The ongoing litigation against the company—18,000 cases and counting—has revealed some of the elaborate scheming and dealing Monsanto engaged in to discredit journalists and deceive the public over the years.

Our 2015 Spinning Food report with Friends of the Earth and US Right to Know touched on many of the tactics we are seeing revealed now. We can’t say we were surprised to discover that Carey Gillam, author of Whitewash, and US Right to Know founder and director Gary Ruskin were targeted by the Monsanto PR machine—but we were shocked by the lengths the company went to discredit them. The cost of the truth for large corporations like Monsanto is billions, but for people like Dwayne Lee Johnson whose lives are impacted by their lies, the cost of their life is incalculable. 

In an opinion piece about the revelations in The Guardian, Gillam commented: “Truth and transparency are precious commodities, the foundations for the knowledge we all need and deserve about the world we live in. Without truth we cannot know what risks we face, what protections we must make for our families and our futures. When corporate power is so intensely brought to silence messengers, to manipulate the public record and public opinion, truth becomes stifled. And we should all be afraid.”

Above: Carey Gillam and Gary Raskin of US Right to Know on Democracy Now!

The post Monsanto Spin Tactics Revealed appeared first on Real Food Media.

A San Francisco jury has ruled in the first court case against the chemical company Monsanto, finding that its signature products, glyphosate-based herbicides Roundup and Ranger Pro, are associated with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma—and that the company acted with malice and negligence in failing to warn consumers. They awarded the plaintiff, 46-year old Dewayne “Lee” Johnson, $39.2 million in compensatory damages and $250 million in punitive damages.

This is a huge win for those who have been sounding the alarm about the dangers of these widely used herbicide products for years. This is also a huge hit to Monsanto: the majority of its $14.6 billion in annual sales come from herbicides containing glyphosate and seeds genetically engineered to withstand those herbicides. This is the first case to challenge the chemical behemoth (which was recently acquired by Bayer Chemical) about its weed-killers, but it won’t be the last: There are more than 4,000 other plaintiffs waiting in the wings.

I attended the closing arguments of the trial and I couldn’t stop watching Johnson, with his back to the public seating and his broad shoulders pressed against his dark-blue fitted suit. Johnson sat still as his lawyer described his cancer as a “death sentence.” His trial had been expedited because these would be his last weeks, possibly months — or by some miracle, years — on the planet.

I thought about the photographs we were shown of his cancerous lesions and how, under that suit, his skin was rubbed raw. I thought about his three sons. I thought about his wife who, we heard, couldn’t be present in court because she was at working 14-hour days, unable to get a paid day off and unable to miss work because the family has bills to pay. And I thought about my own family’s fights with cancer and my father’s death sentence: a diagnosis of glioblastoma at age 61 and the nine months he lived, in deteriorating health, as his cancerous brain tumor grew.

With cancer you always ask: Why? With that question comes the challenge of connecting any one cancer irrefutably to any one chemical exposure. In my father’s case, we speculated: was it the formaldehyde he had used in his lab?

Overwhelming Evidence

In Johnson’s case, his lawyers argued that the Roundup and Ranger Pro—proprietary mixtures of glyphosate and other toxic ingredients —he had used while working as a groundskeeper at a San Francisco Bay Area school was a substantial factor in his non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. In the course of his job, he would disperse upwards of 150 gallons a day during the spraying season. His lawyers argued that Johnson was exposed multiple times over the years he worked there, particularly when his sprayer malfunctioned and he was soaked with the herbicide and when his backpack applicator leaked, dripping it down his back.

Monsanto’s lawyers claimed, not surprisingly, that they were wrong.

Over the course of the trial, Johnson’s lawyers worked to explain complicated stuff: the epidemiology, toxicology, and mechanism of the carcinogenicity of the products. The plaintiff’s lawyers had on their side reams of evidence, including the International Agency on Cancer Research’s (IARC) 2015 determination that glyphosate was a probable human carcinogen.

To argue the case, Johnson’s lawyers had to present this complex science to a jury made up of everyday people. But unlike you and me, the jury had to process what they heard and make a judgment without doing any research on their own, discussing the case with anyone they knew, or digging into any of the evidence outside of the courtroom. And they had to do so with limitations of what they could learn about the case in that courtroom.

The judge had ruled as inadmissible, for instance, the fact that the California EPA follows the assignations of IARC’s rulings. In other words, this California-based jury had no idea that after the IARC classification that glyphosate is a probable carcinogen, the state’s Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment had demanded cancer warnings be placed on Monsanto’s glyphosate products sold in the state. (Implementation is tied up in the courts, as Monsanto sued to block the warnings). So when the Monsanto lawyer claimed in closing arguments that “no one has said that glyphosate should carry a cancer warning except plaintiff’s lawyers,” it was, to put it generously, a “slippery comment” as journalist and glyphosate expert Carey Gillam noted. (To put it plainly, it was a lie.)

Johnson’s lawyer argued that it was exposure to formulated product—glyphosate plus much more—that was the precipitating factor in his cancer. But the judge had struck from the record, after Monsanto petitioned the court, the witness commentary that referred to the decision by European regulators to demand Monsanto change its formulations for the herbicide sold. The European Food Safety Authority was particularly concerned with the ingredient polyethoxylated tallow amine (or POEA); it is now banned in glyphosate formulations there.

Similarly, the jury also wasn’t given an opportunity to peruse for themselves all of the pages of court documents to understand how the company has worked to obfuscate the science and instill doubt about the IARC ruling.

The jury also had no chance to learn that George Lombardi, counsel for Monsanto, has been defending the tobacco industry in court for years. Lombardi’s bio boasts that he “has secured numerous victories for client Philip Morris (PM) in its ongoing tobacco litigation cases.” Would the jury have been less inclined to trust Lombardi’s judgment about cancer and risk if they knew he defended Philip Morris for misleading consumers about the safety of Marlboro Lights in a massive class action lawsuit in Missouri?

The tobacco industry has known for decades that light cigarettes are no safer and that smokers assume otherwise, exploiting these two facts to market light cigarettes on safety claims. Yet Lombardi helped defeat the class action, saving Philip Morris a potential $1.8 billion claim. Today, more than 11,000 people die every year in Missouri from tobacco-related illnesses or second-hand smoke.

On the conclusion of closing arguments, the jury adjourned. It was nearly three days before they reached the verdict. And despite all of these limitations to the information they could access, the jury ruled unanimously on behalf of Johnson—on every single count.

