Building on Historic Public Health Efforts - Holly Scheider
Holly Scheider, chair of Berkeley's Sweetened Beverage Product Panel of Experts, discusses Berkeley's work to reduce sugary drink consumption and their fight against the beverage industry. She touches on the ways Berkeley's Measure D has been used to invest in community-led health initiatives for those most harmed by the negative health impacts of sugary drinks and describes how healthy checkout ordinances, city procurement policies, and other strategies can be complimentary to soda taxes in combatting the tactics of the beverage industry. Drawing on her extensive background working on clean air ordinances and other public health policy to challenge Big Tobacco, Holly connects the fight against the beverage industry to the historic public health efforts that took on the tobacco industry. Building on this experience, Holly breaks down excise taxes and helps reframe arguments of regressivity to place the responsibility squarely on the shoulders of sugar sweetened beverage industry.
Note: Since our interview with Holly in September, Berkeley City Council passed the nation’s first healthy checkout ordinance. Learn more about Berkeley's policy.
This episode of In Praxis is a part of Season 2: Sugar Sweetened Beverage Taxes. Learn more about Praxis’ work around SSB taxes on our Centering Community & Equity Through Sugary Drink Tax Investments page.
The information, opinions, views, and conclusions proposed in this episode are those of our podcast guests.
You can also tune into this episode on Anchor, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and Stitcher. Below is a transcript of the episode, edited for readability. You can also watch this episode on YouTube with subtitles for accessibility.
Building on Historic Public Health Efforts - Holly Scheider
Podcast Transcript
They're using people. There's a whole book called The Pepsi Challenge which was how Pepsi was one of the first companies to see African Americans, Black people in the United States as a market. They changed their hiring practices; they went in and, you know, marketed and started to sell their products in Black communities, and at the same time, they were getting a whole lot of people to be addicted and to start purchasing their products, and make money off of them, and then ultimately kill them.
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[In Praxis Intro] You are listening to In Praxis, a podcast by The Praxis Project created to support, hear from, and uplift the stories coming out of the ecosystem of basebuilding organizing. An ecosystem that includes frontline basebuilding groups and the folks who help support their important work. In this season of In Praxis, our hosts, Julian Johnson and Kourtney Nham, focus on sugar sweetened beverage taxes. We have compiled interviews from advocates working on issues surrounding the reduction of sweet and sugary beverages as well as the taxation of these products. Participants of this podcast are community members, public health practitioners, health department representatives, and concerned parents that span across the country. In each episode, you will hear about their phenomenal work as well as their perspective on the health effects of sugary consumption, and in what ways policy can be used to combat this and lead to reinvestment in our communities.
Julian Johnson: Hi everyone, we are here today with Holly Scheider. Holly, would you mind telling us a little bit about who you are and what you do?
Holly Scheider: Absolutely! So, I live in Berkeley, and I have a background in public health and spent years fighting the tobacco corporations and passing local tobacco policy that limited where people could smoke. The first round that I did was clean indoor air and then moved into restrictions on flavored tobacco, and I also have three children who were all in the Berkeley public schools, and they all went through Malcolm X which has a beloved garden and garden teacher, and so friend of mine mentioned to me in the winter of 2013 that we knew that the funding for the garden programs was coming to an end because it was being realigned, the federal funding. So, there was a group of folks who were working to figure out, you know, alternative ways of keeping that funding going for the cooking and gardening program that all the students got to participate in. She mentioned that that group was looking at a potential soda tax, and I thought “oh, here it is, this is my ticket” because I had all this experience going up against the tobacco industry, and I knew that big soda was going to be very similar, and I was excited. So, I was very involved in the ballot initiative campaign. I joined in 2013 as I mentioned, and I was part of the leadership group starting in April through the election and wore a number of hats, did a lot of different things, and then I've been on the commission that was created by Measure D from the beginning–the beginning being the spring of 2015.
Julian Johnson: Awesome, and so this is more broadly speaking, but how did you first get involved in working on issues of health? I know you said that you first got into the realm of health looking at tobacco, so I'd love to hear more about that journey.
