Taking on the Giant - Janna Cordeiro
In 2014, when Berkeley, CA passed the nation's first soda tax, advocates and public health practitioners in San Francisco made a parallel effort to enact a similar tax on sugar sweetened beverages in their city. A testament to the beverage industry's massive funds, the measure failed in San Francisco in 2014. It would take another two years for the city to pass this measure successfully.
Janna Cordeiro from San Francisco's Wholesale Produce Market discusses her public health work on sugar sweetened beverages in San Francisco and the struggles of taking on the well-resourced soda industry. As the SFUSD parent representative to the San Francisco's Soda Tax Advisory Committee, Janna speaks to the ways soda taxes can be reinvested to advance health equity and reduce prevalence of preventable chronic diseases in working-class communities of color. She advocates for the use of soda tax revenues to support small business owners and to fund community organizations working on the ground to directly address the most urgent health issues of communities hardest hit by the beverage industry's exploitation.
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.
Taking on the Giant - Janna Cordeiro
Podcast Transcription
When I started digging in and learning about sugary drink consumption marketing around sugary during consumption and really dove into that and really looked at the history the secret history I was just appalled at the extent of the racism and how class had been utilized to essentially encourage, support, and make people drink these drinks that were making them sick and making their children sick.
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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: Hi everyone today we are joined with Janna Corderio. Janna, would you just mind introducing yourself and telling us a little bit about who you are and what you do?
Janna: Sure. There's a lot of a lot of ways to introduce myself I’ve been in public health for over 25 years and worked in the northeast in, Atlanta and now in San Francisco for the last 20 years. I have a daughter who just graduated from high school and I also come from a working-class background as the first person on both sides of my family to go to college. So I think that also plays a large role in how I see things. I am white identified and have a partner that, a male partner that I’ve had for 30 years. That's a little bit about me. I focused my public health work initially on women's health and HIV. I also have worked with people who are impacted or use drugs and did a lot of health education as well as developing community programs and evaluating them and doing community-based research working with the CDC on their HIV prevention programs that they funded nationally and then moved into working in the breast cancer research field. [I] did evaluation and special projects for state-funded breast cancer research program here in California. Then I became self-employed for about eight years and that's really when I started learning more about and working actively on sugary drink work both policy and education work. For the last three and a half years though I’ve moved more directly into food security, food access programs and now work for the San Francisco wholesale produce market which is the only produce terminal in San Francisco provides fresh food to restaurants, grocery stores, markets, and food entrepreneurs in the Bay Area and beyond. I run the community programs there.
Julian: Awesome it's so exciting to be able to speak with you today! So, I guess just kind of going back to looking at your work in sugary drinks. When did you first realize that sugary drinks were a health problem or could be attributed to health problems?
Janna: It wasn't really until 2008-2009 when I became an independent consultant and started working with the San Francisco Department of Public Health (DPH) the “Shape Up of San Francisco Coalition” they'd been doing work on access to water and sugary drinks for a long time. I started working on a project about access to healthy food in the bay view in San Francisco which is a community that has historically been impacted by food apartheid. That really opened my eyes to my own community and the lack of access just to healthy food and then obviously the role of sugary drinks came in very quickly after that.
Julian: So what made you decide to invest more of your energy into reducing the consumption of sugary drinks?
