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US-Appointed Egg Lobby Paid Food Blogs and Targeted Chef To Crush Vegan Startup

Posted by samzenpus on from the dirty-tricks-team dept.

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.

8 of 317 comments (clear)

  1. No surprise... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    The whole food-industrial complex in the US is so far out-of-wack with the concept of healthy food it's not even funny.

    Want to fix our chronic health / obesity / diabesity problems --

    1. Reform campaign finance laws.

    2. End corn subsidies.

    3. Profit (from good heath).

    1. Re:No surprise... by ArmoredDragon · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Actually I think the health problems are more caused by the wrong advice given by both the FDA and the American Heart Association. Basically for the last 50 years, both of them have been recommending low fat diets, and the FDA only reversed its stance recently, with the AHA (a nongovernment organization) yet to follow suit.

      Research after research has proven that not only is dietary cholesterol not bad for you (and doesn't actually raise your blood cholesterol afterall,) but saturated fat isn't either, and in fact low fat high carb diets themselves are likely the cause of obesity, high blood cholesterol, and a number of other problems. It's likely not a coincidence at all that while these things have been rising in the last 50 years, dietitians have been making the wrong recommendations for the past 50 years. (Just as an example, one might look at how much the "food pyramid" has changed over that span; in fact it is no longer even used because it was proven wrong so many times.)

      Vegan diets are ALL ABOUT low protein, low fat, high carb. It is NOT a healthy way to live (if you fail to watch your amino and mineral balance, you can have really bad things happen, such as blindness.) The fact is that protein and fat raise blood leptin better than carbohydrates do, which makes you feel more full on less overall calories. The only reason some vegans may appear healthier is because usually they don't consume too much sugar (a simple carb) often found in breads and snacks that are made in part by egg and/or dairy products. However neither egg nor dairy products are inherently bad, it's just the high amount of carbs found in these that are.

      An example of a really bad dietary habit that most Americans (and a lot of the world at large) have is that they consume cereal grains for breakfast, (such as oats, grits, corn, wheat) or even worse, cereals that are also loaded with sugar. Classic egg and bacon breakfasts, believe it or not, are a much better option.

      And no, I don't work for any food company, rather I have a number of health problems that require dietary maintenance just to keep in check, so it just happens that I've done a ton of reading on this. (And no, these health problems weren't caused by a bad diet, for example one is an immune condition called IgA nephropathy.)

    2. Re:No surprise... by Z00L00K · · Score: 3, Interesting

      if you fail to watch your amino and mineral balance, you can have really bad things happen, such as blindness.

      I think that mental blindness appears before real blindness, often Vegans are no different from religious fanatics which also are similar to zombies.

      --
      If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
    3. Re:No surprise... by ArmoredDragon · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Also it's worth nothing that a classic egg and bacon breakfast is still only really fine if you have a classic farmhand's expenditure of energy in the morning.

      It's still fine even if you're sedentary, just consume less of it. So for example, a farm hand might have 2 eggs and 5 slices of bacon; if you're sedentary limit it to say 1 egg and 2 slices of bacon. I work in IT, and I limit breakfast to 250 calories. So long as those calories are mostly meat/egg, I'm usually sated until well into the afternoon, and I'm 5'11" 202lbs. I remember that I would have to eat a large bowl of cereal to get the same effect (which it turns out the typical American cereal bowl is about 600 calories worth of food, and some people eat two of those in the morning...think about that, 1200 calories of basically all carbs...it's no wonder people are getting obese.) At my peak I think I weighed about 290lbs.

    4. Re:No surprise... by wienerschnizzel · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Vegan diets are ALL ABOUT low protein, low fat, high carb.

      I think you are confusing vegans with frutarians, who are just a small subset of vegans. Vegan diet can range from "mostly protein" (vegan athletes) to "just carbs until my children die horribly" extreme frutarians.

  2. Good For Them by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I'm strongly in favor of eggs. Go eggs.

  3. Re:Additionally... by DNS-and-BIND · · Score: 1, Interesting

    The same people who think GMO foods should be prominently labeled because what's in the can isn't real food are, naturally, against it when it suddenly suits their political biases. Surprise, surprise.

    --
    Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
  4. Re:Are we supposed to believe *everything* they sa by Ash+Vince · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It is The Guardian, beloved of the Left. You don't need to question them, it is unseemly and icky. Everything they print is true, because it agrees with the Left's pre-existing ideas. Anything contradictory is simply not printed in the first place. This is one of the big reasons the Left has gone off the rails into obsessed hate in the past 20 years, they live in an echo chamber and think that dissident opinions have no place in political speech.

    I certainly do not agree with everything the Gaurdian prints, but it is worth remembering that as it is a UK publication they have printed this knowing that if they can't prove every word they would be sued into oblivion for liable under the strong laws we have in the UK. We also have a slightly more regulated press than the you in the US in terms of a body that overseas them and force retractions if they print anything that is utterly made up.

    So with that in mind you can be fairly sure that there is a fair amount of substance to this story unlike half the crap that the right wing press in the US run with where your free speech laws allow them to just make stuff up. All you have to prove in the US is that although you printed a pack of lies you did not do it "maliciously". Since that maliciousness is almost impossible to prove in court the you can get away with far more.

    --
    I dont read /. to RTFA, I read /. to offend people in ignorance.