Holly Scheider: Yeah, so when I was in college in the 80s, I was the first women's studies major at my small liberal arts college called Swarthmore, and as part of that interest, I spent a summer in Philadelphia–because the school was outside of Philadelphia–and I worked for Women Organized Against Rape, and I was a courtroom advocate. So, I was in the courtroom helping women and girls who were testifying about being raped, explaining to them how the system worked, and based on that experience, I felt both like I really wanted to continue to help women, but I also wanted to move upstream, and so I…When I graduated from college, I was very focused on working at Planned Parenthood, and I knew there were these sort of entry-level educator jobs, and so I moved to California–the Bay Area, in fact–and I…I worked at Planned Parenthood in Concord where I was helping women to take control of their health and their sexuality to treat STD’s, but also to try to prevent we now call STI’s. Then moved from there to organizing something called National Condom Week which was on campuses–again, it's more like health promotion and ended up through that learning about and going to School of Public Health at Cal Berkeley which was all about doing things upstream and organizing and social change. I think it's more focused on behavior now, but I remember very clearly going to the information session about the program and thinking, “oh my god, I found my spot.” I was so excited. So, I got my master's in public health and right around the time that I graduated was when the first tobacco tax in California hit, and California had this incredible model where they directed some of the tax–a nickel for every quarter or something, I can't remember anymore– but five percent, so I guess a nickel of every quarter, went to county health departments all around the state to hire people like me to work with local jurisdictions, cities and counties, to pass these clean indoor air ordinances, and so that's what I did.
Julian Johnson: Awesome, and so looking at sugary drinks, when did you first realize that they were related to health problems?
Holly Scheider: It was really when I started having kids. There was a lot of health information about juice, and limiting juice, and the damage that having too much sugary drinks can do to your teeth, so I think that's really where the awareness came in that it wasn't healthy. I mean, I knew eating too much processed sugar was not a good thing, and I have a sweet tooth and I’m all about trying to do it in moderation, so I pick my poisons and I make sure they’re something I enjoy, and sugary drinks weren't my poison. I'm much more of a chocolate and ice cream gal, and so then when my kids came along, I can remember taking them to restaurants and saying, “Okay, as a special treat, you can have a sugary drink.” You know, we categorized it and framed it as: this is a special dessert treat, sugary treat, but you're not going to have a sugary drink *and* ice cream or cake afterwards. My middle son always went for the sugary drink and my older son always went for the cake or ice cream.
As I was thinking of kind of re-entering my field–because I had left–I had a friend who worked for what's now called Public Health Advocates, and they had an event. I remember it was downtown Oakland at the California Endowment, and they had something about sugary drinks that I went to around the same time that I joined this effort in Berkeley. So, you know, I started to educate myself, started to read the literature that was out there and that's when the link to diabetes and the concerns–the same concerns that were there with tobacco which was disproportionate marketing to communities of color and low-income communities and kids, you know, those are the same target groups. A lot of the same tactics in terms of marketing, although there was a big difference right between tobacco and sugary drinks which makes it that much harder to deal with in terms of local policy. The big difference being that it's illegal to sell tobacco products to kids. There are federal restrictions on marketing of tobacco products, so it's those restrictions that allow us to go after, for example, flavored tobacco products claiming–rightly so–that they market to kids. But you don't have any of those advantages and you don't have secondhand soda the way you had secondhand smoke, and people have to drink something. They don't have to drink sugary drinks, but nobody needs to smoke anything. It's not like a daily requirement, but you do have to drink water at least, and there are places in the world where the water is not clean, and so people drink all sorts of other things and, of course, the sugary drink companies are there marketing. Actually, this is an interesting side story.
