Michael Jacobson.

• Author: Rocawich, Linda
• Position: Director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest - Interview

Michael Jacobson makes the American Restaurant Association crazy. In mid-July, the Center for Science in the Public Interest--he's the Center's director--released its study of the nutritional content of Mexican-restaurant food, and it made the top of Page 1 of USA Today. In case you thought a combination plate with all that rice and beans and chimichangas was okay, forget it. You're eating the equivalent of a dozen cream-filled glazed doughnuts. Or a stick of butter. In recent months, Jacobson has done the same number on Chinese-restaurant food and Italian-restaurant food and movie-house popcorn.

The problem is he's right. Of course, the people who speak for the restaurant industry--and when it comes to Michael Jacobson, I should call them the people who whine for the restaurant industry--are also right when they say, "There is nothing wrong with Mexican restaurants for the consumer who is concerned about nutrition. The alternatives are there. It's not up to us to tell customers what to eat in a restaurant." (That's what the ARA spokesman said in July.) And yes, you can go into your favorite taco-joint and have the chicken fajitas without sour cream, without guacamole, without the lard-laden refried beans, and without the tortilla chips. But do you know anyone who does?

And do you know any other nutrition expert who gets his point on the front page of USA Today?

Last year, in the wake of CSPI's study of Chinese restaurants, The Washington Post featured Jacobson on the front page of its Wednesday Food Section. In a large full-color photograph, he was taking a hammer and chisel to a fifty-pound block of hydrogenated fat, the kind we eat every time we grab a fast-food sandwich. Post food writer Carole Sugarman labeled him "master of his own kind of news bite--the fat bite."

I met him in Chicago a few months ago. After we talked about the fifty-pound block of fat, I told him about the twenty-pound bag of carrots--stamped CERTIFIED ORGANIC--I'd just seen outside a kitchen in the food court on the mezzanine of Water Tower Place a couple of blocks away.

For two decades, Jacobson has been trying to get us to eat better, and I can't name another person who could claim more credit for that bag of carrots in a shopping mall than he can.

Q: The headline of this Food Section profile of you in The Washington Post asks the burning question: WHO IS MICHAEL JACOBSON AND WHY WON'T HE LET US EAT OUR CHINESE FOOD AND FRENCH FRIES IN PEACE?

Michael Jacobson: I don't know that I can answer that. I'm interested in food because what we're eating contributes to hundreds of thousands of deaths every year, about as many deaths as cigarette smoking. So that's the health reason.

From the political angle, the shocking thing is that food companies encourage us to eat the kind of diets that will kill us, just to make a buck. They know better, and they use their influence however they can. They use it politically in Washington and in state capitals; they use public relations to try to get us to eat their foods, regardless of the effect it has on our health.

And the saddest thing is how companies go after children. Mercilessly. It starts with Saturday-morning television, encouraging kids to eat hamburgers, French fries, sugar in breakfast cereals. Not exactly what the Surgeon General says is good for them. Then the kids go to school, and the cafeteria food is mediocre. The classrooms, all too often, have propaganda from the food industry, free or cheap materials to miseducate kids, and teachers rely on them.

Q: How old is the Center for Science in the Public Interest? And how did it come about?

Jacobson: It began in 1971, and I am one of the founders. In 1970, three scientists who were essentially volunteers with Ralph Nader said to each other, "Maybe we can set up an organization run by scientists that would work on issues that have some science base, and it would serve as an example to other scientists to get more socially involved. So the three of us gradually left Nader and set up CSPI.

Q: What is your science background?

Jacobson: I have a Ph.D. in microbiology. The others were a chemist and a meteorologist.

Q: Has CSPI worked mostly in food and nutrition from the beginning?

Jacobson: No, we started out with three co-directors. I focused on food issues; the chemist focused on toxic chemicals and energy; the meteorologist, on highways and air pollution. So we really covered a lot of ground and, over the next five or six years, we worked on those issues, plus nuclear power, asbestos, mercury, lead, and so on.

In 1977, my two colleagues left, and their projects either left with them or disappeared shortly thereafter, leaving us working just on food. Then, in the early 1980s, we took on alcoholic beverages as a new project, and those are the two main things CSPI works on today--alcohol and food. We'd like to work on other projects, too, and over the years we have.

Q: How much of your work now involves children?

Jacobson: A moderate amount. It's not taking over everything, but I have a book on children and nutrition coming out in September. It describes the health effects of children's diets and also describes how kids are encouraged to eat that kind of diet.

Q: I wrote a story recently on the current Pentagon program to double the size of Junior ROTC in the high schools and start "career academies" in about thirty "target schools" (March issue). I was trying to get a handle on these schools to make some generalizations about them, and the thing that someone finally suggested was to look at the percentage of kids in a particular school who are eligible for the Federal food programs--school lunch, school breakfast--and all the schools are high on the list. In other words, these schools are in high-poverty areas.

Jacobson: It's the same thing with Channel...