January 30, 2017

RE: Nomination of Andrew Puzder as Secretary of Labor

Dear Senators:

Our organizations urge you to oppose the nomination of Andrew Puzder as Secretary of Labor. This nomination represents another in a string of Trump administration appointments that betrays the President-elect’s promise to improve the lives of working people.

As CEO of CKE Restaurants, which operates Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s, Puzder’s nomination to an agency charged with protecting working people is rife with conflicts of interest. Puzder’s company has faced numerous Department of Labor violations for failing to pay the minimum wage or overtime: Sixty percent of inspections of Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s restaurants found labor law violations and Puzder has opposed both raising the minimum wage and enforcement of overtime rules and mandatory sick leave. Puzder’s confirmation would ensure that the interests of the fast food industry—and its large meat and food industry suppliers—would prevail over the needs of hard-working people in the food system who face some of the highest rates of food insecurity due to low wages and poor working conditions.

Contrary to what Puzder and other corporate leaders at the National Restaurant Association say about good working conditions in the restaurant sector, the majority of restaurant workers are women and people of color, making as little as $2.13 per hour and rely on tips to survive. These workers face disproportionate rates of poverty, discrimination, and sexual harassment and deserve a Labor Secretary who believes that, as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “All labor has dignity.” Instead, with the National Restaurant Association’s champion heading the Department of Labor, workers will have to rely on vocal opponents of labor regulations to protect their basic workplace rights.

On behalf of the many people and groups who are working for a better food system that provides nutritious food and livable wages and treats the land, farmers, and animals with respect, we the undersigned urge you to oppose the nomination of Andrew Puzder to Labor Secretary.

Puzder would be yet one more nominee working for the interests of big business over the interests of working people.

Signed:

ActionAid USA

African American Cultural Center (Us)

Agricultural Justice Project

Alliance for Fair Food

Beyond Pesticides

Black Community, Clergy and Labor Alliance (BCCLA)

Black Urban Growers

Brandworkers

Brighter Green

California Institute for Rural Studies

Center for Biological Diversity

Center for Food Safety

Center for Science in the Public Interest

Center for Urban Education for Sustainable Agriculture

Climate Justice Alliance

Coalition of Immokalee Workers

CoFED

Common Ground Community

Community Alliance for Global Justice

Community Food and Justice Coalition

Compassion in World Farming

Corporate Accountability International

Dakota Resource Council

Domestic Fair Trade Association

Earthjustice

El Comite de Apoyo a los Trabajadores Agricolas, The Farmworkers’ Support Committee

Family Farm Defenders

Farm Forward

Farmworker Association of Florida

Farmworker Justice

Food & Water Watch

Food Chain Workers Alliance

Food Democracy Now!

Food Empowerment Project

Food First

Food Shift

Food Tank

Foodstand

Foundation Earth

Friends of the Earth

GMO Inside

Grassroots Gardens WNY

Greater Grand Rapids Food Systems Council

Green America

HEAL Food Alliance

Health & Medicine Policy Research Group

Health Care Without Harm

Idle No More Duluth

Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy

International Labor Rights Forum

Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement

Just Food

Land Stewardship Project

Laundry Workers Center

Laurie M. Tisch Center for Food, Education & Policy, Teachers College, Columbia University

Lucid Food

Midwest Pesticide Action Center

MomsRising.org

National Association of Blacks in Criminal Justice

National Black Food & Justice Alliance

National Family Farm Coalition

National Young Farmers Coalition

Natural Resources Defense Council

NC Environmental Justice Network

New Mexico Public Health Association

Ninjas for Health

North American Climate,Conservation and Environment

Northeast Organic Farming Association of

New York

Northwest Arkansas Workers Justice Center

Nutiva

Organic Consumers Association

Other Worlds

People’s Climate Movement NY

People’s Grocery

Pesticide Action Network

Phat Beets Produce

Pioneer Valley Workers Center

Real Food Challenge

Real Food for Kids

Real Food Media

ROC United

RootDown LA

Roots of Change

Rural Coalition/Coalición Rural

Sacramento Food Policy Council

Slow Food California

Slow Food Chicago

Slow Food USA

Small Planet Institute

Soil Generation

South Agassiz Resource Council

Southern Christian Leadership Conference of Southern California

Springfield Food Policy Council

Student/Farmworker Alliance

Sustainable Agriculture of Louisville (SAL)

Toxic Taters

Treasure Valley Food Coalition

Union of Concerned Scientists

University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

US Food Sovereignty Alliance

Warehouse Worker Resource Center

Warehouse Workers for Justice

WhyHunger

Workers’ Center of Central New York

Young Workers United

The post 100+ Food and Ag Groups Stand With Labor and Tell Senators to Vote No on Andy Puzder Nomination 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.

