Food Blogger Claims Agribusiness Takes Page from Tobacco Playbook
La Vida Locavore blogger Jill Richardson claims in a July 6 AlterNet article that a recent webinar touting a “perspective on pesticide residues” was benignly marketed to federal and state health officials by a “self-described non-profit organization,” the Alliance for Food and Farming. While the Alliance’s website does not identify its supporters, Richardson asserts that the organization is an industry “front group” representing California-based farm and pesticide interests, one of which apparently argued in the film Food, Inc. that “foods containing clones should not be labeled.”
“[F]ront groups are a common vehicle industry uses to delude, confuse, and sometimes overtly defraud the public,” Richardson says. She cites author Anna Lappé’s book Diet for a Hot Planet highlighting a 1969 tobacco industry internal memo that discusses “establishing a controversy,” and Lappé opines that “The food industry long ago saw the benefits of fomenting confusion; confusion defuses public outcry about our toxic food system. Long after the discovery of the neurotoxic, carcinogenic, endocrine-disrupting effects of farm chemicals, we’re still debating the merits of organic agriculture.”
Richardson points to other purported industry front groups, naming the American Council on Science and Health and the Center for Consumer Freedom, and refers to Websites maintained by companies that promote industrial agriculture and processed foods. She characterizes the American Farmers for the Advancement and Conservation of Technology, which defends the use of recombinant bovine growth hormone and calls itself “grassroots,” as “about as grassroots as a smokers’ rights group organized by a tobacco company.” Richardson also discusses how industry spends millions to “influence government, the media, health professionals, and consumers.” She recommends that consumers consult certain Internet resources to decide which sources of information are credible, clearly implying that the industry point of view cannot be trusted. See AlterNet, July 6, 2010.
