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US-Appointed Egg Lobby Paid Food Blogs and Targeted Chef To Crush Vegan Startup
An anonymous reader writes: The American Egg Board targeted publications, popular food bloggers, and a celebrity chef as part of an effort to combat a perceived threat from Hampton Creek, an egg-replacement startup backed by some of Silicon Valley's biggest names, according to internal emails. The Gaurdian reports: A detailed review of emails, sent from inside the AEB and obtained by the Guardian, shows that the lobbyist's anti-Hampton Creek campaign sought to:
- Pay food bloggers as much as $2,500 a post to write online recipes and stories about the virtue of eggs that repeated the egg lobby group's "key messages."
- Confront Andrew Zimmern, who had featured Hampton Creek on his popular Travel Channel show Bizarre Foods and praised the company in a blog post characterized by top egg board executives as a "love letter."
- Target publications including Forbes and Buzzfeed that had written broadly positive articles about a Silicon Valley darling.
- Unsuccessfully tried to recruit both the animal rights and autism activist Temple Grandin and the bestselling author and blogger Ree Drummond to publicly support the egg industry.
- Buy Google advertisements to show AEB-sponsored content when people searched for Hampton Creek or its founder Josh Tetrick.
What fear-mongering? Some people can’t eat eggs. Some people don’t want to eat eggs. Hampton Creek is putting out products for those people. They’re not going on Dr. Oz claiming eggs will give you cancer.
Hampton Creek named their product "Just Mayo" when it just wasn't. Mayo has eggs. Just Mayo doesn't. Even Tetrick said that they named the product Mayo instead of Mayonnaise because he knew it wasn't actually mayonnaise. The problem is that Mayo is short for Mayonnaise. I'm sure there are people out there, like you, who think Mayo means Cinco de Mayo or Joe Mayo from Seinfeld and have no idea what Mayonnaise is, but most of us do. Even Merriam-Webster which reads in total Definition of Mayo : Mayonnaise. The definition of Mayonnaise has eggs in it. Just Mayo has no eggs in it. It's not Mayonnaise. Name it something else and put underneath it "Vegan Mayo, er, I mean Mayonnaise substitute." No, continue to whine and bitch that you marketed your product as something that it wasn't and claim conspiracy when you're called out on it. The Egg lobby might have been heavy handed, but they were right. Just change the name, damn. Just Mayo is good stuff, probably not any better or worse than regular Mayo, er, um, I mean Mayonnaise, but I'm not bent on eradicating animal based foodstuffs from the shelves like Tetrick.
It's not YOUR TAX DOLLARS, it's a mandatory fee from the egg producers. They have to be members of the AEB if they produce eggs above a certain quantity and the AEB provides services in exchange for that.
Trying to become famous by taking photos. Visit my homepage please.
Oh and by the way, when I say bacon, I'm talking thick bacon. If you eat the regular bacon found in US stores, generally those are thin and are around 45 calories each (read the label to make sure,) with egg being 76 calories each. At that rate, even if you did say 5 slices of bacon and 2 eggs, that's about 377 calories, which isn't bad even if you're somewhat sedentary.
Compare that to a single muffin, which alone typically amounts to somewhere north 400 calories (unless it's a small muffin.) And a muffin is all carbs, which means you'll get a sugar crash before your typical lunch time, leaving you craving more calories.
hampton creek is no innocent victim here either.
fda warning the company about misleading claims on product labels: http://www.fda.gov/ICECI/Enfor...
Free market means that prices are determined by the forces of supply and demand, as opposed to artificial (non-free, as in liberty) forces that set price ceilings or price floors. Trade secrets are routinely held secret in free markets.
The fact you think "The Left" is some monolithic entity with a single goal speaks volumes for how abjectly childish and oversimplified your view of the world is. Seriously. It's embarrassing to read someone launch such a poorly thought-out tirade against half of the political spectrum as if it is one entity. You really need to read more.
That sounds more like incompetence than malice, or excessive cautiousness...
Vegans won't eat eggs, and will avoid products which contain them.
A lot of products are advertised as "may contain traces of nuts" when they usually dont, the companies are over cautious incase there is a trace of nuts and someone has a severe reaction.
While that's a nice story, that's NOT what GP was talking about. As detailed in a previous Guardian article, the company calls its product "Just Mayo" and has a picture of an egg on the label. The FDA has (rightly) accused them of false advertising, because they (1) imply their product is mayonnaise with their name, but doesn't contain necessary ingredients for the normal definition of mayo, (2) include ingredients that are not allowed in products claiming to be mayonnaise, (3) show a picture of an egg and plant on the label, leading to an impression that the product contains eggs and is likely a "natural" version of mayo, and (4) also implies on the label that their product is "heart-healthy" while not meeting the FDA standard for such labeling.
We have food definitions for a reason. It prevents you from going to the store and buying a thing labeled "ground beef" and getting a bunch of ground-up cat mixed with oats and tofu. There are definitions for mayonnaise, too.
I have no problem if this company wants to sell a vegan product similar to mayonnaise -- that's great. Maybe it's tasty or healthier -- great. But they should either choose a name that clearly indicates it is NOT traditional mayonnaise and/or have an explanation on the label indicating explicitly how it differs from traditional mayo.
Instead, this company wants to try to mislead customers into thinking they are buying a "more natural" and "pure" version of actual mayonnaise ("Just Mayo") by using a deceptive label.
This is definitely not "incompetence." It's clearly deliberate.
I've read hundreds of the best and biggest nutritional studies, and here's my quick and dirty what nutritional "science" has actually proven beyond doubt (mostly from country-country comparisons and massive epidemiological studies):
The ideal diet as we currently know it from available evidence is essentially the Mediterranean diet, which is the only intervention that is consistently and clearly linked to longer and healthier lives. Note that an American-Vegan diet with adequate protein intake is closer to it that the typical fast-food, red-meat, fruit/vegetable-free, processed-sugar heavy disaster that most Americans consume.
My point is that I agree mostly with your summary, but it's not as simple as blaming carbs -- many countries that do better nutritionally eat more carbs than the US (though they're typically complex) -- and there's no reason to villainize vegans and worship bacon from a nutritional stand-point like so many in the geek culture do. Except to be instantly modded up to +5, that is.
Hey mate, spare a sig?
Largely true.
Pretty much false. Vegan diets are about not eating animal products, period. You can easily eat a high protein/high fat/low carb vegan diet.