{"id":60465,"date":"2015-07-13T12:00:42","date_gmt":"2015-07-13T11:00:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=60465"},"modified":"2015-06-30T15:22:57","modified_gmt":"2015-06-30T14:22:57","slug":"the-billion-dollar-business-to-sell-us-crappy-food","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2015\/07\/the-billion-dollar-business-to-sell-us-crappy-food\/","title":{"rendered":"The Billion-Dollar Business to Sell Us Crappy Food"},"content":{"rendered":"

New report sheds light on the covert tactics used to shape public opinion about what we eat.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"headlineImage.adapt.1460.high.food_industry_deceptive_tactics_a.1435632602679<\/a><\/p>\n

30 Jun 2015 – <\/em>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\u2019s miraculous properties didn\u2019t know the project was actually created for the United Fruit Co., the largest trader of bananas in the world.<\/p>\n

The creation of front groups \u2014 independent-sounding but industry-backed organizations \u2014 as a public relations strategy dates at least as far back as Bernays\u2019 day. But a new report<\/a> by Kari Hamerschlag, a senior program manager at the environmental nonprofit Friends of the Earth<\/a>; Stacy Malkan, a co-founder of the food industry watchdog U.S. Right to Know<\/a>; and me shows that such tactics are continuing with ever more scope and scale today.<\/p>\n

The report<\/a>, 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\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> to jump from $35 billion in 2013 to $170 billion in 2025 \u2014 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<\/a>, since 2009 the 25 biggest food and beverage companies \u2014 selling nonorganic processed and junk food \u2014 lost an equivalent of $18 billion in market share. \u201cI would think of them like melting icebergs,\u201d the article quotes Credit Suisse analyst Robert Moskow as saying. \u201cEvery year they become a little less relevant.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the face of this threat, we argue that the industrial food sector \u2014 from the biotech behemoths to the animal agriculture industry \u2014 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\u2019s the Alliance to Feed the Future, which produces Common Core\u2013vetted 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<\/a> and saccharin<\/a>, among other artificial sweeteners and fats. You don\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

Because the food industry employs under-the-radar PR strategies, often people don\u2019t realize the stories are being crafted behind the scenes.<\/p>\n

We detail groups such as the U.S. Farmers and Rancher\u2019s Alliance (USFRA) \u2014 whose goal, it says, is \u201cto enhance U.S. consumer trust in modern food production to ensure the abundance of affordable, safe food\u201d and whose lead partners include animal pharmaceutical company Elanco, biotech giant Monsanto and chemical companies DuPont, Dow and Syngenta. Among the USFRA\u2019s 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\u2019s 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<\/a>, but in livestock animal production to promote growth or prevent disease, leading to the threat of antibiotic-resistant bacteria<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s not just front groups. We describe a plethora of other communication tactics, many of them so under-the-radar that often people don\u2019t realize the stories are being crafted behind the scenes. We describe how the industrial food sector targets female audiences and co-opts female bloggers<\/a>, how industry groups pay for advertisements to look like editorial content and how the industry infiltrates social media<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s increasingly important that we know where our food information comes from and who is behind it. There\u2019s 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\u2019s Dietary Guidelines for Americans<\/a>, set to be finalized later this year.<\/p>\n

We must ensure these PR strategies don\u2019t leave us in the dark about the real story of our food. Because as we debate one of the biggest questions of our time \u2014 how to feed ourselves safely and sustainably \u2014 it\u2019s essential we base critical policy decisions and consumer choices on substance, not spin.<\/p>\n

__________________________<\/p>\n

Anna Lapp\u00e9 is the author of<\/em> Diet for a Hot Planet: The Climate Crisis at the End of Your Fork and What You Can Do About It<\/a>\u00a0and a co-founder of the<\/em> Small Planet Institute<\/a> and<\/em> Real Food Media Project<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 aljazeera.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

New report sheds light on the covert tactics used to shape public opinion about what we eat. Because the food industry employs under-the-radar PR strategies, often people don\u2019t realize the stories are being crafted behind the scenes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-60465","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-health"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60465","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=60465"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60465\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=60465"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=60465"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=60465"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}