Shifting Sands

Chemical pesticides have been in use since the end of World War II, and we have learned a number of lessons in that time: Chemicals that we thought (and were told) were perfectly safe have been found to be profoundly damaging to the birds and bees — and to us.

The insecticide chlorpyrifos, for instance, developed as a Nazi nerve gas, was promoted in the post-war period as an effective pesticide to kill cockroaches and other indoor pests and to stave off insects on farmland. It was not until 2000 that the evidence had piled high enough to show the brain-damaging properties of this insecticide, and advocates pushed hard enough to overcome industry lobbying, to pass an indoor ban. Another nearly 20 years have passed and we are still fighting over chlorpyrifos.

Hawaii was the first to pass a state-wide ban on chlorpyrifos in June and, just last week, the 9th Circuit Court ruled that the EPA must heed its own science and ban the insecticide as well. Now we know glyphosate formulations, which had been promoted as perfectly safe for human health for years, is irrefutably linked to non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. At the press conference after the ruling, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., attorney of counsel Baum Hedlund, who tried the case, noted that “Monsanto has other problems.” The science on these glyphosate formulations is “cascading” with increasing evidence that these products may also be associated liver cancer and endocrine disruption, he added.

We’ve also learned that many of the companies that produce the chemicals we interact with daily have suppressed data, manipulated science, and lied to regulators. It has been reported that Dupont, for example, knew about the toxicity in the chemicals used in its Teflon products, but marketed the products as safe nonetheless. It has also been shown that Monsanto well knew the impacts of its PCBs and fought communities in court for years before settling lawsuits worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Now we know, through this case’s discovery process, that Monsanto has done all of this to keep its glyphosate products on the market. At that same press conference, Johnson’s lawyers noted that they were only able to use a fraction of the evidence against Monsanto in this trial. But more will likely come out in the proceeding cases.

We have been witness to this decades-long history of chemical companies dismissing the science about the human and environmental harm of specific chemicals — sometimes for years, sometimes for decades — all while their products remain in use.

My father died of cancer 13 years ago and I still think about him nearly every day. When Dewayne Johnson dies, he too will live on through his children. The tragedy for Johnson and his family is that it didn’t have to be this way. As his lawyer stated in his closing remarks, Monsanto had a choice: a choice to warn consumers about the cancer risk, a choice to undertake the studies that its own scientists recommended, and a choice not to mislead the public by ghostwriting literature that pushed the narrative of safety. The company now faces the choice to accept this unanimous verdict, take responsibility, and take action to protect others from harm. With their declaration to appeal the verdict, that seems to be another choice they are not making.

This ruling won’t reverse Johnson’s fate. But it may give his sons some solace, knowing that the company may yet be held to account for their loss. And it should give them pride knowing that their father’s case is moving us one step further toward warning communities about this threat and removing these weed-killers from the marketplace altogether.

A version of this post ran on Medium. 

The post The Man Who Fought Monsanto Will Leave a Lasting Legacy appeared first on Real Food Media.

As the daughter of an epidemiologist who took on some of the biggest chemical companies in the world, I had a ringside seat to an industry causing global harm and shirking its responsibility for doing so. Through Real Food Media and in my writing and public speaking, I’ve spent nearly two decades uncovering food system solutions and documenting the impact of agrochemical companies on vulnerable populations. On a recent trip to the lush island of Kauai—ground zero for pesticide testing by the world’s biggest agrochemical companies—I witnessed both.

There, I saw acres of monochromatic genetically modified corn on the island’s windswept west side where DowDuPont, Monsanto, and other agrochemical companies are testing some of their most toxic chemicals. I heard of workers hospitalized with acute pesticide poisoning and kids evacuated from school due to pesticide drift. I learned of local doctors raising the alarm about cancers and birth defects potentially associated with the testing. I also heard about the 2014 legislation that would have provided some basic protections like buffer zones and mandatory spraying disclosure, but that was overturned after the industry waged a high-priced legal battle to fight it.

So I was shocked when I got back from Hawaii to the news that AtlanticLive would be hosting an event called Harvest: Transforming the Food We Eat underwritten by DowDuPont. AtlanticLive is the events arm of Atlantic Media, an online and print media company that publishes The Atlantic magazine, among other publications. And DowDuPont, after its recent merger, is now the world’s largest chemical corporation, with products spanning neurotoxic insecticides like chlorpyrifos and a host of other agricultural pesticides and industrial chemicals.

Colleagues at the Kauai-based Hawaii Alliance for Progressive Action wrote a public letter to express their dismay that The Atlantic “would choose to align itself with DowDupont, a company that has so recklessly endangered members of our community.”

You may be familiar with Dow and DuPont: each company has its own long and toxic history, from Dow’s legacy in Bhopal and its herbicide Agent Orange used in Vietnam to DuPont’s Teflon. Both companies also have a long history of suppressing science and covering up their toxic toll. Dow, for instance, knew for years that the defoliant Agent Orange was “one of the most toxic materials known,” but downplayed the risks. It did the same with the toxic herbicide of dioxin. And for decades, DuPont covered up the harm of Teflon.

It’s a critical time for the newly merged company: the EPA nearly banned Dow’s insecticide chlorpyrifos, the difficult-to-pronounce neurotoxin that New York Times opinion columnist Nicholas Kristof dubbed simply “Dow’s nerve gas pesticide.” But Trump’s EPA, under the direction of Scott Pruitt, deemed chlorpyrifos safe enough despite findings to the contrary from the agency’s own scientists. Now, community advocates across the country—including California, New Jersey, Maryland, and Hawaii—are pushing forward legislation to ban the toxic pesticide.

It’s also a critical time for the media. As you may have noticed, fake news undermines the Fourth Estate’s credibility. Now more than ever, media institutions need to hold the corrupt accountable and draw clear lines between themselves and the industries they report on. It’s one reason I’ve been delighted by institutional funders and individual donors stepping up to support critical media, projects such as The Intercept, the Center for Investigative Reporting, and The Marshall Project, to name just a few. And it’s why I was pleased to see the Emerson Collective, founded by Laurene Powell Jobs, Steve Jobs’s widow, support The Atlantic, buying a majority stake last year. But it’s also why I was so upset to see The Atlantic continue its corporate-sponsored event model with this DowDuPont deal.

