The Billion-Dollar Business to Sell Us Crappy Food

by Anna Lappé for Al Jazeera America 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., […]

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McDonald’s Two-Faced Talk

by Anna Lappé for Al Jazeera America 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 […]

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NY Times Letter to the Editor: When Food Is Genetically Modified

In the New York Times Opinion Pages To the Editor: Mark Lynas’s profile of one farmer in Bangladesh does not represent the facts on the ground about genetically engineered eggplant there. The trials of the new variety of eggplant have actually had very poor results: Genetic engineering did not protect plants from most pests and have […]

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The Long, Dirty Trail of Fake Science

by Anna Lappé for Al Jazeera America “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 […]

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Hey, Food Movement: We’re Being Heard

Last week, Fortune ran an article with this headline: “Campbell Soup CEO says distrust of ‘Big Food’ a growing problem.” Apparently the CEO of the soup giant explained that a “growing skepticism of large food makers that has resulted from consumers’ changing tastes as a key challenge for her industry.” Yes! That’s right. The diverse […]

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Can GMOs Save the World?

by Anna Lappé for Al Jazeera America   In October in Istanbul, farmers, agricultural researchers and advocates from around the world gathered for the Organic World Congress, organized by the 42-year-old International Federation of Organic Agricultural Movements (IFOAM). With 800 affiliates in 124 countries, IFOAM comes together every three years to gauge its global efforts to promote chemical-free […]

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