Before You Head to the Polls, Find Out Where Congress Stands on Food Issues

Every year for the last five, top food policy experts – including representatives from the Pew Charitable Trust, the Center for Science in the Public Interest, the National Black Farmers Association, Oxfam, and more – have graded members of Congress on how they’ve voted on issues related to hunger, nutrition, food access, food and farm workers, food safety, local food and farming, and animal welfare. Lawmakers who voted in line with the FPA experts’ consensuses receive a higher score than those who vote against them. In the 114th Congress, which began in January 2015, the overall scores averaged 57 percent out of a possible 100, up from 51 percent from the 113th Congress.

“People want to know where their food comes from, how it was produced, the effect it has on the environment and our health,” says Colicchio. “We made some headway this year. We got some good policies that are working.”

Of the 435 voting members in the House of Representatives and 100 in the Senate, 117 legislators’ scores decreased while 310 legislators’ scores increased an average of 14 percent. Eighty-two members of Congress received a perfect 100 percent, including House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. Representatives Jody Hice (GA-10), Paul A. Gosar (AZ-4), and Tom Graves (GA-14) received the lowest scores, 12 percent, based in part on voting against legislation that would manage cyanotoxins in drinking water and voting to repeal a law that mandates meat and other foods be labeled with their country of origin.

According to Ken Cook, chairman of the board for FPA and the president of the Environmental Working Group, some positive gains this year included the reauthorization of the Older American Act, which provides support for senior nutrition programs like Meals on Wheels; the Global Food Security Act, which addresses hunger issues worldwide; and the unanimous passage in both the House and Senate of the Illegal, Unreported, and Unregulated Fishing Enforcement Act, which steps up enforcement against illegal fishing practices.

“We feel Congress was doing the right thing taking steps to strengthen our food system, but in other respects there have been setbacks,” Cook says. One of the big disappointments, he says, was the failure to pass an updated Child Nutrition Reauthorization Act, the legislation that feeds millions of school kids every day.

Cook says the compromised mandatory GMO labeling law that passed in July left a lot to be desired – including how, exactly, it will be implemented – but in the end the board felt that it, “broadly covers food and technologies a lot of us want to see covered.”

Search to see how your local members of Congress voted here. You can also see who FPA endorses for 12 of this year’s Congressional races as well as the Presidential race here.

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