We’ll never know whether DowDuPont’s financial support for the Republican National Convention, topping out at $250,000, influenced the Trump administration’s reversal on chlorpyrifos. Nor whether the fact that a former event manager for said Republican convention is now at AtlanticLive influenced this event. But given the controversy surrounding the chlorpyrifos decision, DowDupont likely understood that additional effort would be needed to contain the brand damage that could result from the company’s closeness to one of the least popular administrations in US history. Cue the greenwashing.

I am not alone in my alarm. Colleagues at the Kauai-based Hawaii Alliance for Progressive Action wrote a public letter to express their dismay that The Atlantic “would choose to align itself with DowDupont, a company that has so recklessly endangered members of our community.” Pesticide Action Network, whose 2007 lawsuit with NRDC and Earthjustice brought chlorpyrifos to the brink of withdrawal, also raised concerns—and its members flooded Twitter with their outrage. Folks at the Center for Environmental Health, the Bhopal Medical Appeal, author Stacy Malkan, among many others, also weighed in.

As distress mounts about the growing collusion between industry and elected officials, we need media we can trust for unvarnished muckraking—and we need it more than ever.

I reached out to several people close to The Atlantic to raise these concerns. The Emerson Collective individuals I reached out to said their institution didn’t have any power over the decision: they aren’t involved with the day-to-day operations of the outlet. An Atlantic magazine editor said he didn’t have any influence over AtlanticLive events. Others justified the decision, saying it’s the job of media institutions, and those engaging with events like this, to bring diverse voices together to have “uncomfortable conversations.”

Well, the event was anything but uncomfortable. As the evening began, Neal Gutterson from DowDuPont’s agricultural division received a warm welcome and opened the proceedings. On social media and beyond, the company got to boast about its association with a venerable media institution. And while some presenters may have had diverging views, no one spoke to the toxic elephant in the room: the company underwriting the program.

I love that old saying: media should comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. DowDuPont’s Gutterson was definitely not afflicted.

No one asked what place DowDupont’s toxic chemicals should have in the future of food. No one talked about the children whose brains have been damaged by childhood or in vitro exposure to Dow’s chlorpyrifos. No one mentioned the Vietnamese and veterans who suffered from exposure to Agent Orange and the generations still born with birth defects or illnesses from the dioxin left behind in the environment. No one reminded listeners of the families in and around Midland, Michigan, home to Dow’s manufacturing headquarters, where the EPA detected the highest concentration of dioxin anywhere in the country and where women suffer a greater risk of developing breast cancer than the national average. No one mentioned the half a million people exposed to toxic gas in Bhopal, India, from a Dow chemical factory leak or the three-decade-long battle to hold the company accountable.

Nor did anyone mention the mothers in Kauai who have given birth to babies with gastroschisis, a birth defect associated with pesticide exposure that causes intestines to grow outside of the body with life-long health implications. No one pointed out how Dow, along with other chemical corporations with a presence on Kauai, took the community to court after the island passed a Bill 2491 with common sense policies like buffer zones to protect schools and communities from spraying and mandatory disclosures of spraying. With its well-paid lawyers fighting the community all the way to the Ninth Circuit federal court, Dow and the other chemical companies won and overturned the policy. Today, there are still no buffer zones, no mandatory disclosures of spraying, and no birth defect registries.

There are living-and-breathing consequences of this multinational corporation: no one heard about them at Harvest: Transforming the Food We Eat.   

It should go without saying that media should not be helping to never have a role in normalizeing a company like DowDuPont or sugarcoating its toxic history by providing the platform of a public event like this one. As distress mounts about the growing collusion between industry and elected officials, we need media we can trust for unvarnished muckraking—and we need it more than ever. When an institution like The Atlantic plays host to events like this, that fragile trust is lost.

Anna Lappé is the national bestselling author of Diet for a Hot Planet: The Climate Crisis at the End of Your Fork and is the founder and director of Real Food Media. 

Originally published on Medium

The post Exposing Toxic Legacies in an Age of Fake News appeared first on Real Food Media.

If you made National Geographic collages of the basic four food groups — meat, dairy, grains and fruits and vegetables — in elementary school as I did, you have the federal government’s dietary guidelines to thank. Every five years, the government reviews these recommendations and releases new advice to eaters. The implications are huge: The guidelines direct billions of dollars in government food and nutrition programs, from school food to funding for the Women, Infants and Children program. What’s more, they inform how millions of Americans decide what is healthy for themselves and their families — influencing billions of dollars in food purchases.

Last year the government’s nonpartisan Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee made some unprecedented recommendations. Among other things, it suggested it was time to break from past guidelines and make clear that Americans should reduce consumption of red and processed meats and added sugars, especially sugar-sweetened beverages.

The committee also argued that the guidelines should take sustainability into account. Healthy eating, after all, means ensuring that we can feed ourselves and our children healthy food for decades to come. To that end, the committee wrote that “a diet higher in plant-based foods, such as vegetables, fruits, whole grains, legumes, nuts and seeds, and lower in calories and animal-based foods is more health promoting and is associated with less environmental impact than is the current U.S. diet.”

Unfortunately, the final guidelines, released last week, backpedaled on many of these common-sense recommendations. The reason is simple: The food industry — especially meat and beverage companies and trade groups — lobbied heavily against the committee’s recommendations. According to Bloomberg, four-fifths of the 60 groups that lobbied on the guidelines represented food corporations, industry groups or farmers. While Barack Obama’s administration presented the final guidelines as the best distillation of nutrition science, the reality is that they have been distorted by industry influence.

For instance, while the recommendation to reduce added sugars stuck, the emphasis on soda — one of the main sources of such sugars — was downplayed. Dr. Lawrence Gostin, the director of the World Health Organization (WHO) Collaborating Center on Public Health Law, said on Democracy Now that the biggest beverage companies “put a lot of pressure” on government officials to change the language.

The recommendation to reduce meat consumption was also distorted. The final guidelines suggested limiting such consumption only for teenage boys and men, and even this recommendation was buried in the final report. Noticeably absent from the guidelines was a strong recommendation for reducing red and processed meats, even though the science is clear about their links to serious illness.

As my colleague Kari Hamerschlag from Friends of the Earth said in a statement, “Despite clear evidence that high red meat consumption is linked to cancer and threatens future food security because of its huge resource demands, the 2015 guidelines failed to make a specific portion size recommendation for red meat,” as in the 2010 version. While the WHO recommends significantly limiting intake of processed meats because of the associated increased cancer risk, the guidelines are fuzzy on this message. In fact, buried in the guidelines is the suggestion that eating processed meat is fine as long as it is in quantities that fall below fat and salt limits. Nowhere is there a reference to the WHO’s findings linking processed meat consumption and certain cancers.