I had a first-hand experience of the penetration of the of big soda in 1996. My husband and I traveled in South Africa, and I was working in HIV at the time and sort of connecting with the groups that were doing HIV prevention, and through that link we went into a township to visit and see how people were living and get to know some people. Well, the day we were there happened to be a special assembly at the school, so all the kids were there, and there were all these signs, and it was like called Coke Day or something like that. Every kid got a free coke, and it was this huge publicity stunt. This is not Nestle, but it's down the path from Nestle that was telling women in developing countries that they shouldn't breastfeed, that they should, in fact, buy formula and mix it with the water that was not clean. They’re corporations that managed to infiltrate in all sorts of places, and then I later learned that vaccine programs that were trying to get into remote areas turned to Coke because they had already done it, and they said “How do you do this? How do you penetrate into these communities?” I was very aware of the global ramifications and having traveled in places with my children. We went to Tanzania and were in a very remote area near the Kenyan border, and you couldn't drink the water. I remember we were staying at this program in Tanzania, and there was a refrigerator full of beer for the adults and soda for the kids–and my kids just they got to too, you know…because that was what they were drinking.
Julian Johnson: Because we know that beverage industry is so good–I guess for lack of a better word–at being able to infiltrate these communities, what have you seen as the best strategies in order to reduce your drink consumption? I know you mentioned education and awareness, but I'm wondering are other strategies that you've seen or used that you think also are well-equipped in order to kind of… essentially fight this fight?
Holly Scheider: Well, since my days in tobacco, I have definitely been focused on policy and organizing. I think education is a great tool, but education focuses on individual responses, and I saw what happened with tobacco firsthand. Public health people did decades of education around how tobacco actually was linked to cancer, and what really tipped the balance in terms of people smoking was when the feds reduced marketing and when we started passing these clean indoor air ordinances and that made a huge difference and that caught on but it started…and I like to tell people this story around the sugary drinks. Because with sugary drinks, we’re just at the very beginning. I mean, we still don't have any policy at the state level. There's no statewide soda tax. Public health advocates and others have been trying to get a statewide soda tax passed in California for probably 15 years. Also, at the local level there were, I believe, 31 attempts before Berkeley finally did it. So, I think the tax is one strategy and keep in mind with the tax, there's this whole debate about the tax because any tax or any increase–anything that increases prices is going to be regressive. For people with more money, an increase on a drink of a few cents or 12 cents or a quarter isn't going to make a difference, but for people who have limited resources–and that includes young people, which is one of the reasons with tobacco that we argued for an increase in pricing because it makes it harder for kids to start and there's all sorts of research about it most people who start smoking start before they're 25 which is one of the reasons that even though it's illegal, tobacco companies keep trying to hook kids when they're young. So, there's the whole issue of regressivity, and is it fair. And there's a whole world of evidence around health disparities, health inequalities and some of that has to do with the disproportionate marketing, and there are higher rates of diabetes, and then it has to do with the experience of racism, the stress that that puts on your body, as well as the things that make it so that people of color are more likely to not have health insurance, are more likely to not have as many financial resources and have to struggle more financially and economically–all of this.
I'm going to bring this all back to why I support policy. Even though the taxes may be perceived as regressive, policies don't involve this arduous act of reaching out to individual after individual and relying on those people to follow up on that education and turn it into behavior. The choices we make around behavior every day aren't always taking into… like our brains compartmentalized and we push away the id, if you want to go Freudian, right? So, what you want in the moment can push back the knowledge that you might have, so you take a risk. You might evaluate that risk. You might just ignore that risk, and then translate that into decisions about what to eat and drink every day. Certainly one soda isn't going to kill you, but one soda every day does drastically increase your risk of getting diabetes for example, and then there's all the marketing: marketing to kids on TV, marketing to kids in stores, marketing to people in stores and marketing includes pricing, so now we get back to the tax. Technically, it's an excise tax, just like tobacco products which means it's a tax on the industry. So, technically the tax is not regressive because the industry has plenty of money to pay that tax. Whether the industry decides to then raise their prices is on them. That’s not an argument that I articulated a lot to people because it's a little in the weeds and the fact is if the price