Janna: Yeah so, as I said I’ve been in public health for over 25 years. I’ve always been interested in the nexus between race, class, and gender. My passion initially I grew up in the 80s in the beginning of the AIDS epidemic. My dad came out to me, he's gay. It was a very scary time and the response to that for me was to learn as much as I could about HIV and HIV prevention and get involved. I really understood at that time that health is not just simply about having information and making the right choice. It's extremely much more complicated than that and so when I started digging in and learning about sugary drink consumption marketing around sugary during consumption and really dove into that. Really looked at the history the secret history that nobody knows about or talks about because the industry has done a really good job at blurring the truth. I was just appalled at the extent of the racism and how class had been utilized to essentially encourage, support, and make people drink these drinks that were making them sick and making their children sick. I’d never been like a big soda consumer in my lifetime I mean, in the 70s we drank Kool-Aid in California but sodas and fast food and my household were a special treat we just couldn't afford it. But when I moved to Atlanta which is Coca-Cola central! I just through osmosis started drinking soda not that often but, I would drink a coke for sure. I knew personally how your environment can shape you, obviously, I mean there are many examples of how that happens. But when I started reading about how the industry developed their media campaigns in particular all the tactics that they used. I was just appalled and I started calling it out and talking about it. I was more appalled at how afraid people were to take on the soda industry. People in San Francisco who are bold and badass and took on all of the forces that caused us to have an HIV epidemic and the loss of life so many people in this suffering. Many people even those people who would do underground needle exchange. You know, all kinds of strategies. Chain themselves to a desk. People don't know– people in my daughter's generation for sure but, a lot of people even millennials don't know about ACT UP and what they did!
Julian: Yeah.
Janna: I was just like we need an ACT UP around soda and everybody looked at me like I was the total crazy woman in the room. The bureaucrats and the heads of the foundations and the– nobody wanted to give us money just to do an education campaign we couldn't get money. I have written grants for millions of dollars and we could not– we got one 25,000 grant. Which had to go to like a special session because people on the board were uncomfortable and we got money from Kaiser a little bit but they didn't want their name on it. Then the Health Department and a lot of the folks in the upper management levels of the city… San Francisco the most progressive public health city in the country, pretty much, didn't want us doing this work. They didn't want us talking about it they didn't want us changeling. They didn't want us saying like– why is Rec & Park getting this money? Hundred thousand dollars from Coca-Cola. What's going on? That’s why I got involved. Because I realized even more than HIV this is the issue that in making people sick. I mean it impacts so many people and it's all on the backs pretty much of Black and brown folks. They're getting sick and with real diseases and suffering unnecessarily. I was outraged and looked around and was more outraged by how little outrage there was.
Julian: It's interesting to hear now the pushback from agencies and departments you'd think would be interested in combating sugary drinks and the health outcomes that they cause that adverse and so it's interesting to hear that you receive that pushback. I guess in your current work. What are some strategies you're trying to use to try to reduce your sugary drink consumption? You mentioned education, [but] are there other ways that you are seeing yourself kind of navigate or be called towards trying to fight this fight.
Janna: Well because of what I learned from my work with the Health Department I did a couple of things wellness policies for youth serving organizations sugary drinks was a big part of that but, then we created the Open Truth campaign and out of that the supervisors in San Francisco who were interested in soda taxes asked the Health Department for guidance on the policy development. I was able to be at the table in the development of the 2014 soda tax attempt. The same year that Berkeley was successful and we took a different approach primarily because we have a different city government and we didn't trust the city to spend the money as promised. We didn't do a general tax fund we did a policy that would require two- thirds [vote] and we had like– I don't know, under a hundred thousand dollars and the industry spent over 10 million. I can't remember what the exact numbers is –in the counter. It was appalling and again my friends and my colleagues were having to do this on the weekend in their free time because they were explicitly told by UCSF by DPH by whoever what their current employer was that they couldn't do the work during their work hours. They couldn't use any resources from those institutions to even educate people about sugary drinks. We were put on hold– our campaign, our open trees campaign was put on hold during the soda tax when the soda tax legislation went live and before the election. I think one of the biggest and most effective strategies is soda taxes.
Julian: One thing that I’m seeing when you're looking at different health initiatives that are working to improve health. There's this concept of centering health equity. I would just love to hear from you. What are some ways that health equity can be centered in soda tax policy? You hear a lot of times in industry that it's regressive that it will hurt communities of color and low-income communities. How can we make sure that health equity is centered in soda tax policy?