As for the sustainability language, that was taken off the table months ago when Department of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack declared it beyond the scope of the dietary guidelines. (Though the final recommendations include physical activity — decidedly not a dietary recommendation). Dr. David Katz, the director of Yale University’s Prevention Research Center, expressed his disappointment, saying in a statement, “If we ignore sustainability, it’s as if we are saying we don’t care whether what is good to eat and drink is still here as a choice for our children and grandchildren. What a deplorable, unconscionable position that is to take.”

The final language frustrated many observers. Groups such as My Plate, My Planet (which brought together environmental and health organizations and individuals in defense of the advisory committee’s recommendations), Friends of the Earth and the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future helped mobilize ordinary Americans, public health officials and doctors to express their support during the public comment period. An unprecedented 150,000 petitions and 29,000 public comments were submitted. In addition, more than 700 health professionals submitted a letter in support of the committee’s report and a resolution from the U.S. Conference of Mayors did so as well.

Despite this public expression of support, the U.S. food industry lobbied heavily to shape the finalized guidelines. The meat industry, for one, was “pleased with the fare served up in the [guidelines].”

This isn’t just industry playing politics with our plate; it’s industry being complicit in the loss of life and limb of millions of Americans. About half of Americans have one or more preventable chronic diseases relating to poor diet or physical inactivity, including hypertension, diabetes and diet-related cancers, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Today, thanks in large part to added sugars, especially in soda, 29 million Americans suffer from diabetes; one-third of African-Americans are predicted to be afflicted by the condition in their lifetime. In 2010, 73,000 Americans had a lower limb amputated as a result of diabetes.

From 1956 until 1992, the USDA dietary guidelines recommended that we eat from those basic four food groups. What those recommendations obfuscated was that there are ample sources of protein besides meat and ample alternate sources of calcium besides dairy. Yet those food groups stuck around for more than three decades because of pressure from the dairy and meat industries, not because of sound science.

We’ve finally done away with these false classifications. Today’s recommendations talk about dietary patterns instead, even introducing a vegetarian dietary pattern as a healthy choice. We’ve also enjoyed success in pushing for recommendations to reduce added sugars. Yes, the guidelines may be a poor representation of the sound recommendations of the dietary guidelines committee, but they are a step forward.

Originally published in Al Jazeera America

The post Lobbyists Distort Our Idea of a Healthy Diet appeared first on Real Food Media.

American consumers are waking up to the fact that a lot remains hidden about what is in their food and how it is produced. As a result, they are increasingly demanding greater access to information about added sugar, potential allergens, irradiation, use of antibiotics and more. The food industry has fought all these demands. But perhaps no call for transparency has been more contentious than the demand for mandatory labeling of genetically engineered (GE) food.

For the past several years, voters and legislators in over 30 states have promoted mandatory GE food labeling policies, with three states — Vermont, Connecticut and Maine — passing laws. Vermont’s law, the first of its kind, is set to go into effect in July 2016, having survived a court challenge by the food industry. In response to these calls for greater transparency in the food supply chain, the food industry is working to block Vermont’s law in the halls of Congress, most recently by attaching a rider to the must-pass federal spending bill that would bar states from labeling GE foods.

This staunch antagonism toward transparency has led many consumers to question the motivations of the nation’s largest food companies. In a battle the industry appears to be losing, the Grocery Manufacturers Association, the largest food industry trade group, announced a plan to respond to consumer demand for transparency: Smart Labels. The concept, as the industry spins it, is a high-tech way to satisfy consumers. Using on-label quick response (QR) codes, similar to bar codes, consumers will be able to access important ingredient information with a scan of their smartphone.

While the Smart Label plan may seem like progress, it is really just the latest marketing ploy to defuse consumer demand for real transparency.

There are several inherent problems with the QR code plan. First and foremost, by relegating important information such as GE content to cyberspace, Smart Labels will keep key information off the package — and out of sight. This is of particular importance when you consider that fewer than two-thirds of consumers have smartphones, the technology Smart Labels depend on, with access disproportionately lacking in low-income, elderly and rural populations — exactly the populations most vulnerable to diseases linked to poor nutrition.

But it’s not just who can access this information; it’s also a question of what information consumers will be able to access. In the QR code plan, companies remain in control, deciding exactly what information to reveal and how it will be displayed. Early examples of the Smart Label websites bury content about GE on hard-to-find pages. While the policies consumers have been fighting for across the country would require GE labeling, the Smart Label plan asks only for voluntary disclosures. In addition, there are many unanswered questions about how companies will use the consumer information they could gather with these technologies, leading to serious concerns about consumer privacy. How the companies will track the information they could gather has not been disclosed. As with other apps, it may link to users’ profiles, gather their personal information and use data about what they are scanning for marketing purposes without customer knowledge or consent.

While presented as an olive branch in the wars for transparency, Smart Labels obscure the truth behind the food choices made by busy shoppers. Knowing what’s in your food shouldn’t require sleuthing around on your high-tech device; it should be clearly visible on food packages.

It’s not just consumer advocates who believe in the power of the label: A recent poll by the Mellman Group found that nearly 90 percent of those surveyed preferred on-package labels to bar-code-based ingredient information; only 16 percent of them had used a QR code to gather information in a grocery store. This likely isn’t news to food companies; it is exactly what they are banking on. While the companies behind Smart Labels are claiming a good faith effort to give consumers information, the reality is that few consumers will use this technology. The majority will remain in the dark about how their food is produced.

We’ll find out this week if the food industry is able to sneak its anti-labeling rider into the federal spending bill. If not now, the fight is sure to continue in the New Year. Numerous members of Congress, including Sen. Patrick Leahy and Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, Sen. Jeff Merkley of Oregon, Sen. Barbara Boxer of California and Sen. Jon Tester of Montana, all Democrats, have already voiced opposition to the rider; more are expected to do the same. But even if the rider is defeated in the short term, it’s clear the industry will keep on fighting against true transparency.

The Grocery Manufacturers Association has planned an elaborate rollout of its Smart Labels initiative. Consumers and consumer advocates shouldn’t get suckered. Smart Labels may be smart marketing, but it’s not the solution we need to achieve transparency about genetically engineered ingredients — or other key information we want to know about what we eat.

Originally published in Al Jazeera America

The post Don’t Be Fooled by the Food Industry’s Smart Labels appeared first on Real Food Media.