goes up, they might still perceive it as being regressive. On the other hand, I believe that industries like tobacco and big soda and big oil, all the corporate and industrial groupings that we use that little frame, “big,” their profit should help to compensate the damage that they do. Preferably, they would just revise their practices and stop doing damage, so the taxes are a way of pushing back and saying “uh-uh.” It's clear with tobacco taxes because tobacco was the number one preventable cause of death, right? So, we're not talking about dirty water or whatever, we're talking about something that we can actually prevent, but the bottom line is there's a group of diseases that we consider to be preventable and preventable sources of death and of illness/disability, and tobacco has been the leading cause of preventable death and sugary drinks are fast approaching, and potentially going to surpass that, especially as people are more aware and smoking less. For decades, the tobacco companies cause people to have heart problems and lung cancer and lung problems, and health insurers and the people who pay into health insurance–because the whole idea of health insurance is to spread it across and you charge all the people–and then even more impacted was the public health system for people who didn't have health insurance and would show up often really late in the game because they didn't have health insurance, and then they'd have to pay for all this. All the lawsuits and settlements against tobacco, a lot of that was about: “hey, you're profiting, and then you're causing our public system and our taxpayer to have to pay for this,” and I mean, that's just ignoring the human cost which is awful, if you are the person who's suffering, or you have a family member who dies prematurely. Then in developing countries, there's another economic impact. So, when I was in Indonesia doing some public health work, they asked me to write a little smoking cessation guideline for the nurses, so I started talking to people and what I found, one of the most compelling arguments was how much it's costing people–poor people–the men, in particular. Some horrifying number like 60% of men by the time they're in their late teens smoke in Indonesia. So, the cost of buying cigarettes could be as much as 20% of their annual income or more. You talk to people about: you could spend that money on feeding your family or educating your kids. Do you really want to spend you know 20, 30% of your income on tobacco products? That was a much more compelling argument to help people make the decision to quit.
In terms of the public health aspect of passing soda tax, there is both the desire to hold the corporations accountable for the health impacts and the public cost of those health impacts–the actual health care costs–and there is a desire, which is to some extent regressive if it's passed on to customers, to raise the price to make it less accessible to kids and that also means that it's less accessible to lower income adults who are also more likely to have diabetes. Now, that may feel a little big brother to people, but it's also improved health. The most important aspect of the tax is–well, in Berkeley, I'll talk about in Berkeley, and also in the Bay Area, the massive campaigns that we did to pass the tax was a huge sort of education and awareness program, so that was one way that passing a soda tax impacts community health. Another way is if prices are raised and that reduces consumption, and then the most important way is the one that we do with the commission, which is using those taxes, the revenues raised, to fund programs that address the impact, that go in and try to prevent people from starting down the path of drinking sugary drinks to begin with. We have made recommendations, we're all advisory committees, but we make recommendations to council, and we hope that there's a certain accountability that's built in and political pressure based on the tax campaign and the public involvement in that. In Berkeley the council has been very responsive to the recommendations that we've made. Some other cities, they have wanted to use those soda tax revenues for other things, but there's still a huge influx of funding to fund programs in communities of color and low-income communities in the Bay Area–and I believe Seattle has done this as well–to do prevention and education programs and to do media campaigns, which was another thing that the tobacco experience taught us.
It was very clear that the statewide media campaign combined with the education and policy work that was happening at the local level, magnified the impact because there was a time in the 90’s I believe when the governor at the time basically raided the tobacco tax, the Prop 99 fund, and cut off the tobacco media campaign that the state was running. It was an 18-month period before it was reinstated, and there's this beautiful graph that shows how the smoking rates are going down, going down, going down following Prop 99 and the implementation of all this funding to do prevention education and media, and then during that 18 months when the media campaign was cancelled, it was clear the impact and the added benefit of the media campaign. Then, when the media campaign was reinstated, you saw again the steeper decline in tobacco consumption. So, funding media campaigns is a great adjunct to the prevention and education program. I have been chair and started the policy subcommittee of our commission and have looked at what policies we can implement at the local level that would assist and support those education prevention programs.
