Well, it seems that this is not exactly breaking news, but I can no longer enjoy a guilt free bar of Green & Black’s chocolate either!
Whilst looking at a forum today on the subject of ” boycott Nestle this Easter ” I read that THE BODY SHOP sold itself to L’oreal in 2006 and L’oreal is part owned by NESTLE.
When cross checking this information on other site’s on the net, I came across this report in The Guardian
and also found that Green & Blacks is owned by Cadbury’s - Schweppes.
It seems to be the case now, that if you want to buy truly ethical products, not only do you have to check the conduct of the immediate company that the product is made from but, also to look deeper into the spiders web of which other companies have any sort of involvement in shares / partnership.
Well, at least I will have a damn good excuse to not attend any future Body Shop parties that I am asked along to in the future.
I thought that Anita Roddick had higher standards.
A couple of days ago, like thousands of other people, I received a Facebook invite, to join the group ” have a Nestle free Easter “. I joined without any hessitation, along with 14,766 other people.
I commend anyone’s actions, who chooses to buy a chocolate bar, displaying the “FAIR TRADE” logo, instead of a bar that does not have this ” it’s o.k to buy this as it has been ethically produced ” product.
BUT:
IS THAT WHAT THE LOGO REALLY REPRESENTS ?
Well, I had thought this to be the case, but after watching a recent Panorama documentary, ” Chocolate, The bitter truth “, I am not convinced. There does not appear to be any real change in Nestle’s, Cadbury’s or others conduct on this issue as we may believe, by the visual image of the fair trade logo on packaging.
Most of the world’s cocoa beans are grown in West Africa, predominantly in Ghana & The Ivory Coast.
Paul Timothy, went to West Africa to reveal how ” the worst forms of child labour ” was still being used in cocoa bean harvesting & had a website ” Paul Timothy Chocolate “, set up, so he could act as a credible dealer to conduct his investigations.
This is very dodgy territory for journalists, as there have been cases of journalists ” going missing ” in the past when reporting ” child trafficking ” in the past.
10 million people in Ghana & The Ivory Coast depend on the growing & harvesting of Cocoa. Both Governments profit from taxation from the industry. And the chocolate industry relies on both countries as together they produce 60% of the worlds cocoa.
In the very small country of Burkina Faso, which boarders Ghana & The Ivory Coast, the incomes are amongst the lowest in the world. Thousands of kids disappear from Burkina Faso each year.
In Burkina Faso, they understand French, so Paul Timothy was able to speak to some of the children working in Ghana , who the farmers claimed were from Ghanaian.
If a child is working on a cocoa farm, that is o.k if, they are not trafficked & they also get schooling, but the reality is that a very large number of kids are trafficked & have no schooling, they are not paid & they are often told that their parents are dead!
Most of the children seem to have a very well rehearsed line, if interviewed they say ” All children go to school & none of them work “.
Unfortunately, a lot of these children are trafficked by other family members, such as uncles, who are paid for the child’s labour at the end of a harvest. Some of the children are as young as 7 years old and are often working from 6am ’til 4pm using machete’s to cut down & split the cocoa husks.
The ILO, ( International Labour Organization ), states that trafficking is illegal & a serious breach of global standards. It also prohibits what it calls ” the worst forms of child labour “. It also prohibits any work ” likely to harm the health, safety or morals of children “, the use of ” hazardous tools “, and prohibits work that interferes with schooling.
A farmer, that was interviewed on Panorama, was suspended ( as well as other farmers ) after being found to be using child labour, to supply a large fair trade co-operative KUAPA KOKOO, who supplies cocoa for Cadbury’s fair trade chocolate.
Cadbury’s stated , it has not… ” sourced from any of the implicated societies, either prior to or during the suspension “. ” The fact that child labour issues were identified…is the evidence that fair trade certification process is working “.
Fair trade kit kats use cocoa purchased from several co-operatives around the Ivory Coast including the co-operative KAVOKIVA. One farmer who has supplied this co-operative said ” lot’s of farmers use child labour, it is normal. Some go to school, some don’t “.
Paul Timothy went to San Pedro, a major port where the majority of the worlds cocoa is shipped from, to see how easily the traceability of the beans he had acquired, could be sold on, to end up in our high street brands, with the source of the cocoa being untraceable”. This was easily done buy selling the cocoa onto licenced dealers along the roadside who did not need paperwork.
Wall Street Traders, can sell the cocoa, several times over, before it even reaches the Country. Some making $100 a minute & sometimes up to 1/2 a million dollars on a good day.