What is it about corporations trying to sound hip that so often hits the wrong note? It comes off like your mother ending a text with “LOL.” It doesn’t sound cool; it sounds out of touch. That’s just what I thought perusing the website of Mixify, a new marketing campaign by the American Beverage Association (ABA).

Launched earlier this year, Mixify promotes balance in what you “eat, drink and do.” Mixify, according to the site, is “like a balance wingman.” (Who knew balance needs a wingman?) “Balance” is defined as “crossing cats with dragons”; finding it will keep you “feeling snazzier than the emoji of the dancing lady in red.” Honestly, I’m not even sure exactly what that is supposed to mean, but you get the idea. It’s all about communicating that, dear (youthful) reader, we’re hip, we’re cool, we’re one of you — and we don’t want you to be worried about drinking our beverages.

As the beverage industry trade association, the ABA spends tens of millions of dollars every year to promote its members’ interests, from fighting taxes on sugar-sweetened beverages to stopping initiatives to get soda out of schools to pushing marketing campaigns such as this one. (It spent $62.5 million in 2013 alone.) Mixify is just one tactic it is deploying to try to fix a core image problem.

As part of this massive campaign — including interactive social media accounts on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram — Mixify is hitting the road with free events for teens in more than half a dozen cities around the country this summer. So what’s the problem with a little summer fun, a little “silent disco” in D.C. or outdoor games at a football field in Philly?

The problem is that soda is not innocuous. Sugar-sweetened beverages are tied to the biggest public health epidemic of our time: rising rates of diet-related illnesses.

Public relations campaigns such as these are designed to deflect concerns from a culprit of ill health — drinking soda — by promoting balance. Lori Dorfman, the head of the Berkeley Media Studies Group, noted the parallels between this strategy and the alcohol industry’s promotion of designated drivers: “Those campaigns actually promoted drinking. Some people called them designated drinker programs because they gave people permission to drink to excess if they weren’t driving — as if drinking and driving were the only problems related to alcohol,” she said. “Many alcohol companies created their own campaigns to look like good guys, but all their slogans encouraged drinking and never suggested that a designated driver should have nothing to drink, with slogans like ‘Think when you drink’ and ‘Know when to say when.’”

The parallels between sugar-sweetened beverage marketing such as Mixify and Big Tobacco public relations are also striking, as Dorfman and others write in a recent paper in PLOS Medicine (PDF). Like the tobacco industry before it, the sugar-sweetened beverage industry is employing “elaborate, expensive, multinational corporate social responsibility campaigns,” they write. “These campaigns echo the tobacco industry’s use of [such campaigns] as a means to focus responsibility on consumers rather than on the corporation, bolster the companies’ and their products’ popularity and to prevent regulation.”

Mixify is troubling, too, in how the ABA uses it to tap young people to do the marketing for them. At each public event, Mixify engineers photo opportunities with Instagram and YouTube microcelebrities, turning “unsuspecting minors into unpaid conscripts,” said Jeff Cronin, the communications director at the Center for Science in the Public Interest. At the Washington, D.C., Mixify event Cronin attended — as at, one presumes, all of them — every participant was consenting, whether they realized it or not, to be part of this marketing. A crowd notice posted at the perimeter read, “By entering this area, you irrevocably consent to … recordings of you … for worldwide exploitation, in perpetuity in any and all media, whether now known or hereafter devised, for any purpose whatsoever.” Cronin said, “These kids are unwittingly giving the American Beverage Association the right to use their images and recordings, turning them into an army of drones spreading the industry’s PR garbage on social media.”

This is particularly worrying because soda companies market heavily to youth of color, through celebrity endorsements, websites, advertisements and more — both alarming and irresponsible given that communities of color, especially black and Latino youths, are being disproportionately affected by diet-related illnesses. “African-Americans are 50 percent more likely to be obese and over twice as likely to die from diabetes as whites,” write the authors of “Selfish Giving,” a 2013 report from the Center for Science in the Public Interest (PDF), about the soda industry’s use of philanthropy to serve its business interests.

But it’s not surprising. This demographic is a growth sector. The authors of “Selfish Giving” quote Coca-Cola’s chief marketing officer, Bea Perez, who said, “We know that 86 percent of the growth through 2020 for Coca-Cola’s youth-target market will come from multicultural consumers, especially Hispanic, and focusing on this segment is critical to the company’s future growth.” It’s no wonder, then, that according to the Rudd Center, in 2013 black children and teens saw more than twice as many ads on television for sugary drinks and energy drinks than their white peers. No matter the medium, the imbalance remains. The Rudd Center also found that in the U.S., black youths were 34 percent more likely to visit the website of a sugary or energy drink brand than the national youth average.

Mixify’s timing is curious. In July we learned that deaths in Mexico from diabetes, cancer and heart disease tied to sugary drink consumption far outnumber deaths from violent crime in that country, according to research from Tufts University. In the wake of the landslide win for a soda tax in Berkeley, California, there are murmurings of other U.S. cities exploring taxes on sugar-sweetened beverages. And the consumption of soda is way down. New data show a major reduction in Americans’ soda consumption. In 1998 the average American purchased 40 gallons of soda a year, according to data analyzed by the Center for Science in the Public Interest. By 2014 that figure dropped to 30 gallons. (Keep in mind that that’s still about 100 cups of sugar from soda per year.)

“The industry’s under siege,” said Cronin. “Consumers are fleeing from full-calorie carbonated soda, and public health officials are increasingly looking to drive consumption down further with taxes and other policies.”

According to the “deets” (yes, it reads “deets”) on the Mixify website, the tour heads next to Dallas, where kids can also be expected to be enlisted in this marketing campaign for a dying industry, with well-paid PR execs trying to hook the next generation on the sweet stuff.

Originally published in Al Jazeera America

The post The Soda Industry’s Creepy Youth Campaign appeared first on Real Food Media.

At the turn of the last century, the father of public relations, Edward Bernays, launched the Celiac Project, whose medical professionals recommended bananas to benefit celiac disease sufferers. Those pitched on the sweet fruit’s miraculous properties didn’t know the project was actually created for the United Fruit Co., the largest trader of bananas in the world.

The creation of front groups — independent-sounding but industry-backed organizations — as a public relations strategy dates at least as far back as Bernays’ day. But a new report by Kari Hamerschlag, a senior program manager at the environmental nonprofit Friends of the Earth; Stacy Malkan, a co-founder of the food industry watchdog US Right to Know; and me shows that such tactics are continuing with ever more scope and scale today.