Tobacco–again, I keep going back to this because it's very clear, and it's all in the past, so we can see how it impacted–but when you have these campaigns that tell people not to smoke, you have smoking education schools, but at the same time you have marketing bombarding people, and you have the prices being low, and you have the addiction factor and no restrictions on where people could smoke, and so the social norms were that it was accepted. Then you start to shift that, it becomes more expensive, you restrict marketing, and then you pass all these clean indoor air ordinances. People smoke in their workplaces, in schools, on airplanes. I remember being on airplane in the non-smoking section and that's a joke now, right? But there were non-smoking sections of airplanes and restaurants. The first law that was passed in the state of California around clean indoor air, was to ban smoking on flights within the state of California, so that would be your one-hour flight from LA to Oakland or San Francisco. That was like a minuscule step, but it opened the door, and then we started doing all these local ordinances because, again, at the state level–just like with big soda–you have a ton of industry money going there and basically paying off the legislators to not pass anything at the state level. We're going to be building momentum, we will get there, but it took a long time of local policy happening at the local level all over the state before the state finally caved and passed the statewide ban on smoking, but you're changing norms in a significant way. Suddenly, people can't smoke anywhere they want which sends a huge message. There's a reason for this, it's not healthy, it's costing us as taxpayers, and so that policy that affected everybody no matter who you were, how much money you have, what your ethnic, racial, cultural, immigrant status was, it affected everybody, and then that reinforces all that education and prevention work as well. So, that's been my goal with sugary drinks. Now we've got the tax money, and we can invest it. What are things we can do to change the norms, change the community culture and law and rules about what people can do? So again, it's much harder with drinks because everyone has to eat, everyone has to drink. It's not illegal to sell sugary drinks to kids, and it's really hard to restrict marketing at the local level because you run into a lot of laws about the first amendment so that really has to happen at the federal level, and that ain't gonna happen anytime soon.
So, what can we do? Well, one thing that we're doing: Berkeley is on track–we hope–to pass the first ever in the country healthy checkout ordinance, and we've been working on this. This was an initiative that I started in 2017 when I went to a workshop that was led by Center for Science and Public Interest about healthy checkout and what it could be. There are efforts that have happened voluntarily, and there's been research done on what those voluntary efforts have accomplished in the UK and showed that when you change the products that are offered at the checkout area where people stand in line to pay, that people purchase and consume less junk food and that includes sugary drinks. So, we were looking to pass the first ordinance to start another wave of policy that might pass around the country to start changing what checkout areas look like, and again this is a lot focused on kids because you hear a lot from parents how they're waiting in line with their kids and maybe they've bribed their kids to get through the grocery shopping by saying we're going to get something at the checkout aisle, and then all that's there is candy and soda.
One more policy that we've been looking at which is called a procurement policy, and what that means is that we have asked the city to institute its own internal policy for all city departments and events that happen on city property that they don't allow the sale of and they don't distribute sugary drinks. It's not only beginning that process of demonstrating, of walking the talk and changing norms in the city, but in city buildings, at public meetings, city employees are not going to have a vending machine that sells sugary drinks. They can go out to the store and purchase one and bring it back in, but they're not going to sanction it. So, it's the best we can do in the sort of realm of clean indoor air, but the most important aspect–which again the city of Berkeley subcommittee that passed the first round of this–approved was to not allow the sales sugary drinks at festivals that use city property or get city money. So think about–I don't know if you know Berkeley–but that includes some really popular huge events, like the book festival and the kite festival, so that would be a huge thing in terms of changing community norms. You go to your favorite street fair, and you can't buy soda because it's a city event. So, that's another policy we've been working on.
Julian Johnson: Oh wow. So, I want to continue on this thread of talking about policy because I want to talk about the concept of health equity. I know you've kind of briefly touched on it, but I want to hear more about how we can center health equity in soda tax policy. We know that beverage industry usually tries to make this argument of regressivity and that it’s going to hurt low-income communities as you've mentioned, and so I'd love to hear how we can make sure the policy is not doing that and is not doing what the industry is trying to claim it's doing.
