The following is a statement from PBFA’s Executive Director Michele Simon:
The misleading and disingenuous ad from the ironically-named “Center for Consumer Freedom” that ran only in the Washington, DC television market last night during the Super Bowl is the latest example of the hypocrisy and absurdity of this front group and its well-heeled meat industry backers.
Rather than compete on a level playing field, the meat industry is using a notorious front group to smear innovative food companies making meat derived from plants.
The Center for Consumer Freedom is receiving untold millions of dollars from the meat industry – that much we can safely assume because that is how the group operates. (It began years ago with funding from Big Tobacco.) But we don’t know exactly who the funders are because they would rather remain secret and pay others to do its dirty work.
The smear campaign by the meat industry against plant-based foods is the height of hypocrisy. Meat from animals is far from the “one ingredient” found on the package of beef or pork or chicken in the grocery store.
The meat lobby, thanks to decades of influence-peddling in Washington, hides the fact that its product – meat derived from slaughtered animals – is in fact heavily processed: from artificial insemination to animals eating unnatural grain diets, to inhumane treatment and slaughter, to the use of processing aids (remember “pink slime”?).
Industrial animal production also comes with a parade of horribles that plant-based foods aim to displace: the overuse of antibiotics, environmental hazards and contributions to climate change, chronic disease, animal cruelty, and worker exploitation.
Ironically the group behind this shameless campaign has also criticized similar fearmongering when paid to do so by other sectors of the food lobby. Pay no attention to the hired guns fronting for an industry feeling threatened by changing consumer tastes. All that matters is the marketplace, and there plant-based foods are winning.