Spinning Food: How Food Industry Front Groups and Covert Communications are Shaping the Story of Food

Today, my colleagues Kari Hamerschlag, Stacy Malkan and I are excited to share our new report: Spinning Food.

Our findings are stunning (but probably won’t surprise you): The industrial food sector has spent hundreds of millions of dollars over the past few years on stealth PR tactics and deployed over a dozen front groups to push coordinated messages to attack organic food, defend pesticides and the routine use of antibiotics, and promote GMOs — messages that are making their way, day after day, to the pages of the largest media outlets.

Our aim is to shed light on how the food and agrochemical industry is trying to defuse concerns about the real risks of chemical-intensive industrial agriculture and undermine public confidence in the benefits of organic food and diverse, ecological production systems. We hope to encourage journalists, opinion leaders and the public to bring increased scrutiny to industry’s messages and messengers.

Will you help us spread the word about this report and our findings?  

My opinion piece on Al Jazeera America is here.

Please share our facebook post and promote on Twitter if you can. Sample tweets are below but feel free to draft your own. We’re using the hashtag #FoodPRWatch. If you can schedule a few during the day and throughout the week, even better!

• Spinning Food: How agribiz front groups & PR firms spin story of food: http://bit.ly/1GMdkLk @annalappe @KariHamerschlag @StacyMalkan
• .@MonsantoCo linked to at least 4 front groups that spend millions on PR spin defending GMOs, pesticides http://bit.ly/1Hv0c2T #foodPRwatch
• Spinning Food: How agribiz front groups use PR spin to target moms, attack organic, defend #GMOs http://bit.ly/1GMdkLk @foe_us #foodPRwatch

Many, many thanks for helping us get this information out!