Holly Scheider: Well, first of all, I mentioned with the soda tax that technically it's a tax on the industry, and so if Coke, for example, decides to raise the prices or if the stores like Safeway or even the corner store decide, “well, the distributor is passing on this price to me, I’m going to raise my prices.” The tax itself is not technically regressive; however, the impact of it may be. There's also been an argument around regressivity that it focuses on soda. People call it soda tax, but it's not, it's a sugary drink tax. It also applies to like, your sweetened coffee drink, right? And those are drinks that more affluent people also drink, so this idea that it's only taxing the drinks that poor people drink or people of color drink more soda, and you're only taxing that, well, that's not true. All those sweetened iced teas and the sweetened coffee drinks are also taxed. The syrups that go into Italian sodas are also taxed, so it applies to everybody. What we advocated for in the ordinance itself, in the ballot initiative Measure D and on the commission, was to allocate funding to make conditions better in the communities most targeted by the beverage industry, which are communities of color, low-income communities, and then youth in general. So, that is an attempt to create some equity in the funding of programs and making those aspects, those parts of the community healthier. You see this more starkly in places like Oakland where there are neighborhoods that don't have grocery stores, and so people go to corner stores and what's available in corner stores and what's cheap in corner stores? There are corner stores in Oakland that following the tax education effort, made an effort because they cared about their community. This is not all of them, but a handful of them that I’ve actually spoken with, they raised their prices on sugary drinks and lowered their prices on bottled water, so they were using pricing–which is one aspect of marketing–to try to promote water as an alternative drink, so that's one way to kind of get into the weeds that the taxes can impact the actual experience on the ground in lower income communities and make it so that there's an incentive for retailers to find other drinks that might be cheaper because they're not taxed that would be healthier drinks for people.
There's a lot of funding that has gone to community programs, and I worked with the Sugar Freedom Project in Oakland which is an amazing program. It grew out of the Oakland soda tax movement, and it has been funded by the Oakland soda tax revenue, sugary drink taxes, and they have done organizing in the communities. They're in their sort of second round of developing community leadership and holding events, and they're working in a lot of immigrant communities, and so they're asking people to bring healthy foods and drinks that highlight sort of the Indigenous nutrition practices from whatever community. I don't know if you've seen the Bigger Picture Project, it's a collaboration I think with UCSF. One of my favorite ones is called “The Taste of Home.” It's in English and Spanish, and the young woman who does it, she's from Mexico, and she talks about how whenever people come over it's become a social norm that you offer them a Coke. It's disrespectful if you don't offer them a soda to drink, and everybody's drinking it, and they're all these images that show themes of family dinners, and they're all accompanied by sugary drinks or alcohol–that's a separate issue–but she makes the point very eloquently, and there are others that do the same, but there's nothing culturally indigenous to Mexico about Coke. Coke is not a traditional drink. It is a drink that is marketed and penetrated, and now it's considered staple and yet, Mexico has some of the highest rates of obesity and diabetes and health related problems in the world which is why they passed the soda tax at the national level before we did in the city of Berkeley. So, I think there's that cultural relevance, cultural respect of bringing in and helping people to see you're being targeted, you're being marketed to, and they don't care what happens to your health. They're in it because of the profit–and to be quite crass–they know that you have less money, and this is cheap for them to make, and yet the profit is incredibly high.
There's no reason that those companies couldn't just eat this penny an ounce tax if they wanted to, and so getting back to health equity and racial equity, when you have that kind of restriction that covers everybody, it levels the playing field a little bit. So, all these efforts to restrict what people can sell and where they can sell it and the cost will hopefully level the playing field, so that every store–we're starting with stores that are over 2500 square feet, that includes in Berkeley all the Walgreens, the Targets, the CVS, the Safeway, as well as Whole Foods, Monterey Market, Berkeley Bowl, a couple of local owned stores–so we're not starting with the local corner stores. We wanted to start with the big stores where people do most of their grocery shopping, and it doesn't say that they can't sell sugary drinks in the store, it's just that it allows parents to say, “We're not going into that aisle because that aisle is where all the sugar is. We're just going to go and get the foods on our list, and then we're going to go in the checkout aisle, and guess what? There are drinks here that you could have. There are flavored waters that don't have added sugar, there might be juice which at least has some vitamins in it, and there might be you know dry fruit and nuts that don't have more than a certain amount of added sugar or salt.”
