Kraft, Sara Lee make play for green crowd

[OKIsItJustMe]

http://www.chicagobusiness.com/cgi-bin/news.pl?id=27918&seenIt=1

Kraft, Sara Lee make play for green crowd

Kraft Foods Inc. uses a cream cheese byproduct to help power a New York plant. Sara Lee Corp. plans to run a New Mexico bakery using solar energy.

Al Gore's campaign against global warming is turning up the heat on the food industry. After years of taking on the oil and coal companies, environmental organizations are scrutinizing the makers of Oreos and Jimmy Dean sausages, and that's attracting the attention of consumers and investors.

Fearing retribution from environmentalists that could taint their brands, Kraft and Sara Lee are among companies responding by reducing the amount of energy and water they use.

"CEOs ignore this environmental movement at their own peril," says Steve Hellem, executive director of the Global Environmental Management Initiative, a Washington, D.C.-based non-profit organization whose members include Kraft and other large corporations.

"If a company is identified as environmentally irresponsible, it will hurt their reputation and brands. The food companies know they need to focus on this, but they are still trying to figure out what to do."

...

[NNadir]

1. I always have to laugh when Phillip Morris feigns a social conscience.

After my father's death, I never ate Cheezewiz again.

[bananas]

3. Another victim of Hill & Knowlton

In December 1953, H&K designed the tobacco industry's strategy for counteracting scientific evidence which linked cigarette smoking to lung cancer, authoring The Frank Statement <1> to the public printed throughout the USA in January 1954. H&K also helped organize the Council for Tobacco Research <2>. As a result, H&K was named a co-defendant of Philip Morris in numerous tobacco lawsuits.
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Hill_%26_Knowlton

For example, in February 1993 H&K drafted a 16-page memo for the world's largest private tobacco company, Philip Morris (PM), on the challenges it was facing to its operations in Asia. In its report, H&K was open about tobacco's deadly toll. "Overall, the current three million global deaths (mostly in the wealthier nations of the world) attributed to smoking will rise to 10 million by 2025. Seven of these 10 million will be in the developing countries and most will be in Asia, activists claim," the firm wrote. Significantly, H&K didn't dispute the numbers or address the moral dimensions of PM's share of the death toll. The firm simply flagged that the "challenge for the tobacco industry is maintaining its customer base in the face of strong challenges."
http://www.prwatch.org/node/6356

The tobacco industry has waged a fifty year campaign to hide the health effects of smoking. In 2005, the US Department of Justice's legal case, asking for a staggering $280 billion in damages, finally reached court. They argued that the tobacco industry carried out a fifty year campaign of deception. At its heart was Hill and Knolwton. An Executive Summary of Preliminary Findings noted: <7>

At the end of 1953, the chief executives of the five major cigarette manufacturers in the United States at the time - Philip Morris, R.J. Reynolds, Brown & Williamson, Lorillard, and American - met at the Plaza Hotel in New York City with representatives of the public relations firm Hill & Knowlton and agreed to jointly conduct a long term public relations campaign to counter the growing evidence linking smoking as a cause of serious diseases. The meeting spawned an association-in-fact enterprise to execute a fraudulent scheme in furtherance of their overriding common objective - to preserve and enhance the tobacco industry's profits by maximizing the numbers of smokers and number of cigarettes smoked and to avoid adverse liability judgements. The fraudulent scheme would continue for the next five decades.

One of the tactics was to create a controversy over health where there was not one. For example one Hill and Knowlton memo from the sixties says: "The most important type of story is that which casts doubt in the cause and effect theory of disease and smoking". Eye-grabbing headlines were needed and "should strongly call out the point - Controversy! Contradiction! Other Factors! Unknowns!" <8>
http://www.nuclearspin.org/index.php/Hill_&_Knowlton

A Frank Statement to Cigarette Smokers
As it appeared in the New York Times and
over 400 other newspapers on January 4, 1954
http://www.tobacco.neu.edu/litigation/cases/supportdocs/frank_ad.htm

[NNadir]

4. There was absolutely no reason for any literate person to believe that smoking was safe.

When I was a child, my mom would give me money to buy my old man a carton of unfiltered Phillip Morrises. That stopped in 1964 with the surgeon general's report.

We all knew that cigarettes would kill my old man. He knew it too. It's hardly the case that any literate person believed a single word put out by the cigarette companies after 1964.

I am completely familiar with the denial of science from my work here and elsewhere. It's not like there is fucking person left on this planet who knows that coal is bad for you, for instance, but I hear a lot of illiterate anti-scientific propaganda from brainless types to the contrary.

The scientific literature is full of reports on the external cost of energy, but there is a lot of "renewables will save us" crapola written here in any case.

Anybody who tells you that he is influenced by marketing and controlled by marketing is merely confessing that he or she is incapable of critical thinking or, equally as probable, merely lazy and in denial.

[LiberalEsto]

2. Green cheese

is what they'll start pushing.