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.

Comments

You say that like it's a bad thing.

[JazzHarper]

Those are all perfectly legitimate responses to attacks from food-fear mongers.
It's not just one startup--it's a multi-billion dollar industry built on FUD.

Are we supposed to believe *everything* they say?

[Taco Cowboy]

I read the TFA, I even went to the news article at the Guardian, and still I can't find any real link !

It is easy to say that so and so lobby paid thousands to blogs to publish this or that, but until we can read the articles in question ourselves, how are we to believe anything reported in the news article is true?