Janna: The two main huge things. One is supporting the small businesses such as corner stores, small grocery stores, even to some extent some restaurants that rely on soda revenues to survive. We really need to better understand and promote both the facts that soda taxes don't hurt small businesses and in fact can help transform small businesses particularly when the tax money is reinvested into those communities. Most of the small corner stores are owned by immigrants and they're really impacted by a lot of our public health rules in San Francisco in 2016 we passed cigarette tax, soda tax, we banned flavored tobacco and– we did something else that impacted the corner stores I–can't remember what it was but, whatever it was they were like hit from all sides. We pretty much ignored them but we shouldn't ignore them. We need to invest in our small local corner stores that really supply communities. They're very important in these immigrant communities and low-income communities for a lot of reasons. The second thing, obviously, is to invest in community groups that are on the ground working directly with the folks that are being heavily targeted by the beverage industry. It doesn't have to be like specifically educating about the harms of sugary drinks it can be and should be broader than that. Whatever the pressing needs are of those communities they should really set the agenda. Whether it's access to healthy food as a whole or water access, housing or employment all of these things can be connected to soda tax. Taking soda tax revenues and reinvesting them directly with the communities that are most impacted. That's what I’ve done. what I didn't say in the beginning is that I sit on the San Francisco soda tax advisory committee as the SFUSD parent rep. I’ve been very involved in advocating for direct investment into community groups that are working with communities that are heavily targeted by the beverage industry.
Julian: I kind of want to go to an earlier point you mentioned in the beginning of this interview as well, I know for me just exploring sudden attacks and a very surface level of understanding so far you can liken a lot of their strategies to the tobacco industry in terms of they're really great at messaging and really great at creating this narrative that goes against this idea that sugary drinks could be unhealthy. So, I’m wondering how do we create counter messages to that point? I think a lot of times community members are in a way inundated with this messaging this narrative that they don't cause health effects and that they aren't bad for you and that the science is not adding up to what the reality is. In your advisory role on that board what are some messaging tactics that you use that you think are really powerful and help community members understand that what the beverage industry is telling you is not the truth?
Janna: So for a couple of reasons we have not invested in nor taken on an anti-industry media campaign or messaging campaign. Part of that is city government again, is uncomfortable doing that and unwilling to do that. But, the bigger answer to that question is we just don't have the resources that the industry has. We're never going to match with the resources so, the better use of our time and our energy again is to invest directly in communities both in programs but also in infrastructure and resources. We have supported water filling stations for example that's a good infrastructure both in schools at parks but then, also in public areas. So concrete things that you can utilize that money to do to improve access to the healthier choices healthier options as opposed to trying to just counter the messaging from the soda tax industry. All people want essentially the same thing. They want their families to be healthy, they want them to be educated, they want to have jobs, and they want to be supportive. In terms of like mental health and things like that. What can we do to support those groups and support those kinds of activities and that I think should really be the focus? Rather than trying to David and Goliath this situation with the industry we're never going to win that war so that has been more of our strategy like what can we invest in that's positive improving school food for example. In San Francisco, very large number of children get free-reduced lunch. Improving that food is going to improve their overall health. It's going to teach them about healthy eating in a different way than just a poster would or a class would. That's going to go a long way in the long term than a short-term sort of messaging.
Julian: I know you touched this earlier but, just to make sure that people that listen in the future understand. What would you say the most pressing research needs for advocates to continue to look into in order to advance our efforts and opposing industry claims? I know we can't like you said–going against the industry in terms of trying to match their money or their reach is not a fight that is in advocates like yourselves best interest it's more so about community level investment and really talking to community on the ground. I’m wondering then on the research side of it what are areas that you guys would like to explore further to try to kind of continue that fight?
