Michele Simon is a public health lawyer specializing in industry marketing and lobbying tactics. She is the author of Appetite for Profit: How the Food Industry Undermines Our Health and How to Fight Back, and president of Eat Drink Politics, an indu
This week, food labor advocate Saru Jayaraman is releasing her new book, Behind the Kitchen Door, which relates heartbreaking stories of just some of the 10 million restaurant workers in
Recent reports of secret meetings among industry reps and the Food and Drug Adminstration over GMO labeling piqued my interest, mostly because this critical aspect was missing: any effort to
If you wanted to ensure a report gets buried, a good time to release it would be the Friday before a holiday week. That the Federal Trade Commission released its
The most under-reported and neglected aspect of the good food movement is the 20 million workers who toil every day — often under inhumane conditions — harvesting fields, killing and cutting up
California’s Proposition 37, which would have required labeling of GMO foods, died a painful death Tuesday night. Despite polling in mid-September showing an overwhelming lead, the measure lost by
Over the past few months, I’ve been writing about Proposition 37, the California initiative that would require foods made through genetic engineering to be labeled, a policy that is
To no one’s surprise, Beef Products Inc. (BPI) – maker of the ground beef product that took on the moniker of “pink slime” – filed a defamation lawsuit earlier this month
Today the New York City Board of Health approved Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s proposal to limit the size of sugary soft drinks. Motivated by rising diet-related chronic diseases (along with
The food industry really hates it when you compare them to Big Tobacco. They try to deny the negative association by claiming that food is different than tobacco. Of course
In case you had any doubt that California’s Prop 37 — which would require labeling of food containing genetically-modified organisms (GMOs) — is a significant threat to industry, a top food
As expected, the House version of the 2012 Farm Bill contains deep cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly called food stamps). With its $16 billion proposed cut
It’s hard not to get depressed over the politics of food these days, given the massive power of the food industry to influence everything from the farm bill to
