Situated in the heart of downtown Hartford, Conn., Constitution Plaza is home to numerous office buildings and is a short walk away from both the Connecticut State Capitol and a satellite campus of the University of Connecticut. The center of a bustling metropolis, the site will be a stark change of scenery for the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity, which currently sits on the northern end of Yale’s campus in a stately, red-brick, white-columned home on quaint Edwards Street. After a semester of tying up loose ends, the Rudd Center, along with its faculty and staff, will make the move to Constitution Plaza, placing it closer to both its new academic home at UConn and the seat of the state’s policymakers.
The decision to move comes a year and a half after it was announced that the Rudd Center’s former director, Kelly Brownell, would pursue a deanship at Duke’s Sanford School of Public Policy. Brownell founded the Center in 2005 in the hopes of bringing the disciplines of psychology, public policy, and obesity studies into conversation with one another. His lecture course, “The Psychology, Biology, and Politics of Food,” is still considered an influential introduction to critical thinking about food, and brought together students from all parts of campus under the dim lights of the Art Gallery’s McNeil Hall twice a week.
This January, the Rudd Center will take a flight similar to Brownell’s, and its presence will likely be as missed. According to Megan Orciari, the Center’s communications manager, “The move will allow Rudd Center researchers to expand their research and build new collaborations with UConn experts on nutrition, public policy, psychology, agriculture, economics, and obesity,” as a part of a larger push by UConn to broaden its authority in health and wellness. “Our move is one of the first major initiatives of [UConn’s] academic vision, which prioritizes…an expansion of research in this area,” she wrote in an email to the Herald.
The move to Hartford in many ways represents a multi-tiered expansion: for the Rudd Center itself, for the ways in which the Center will continue to influence policymakers, and for the field of food policy more generally. While the loss Yale will face will not necessarily preclude the University’s capacity for future research in this field, the Center’s roots on our campus and in New Haven have led to the development of novel approaches of thinking about obesity that have shaped a lasting national conversation.
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Even if Brownell is most publicly known for his former role as the director of the Rudd Center, his role as a professor of psychology has had a lasting impression on countless students. Most recently, the course he taught was mentioned in a Yale Daily News op-ed by Ally Daniels, BK ’16, wherein she claimed that, after taking the course, her “approach to food changed.” In the column, Daniels discusses her summer spent on a farm, where she put what she learned into practice—particularly what she learned about sustainable agriculture. “The Psychology, Biology, and Politics of Food” seems to be the common denominator for anyone at Yale even cursorily interested in food. Kate O’Shaughnessy, CC ’10, is no exception. “I came to Yale thinking I’d go pre-med, but rethought that entire plan after taking Brownell’s excellent survey course.” The course was enough to convince her to major in psychology.
“I’d always loved food, and this was my first exposure that I could pursue it meaningfully, academically and otherwise,” O’Shaughnessy said. “I became a psychology major and spent my junior and senior years working as a research assistant [at the Rudd Center] for the marketing team.” In her research at the Rudd Center, she contributed to reports detailing advertising tactics the food industry employed, with special attention to the ways they targeted children. The confluence of her research and study was exhibited in her senior thesis: in one of Brownell’s seminars, O’Shaughnessy designed a series of public service announcements for food policy based on the anti-tobacco “Truth” campaign. “I used the advertisements to evaluate whether or not that kind of message-framing had an impact on peoples’ beliefs about food policy.” Even after graduation, O’Shaughnessy followed her interests in food in culinary school and at the Yale Sustainable Food Project.
The degree to which O’Shaughnessy was affected by Brownell’s course and the Rudd Center is perhaps an outlying example, but the Center’s influence on the University as a whole is hard to deny—the Center has had a hand in the College, as well as partnerships with the other professional schools. Jacob Hacker, GRD ’00, a political science professor and director of the Institution for Social and Policy Studies (ISPS) lauded the Rudd Center’s ability to attract undergrads when reflecting on what makes a policy center at Yale successful. “It has significant student interest and involvement where a lot of enthusiasm for the center comes from Yale College students who want to be more involved in the centers work,” he said. Even Dean of Yale Law School Robert Post, LAW ’77, has taken personal interest in the work of the Center, devoting some of his scholarship to the more contentious arguments that the Rudd Center has made regarding the role of personal responsibility, or lack thereof, in food choices.