Janna: Well, like I said working to understand how soda taxes and subsequent investments in small businesses can actually support community and community businesses that they don't have to rely on money from cigarettes, money from alcohol, money from soda to have a thriving corner store. Anecdotally, what I heard from store owners is that the stores who had already changed their type of offerings to offer more healthy offerings they were making more money from the healthy offerings anyway. So we need to really understand that what happens when you do tax beverages in small community stores. What do they need to pivot their business and grow and tell that story! Then how does the business owner in particular and the family of that business but, also the community benefit from stores that are actually providing items that are healthy and supportive for the community as opposed to unhealthy and damaging. So that's one and I think the other is really highlighting what we can do with these funds as someone who's worked in chronic disease prevention there's no money for chronic disease prevention it's all for treatment or other kinds of prevention but not chronic disease. For some reason everyone is perfectly fine with 65 percent of people my age– I’m 50, in California having pre-diabetes or diabetes that's wrong! We tolerate chronic disease much more than we tolerated something like HIV even just like rare cancers you might have 20 in a community and people will freak out and do big huge fundraisers and all this kind of stuff but why is it okay that 70 percent of people are dying from preventable chronic diseases right now.
Julian: Yeah! Exactly.
Janna: They're not just dying they're suffering for years it's impacting their family life their ability to enjoy themselves their ability to work. I mean on and on and on… so I think research into how these investments can really support communities just like the good storytelling that has been done with the Berkeley soda tax funds. We need to happen and I’ve been advocating for this in San Francisco and we've had one challenge after another the mayor took the media budget out. Then we did it this year and then with COVID it's been one thing after another. The city meddled in our media campaign and wanted to try to put educational messages in the campaign which was not the point and distracted and delayed. Then COVID hit and all this other stuff happens– so I’m dying to see the good stories of how these funds can be used to support communities and transform and help people's whole health that are targeted by the beverage industry!
Julian: No, I agree. I think when you can see stories and see people that are actually being affected positively from soda taxes it definitely paints a different picture of what can be done.
Janna: Yes and community members see that these taxes are worthwhile I think most people feel that if their tax dollars are going to something good, they're willing to pay it but if they feel like they're going into the black hole the city government they don't want to pay them. The reason why I am on the soda tax advisory committee is because I made a lot of promises to voters in my campaign and I wanted to be a watchdog to the city and try to hold them accountable. It's frustrating but it's worth it I’m committed.
Julian: That kind of brings me I guess to my next question; I know people may be wondering when they listen to this. What is the end game? What will it look like when advocates such as yourself win against the soda industry? Is it that we have these sorts of taxes throughout the country on a nationally adopted basis? Is it that we have watchdog committees like the advisory committee sit on just continuing to monitor the actions of beverage industry? So, what is the end goal in your opinion? What would you like to see down the line?
Janna: Yeah, I would like to see soda taxed at a level equivalent to cigarettes. Policies that discourage drinking soda things like city governments not being able to purchase soda, community groups that are receiving public dollars not being able to use soda. These are policies that are in place right now in San Francisco but they're not always followed. But you know, the kind of policy support that we saw with cigarettes—I’m an ex-smoker I smoked actually through public health school which is pretty funny. But I stopped smoking because it became expensive, inconvenient and I was supporting an industry that I knew was evil. I think that's what we need to do with sugary drinks. They need to be like socially unacceptable and they need to be socially unacceptable because they're not very available and they're expensive and people know that they can make you sick. But I think the significant tax that can be reinvested that doesn't just go into a general fund but it does get reinvested and targeted in coordinated ways. Is led by the local community decided by the local community so more control than currently Berkeley and San Francisco has. Berkeley is lucky enough to be small and to have pretty homogeneous sort of political stance on things and so you're able to implement them as intended both Oakland and San Francisco have struggled. We've made a lot of progress and I’m proud of what we've done in San Francisco but there's a long way to go there. So, significant tax other policies that discourage or prohibit sugary drinks from being an everyday all the time normal activity and then reinvestment of soda tax funds by local community-based advocates that understand what folks on the ground need.
Julian: I think that's a great way to end it! Thank you so much Janna for speaking with us today. Is there anything else you'd like to add before we close?
Janna: No, I think I’ve said it all! Thank you so much for your time and all the work you guys are doing.
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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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