McDonald’s is having a bumpy year. It just installed a new CEO after a mere two-and-a-half-year stint by his predecessor. In January it announced its latest returns — and the news was bad. It included such shareholder downers as a “global comparable sales decrease of 1 percent, reflecting negative guest traffic in all major segments.” Last month the business press reported that the Gates Foundation divested $1 billion in stock from the company last quarter. While the stock divestment doesn’t affect McDonald’s bottom line, it does affect its reputation: McDonald’s is stumbling.

In the face of this string of bad news, McDonald’s appears to be having a brand identity crisis and pouring PR money on its problems instead of addressing head-on their causes: a growing disinclination, especially among millennials, to support a company renowned for its ill treatment of workers, predatory marketing to kids and questionable food sourcing.

Struggling for Relevance

Millennials — 20- and early-30-somethings — are turning their backs on the brand. From 2011 to the end of 2014, the percentage of 19-to-21-year-olds visiting McDonald’s fell nearly 13 percent. As an August 2014 Fortune headline put it, “McDonald’s struggling to stay relevant with millennials.”

They are flocking elsewhere for a number of reasons. They came of age in a time with a lot more fast-casual options than previous generations could have anticipated — options that are better tasting, higher quality and still affordable. (Chipotle, anyone?) They’re turning to other brands that reflect more of their concerns with the environment, workers’ wages and animal welfare. Instead of listening to these concerns, McDonald’s is turning to PR spin to solve its problems.

While a diverse bunch, many millennials are more engaged in environmental and social causes than young people have been for a long time. In one recent poll, two-thirds of millennials said they would vote for a candidate who supports cutting greenhouse gas emissions, compared with just half of Americans over 65. Millennials have been on the front lines of some of the biggest environmental fights of our time, from the Keystone XL pipeline battle to the 450,000-person People’s Climate March in New York City last year.

They are a leading force in the good food movement, with national networks such as Real Food Challenge, which was founded just a few years ago and now enlists tens of thousands of college students to push for better food on college campuses, and Food Corps, a national AmeriCorps training program that fosters youth school garden educators. Books such as Michael Pollan’s “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” films like “Food Inc.” and advocacy groups such as Food & Water Watch are inspiring young people to ask questions about where their food comes from and raise hell about antibiotics and hormones in meat.

Millennials are passionate about workers’ rights and income inequality, evidenced by the dynamism of Occupy Wall Street and the fight for a fair wage that heated up around the country last year in actions such as the Fight for $15. From its poor pay to its wasteful packaging to its sourcing of climate-destructive industrial meat and dairy, McDonald’s doesn’t represent labor-friendly, sustainable or healthy practices.

So if not to McDonald’s, where are millennials headed? Those who have the disposable income to do so are pulling up a stool at Chipotle, diving into a burger at Shake Shack or grabbing a sandwich at Panera Bread. In short, many are spending their money at fast-casual establishments, which saw a 2.3 percent jump among 19-to-21-year-olds and a 5.3 percent increase among 22-to-37-year-olds from 2011 to the end of 2014. Fast-casual restaurants show continuing signs of strong growth. Since Chipotle went public in 2006, “its stock price has risen more than 1,500 percent,” James Surowiecki wrote last month in The New Yorker.

While Chipotle and Shake Shack shouldn’t be confused with health food joints — a steak burrito from Chipotle can load you with 1,290 calories, and a double ShackBurger have 770 calories and your daily recommended dose of sodium — these chains arguably produce better-tasting food and have made explicit commitments to sourcing better ingredients. Shake Shack owner Danny Meyer, for instance, has promised to use only meat raised without hormones and antibiotics. Many of these restaurants offer better benefits and pay than McDonald’s does. Take Shake Shack’s starting hourly wage of $10 in New York City; it’s still not going to get a family of four out of poverty, but it’s better than the minimum wage.