The report, released today, exposes the growth of food-industry-sponsored front groups and other covert communication tactics in the past few years. While food industry spin is not new, we’re seeing an unprecedented level of spending and deployment of an ever wider array of PR tactics. We argue this rise of industrial food spin is a direct response to mounting public concerns about industrial agriculture as well as a growing interest in sustainable food and groundswell for organic products.

Increasingly, the American public is raising questions about toxic chemicals used in farming, routine antibiotics used in livestock production and genetic engineering in agriculture. The booming organic food business is one sign: Sales of organic food and products in the United States are projected to jump from $35 billion in 2013 to $170 billion in 2025 — a direct threat to the profits of the processed food, animal agriculture and chemical industries engaging in such spin. According to a recent Fortune article, since 2009 the 25 biggest food and beverage companies — selling nonorganic processed and junk food — lost an equivalent of $18 billion in market share. “I would think of them like melting icebergs,” the article quotes Credit Suisse analyst Robert Moskow as saying. “Every year they become a little less relevant.”

In the face of this threat, we argue that the industrial food sector — from the biotech behemoths to the animal agriculture industry — is working overtime to defuse these concerns with well-funded communication efforts and a rash of new front groups. From 2009 to 2013, just 14 of these front groups spent $126 million to shape the story of food while presenting the veneer of independence. There’s the Alliance to Feed the Future, which produces Common Core–vetted curricula on healthy food for public schools. Its members include the Frozen Pizza Institute and the Calorie Control Council, which promotes the benefits of Olestra and saccharin, among other artificial sweeteners and fats. You don’t need to be an expert in food security to be skeptical to take advice about feeding the world from the trade council for fake sugar and fat.

We detail groups such as the U.S. Farmers and Rancher’s Alliance (USFRA) — whose goal, it says, is “to enhance U.S. consumer trust in modern food production to ensure the abundance of affordable, safe food” and whose lead partners include animal pharmaceutical company Elanco, biotech giant Monsanto and chemical companies DuPont, Dow and Syngenta. Among the USFRA’s communication priorities since its launch in 2011 has been to combat growing public concern about the routine use of antibiotics in animal agriculture. Its Antibiotics Working Group has developed educational materials, hosted public conversations and trained media representatives to downplay the risks of antibiotics. But the group’s messages contradict well-documented evidence of the widespread misuse of routine antibiotics. Today 70 percent of medically important antibiotics sold in the United States are used not in humans, according to the Food and Drug Administration, but in livestock animal production to promote growth or prevent disease, leading to the threat of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

But it’s not just front groups. We describe a plethora of other communication tactics, many of them so under-the-radar that often people don’t realize the stories are being crafted behind the scenes. We describe how the industrial food sector targets female audiences and co-opts female bloggers, how industry groups pay for advertisements to look like editorial content and how the industry infiltrates social media. In one example, the Biotechnology Industry Organization hired PR firm Ketchum to develop GMOAnswers.com, populated with industry-approved answers about genetically modified organisms. The firm even won a prestigious advertising award for this campaign, particularly for its success in tracking negative tweets about GMOs and engaging users directly, urging them to visit the website.

The trade groups for the industrial food sector also reach into their deep pockets to shape how the media report on our food system. In our analysis, we found that just four major trade associations for the chemical, biotech and animal agriculture sectors had expenses totaling half a billion dollars from 2009 to 2013, including communications and marketing campaigns.

These are just some of the tactics we describe. While it is far from a comprehensive documentation of every front group or tactic, we hope the report inspires everyday Americans, public officials and journalists to be critical consumers of the stories we hear about food and farming. Particularly at a time when mainstream media outlets are hemorrhaging, cutting back on the resources available for the investigative pieces essential to accurate reporting on and exposing industry malfeasance, it’s increasingly important that we know where our food information comes from and who is behind it. There’s new indication of the importance of this every day. Consider how the food industry is already busy pushing back in the media against the sound recommendations from the scientific advisory committee for the government’s Dietary Guidelines for Americans, set to be finalized later this year.

We must ensure these PR strategies don’t leave us in the dark about the real story of our food. Because as we debate one of the biggest questions of our time — how to feed ourselves safely and sustainably — it’s essential we base critical policy decisions and consumer choices on substance, not spin.

Originally published in Al Jazeera America

The post The Billion-Dollar Business to Sell Us Crappy Food appeared first on Real Food Media.

by Anna Lappé

Last month, Chicago hosted two seemingly unrelated meetings. At the National Restaurant Association’s annual trade show you could check out workshops such as “Pickle Your Fancy” and “You Bacon Me Crazy,” while mingling with some of the other 63,000 attendees. Though the annual trade show is the NRA’s most public moment, the group works year-round behind the scenes, influencing politicians and legislation to shape what we eat, how we eat it and how restaurant workers — including those employed by McDonald’s — are treated.

As trade show participants, including those from some of the biggest restaurant chains in the country, were closing up their display cases, McDonald’s annual shareholder meeting was just getting started. It would appear to be no coincidence that the trade association’s meeting was timed to coincide with the Golden Arches confab of shareholders — McDonald’s is one of the trade association’s generous corporate sponsors.

But in recent years, McDonald’s annual meeting has become a venue not just for corporate officials opining on official sales reports, but also for public-interest advocates taking the fast-food chain to task for contradictions between what the company says it values and what it does in practice.

McDonald’s NRA membership makes its recent professed concern for its workers ring hollow. The trade group has actively lobbied for years against improving conditions for restaurant workers, including better worker wages and benefits. As one of the NRA’s largest dues-paying members, McDonald’s supports such lobbying and benefits from its success.

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, the NRA lobbies on “virtually every issue affecting the restaurant industry.” In 2013 alone, the NRA, a tax-exempt, non-profit organization, spent a total of $71 million, including on lobbying and campaign contributions.

In 2014, it spent $3.9 million on contributions to candidates and lobbying 89 separate bills, according to its disclosures. Some of these efforts included longstanding lobbying against health care reform and increases in the minimum wage. The NRA specifically lobbied against policy proposals such as the “Forty Hours is Full-Time Act,” which would give those who work 30 hours a week the same benefits as those who work 40 — especially important today as business owners reduce hours per week to minimize their responsibilities for providing benefits such as health care. (Michele Simon documented more of these lobbying efforts in an Al Jazeera America column last year.)

