Anna Lappe

Who’s behind the USFRA?

National bestselling author, sustainable food advocate, & mom / Founding principal of Small Planet Institute & Small Planet Fund, Oct 04, 11.

Tagged with food, industry, farmers, ranchers, lobbyists

The USFRA describes the Food Dialogues, and their broader multimillion dollar media campaign, as an effort to amplify the voice of farmers and ranchers and help consumers know more about “how their food is grown and raised.”

Sounds good, on first blush.

Most of us are in the dark when it comes to the story of our food. And, farmers and ranchers—the people working hard every day to bring us our food—are nearly invisible in mainstream media. But dig into the Alliance’s membership, and its impetus for forming, and you start to wonder whether it truly represents the voices of grassroots food producers or whether this well-funded media campaign is agribusinesses latest attempt to push back against well-documented and well-publicized concerns about the environmental and health consequences of industrial agriculture.

When I asked a rep from Ketchum—the public relations firm hired by the Alliance—what motivated these groups to come together, without skipping a beat, he answered: Food, Inc. and movies like it. “People see Food, Inc.,” he said, “And think everything in that movie is accurate.” But, he continued, the film only presents one side of the issue and USFRA members feel they didn’t “have a voice in it.” Now, as the Ketchum rep put it, USFRA wants to “clear the air” and “get a national dialogue, a conversation, going.”

There are two big holes in this argument: Robert Kenner, the director of Food, Inc. did try to get industry voices into the film. And, while USFRA members may not like it, Food, Inc. is an accurate, if unpleasant, account of our industrial, toxic food system.

When I mentioned that Kenner approached many food companies to get their perspective, and they refused to go on camera, the PR rep said: “I’ll be honest with you: this is a change with how they’ve done things in the past. They’re trying to open their doors up.”

While these industry players may be saying they want to “open their doors up,” it seems only on their terms. Certainly the Food Dialogues event gave a semblance of impartiality: Highly credentialed journalist Claire Shipman of Good Morning America moderated from a satellite location in D.C. and celebrity chef John Besh hosted the panel in New York City.

But the reality was an orchestrated framing of the message about “modern agricultural production” from the perspective of big business. In the staged kitchen set at the New York City, the questions from the “audience” included only one: a prearranged question from the head of the National Pork Board. In D.C., Jay Vroom, from the agrochemical trade association CropLife America, was handpicked to join in the “conversation” and lob a softball question to John Besh about chefs and portion control.

Full Story: Who’s behind the U.S. Farmers & Ranchers Alliance and why it matters
Source: Grist, September 26, 2011

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