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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.
This all sounds like what many companies would do when faced with an upstart competitor - basically what's known as "playing hardball".
If this Hampton Creek company is backed by some of the "biggest names" in Silicon Valley, isn't it well-positioned financially to respond? This doesn't exactly sound like David vs. Goliath.
As an aside - is there such a thing as "Big Egg"? We buy ours from a local farm.
#DeleteChrome
I'm strongly in favor of eggs. Go eggs.
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.
I think they are saying the board is funded by government. So basically your taxes are being used top fund bloggers to pay about eggs to hopefully surpress innovation.
If a person did this...
Did what? Public relations? Advertise?
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?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
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.)
Did what? Public relations? Advertise?
The AEB is a taxpayer funded organization, so yes, running PR, misleading advertising campaigns, and undermining a private company, with my tax dollars is inappropriate.
The Egg Board is an advocate for the consumption of eggs. What's the problem?
This article seems more like a slashvertisement for Hampton Creek
The problem is a fraud on the public. Advocating a position that is based on who pays you, without regard to reason or truth or the benefit to mankind, without so much as a notice of your bias, causes massive amounts of harm to the public by sustaining inefficient practices.
It is perhaps the single most harmful activity to society a person can engage in--it wastes other people's lives. It perpetuates the spread of misinformation.
And it is fundamentally contrary to the ideals of Nerds, Geeks, and those who believe in the potential of science and information to help mankind get out of the mess we've made of our world and our societies.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
"The result is that they try to make us feel guilty for eating eggs, drinking milk and even chewing on imported fruits."
It's a yolk we have to bear.
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.
And use Bourbon instead of milk, not to mention following your cereal with a cigarette, to give you that proper "ultimate power breakfast" feeling :)
Sky subscribers are morons. They pay to be advertised at !
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.
It's an extension of conservative absolutism. When presented with a solution that came from anywhere but the echo chamber, the right dismisses anything that isn't a magic bullet that fixes it 100% without any side effects.
I realize that's me calling the kettle black when I refer to the "right" as a monolithic entity, but the general philosophy is to dismiss anything that wasn't their idea, or is too complicated to think about in terms of shades of grey. Conservatives tend to latch on to the simple, ideological solutions without any concern for anything they don't care about. For example: It's all well and good that Trump wants to deport 12 million people. That's an attractive sound bite that fits nicely on a bumper sticker, but it ignores how complex the issue is. Complexity tends to mean expensive. Who's going to pay for identifying and rounding up all those folks? Where are they processed for deportation? How do we transport them to the border? Who replaces the cheap labor that the agricultural industry relies on? I find that they refuse to see the world as it is, but how they think it should be.
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
Absolutely. In fact, one egg and 2 slices of bacon is what I eat for breakfast if I'm organized enough (which unfortunately I'm not usually) to ensure it's all in the house when I need it, and that I have time to cook it. And I feel physically better and have enough energy in the morning.
By comparison, a bowl of cereal, even a traditional one (ie milk and cornflakes or rice krispies) will ensure I have a sugar crash roundabout 10-11am, and I'm lethargic in the mean time.
The end result? I usually don't eat breakfast... (let's not kid ourselves though, it isn't the most important meal of the day. Nowhere near.)
As for the article, I must admit to thinking a great deal of it is complete crap, with fairly normal and entirely reasonable things spun as being part of a conspiracy. The board that promotes eggs on behalf of the dairy industry saw a commercial threat to eggs and... paid food bloggers to post recipes that used eggs whose funding was disclosed in each post? And was upset about another chef who posted a blog entry that disparaged egg production so contacted him to correct what they saw as wrong information? And someone who didn't work for them but was connected to them advised a company that made Mayonnaise to contact a more suitable body, such as the FDA, about a labeling issue with said rival?
Well my ghasts are truly flabbered. What a scandal you have there Guardian, truly on the same level as the Snowden affair or Cash for Questions. Not.
(The shame is I've seen what are almost certainly campaigns by entrenched industries to destroy competitors that misuse, for example, environmental groups, local media, etc, in secret with no investigation by anyone. Here a group is very open about what they're funding and saying, isn't manipulating the media or independent pressure groups, but apparently that's worthy of treating as scandalous.)
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.