for livestock, while lower-priced livestock products increase the quantity of meat that is demanded by consumers.

Since pricing policies are probably the most influential policy tool affecting overall food product demand and supply, the use of pricing schemes or incentives to encourage the production of nutritious items and the reduction of subsidies for items that are less nutritious or less safe would make agricultural and food and nutrition policies more consistent. Similarly, facilitating the establishment of markets in products characterized by a nutrition or health dimension would permit suppliers to capture the benefits of differentiating their products in order to cater to those willing to pay for particular attributes. Products produced without the use of particular chemical pesticides, or meat produced without animal growth hormones, are examples of foods that some consumers wish to buy and for which they may be willing to pay more if necessary.

Yet frequently there are questions about the certification of such products. To the extent that policymakers can encourage certification of product claims as well as health or nutrition claims, markets may signal to consumers the necessary encouragement to trade in healthier products. Agricultural research policy can also promote desirable qualities in food, not only from a marketing or handling perspective, but also from a nutritional and safety standpoint.

Marketplace signposts

Our increasing understanding of the links between foods, diet, and health status will continue to raise food and nutrition policy issues. Frequently, scientific uncertainty about the nature of diet-health relationships makes ethical judgments necessary in policy formation. When do we know enough to establish a public policy? The controversy over links among diet, cholesterol, and heart disease is a case in point. While increasingly strong links have been found between cholesterol and heart disease, some experts have been unwilling to make general recommendations for the population based on evidence from limited studies or epidemiological associations. Other nutritionists have argued that the public health benefits of general guidelines outweigh any potential costs.

The public recommendations issued by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute for universal screening of those twenty years of age and older to determine cholesterol blood levels represented a compromise between these groups. Nutrition policy recommendations eventually change diet norms and translate into changes in consumer demand.

Agriculture's response to emerging knowledge of diet-health linkages has ranged over time from ostrich like or defensive to collaborative and anticipatory. Many commodity groups and food manufacturing firms now are poised to exploit any positive health linkages they can find and to develop improved products when they can.

The red-meat and egg industries are illustrative. At first relatively unconcerned about potential effects on consumer demand, the industries later became defensive, disputing scientific conclusions linking ingestion of dietary cholesterol with heart disease. More recently, the red-meat industry has responded to consumer concerns by trimming fat from meat and participating in feeding and breeding research programs to produce leaner animals. The red-meat industry has supported a change in the name of the beef grade "good" to "select" in order to promote the image of leaner beef among consumers; previously the grades "prime" and "choice," with their connotations of excellence, were reserved for the cuts with the most marbling. The egg industry is promoting the use of egg whites in processed foods because they are low in cholesterol, and attempting to develop eggs having lower cholesterol.

Other industries are jumping on the health bandwagon by fortifying or enriching their products with currently fashionable nutrients or minerals. For example, in 1986 calcium was added to such diverse items as flour, cottage cheese, orange juice, antacids, milk, and soft drinks.

Consumer concerns about nutrition and food safety and industry responses raise policy questions about governmental roles in setting and maintaining standards and in regulating health claims. In the future, consumers will demand more information, in terms they can understand and use, about the nutrient content of foods. As consumers care about the purity of foods, the increased attention being given to linkages between diet and health in the general media may alarm some consumers because they cannot interpret fragmentary information. Providing consumers with a framework for integrating information about nutrition should be an important longer-term goal for the food system.

As a recent example, tropical palm and coconut oils have come under fire when labeled merely as vegetable oils, because of their high saturated fat content. Consumers and their advocates are asking for labeling of and regulation of saturated versus poly- and monounsaturated fats in foods prepared by commercial sources.

The fortification and modification of foods raise different policy issues for regulators. Should food manufacturers modify traditional products at will — adding vitamins or minerals, or substituting non-caloric sweeteners or fat replacers — or should standards of identity be maintained? What information should be required on labels of altered products?

The regulation of industry health claims for products raises another set of issues. Traditionally, a distinction has been made between claims permitted by the Federal Trade Commission in media advertising—which allow more "puffery"—and those permitted by the Food and Drug Administration on labels, which require premarket approval and are stringently regulated. Recent policy changes indicate a movement away from the stricter standard toward industry self-regulation.

Safer food

The increasing incidence and reporting of foodborne illness has intensified scrutiny of food safety and the food safety regulatory system. The National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences has criticized both red-meat and poultry inspection in recent years for a lack of hazard-based risk assessment and management, and for insufficient means and strategies for managing microbiological contamination of foods.

Legislation recently introduced in the U.S. Senate calls for examining the need for, and recommending if desirable, a monitoring and inspection process focused on possible microbiological contamination of meat, poultry, and seafood products. Essentially, such an undertaking would add new activities to existing inspection structures in the cases of red meat and poultry and establish entirely new inspection procedures for the largely unregulated fish and seafood industries.

Chemical residues such as pesticides, animal drug residues, and environmental toxins have also created concern among consumers, food scientists, and food safety regulators. Residues in domestic and imported fruits, vegetables, and animal products are the focus of particular attention, although other food items may also be contaminated.

In recent years, a tendency to deal with some food safety concerns at the state level has emerged. Proposition 65, successfully passed as a voter referendum in California, called for the identification of carcinogens occurring in the water and the food supply. Strict standards for carcinogens in drinking water, and labeling requirements for carcinogens or chemicals associated with reproductive difficulties on food products, were also mandated.

In Massachusetts, the state has set a stricter standard for Alar residues on apples than the federal government has (Alar is a daminozide, a chemical applied in apple production). While one benefit of state-level regulation of the food system may be that states can act when they feel the federal government fails to accommodate their preferences, a drawback is that a national checkerboard of different rules and regulations raises the cost of doing business and may allow a few influential states to set policy for the nation.

New food production and processing technologies, along with their promises of ever more convenient or desirable products, continue to raise food safety issues. Food irradiation, growth hormones, artificial sweeteners and fats, and other applications of biotechnology and genetic engineering are examples of already controversial procedures that will be scrutinized as their use in the food system grows.

As the U.S. market becomes more internationalized, health and safety standards increasingly operate in international markets not only as national consumer protection measures, but also as nontariff barriers to trade. The EC-U.S. "meat war" over hormones and meat inspection, and proposals to require labeling of tropical oils are two cases in point. Sorting out the legitimate and protectionistic elements in many standards is a time-consuming and difficult process. Nevertheless, in economies increasingly dependent upon international trade, the harmonization of market rules will grow in importance; it will be a major priority in upcoming multinational trade negotiations.

Clearly, the dynamic forces driving the food market result in continuous change in food demand along with altering pressures in the policy arena. The challenge for policymakers is to address emerging links between diet and health together with agricultural and welfare policy concerns.