Food System Transparency Is In Peril

In this New Republic article, Ted Genoways details how food producers caught misusing federal funds are quietly pressuring Congress to shield them from public scrutiny.

Highlights:

• “It started with a court battle over mayonnaise. In October 2014, Unilever, the multinational food titan, sued Hampton Creek, a small food-technology company, for false advertising. Unilever, which owns Hellmann’s and Best Foods mayonnaise, was contesting the name of Hampton Creek’s competing product, Just Mayo, a vegan substitute that uses yellow peas in place of eggs.”

• “Much of the mainstream media covered the fight as a “weird war” between corporate competitors. (“Yep, It’s Mayo,” declared Inc. “No Eggs, No Mayo,” replied Entrepreneur.) But Ryan Noah Shapiro took the lawsuit seriously. A graduate student and animal-rights activist, Shapiro is a master at using the Freedom of Information Act—known as FOIA—to uncover public records that reveal how industry wields undue, and even illegal, influence over government agencies.”

• “Industry groups like the egg board, which together received roughly $1 billion in federal funding last year, are supposed to use tax dollars to promote their own products—usually through advertising campaigns like the ones for beef (“It’s What’s for Dinner”) and pork (“The Other White Meat”). But the egg board, it turned out, was a chief architect of the smear campaign against Hampton Creek.”

• “Joanne Ivy, the board’s president, had emailed fellow board members, instructing them to consider Just Mayo’s success “a crisis and major threat to the future of the egg product business.” She solicited ideas to thwart Hampton Creek, and suggested pushing the FDA to declare Just Mayo’s label misleading. She also used a go-between PR firm to pressure Whole Foods to drop the product. (The grocery chain refused.) In one email, a member of the egg board joked that the trade group should arrange a Mafia hit on Joshua Tetrick, the CEO of Hampton Creek.”

• “In April, 14 food boards—including the leading producers of beef, milk, pork, potatoes, and eggs—quietly convinced Congress to insert language into this year’s Agricultural Appropriations Bill that would exempt them from all FOIA requests. If the measure passes, America’s biggest food manufacturers will be allowed to spend millions in federal funds every year, while operating in total secrecy.”

• ““In long, industrialized supply chains, the thing that makes the system work is transparency,” says Bill Marler, a leading food-safety advocate. “Positive and negative microbial testing, recall information, outbreak information—all of that should be in the public domain. FOIA is the public information system.”

• “The FOIA exemption is just the latest front in the food industry’s ongoing war against public oversight. Over the past decade, in an effort to silence animal-rights activists and other whistle-blowers, eight states have passed “ag-gag” laws making it a crime to film or photograph activities on farms.”

• “As the food industry comes under increasing scrutiny for its dangerous and often illegal practices, Will Potter (Marsh Visiting Professor of Journalism at the University of Michigan) predicts, its efforts to evade public scrutiny will only intensify. “Big agriculture is really facing a crisis of public awareness,” he says. “FOIA is a critical tool, and the industry is trying to cut it off at its knees.”