Flailing Tactics

McDonald’s is trying desperately to lure back millennials. In its one nod to the priorities of this generation, it released a request for proposal late last year for media companies to develop “a big idea” that “generates significant support for a charity” and “engages millennials to support this charity by speaking directly to their philanthropic priorities and leveraging their behaviors and habits,” according to information obtained by The Wall Street Journal.

But mostly the company has been launching a host of new PR campaigns leading to schizophrenic positioning and mixed results. In January, USA Today reported that McDonald’s opened a café in Australia with healthy offerings on the menu and nary a Golden Arch in site, about the same time that it launched a TV spot bragging about old-school Big Macs unchanged by foodie influences. (Kale, quinoa, and soy were all name-checked — and mocked.) Last year saw the rebranding flop of both its iconic Ronald McDonald mascot and the Happy Meal, which set off a social media firestorm as young people around the world mocked the new creepy, toothy look.

It’s trying hard to be hip too, setting up shop last year in San Francisco to incubate digital strategies. The new office, based in the hotbed of digital disruption, will help the company be “more plugged into the flow of ideas,” said the company’s Chief Digital Officer Atif Rafiq. But as one Forbes commentator quipped, “All the talk about digital tech isn’t disruptive, it’s predictably also-ran.”

Last year McDonald’s tried to make a splash with its new dynamic in-store kiosk that lets customers customize their burgers. After spending big on the launch, McDonald’s had to rebrand it from Build Your Own Burger to Create Your Taste because it added chicken to the menu. Oops. It also launched what it calls Experience the Future, “a comprehensive restaurant execution concept” that “capitalizes on investments in reimaging, service and technology enhancements to improve the look, feel and convenience of the McDonald’s experience in ways that are in-tune with today’s consumer needs.” Which sounds more like PR gobbledygook than a serious attempt to rethink the chain.

These missteps, just a few signs of the company’s flailing, are reflected in weak earnings reports and personnel trouble at the top, with significant turnover in key positions. Two McDonald’s USA presidents, President and CEO Jim Skinner, Chief Marketing Officer Neil Golden and Chief Operating Officer Tim Fenton were replaced in the past several years. The trend continues with the early retirement of CEO Don Thompson late last month.

Walmart’s recent announcement that it will increase the wages for its lowest-paid workers makes it ever clearer that McDonald’s is out of step with the rest of retail. It’s time for McDonald’s to give people a reason to love it — and not just throw money at advertisements that tell us we should.

Postscript: Sounds like the new CEO might have gotten the memo. In an announcement today, McDonald’s committed to only “sourcing chicken raised without antibiotics that are important to human medicine.” It’s a step the company took after seven months of dialogue and concerted pressure from civil society groups, including Friends of Earth. The environmental organization’s senior program manager, Kari Hamerschlag, said in a press release, “While McDonald’s focus on poultry is a positive step forward, we look forward to a dramatic reduction of antibiotic use across the board, by focusing on improvements in their pork and beef suppliers’ management practices.” McDonald’s announcement makes it the largest restaurant chain in the country to adopt such a policy.

Originally published in Al Jazeera America

Photo by Beth Wiki/Wikimedia

The post Millennials Aren’t Lovin’ McDonald’s appeared first on Real Food Media.

This past weekend, biotech giant Monsanto paid bloggers $150 each to attend “an intimate and interactive panel” with “two female farmers and a team from Monsanto.” The strictly invitation-only three-hour brunch, which took place on the heels of the BlogHer Conference, promised bloggers a chance to learn about “where your food comes from” and to hear about the “impact growing food has on the environment, and how farmers are using fewer resources to feed a growing population.” Though the invitation from BlogHer explicitly stated, “No blog posts or social media posts expected,” the event was clearly designed to influence the opinions — and the writing — of a key influencer: the mommy blogger. Another invite-only event in August will bring bloggers to a Monsanto facility in Northern California for a tour of its fields and research labs. Again, while no media coverage is expected, the unspoken goal is clear.

Stealth marketing techniques, such as these by Monsanto, reveal how the food industry — from biotech behemoths to fast-food peddlers — is working surreptitiously to shape public opinion about biotechnology, industrialized farming and junk food.