A prominent member of the NRA, McDonald’s has been working with the trade group on many of these policy fights. Advocates at its meeting, including those from the Food Chain Workers Alliance and the Restaurants Opportunities Center, pointed out how the company is undermining worker welfare. The corporation’s “Standards of Business Conduct” report pledges to treat its employees with “fairness, respect and dignity”(PDF) and to “pay fair, competitive wages.” But as a member of the NRA, McDonald’s has helped to fund one of the biggest lobbying efforts to obstruct a national minimum wage increase in decades. Through the International Franchise Association, it’s also suing the city of Seattle for moving to increase the minimum wage to $15 there, claiming franchises, such as McDonald’s operations, are unfairly classified as “large” employers when they should be considered “small” businesses.

Advocates at the meeting pointed to this lobbying activity and to McDonald’s own shortfalls in improving worker wages and benefits. While the corporation was proud to announce a wage hike earlier this year for its workers, only a fraction actually received it: The hike covered just company-owned restaurants, where only about 10 percent of all U.S.-based employees work; the rest work for franchisees. (A projected 1,300 cooks and cashiers at McDonald’s and other major fast-food companies are convening this weekend in Detroit to strategize about such lackluster moves.)

Chicago Teachers Union vice president Jesse Sharkey also spoke of “the growing concerns from people across the globe regarding the devastating impact McDonald’s is having on workers, our food system and the health of our children.” And representatives from Corporate Accountability International, with whom I work, spoke out against the practices and lobbying efforts, especially with the NRA, that undermine the very values the corporation says it holds dear.

The Standards of Business Conduct report, subtitled “the Promise of the Golden Arches,” quotes McDonald’s founder Ray Kroc describing the company as “ethical, truthful and dependable” and committed to its “people.” But with its longstanding relationship with the NRA ensuring it has been a key force in limiting the compensation for low-wage workers — very much its people — it doesn’t appear that McDonald’s is going to make good on those promises any time soon.

Originally published in Al Jazeera America

Photo by Fibonacci Blue/Flickr

The post McDonald’s Two-Faced Talk appeared first on Real Food Media.

You know organic food has gone mainstream when Men’s Health waxes poetic about an organic diet in between shout-outs to a “hot new sex app” and pictures of actress Chelsea Peretti in stilettos. And you know the business of organic is moving out of the margins when CNBC’s ornery “Mad Money” host, Jim Cramer, describes organic as “one of the most lucrative trends of our era.” Sounding more like a permaculture geek than a money manager, Cramer recently said:

Many people will probably tell you that organic food is really just for rich people, that it’s not an economical way to approach agriculture, that it can’t feed the world. Well, guess what? None of that’s true.

For years, the organic food industry boasted that it was experiencing double-digit growth year to year. That’s not so impressive when your products are less than 1 percent of the total market. But that’s all changing.

While chemical agriculture defenders like to say that organic food is still marginal, that’s becoming less and less true. Today organic food sales are 5 percent of the total — but even that figure hides the true heft of the industry. Most of American farmland is dedicated to industrial crops — commodities such as corn and soybeans — that are mainly used in animal feeds, sweeteners or ethanol production rather than eaten by people directly. If you consider the organic percentage of food we eat, the figures grow: 12 percent of fruit and vegetable sales and 7 percent of dairy are organic. For certain crops, the figures jump. “Organic carrots make up 23 percent of the market. Organic kale is 50 percent of the total,” said Laura Batcha, the executive director of the Organic Trade Association.

Choosing organic produce and grains means eschewing foods that were irradiated (treated with radiation, often to slow the sprouting or ripening process or to increase shelf life), made with genetically engineered seeds or fertilized with sewage sludge. Choosing organic-certified meat or poultry means reaching for products raised without artificial growth hormones, antibiotics and a bevy of other drugs, including arsenic-based ones. Those are just a few reasons consumers are choosing organic-certified foods in the marketplace. The benefits of doing so — from personal health to environmental sustainability — are becoming increasingly clear to American consumers.

Companies are catching on. Last month, Chipotle became the first major fast-casual chain to declare it would be breaking up with genetically engineered ingredients, for the most part. (Unless it drops soda and shifts entirely to organic-certified sources for meat and dairy, it is still selling foods that have been made with genetically engineered ingredients.) While a partial shift, this very public move is evidence that companies are feeling the consumer demand for healthier and more ecological food.

From my conversations with consumers across the country, there is a tsunami of demand for these products. National polls reflect the sentiment I’ve been hearing on the ground. In a 2015 survey (PDF) conducted by Wolfe Research, 55 percent of female respondents ranked natural and organic as extremely important or very important in their purchasing decisions, up from 43 percent in 2013.

All of this has companies with big investments in chemical agriculture — from animal pharmaceutical giants (Elanco) to chemical companies (Bayer) and biotech behemoths (Monsanto) — doubling down on their public relations campaigns to tamp down consumer demand for organic.

These companies and their trade groups, such as the Biotechnology Industry Organization and CropLife America (the gussied-up version of the National Association of Chemical Manufacturers), are spending hundreds of millions of dollars every year to combat popular concerns about the chemical cocktails used on farm fields or genetic engineering used on seeds.

They’re also investing in front groups, nonprofit organizations established to be perceived as working in the public interest but effectively PR arms for industry that pour millions into marketing campaigns. Take Elanco, which is a member of the Industry Partner Council of the U.S. Farmers and Ranchers Alliance, whose communications efforts include a campaign countering concerns about antibiotic overuse on factory farms — this despite the well-founded science on dangerous antibiotic-resistant bacteria fostered by just such overuse.

For a forthcoming Friends of the Earth report on the food industry’s corporate spin, I reviewed the expenses of 14 of these nonprofit food industry front groups, seven of which were launched since 2009. Based on filings with the Internal Revenue Service, these groups spent more than $135 million on media campaigns, websites, media representative training and more from 2009 to 2013. That figure doesn’t even include the more than half a billion dollars spent by just three trade associations — the Grocery Manufacturers Association, CropLife America and the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO) — in that period. (Note: BIO’s spending includes amounts for agricultural and health care biotechnology.)

All this money is having an effect. The PR firm Ketchum, for example, was employed last year by BIO to develop a campaign to improve public perception of genetically modified organisms, including developing GMOAnswers.com, a website with industry-approved commentary about GMOs. As part of this work, Ketchum seeks out negative biotech-related tweets and points authors toward GMOAnswers.com. Since its launch, said a Ketchum representative in Delta Farm Press, “There’s been about an 80 percent reduction in negative Twitter traffic as it relates to GMOs.”

