A link to this New York Times article showed up in one of my RSS feeds the other day. I don’t read the New York Times very much, and if this article is an indication of their current level of journalism, this must be the reason.
A few years ago in Europe they changed the rules in most countries concerning advertising in government funded media. It used to be banner advertising was allowed, but embedded advertising was generally not allowed. Embedded advertising is when a media company accepts payment for publishing an article. At first the amount of garbage that was showing up in the media here was so overwhelming and so offensive, people complained loudly. Now it’s a little less offensive, but still there. In America it’s been the norm for decades. I think for many of us here in Europe, the before and after picture of this rule change has been a real eye-opener.
The article above immediately set off my bullshit detector, and it stands out as a perfect example of the misinformation published these days by the food industry as embedded advertising. It’s almost written in Michael Pollan style.
In Europe the food industry recently spent a record setting €1 billion requiring new labelling on foods, listing ‘nutritional analysis’ such as fats, sugars, carbohydrates and so on. This article shows perfectly how the food industry manipulates our perception of food, into thinking they are the good guys and how they are trying to make healthy food for us. This article is a perfect example of how we’re supposed to learn to eat more processed foods.
The one thing I do agree with this article on is their comparison of themselves with the tobacco lobby of a decade or two ago. In many ways the food industry is much more powerful than the tobacco lobby ever was, and food is after all something we all need to eat. It’s nice to see them giving us proof, in their own words, of how we need to take them more seriously than we have ever taken the tobacco industry.
