[ The first White House food summit took place a half-century ago
and changed the trajectory of hunger in America. Has the time come for
a serious rethink about the way we approach food and nutrition policy?
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

IS IT TIME FOR A SECOND WHITE HOUSE SUMMIT ON FOOD?  
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Josh Voorhees
May 7, 2021
Modern Farmer
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_ The first White House food summit took place a half-century ago and
changed the trajectory of hunger in America. Has the time come for a
serious rethink about the way we approach food and nutrition policy? _


There hasn't been a White House food conference since 1969. Could
another one be on the horizon?, Photography by Andrea
Izzotti/Shutterstock

 

Sen. Cory Booker is still a relative newbie on the Senate Agriculture
Committee, but that hasn’t stopped the New Jersey Democrat from
thinking big when it comes to American farming and food. “We must
urgently rethink the way we approach food and nutrition policy,” he
told a group of agriculture reporters late last week.

To name just a few of Booker’s goals: additional federal aid for
Black and other disadvantaged farmers beyond the historic $5 billion
he helped secure for them earlier this year, tens of billions of
dollars in incentives to push farmers and ranchers to adopt
climate-friendly practices, a national moratorium on concentrated
animal feeding operation, or CAFOs, and a permanent USDA food box
program that would deliver fresh fruits and vegetables to communities.
The item on his wish list with the most potential for sweeping change,
however, is not of the legislative variety; it’s a second White
House conference on food and nutrition, an idea to which Booker lent
his support last week.

A national summit may not sound all that ambitious, especially given
that such events are designed to include far more talk than action.
But to understand the potential impact of a second conference, it’s
helpful to revisit the first one, held way back in 1969 when Richard
Nixon was president.

The original White House Conference on Food, Nutrition and Health was
a seminal event that fundamentally reshaped US food and nutrition
policy in ways both big and small. The three-day event included
roughly 3,000 attendees and generated more than 1,800 specific
recommendations—nearly 1,600 of which would eventually be
implemented in one form or another. Not every recommendation was
massive nor necessarily lasting, but several certainly were. Nutrition
experts and public policy types credit the conference report with
leading to major expansions of the food stamp and school lunch
programs, the development of federal dietary guidelines, improvements
to nutrition and ingredient labeling and the creation of the Special
Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children, or
WIC. Sometimes, talk does lead to action.

The conference, however, didn’t manifest itself nor did Nixon call
for it in a vacuum. It was the result of a confluence of events, some
unique to the era and some that still echo today.

Here’s an abbreviated timeline (a fuller version of which you can
find here): In 1967, civil rights attorney Marian Wright testified
before a Senate subcommittee about poverty and malnutrition,
particularly in the American South. At Wright’s invitation,
then-Sens. Robert Kennedy and Joseph Clark went on a fact-finding
mission to Mississippi later that year, in the process bringing with
them the national spotlight. Then, in 1968, CBS News aired a special
report, Hunger in America, which brought previously unimaginable
images of malnutrition into millions of middle- and upper-class
American living rooms. At the same time, activists were in the streets
demanding action, including at the Poor People’s March on
Washington, which Martin Luther King, Jr. helped organized shortly
before his assassination. The following year, Nixon called for the
summit, at which he declared a “national commitment to put an end to
hunger and malnutrition due to poverty in America.”

The federal government didn’t quite live up to that lofty goal, of
course—an estimated 54 million Americans are food insecure
today—but the expansion of federal nutrition efforts prompted by the
conference had a major and almost immediate impact. The number of
children in the school lunch program, for instance, quadrupled during
the two years after the conference, while the number of Americans in
the food stamps program (since rebranded as the Supplemental Nutrition
Program or SNAP) climbed even faster, to 11 million in 1971 from 2
million in 1968, according to a 2019 report from Tufts University and
the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

A half-century later, the American nutrition landscape has
changed—the concern is now less about the quantity of our food and
more about the quality of it, particularly in the face of rising rates
of obesity and diabetes. There’s also increased attention being paid
to nutritional inequities, the significant role that the American diet
plays in global climate change and the vulnerabilities in the food
supply chain exposed by the COVID-19 pandemic. As a group of public
health experts and former government officials put it earlier this
year when floating the idea of a second summit: “Our food system is
complex, touching multiple aspects of our lives, economy and planet.
Fixing it will require innovative solutions.”

Of course, whether a second White House summit would be as successful
as the original is an open question. Notably, the first had
significant bipartisan buy-in, from Democrats such as George McGovern
and Republicans such as Bob Dole. But the GOP is now reading from a
different script than it was a half-century ago when Nixon called
ending malnutrition both a “moral imperative” and a “national
responsibility.” As president, Donald Trump tried to slash SNAP
benefits, a Republican goal he inherited from the more staid party
leaders who came before him, and some in the GOP now claim that
expanding SNAP would create “a moral hazard.”

Given that partisan chasm, it’s hard to imagine a second White House
summit delivering the kind of holistic approach the first one did. But
given the interrelated nutritional, farming and climate challenges
currently facing the nation, it’s also hard to imagine the kind of
coordinated response that is needed happening without one.

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