This infusion of well-funded spin is distorting the conversation about food, health and sustainability. As organic food sales boom, some of the most lucrative companies in the world are threatened. In response, these companies are spending more than ever to shape the conversation about food and sustainability. As they do, it’s all the more essential that the public make informed choices based on science, not spin. Fortunately, despite the millions being spent on it, more people are exposing this spin, and organic continues to go mainstream — whether the chemical and biotech industry likes it or not. 

Originally published in Al Jazeera America

Photo by Tim Psych/Flickr

The post Organic is Going Mainstream appeared first on Real Food Media.

by Anna Lappé 

“Doubt is our product,” wrote executives for tobacco giant Brown & Williamson in a now infamous 1969 memo on industry communications strategy. The memo was revealed during discovery in class-action lawsuits against tobacco companies that would eventually yield a trove of 85 million pages. Among those pages are details about the public relations playbook of an industry that — as far back as 1958 — knew that smoking caused cancer and used public relations to fight regulation for decades.

“Merchants of Doubt,” a brilliant new film from documentarian Robert Kenner (of “Food Inc.” fame), reveals this spin and tracks how other industries, from chemical manufacturers to pharmaceuticals, are ripping pages from Big Tobacco’s playbook to fight their own regulation and public scrutiny.

Based on the book of the same name by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, the film reveals, in particular, Big Oil’s role in climate change denialism. It makes the argument that the world’s biggest energy companies funded PR and lobbying firms that fomented doubt about climate science and thereby stalled action on climate policy. The film pulls back the curtain on the backstage battle to win the hearts and minds of the American public, with nothing short of a stable climate in the balance.

Big Oil’s PR machine

When I was writing “Diet for a Hot Planet,” my book about the connections between the food industry and climate change, my editor suggested I cut the chapter addressing climate change denial.

“Anna,” she said, “the debate is settled. Denial is over.”

You can’t blame her for thinking so. It was 2006. “An Inconvenient Truth” had just come out. Al Gore’s painstakingly researched film about global warming, which would go on to gross $24 million and win the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, built its message on years of accumulating clarity about the crisis. As far back as 1979, scientists Steve Schneider and Roger Revelle had testified before Congress about global warming. In 1988, NASA scientist James Hansen made front-page news for bringing the global warming crisis to the national spotlight. In front of a Congressional committee, he testified that evidence proved, with 99-percent certainty, that global warming was the result of man-made greenhouse gas emissions. The same year, future-President George H.W. Bush said on the campaign trail, “In my first year in office, I will convene a global conference on the environment at the White House … We will talk about global warming … And we will act.”

But as “Merchants of Doubt” shows, and what my editor didn’t know, is that the Big Oil PR machine was just greasing its wheels. The offensive had yet to come.

Big Oil developed a well-funded communications campaign inspired by Big Tobacco’s techniques — funding fake science, think tanks and front groups with innocuous-sounding names such as the Global Climate Coalition (GCC). Supported by energy companies such as Shell Oil, Exxon and BP, the GCC lobbied on Capitol Hill, fighting a global climate treaty and domestic climate legislation by producing issue briefs with the patina of truthiness.

As Kenner shows, such front groups claimed that global warming advocates were manufacturing the crisis as a Trojan Horse for greater government intervention, a claim that riled up the libertarian base and conservative groups such as Americans for Prosperity. The ascendancy of the Tea Party in the mid-2000s stoked fear among conservative candidates that speaking out about climate would make them unpopular with this increasingly powerful voting bloc. This was how the false notion that there was “no consensus” on climate change began to take hold in the public consciousness.

In 2009, 31,478 scientists allegedly signed a petition claiming there was “no convincing scientific evidence that human release of … greenhouse gases is causing … catastrophic … disruption of the Earth’s climate.” Ron Paul quoted from it in testimony before the U.S. House of Representatives that year. Never mind that among those signatories, only 39 were climatologists and many were non-experts (including people on the payroll of Big Oil). Some were even obviously fake names, such as members of the Spice Girls (the mention of which produced my favorite B-roll moment in the film).

But the damage was already done. By late 2009, the Pew Center was reporting a “sharp decline” in Americans who believe that there is “solid evidence” of human-caused climate change: Only 36 percent of respondents agreed that “global temperatures are rising as a result of human activity, such as burning fossil fuels” — down from nearly half just one year earlier.

It has been nearly three decades since Hansen’s warnings about global warming. But you can watch C-SPAN footage — from just two months ago — of Sen. James Inhofe throwing a snowball on the Senate floor to poke fun at climate science. (Inhofe, mind you, is the chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.) You can also read the news about Florida Gov. Rick Scott’s unwritten ban on using the phrases “climate change” or “global warming” under any circumstance.

The spin machine of the oil industry, in other words, is alive and well. The Western States Petroleum Association (WSPA) — whose members include BP, Chevron, Exxon and Shell — is one of the most powerful lobbying forces in California. Since 2009, it has spent millions of dollars in lobbying and in supporting a tangled web of front groups, including Californians for Energy Independence, California Drivers Alliance, Californians Against Higher Taxes, Kern Citizens for Energy and Californians for Affordable and Reliable Energy, according to a leaked PowerPoint presentation — all groups that are promoting the interests of the trade association. Doubt is the product, indeed.

Learn from Big Tobacco

Still, if Big Oil can learn from tobacco, so can we. As documented in a forthcoming companion piece to Kenner’s film, the fight against Big Tobacco was won largely because of sustained organizing that exposed what the industry knew — and when it knew it — about the harms of smoking. Groups such as Corporate Accountability International (for which I am a strategic advisor) and the Network for Accountability of Tobacco Transnationals succeeded in blocking the tobacco industry from participating in international treaty talks. It took decades of organizing, but the World Health Organization’s tobacco treaty finally entered into force in 2005. So far, it has been ratified by 179 countries.

There’s a shot in “Merchants of Doubt” of a woman smoking in a hospital bed, with baby monitors attached to her pregnant belly. Today’s reaction to that image — a gasp of disbelief — is a sign that while it took 50 years, the truth about tobacco finally won out.

The more climate chaos we experience — deadly hurricanes, floods, droughts, heat waves and cold shocks — the more Big Oil and its ilk will spend to peddle doubt. The only trouble is, as Oreskes says in the film, we don’t have 50 years to win back the public.

Originally published in Al Jazeera America

Photo by Septentria/Flickr

The post The Long, Dirty Trail of Fake Science appeared first on Real Food Media.