This would be o.k if the people growing & harvesting the crops for our luxury item had at least the basics that we take for granted, such as, electricity, running water & sanitation. Paul Timothy gave some cocoa workers, adult & children a kit kat to try. They liked it, but they had never even tasted chocolate before & live in very desperate conditions.
Paul Timothy took some of the cocoa back home to make some of his own label chocolate bars & brilliantly put the bars into his own wrappers, displaying on the front & back of the bars, a logo with a stick drawing of a child with a machete with child labour written on the logo and a tick beside the logo. On the back is written ” Every bar of this chocolate, has been made, at least in part, using the worst forms of child labour.” as defined by ILO ( convention 182 ).
When he showed members of the public, his chocolate bars & pointed out the logo, everyone responded with a shock reaction & they ALL said that they would boycott any chocolate if they KNEW it was made using child labour.
Eliot L Engel ( U.S Congressman ), when he was shown the wrapper said ” it was probably not a bad idea “.
Peter McAllister from the ( International Cocoa Initiative ), responded with a less than impressed response & a long winded spiel about traceability. But, the International Cocoa Initiative is partly funded by the chocolate industry, so not much surprise there.
Personally, I think the bottom line here is, should we have some kind of tax perhaps on our chocolate treat luxuries ? Would we all be happy to pay a few pence extra to have our chocolate fairly produced ? But how can this be done, in such a way, that we KNOW that it really is FAIR TRADE ???
This is an actual advert from the Soda Pop Board of America.
It looks a bit shocking now, but soda companies have not improved on their ugly marketing techniques. There just not quite so blatant about how they push their products on kids, to get them hooked for life.
Below is the text on the poster.
How soon to start?
Not soon enough. Laboratory tests over the last few years have proven that babies who start drinking soda during that early formative period have a much higher chance of gaining acceptance and “fitting in” during those awkward pre-teen and teen years. So, do yourself a favor. Do your child a favor. Start them on a strict regimen of sodas and other sugary carbonated beverages right now, for a lifetime of guaranteed happiness.
Food that fight stress, more like food that makes my blood boil !!!!!!!!!
I just finished my last post on here a couple of minutes ago & then opened an email that I got along with the email showing me the Greenpeace Kit Kat ad.
The link was about stress free foods & thought my brother had sent it, in case I needed inspiration for subject matter to write about.
Argh!!! It takes you to a page of 8 foods that fight stress. The second on the list is kit kat chocolate bars & if you click on it you see annother kit kat advert, showing it to be this thing that will make you feel all cozy & at peace with the world.
Well, it sure had an effect on my mood. But it was not soothing!
Nestlé is singled out for boycott action as monitoring shows it to be responsible for more violations of the requirements than any other company. ( Copied from Baby milk action.org )
Last night a friend had put a comment on facebook ” Why have a break with a Kit Kat, when you can have a break with a pint for 8 less calories”. Fair point. But I commented on liking his rationale, & that Nestle should be boycotted anyway & it is far better to support your local brewery.
My brother sent me a link today to a CNN report. “Greenpeace, Nestle battle in kit kat viral”.
(CNN) — A video clip which shows an office worker opening a Kit Kat chocolate bar and finding an orangutan’s finger has been re-posted on video-sharing Web site YouTube, a day after it was removed at the request of food giant Nestlé.
The viral campaign, which parodies a Kit Kat television commercial, was intended by Greenpeace to highlight how Nestlé buys palm oil — a key ingredient in many of its products — produced from the destroyed rainforest homes of the last orangutans in Indonesia.
Here is the video:
“The Greenpeace campaign will continue until Nestle has cut the Sinar Mas group from its supply chain. –John Sauven, Greenpeace UK
After watching this video & noticing that the Kit Kat on the video had a FAIR TRADE logo on the wrapper, I went to my nearest outlet for said confectionery, I found that YES INDEED, Kit Kat wrappers do display a FAIR TRADE LOGO. ABSOLUTELY SHOCKING!!!!!!!
I do of course intend to find out how & why they can get away with this. Perhaps Kit Kats are made using fair trade chocolate ( or some similar thing that would qualify them for the logo useage ),? but using palm oil from grossly deforested area’s is o.k. then?
I will do a seperate blog post on this when I have investigated this issue on what the rulings are for qualifying something to proudly boast an item as being fair trade.
You can’t really blame people for thinking that a Kit Kat, was perhaps an ethically o.k. chocolate snack to buy as bearing the fair trade logo, would OR SHOULD make you think that the ingredients were ethically sourced. Unfortunately, this is not the case, and people will consider the logo & probably see how many calories it contains to help them decide if that should be their snack of choice that they want to buy.