Brownell’s professorship and directorship put him at a nexus of academia and activism. This marriage of scholarly pursuits was evident even in his course syllabus—students enrolled in the class were required to write an op-ed for submission to a publication to hone their policy advocacy skills. His role as a public intellectual made him a powerful voice at Yale that bolstered the profile of the Rudd Center; the fact that his course is offered through Yale’s Open Courses database, free for anyone to view, reiterates that sentiment.
Marion Nestle, a nutrition and food studies professor at New York University, knows firsthand what this balance requires. “It helps—no, is essential—to have tenure. That frees you up to take positions on issues that might prove controversial,” she said. Indeed, libertarian-leaning intellectuals might recoil at the idea that anything but personal choice contributing to obesity. “If you are lucky, your university will appreciate your role as a public intellectual and your ability to attract students.”
Brownell, who could not be reached for comment for this article, certainly attracted students to his lecture and the Center, setting the scene for critical thinking about obesity and food policy at Yale. His departure meant the course would no longer appear in the Blue Book, but the departure of the Rudd Center as a whole might signal an end to the sort of influence it had on Yale more broadly.
After Brownell left in 2013, Marlene Schwartz, GRD ’96, came to the helm of the Rudd Center, replacing him as director. Her relationship with Brownell “goes way back.”
“I was already working with Brownell as a co-director for the Yale Center for Eating and Weight Disorders, where we did clinical work treating people in the community with obesity and eating disorders,” she said. As a doctoral student at Yale, she, too, took classes that Brownell taught.
Her experience was colored by years of clinical work she conducted after graduating, where she started paying greater attention to the environments—places where food is purchased or consumed, like a restaurant or school—that contribute to obesity and what preventative measures could change them. “It’s very hard to treat obesity after somebody becomes obese. It’s really hard to help people lose weight and keep it off,” she said. “Part of the decision to start doing research was to change the environment to prevent obesity rather than treat it after the fact.”
“Toxic” is one way the food environment in the United States is often described—Brownell himself popularized this characterization. As Nestle put it, “He was early in figuring out that obesity, especially childhood obesity, was much more than a matter of individual food choice, but very much depended on having to function in a food environment that prevents healthful choices. He’s taken the lead in fighting blame and stigma of obese individuals, and working to change the food environment so that it makes the healthy choice the easy choice.”
Nestle literally wrote the book on food politics. In Food Politics, published in 2002, she exposes how industry has a hand in influencing nutrition and health. A powerhouse in the food policy movement in her own right, she proclaimed Brownell as a giant in the field of obesity policy. Brownell frequently made reference to her in his lectures; he appears in a lengthy tenth-anniversary addition to the original version of her book. “I think of Kelly Brownell as a close collaborator and an extraordinarily valued colleague,” Nestle told me. In the revised edition of her book, she mentions what is one of the most important contributions of Brownell’s to the food policy discourse—taxing sugar-sweetened beverages, like soda.
In describing the food environment, or the food options a person has readily available, Brownell explained how it is often easier for people to make less healthy choices in a largely economic context. “Brownell really made the case that the way that the pricing of food is set up right now is backwards,” Schwartz said. “The healthiest foods, fruits and vegetables, are more expensive, and have become more expensive. If you look at the least healthy foods, like sugary drinks, those have gotten less expensive over time.”
How, then, does the food environment improve? According to the research of the Rudd Center: a tax. “Economically, there’s an incentive to buy worse-for-you foods because they’re more affordable. The idea [of a soda tax] is to try to change prices to encourage consumption of healthier foods,” Schwartz added. A cigarette tax works by the same logic—tax people in order to disincentivize unhealthy behavior. “You can look at the level of the state tax and the prevalence of smoking over time, and it’s pretty clear that state taxes [on tobacco] make a difference. It sparked the idea of trying to use that same strategy with foods.”