We’ve come a long way from Don Draper’s whisky-infused ad concepts meant for old-style print publications. As our media landscape has changed, Big Ag has changed along with it, devising marketing to take advantage of this new terrain and influence the people and platforms — not just journalists and newspapers — that shape our understanding of farming and the health impacts of biotechnology and junk food.

Sean Timberlake, who has been blogging for nearly a decade, characterized industry’s move into the social media space as “sweeping and vast.” He explained that back when he started out, “I don’t think the Monsantos of the world understood what blogs were — or cared,” but now, “companies develop entire budget lines for social media programs. They build it into their whole ad budget.” Ad networks such as BlogHer and Federated — two of the biggest — facilitate companies’ advertising and outreach on blogs by aggregating blogs to sell as a bigger package. These networks, Timberlake explained, “can be leveraged and used as a bullhorn for their marketing.”

Sure, PR is an old game, but Big Ag is giving the age-old techniques of shaping public opinion a new, sneakier spin. Much of today’s marketing happens behind the scenes and off the printed page — on the Web pages of blogs, on Twitter feeds and Facebook pages, through sponsored content and industry-funded webisodes and on the stages of big-ideas festivals.

Monsanto is not the only food company engaging with the blogosphere. Mommy bloggers are the food industry’s newest nontraditional ally. McDonald’s has been wooing them aggressively too, offering sweepstakes in partnership with BlogHer for the company’s Listening Tour Luncheon, an exclusive event with the head of McDonald’s USA — framed as a two-way conversation about nutrition, but more likely a gambit to garner the support of a powerful group of influencers. And in Canada, McDonald’s offers All-Access Mom, behind-the-scenes tours of the company’s inner workings.

It’s not just through blogger meet-and-greets that industry is attempting to sway opinion. Video is an increasingly popular (and shareable) medium for PR disguised as content. This summer, for example, Monsanto is funding a Condé Nast Media Group film series called “A Seat at the Table.” According to a casting call, each three- to five-minute episode will cover questions such as “Are food labels too complicated?” and “GMOs: good or bad?” and will feature “an eclectic mix of industry and nonindustry notables with diverse viewpoints.” It’s hard to imagine truly free-flowing discussions resulting, paid for as they are by a company with a definitive take on — and stake in — the food-labeling wars. The U.S. Farmers and Ranchers Alliance, meanwhile, funded the documentary “Farmland,” described as a “look at the lives of farmers and ranchers,” but whose narrative — as critics have been quick to point out — “glorif[ies] the trend toward larger, more industrialized farms.” No surprise, given that the film’s financing comes from an agribusiness front group.

Big Ag is putting its communications dollars toward big-ideas events too, such as the Aspen Ideas Festival, where underwriters such as Monsanto are celebrated — and get a voice. Monsanto executives got to share their opinions onstage about GMO labeling (surprise: they’re not in favor of state-based labeling initiatives) and how best to feed the world (again: their chemicals and genetically engineered seeds are key to combating hunger). And past years have seen Coca-Cola, DuPont and Syngenta executives all touting their companies’ sustainability onstage.

The uptick in these stealth-marketing strategies coincides with growing popular outcry about agricultural chemicals, soda and junk food and genetically modified ingredients. Consider that despite millions spent on marketing over the two decades since genetically engineered seeds were first commercialized, 93 percent of Americans still think GMOs should be labeled and 65 percent are either unsure about the technology or believe it to be unsafe. Last year, when Monsanto retained the PR firm FleishmanHillard, known for its work with social media and agribusiness, to develop its new marketing initiatives, it did so “amid fierce opposition to the seed giant’s genetically modified products,” noted the Holmes Report, a PR industry publication.

The father of public relations, Edward Bernays, might never have dreamed up the age of Twitter and Facebook, but he likely wouldn’t be surprised to see food-industry tweets and Facebook ads dressed up as news. Bernays knew the importance of constant PR innovation. If the public “becomes weary of the old methods used to persuade it,” he wrote in his 1928 book “Propaganda,” then we must simply present our “appeals more intelligently.” Or, as we’re seeing with Monsanto and its food industry counterparts, if not exactly intelligently, then at least more surreptitiously: on the podium, the Twitter feeds and the mommy blogs.

Originally published in Al Jazeera America

Photo by Steve Jennings/Getty Images for McDonald’s via Al Jazeera America

The post Big Food Uses Mommy Bloggers to Shape Public Opinion appeared first on Real Food Media.