We’re trying to change how people think about treats to make it healthier and the kind of decisions that parents have to make when they're stressed and that is for all parents, no matter what their racial or economic status is. That's another way that policy can help, and then when you get back to the festivals, if we're able to do that along with the schools–and the state did do that, the state banned the sale of sugary drinks and the serving of sugary drinks in schools–it has to be enforced. In the Berkeley Unified Schools, for example, birthday parties are never enforced, so kids’ parents brought, you know, cookies and cake and all the stuff and juice boxes, and I would just be like, “oh my god, let’s just have water or milk. We're already having a sugar bomb here, you don't need more.” And, you know, you're like, “oh, it's a special occasion,” but you have 20–25 kids in a class, that's basically every couple weeks, right, birthday or holiday celebration. Sol, we're trying slowly to pass policies that and enforce them either at the school level, or the community level, or you know level of stores where we're changing norms for everybody no matter who they are, as long as they go to those places and every kid has the opportunity to go to public schools and that includes community colleges up through the UC’s, you know, so we're…we're trying to change those norms for a whole range of our community that would hopefully make the marketing and the opportunities to be healthy more accessible to everybody.
Julian Johnson: I think what you've mentioned also ties into the counter-messaging in terms of letting community members know that this tax is going across all socioeconomic positions. You know, it's targeting high-end stores and low-end stores, and I think also letting people know that the beverage really could not care less about the health of the community members, could– cannot care less about whether they are healthy or whether they have to pay more for their products. It's all about money and elevating their own pockets, and so I think that's also a really good point that you mentioned as well, in terms of how to counter-message the narrative industry tries to make.
Holly Scheider: Right exactly, and to that point, all of these industries that we've talked about, including the beverage, alcohol, and tobacco industries have been a big supporter of civil rights because they then turn around and sell their products at these festivals and fairs, and they buy off–I mean this is what happened with the Richmond efforts to pass the soda tax. They bought off the NAACP and a lot of the Black churches. You know, they actually paid for a Black church to get a new roof I think, so they're like, “Hey, we're your friends. We’re gonna support your efforts and don't you dare tell your people to support this tax.” They're using people. There's a whole book called The Pepsi Challenge which was how Pepsi was one of the first companies in, I want to say the 40’s, to see African Americans, Black people in the United States as a market. They changed their hiring practices; they went in and marketed, and started to sell their products in Black communities, and at the same time, they were getting a whole lot of people to be addicted and to start purchasing their products, and make money off of them, and then ultimately kill them. I would love for us to have a change in leadership at the state and federal level to start doing things as basic as stop subsidizing corn syrup, and we're working on that, but that's a ways down the road.
Julian Johnson: So, I want to kind of end this conversation with a more open-ended question, and I think it essentially sums up to being: what is the end game or the end goal? What would it look like when advocates like yourself win? I know you mentioned earlier it's not completely banning sugary drinks and beverages, but consuming them within means, but I wonder also, in terms of looking at the policy level, what would be ideal? If you could essentially implement whatever policy or initiatives you could, without any pushback, what would you like to see five years or 10 years down the line?
