Coca-Cola Paid $1,000,000 to Make Sure You Don’t Know This
Coca-Cola has been having a rough time. The company owns Honest Tea,
Odwalla, Powerade, Vitamin Water, Simply Orange, and other products marketed to
health-conscious consumers. But it is best known for making Coke, a product
that is utterly devoid of nutritional value and is often blamed for
contributing to the obesity epidemic — an epidemic that is costing hundreds
of billions of dollars and causing hundreds of thousands of deaths each year.
With demand for the company’s carbonated and artificially flavored sugar
water declining, hope for Coca-Cola’s profitability has been increasingly
resting on the brands it markets as healthier alternatives. Bloomberg.com
reports that sales of Coca-Cola-owned brands like Honest Tea, Powerade,
and Simply Orange are the company’s new profit center.
But there’s a problem.
In October,
campaign finance reports revealed that Coca-Cola had
secretly contributed more than a million dollars to the fight against GMO
labeling in Washington. It took the state’s Attorney General suing the
Grocery Manufacturers’ Association (GMA) for what turned out to be an $11
million violation of the state’s campaign finance laws to reveal
these secret contributions. But now that the truth has been exposed, some
healthy food activists are fighting back.
Andrew Kimbrell, founder of the Center for Food Safety, comments:
Consumers of healthy beverages want to know what’s in their food. By using money from sales of natural brands to secretly fund an anti-choice agenda that deprives consumers of the right to know what they’re eating, Coca-Cola has been betraying the public interest and standing on the wrong side of history.
We at the Food Revolution Network agree. And we have
launched a petition on Change.org that calls for Coca-Cola to
stop funding anti GMO labeling campaigns. Check out and sign the petition here.
Coca-Cola’s CEO, Muhtar Kent, says, “We have… provided a tremendous
amount of choice to people.” But when it comes to the right to know if your
food was genetically engineered, Coca-Cola would apparently like to keep you in
the dark. According to reports, Honest Tea co-founder Seth
Goldman said as recently as September that “after internal
discussions,” Coca-Cola wouldn’t be “directly” funding efforts to
defeat I-522. Apparently Coca-Cola thought that allegedly
illegally laundering money through the Grocery Manufacturers’ Association
would keep their involvement a secret.
Honest Tea doesn’t look quite so honest when it’s being used to put an organic face
on an alleged money laundering scheme whose goal is keeping you from knowing if
your food is genetically engineered.
And what makes matters worse, Honest Tea proudly proclaims throughout
their website that they are GMO free — while their parent company
is actively working to prevent GMO labeling.
I wrote Coca-Cola asking if they intended to continue funding anti
GMO labeling campaigns. The company’s response was to repeat the anti-labeling
lobby’s talking points. They told me that Washington’s labeling initiative,
I-522, would: “Require tens of thousands of common food and beverage products
to be relabeled exclusively for Washington State unless they are remade with
higher-priced, specially developed ingredients. The measure will increase grocery
costs for a typical Washington family by hundreds of dollars per year.”These are charges that the nine-time Pulitzer Prize winning newspaper The Seattle Times called “mostly false” and that Consumers Union, publisher of Consumer Reports, flatly rejected.
In short, Coca-Cola not only tried to hide their contributions to the anti-labeling efforts in Washington, but they continue to try to deceive people about the actual realities of GMO labeling.
And they’re using sales of Honest Tea, Odwalla, Powerade, Vitamin Water, Simply Orange, and all their other brands, to finance their agenda.
Fortunately, you don’t have to fall for it.
Click here to add your name to the petition calling Coca-Cola to stop funding anti-labeling campaigns.
Source(s):
foodrevolution.org
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