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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
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 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 !
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.
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.
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.
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?