Don't look for any mention of Romney's ties to Carlyle or the Equity Club lawsuit nor ties to the corporate welfare system of subsidizing corn and dairy products from Monsanto.
No, there's not enough available in public documents to touch on the hypocrisy of promoting an agenda of change. Not a chance the public will catch wind of those issues when the big money is in keeping the junk foods going into consumers grocery carts and the subsidies going to Wall Street insider pockets.
Maybe the article is even a little self serving, since the author of this bit of poison penmanship, Kim Severson wrote a cookbook that could be used as a marketing tool for Monsanto's first gmo seed product, aimed at tapping into the consumers awareness of the dangers of trans fats.
It's impossible to know if Severson has any awareness of the upside to the new gmo soy being a perfect fit for her Trans Fat Solution cookbook, because the quality of the research in the attack half of the piece is so poor.
Who knows if the cookbook is even anything decent, since Ten Speed Press who publishes it, doesn't list Severson's title on its banner titles along with these notables, White Trash Cooking, How to Sh*t in the Woods, Why Cats Paint, Cannabible, and Furry Logic. It is hard to guess where Severson's talent falls with a feature list like that, but it is a judgement that is best left to the readers.
According to the biography posted at the Times Severson spent seven years in Alaska as a restaurant critic. It is unclear to me how the author sees fit to pass judgment on the viability of the theories of food science but apparently her concerns are one sided. She does have a cookbook about trans fats and that makes her, what?
Well it makes her qualified to repeat the mainstream talking points and it seems that in this case that's what was required. This begins with the Allergy Kids founder's summary point as reported in Severson's article before launching into the agribusiness side of the story.
“It was absolutely terrifying to unearth this story,” she said over lunch at a restaurant in Boulder, Colo. “These big food companies have an intimate relationship with every household in America, and they are making our children sick. I was rocked. You don’t want to hear that this has actually happened.”
But has it? ...
But her biggest asset might be a relentless drive to wind together obscure health theories, blog postings and corporate financial statements. She then posts her analyses on her Web site.
She chides top allergy doctors who are connected to Monsanto, the producer of herbicides and genetically modified seeds. She asserts that the Food Allergy and Anaphylaxis Network, the nation’s leading food allergy advocacy group, is tainted by the money it receives from food manufacturers and peanut growers.
While every connection to corporate money does not make information from a source biased, there is the well documented effect of finding what you look for. Corporate funding of studies tends to produce support for products and positions but that doesn't enter the discussion for the author.
Doing the Times article Severson uses the well known and well funded FAAN as her alternate view and makes no effort at all to investigate the validity of the claims she tosses off as O'Brien's unfounded theories. Severson defaults to the mainstream position.
Anne Muñoz-Furlong founded the network in 1991 after her daughter was found to have milk and egg allergies. She said the group now has 30,000 members and a $5.6 million budget.
Although Kraft did help the organization start its Web site and other food manufacturing companies and trade groups sponsor some of its programs, that support has amounted to about $100,000. Mrs. Muñoz-Furlong said that she and doctors on her medical board do not believe that genetically modified foods cause food allergies
Okay, that might sound reasonable. There seems to be no publicly available information on the funders but we can take the claim as true and attribute the mega million dollar budget to allergy sufferers. Though the figure of $5.6 million seems to fly in the face of claims that the problem of food allergies is not growing and the group just has very generous regular supporters.
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