by Anna Lappé for Al Jazeera America It’s something of a truism to say that there are two Americas when it comes to food: the ample aisles of posh Whole Foods in wealthy neighborhoods and the corner stores brimming with Doritos and Coke in poorer communities. But there are also two nations of food when […]
by Anna Lappé for Al Jazeera America What is it about corporations trying to sound hip that so often hits the wrong note? It comes off like your mother ending a text with “LOL.” It doesn’t sound cool; it sounds out of touch. That’s just what I thought perusing the website of Mixify, a […]
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., […]
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 […]
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 […]
REAL FOOD READS WITH AUTHOR TED GENOWAYS In this month’s #realfoodreads selection, The Chain: Farm, Factory and the Fate of our Food, Ted Genoways offers a powerful and important work of investigative journalism that explores the runaway growth of the American meatpacking industry and its dangerous consequences. I sat down with Ted to ask him some questions about the book, […]
by Anna Lappé for Earth Island Journal In the fall of 1962, a group of chemical companies including Monsanto – at the time the largest producer of the cancer-causing chemical compound, PCB – launched a full-throttle public relations campaign against Silent Spring and its author, biologist Rachel Carson. In Silent Spring, Carson dared […]
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 […]
by Anna Lappé for Al Jazeera America McDonald’s is having a bumpy year. It just installed a new CEO after a mere two-and-a-half-year stint by his predecessor. In January it announced its latest returns — and the news was bad. It included such shareholder downers as a “global comparable sales decrease of 1 percent, reflecting negative […]
As Mark Bittman says in The New York Times, “The report is not a paradigm shift, but it does contain significant improvements.” Here’s what is most exciting to me about them: For the first time the scientific advisory committee on dietary guidelines did a radical thing: it recommended we eat less sugar and red meat, […]