Applying the same principles to sugar-sweetened beverages (or SSBs, as those in the know say), a policy that increases taxes would drive consumption of soda, juice, and other similar sugary drinks down. As a result, the incidence of chronic disease, like obesity and diabetes, associated with sugar-sweetened beverages would decrease, since the beverages would be more expensive to purchase, and that, in turn, would shrink the cost of healthcare from those diseases. Expanding on that, the Rudd Center’s study of the subject incorporates the possibility of the revenue from the tax going toward funding health programs to address other aspects of a food environment that might encourage obesity. “We can raise money through the tax to subsidize the healthier foods,” Schwartz added. “We’re trying to turn it around.”
ISPS Director Hacker thinks that this approach is why the Rudd Center has been so successful. “I’ve said many times that the Rudd Center is one of the preeminent policy centers at Yale. It’s really a model of how to combine good scientific research with good, thoughtful advocacy on public policy issues.” In the year since Brownell left, the ISPS has strengthened ties with the Rudd Center.
According to Hacker, the approach the Rudd Center takes to publicizing its findings echoes the aforementioned activism that Brownell might have encouraged. “A lot of the work they do is in social sciences, and they are not just seeking to produce high quality academic research that’s placed in good journals, but also to bring those findings to a broader audience and influence public policy for the better.” He added, “there are a few other examples of institutions like that at Yale, but they’re unusual and the Rudd Center is arguably one of the most successful.”
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If outreach and communication are the Rudd Center’s forte, then it only makes sense that it has played a role in the community that surrounds its Edwards Street home. The New Haven Food Policy Council shares the “food policy” part of its name with the Rudd Center, but has a narrower focus: the council serves to find out what policies can improve the food environment of the city. Justin Elicker, SOM ’10 FES ’10, executive director of the New Haven Land Trust and former alder, saw firsthand how the Food Policy Council benefitted from the work and guidance of the Rudd Center. “I’ve attended a lot of meetings of the New Haven Food Policy Council and for a very long time the Rudd Center was a big part of those conversations,” he said.
“There were a number of people involved in the Rudd Center who were studying policy changes that we could implement,” Elicker added. “They helped us with research about what other cities are doing in similar initiatives.” He noted that the efficacy of policies proposed at the city level depends on what has and hasn’t worked in other cities across the country, and the Rudd Center served as a partner in evaluating that. One such program was a Healthy Meals Ordinance for kids, which sought to incentivize fast food restaurants like McDonald’s to make the foods marketed toward children healthier. “We’ve really been involved locally,” Schwartz said.
Schwartz characterized the nature of the Rudd Center’s relationship with the city as part of a more general interest on Yale’s part in the surrounding community from an academic perspective. The Food Policy Council’s current chair, Alycia Santilli, may be the best example of the town-gown bridge when it comes to looking at health: she’s the assistant director at the Community Alliance for Research and Engagement (CARE), a program at the School of Public Health focused on measuring health outcomes in New Haven neighborhoods. Schwartz also pointed to work being done in the local school system. “[The Rudd Center has] been tracking nutrition, physical activity, and academic achievement to see if health can be linked to achieving higher in the classroom.” Hacker mentioned that the ISPS Health center “has been very involved with University-wide efforts to get the graduate schools and Yale College more engaged with issues of health in the community, both in New Haven and within the state.”
Even with these ties, Orciari, the Rudd Center’s communications manager, maintained that the Center “will continue to do work that benefits all communities—not just the New Haven or Hartford communities.” While the policy work in New Haven was no less important than any of the other work the Center does, it’s seen more as the type of work that can apply to cities around the country. The meaningful relationship between the Food Policy Council and the Rudd Center was more a positive byproduct of the Center’s more zoomed-out focus, where New Haven served as a living laboratory for consideration and implementation.
Elicker agrees. “In a city like New Haven, it’s really beneficial to have something like the Rudd Center, because you have qualified experts who can perform the research necessary for finding the best policies to effect what we’re trying to achieve.” Even so, he recognized that the mere existence of the center was more important than its geographic location. “It’s not that New Haven is going to have problems implementing policies and programs to increase access to healthy food [without the Rudd Center], it’s just that the access to a research organization that’s right down the street can be helpful.”
