Reaction from both sides of the food freedom debate continues to roll in after the defeat of soda tax ballot measures in the California cities of El Monte and Richmond and the failure of a statewide initiative to label some foods produced using biotechnology. One columnist who saw the measures as unnecessary suggested that voters didn’t want to fix what wasn’t broken. He noted, “No one is dropping dead from genetically engineered food, and customers concerned about sugar intake don’t need a new tax to keep them from drinking soft drinks.” Meanwhile, New York Times food snob Mark Bittman doesn’t think getting whipped by a two-to-one margin is necessarily a failure. We’ll let him have as many non-failures of that kind as he wants.- PETA and other animal rights groups were thrilled this summer when NFL running back Arian Foster declared himself a vegan. Unfortunately for animal rights groups, he isn’t anymore, at least according to a statement he gave to the Houston Chronicle. Saying, “I’m not in a cult,” Foster admitted that while he doesn’t eat animal products very often, he does occasionally partake of chicken. We hope he enjoys whatever he’s eating.
- You might remember the anti-soda campaign that the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) launched last month, created by Alex Bogusky. Well, it turns out that not all sugared beverages are equally deserving of Bogusky’s opprobrium, because he’s now cutting ads for SodaStream, a soft drinks company that sells sugar-sweetened varieties. Bogusky isn’t the first CSPI-linked person or group to display hypocrisy: CSPI itself recently bashed companies for justifying claims based on animal studies while publishing a report loaded with animal-derived results, just to name one.
- CCF in the News: In the wake of President Obama’s re-election, the so-called Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) is asking him to give up meat. The Hill noted that we asked the vegan activist group to lay off when they bashed Obama back in May, and we stand by that. We’re also telling readers of the Kansas City Star that “candy equals crack” is a dubious comparison and our HumaneWatch project is holding Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) CEO Wayne Pacelle to account for his PETA-like statement on pets.
- CCF This Week: In our daily posts this week, we covered the food initiatives on California ballots (and their failure), warned that methodologically problematic studies could lead to increases in proposals to ban restaurants from parts of cities, and reported on a European court delivering a smack-down on one of PETA’s most disgusting campaigns (and how its former director failed up in the perverse world of animal rights to become Food Policy Director of HSUS).