Holly Scheider: Well, I'll tell you my fantasy, but I think it's more than 10 years down the line. It's interesting because in the 70’s, I think it was the Food and Drug Administration, tried to ban all marketing to kids and it went down, so that would be the first thing I would do: ban all marketing to kids, of anything–at least any food or beverage item. The nutrition labeling stuff that's starting to change, that's good, and warning labels would be really important. But again, remember how we talked about risk assessment, and in that vulnerable moment that people have they're having a horrible day, they've just been laid off from their job, or they are struggling financially, all the stress that people face in their lives and, of course, it's harder for people with fewer financial resources or people who face discrimination and oppression in this country which is disproportionately people of color, you want something to make you feel better, so you go for that sugary drink or that tobacco product that you've been addicted to because of all the marketing. We want to change all of that starting from the roots. You know, I would go to Black Lives Matter and to changing the economic opportunity. That's a whole big other discussion, but in terms strictly of sugary drink policy, what I'd like to see is at the federal level no more subsidizing of corn and corn syrup, and that there be very strong attention to what we as a country subsidize in terms of nutrition and promote in terms of nutrition, that farmers who are producing healthier food are given the kinds of subsidies and support–or more so–than big agriculture which doesn't have incentives to spend more money to make things healthier and not use pesticides, etc. I would ban all marketing to kids. I mean ideally, I would ban all marketing of products that have a proven health detriment, but that's a tricky thing to define. But, you know, when it was so clear that tobacco products caused cancer the feds actually took that step, and we have very clear links about sugary drinks and diabetes and the cost of that both in terms of human costs and financial costs, so one could certainly restrict marketing practices of sugary drinks. With tobacco I advocate for things like plain packaging and sales only at state stores. I don't think that's practical for sugary drinks, but I think there can be incentives happening at the state and federal level for companies to produce healthier drinks. There’s a proliferation now in grocery stores of these flavored bubbly waters they have no added calories; it's basically water that's carbonated, it has a little bit of flavor, some are better than others. I wonder if there can be incentives to make those available in all stores and make the pricing competitive, so that it's accessible to everybody. I would love to see that there be the kind of support that you need to have festivals and celebrations for all kinds of groups, so that they didn't have to go towards sponsorship by alcohol, tobacco, or sugary drink company. I would love to see at the city level that there be restrictions on sales of sugary drinks at those kinds of festivals and certainly in schools and public institutions and vending machines. I would love to see even more restrictions in stores. Prohibition doesn't work, there's no point in doing that, it just backfires, but I think that once you get a healthy checkout, you could basically say: put all the sugary stuff in one aisle, like the cookies, cake, sugary non-alcoholic drinks in one aisle, all the alcohol, so that it's even easier for people who are making a decision to avoid that stuff to avoid it when they go into the store, so you don't have that temptation.
Julian Johnson: Awesome, I think that's a great way to end it. Thank you so much Holly for speaking with me today. Before we close out, are there any last bits of information or things you want to share?
Holly Scheider: It’s just been a really exciting process to be engaging with our community in this way and to have this commission that allows for community members to have a voice. I guess another thing for California would be to get rid of the restriction in Prop 13 that has made it so that it's very hard for local districts to pass designated taxes, so that you don't have to have this voluntary thing, but you can have a designated tax that goes to a specific fund. It could be sugary drink prevention fund that could be overseen by a commission as well, but that there isn't the possibility for cities to take that money and divert it. To pass a statewide soda tax, and to do that, we first need to change the law that the legislature passed that put a moratorium on local–well, that's different–but to change that law, so that locals can start passing local soda taxes, and then for the state to actually take action. And then, to have the state funds go to actual programming and prevention and policy, and not just go into those state coffers. As a parent, I saw that that cooking and gardening program was both an amazing program that my kids love, but a way to get that healthy nutrition and like “where does our food come from” that kind of education to everybody, public schools, a great sort of health equalizer. That was another motivation for me to get involved to try to keep that program going, and I think that was one of the keys to success in Berkeley was we had an established program that was being threatened to go away because we didn't have funding; which is different than saying if we get the funding, we'll do these things, and people would say “wait a minute that money isn’t going to go there, you're not going to do these things.” In Berkeley we were saying, first of all, we trust our city council to do things, we're going to hold them accountable, but also, we have this program that's going to go away, so they'll be evident if the money doesn't go to support that program. We've kept that promise by supporting that program.
Julian Johnson: Thank you again, it's been a true honor talking to you.
Holly Scheider: Alright, nice to talk to you, Julian.
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[In Praxis outro]Thank you for listening to this episode of In Praxis. We hope you all enjoyed it. Make sure to visit our website, www.thepraxisproject.org, where you can check out additional episodes of other guests as well as learn more about our work.
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