“There’s so much energy surrounding the healthy food movement that I don’t think the Center’s leaving will impact our efforts too negatively,” Elicker said. “My hope is that New Haven will continue to benefit from its research even if they are no longer based at Yale.”
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This past summer, Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro, a Democrat representing the third district of Connecticut, introduced the SWEET Act—the Sugar-Sweetened Beverages Tax Act—which proposes a one-cent tax per teaspoon of sugar. Despite being hailed by many as a symbolic act to bring obesity policy to the fore at the federal level, it, like most bills, has little chance of passing Congress. It represents the culmination of the Rudd Center’s research on beverage taxation, even if only for the fact that the Rudd Center put taxing SSBs on the map as a potential policy strategy in combating obesity.
“DeLauro, as our representative, has been really terrific about caring about issues like food insecurity and childhood obesity,” Schwartz, the Rudd Center director, said. “She and Kelly have had a good relationship, and the rest of us have gotten to know her.” While the Rudd Center was not involved directly with the bill’s drafting (that would be lobbying, Schwartz explained), the research of the Rudd Center and of the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), a think- tank out of Washington, D.C., were undoubtedly influential.
When asked about the evolution of the clinic’s research, Schwartz said that the focus of the Rudd Center has remained relatively constant. “We’ve only been around for almost ten years. I don’t think there have been huge changes—I think our basic philosophy is to put together an interdisciplinary team and try to pull the diverse expertise together to solve these problems, like obesity,” she said. “We still do that. That hasn’t changed.”
What has changed, then? “The country has changed. The things we used to talk about ten years ago and were seen as extreme are now pretty mainstream,” she said. Mirror this pattern, when the Rudd Center introduced the idea to tax sodas a decade ago, it constituted a radically novel policy concept— one that has now made its way to the halls of the Capitol. What began as a suggestion to remove unhealthy beverages from schools in favor of juice and water was initially met with a massive lobbying counter-effort from beverage companies, but has garnered widespread support and a federal law banning sugary drinks in schools.
Nestle also marveled at the Rudd Center’s part in making a once-scandalous notion more and more of an accepted truth in the food world. “I can’t emphasize enough how important [Brownell’s] work has been in shifting the focus of obesity intervention away from personal responsibility to societal responsibility—from an individual problem to one of public health.”
With such significant contributions to the field of food policy in its rearview mirror, the Center is now looking to maintain its position of influence moving forward. “We’ve tried to stay ahead of the game,” Schwartz said. As the Rudd Center heads to Hartford, its agenda will be more concerned with food security—whether people have access to healthy food, and the dual problems of hunger and obesity that insecurity causes. “Before, when we were just focused on nutrition and obesity generally, we started seeing that the people at highest risk for obesity were the ones having trouble affording healthy foods.” Schwartz’s time on the board of the Connecticut Food Bank, headquartered in East Haven, Conn., was a stepping stone to her interest in how food insecurity and hunger persisted in one of the healthiest states in the country.
Still, the Rudd Center will continue focusing on the things it knows best. Deputy Director Rebecca Puhl, GRD ’04, will continue addressing weight stigma as a social justice and quality-of-healthcare issue. One of the Center’s newest projects will look at how to reduce children’s consumption of sugary drinks through the American Heart Association’s Voices for Healthy Kids initiative. Even a project with CARE, the School of Public Health’s program, will maintain the Yale connection after the move to Hartford.
Come winter, 309 Edwards will be vacant, and the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale will no longer be at Yale. But it will certainly not cease to exist, and it seems as though the move is a harbinger of bigger things to come. The Rudd Center did not simply find a home “at Yale,” but in the University’s classrooms, its professional schools, the New Haven community, the state, and the nation. This was possible because the Center’s ideas, above all, permeated the spaces in which they were theorized, discussed, challenged, and even implemented. In Hartford, they are likely to do the same.
Illustration by Zachary Schiller