The 60-second clip ends with a play on Kit Kat’s famous slogan: “Have a break? Give orangutans a break.”
Give us a break as well. Give us decent laws on food labelling & advertising & let us then, be able to make an educated & informed choice on what we eat, what is in it & where it comes it come from.
I recently watched a BBC documentary called, Mischief: who made me fat?
Although this programme was excellently presented & well researched, it made me pretty angry ( especially the part about the olympic games, that I shall go into in a minute.
The programme was presented by Becca Wilcox & I have to admire her control during interviews & whilst being accosted by security guards.
One of the opening statements on the programme went something like this: fat people are a bigger threat to the economy than terrorism or global warming.
Well, The NHS spends 4.2 million on obesity & the ministry for health spends 75 million on tv & advertising campaigns such as their “change for life campaign”.
One example of the cost of tackling obesity was given about the fire brigade needing to get a fat man out of his house. They needed to build a ramp & close the road & the procedure took 5 hours to get him out.
Now to the bit that really annoyed me:
Olympic games:
Apparently, the only companies giving money to the 2012 London Olympic games are
Cadburys
McDonalds
& Coca-cola
Yep! healthy choices indeed. A diet consiting of that lot will surely turn you into a mean, lean olympic machiene!
Here are a couple of McDonalds olympic’s adverts:
The companies derive a “halo effect” by sponsoring such events ( not to mention making a huge amount of money & getting more kid’s hooked on the junk they call food ).
The ethos that has always been behind the olympic games since they begun is ” physical excellence “.
Becca Wilcox portrayed this well, with gathering a few less pysically excellent specimens and parading around the Olympic commitee offices as team GBB ( Great Big Britain ) and said ” Don’t take food from an athelete, they may be feeding you junk “.
Personally, I think that any athlete that helps these types of “junk food feeder” companies, should be disqualified for any olympic games.
Becca also sent a cracking letter to Lord Sebastian Coe about the sponsorship & in his reply he said that, The Olympic Commitee ” was proud to be associated with ” said companies. Well any respect I may have had for Sebastian Coe is gone.
Now, on the sponsorship front……………………….
Burger king sponsors NHS:
Yes, sad & hard to believe isn’t it. But enter your nearest NHS hospital and do not be too surprised if you see a Burger King in the foyer. I sadly have noticed this myself in the past, but apparently one of the best known hospitals in the UK, which is renown for it’s heart surgery ( I think it was Brookes Hopsital in Cambridge, but did not take enough notes at the time, probably due to shock! ) Has actually got printed in it’s directions on how to get to the heart surgery department ( I think it was ) turn left after the Burger King in the foyer. It was certainly something like that. The point is, how can they even consider printing such a thing, let alone allow a fast food chain within the hospital grounds.
Below is copied from a web page about the NHS Reading walk in centre, It doesn’t say much about Burger King but they do seem to like to name drop BK when they can.
Slough NHS walk in centre.
Reading Walk-in Health Centre is located on the first floor of the Broad Street Mall in Reading town centre and offers a wide range of GP-led services.
Reading Walk-in Health Centre is an 8am to 8pm service, open to registered and unregistered patients with or without an appointment, 365 days per year. Please note that after 5.00pm on Sundays when the Broad Street Mall is closed, entrance to the Centre is only possible using the door near to Burger King.
( I wonder how much longer it will be a walk- in centre rather than a roll- in centre , or being hoisted by a crane-in centre )
The NHS seem to be obsessed with promoting burgers.
And from the British Heart Foudations website:
12/02/2010
Responsible approach to portion size needed
In response to an enquiry regarding a new ‘double Angus three cheese burger’ being sold at Burger King restaurants Victoria Taylor, Senior Heart Health Dietitian at the British Heart Foundation (BHF) said:
“A responsible approach to portion size is vital to the promotion of healthier diets and never more so than in meals that are high in saturated fat.
“Although both the standard and double versions of this burger are high in saturated fat, going for the double Angus three cheese burger would provide an adult woman with her entire daily saturated fat allowance and half her daily calorie limit, and that’s without adding in chips and a sugary fizzy drink.
“Consumers need to use nutritional information available to them to help make healthier choices and be wary of going large – as they could get more than they bargained for.”
Is it just me, or is that an increadibly lame response. No mention of home cooked meals, eating fruit & vegetables & that junk food should not really be eaten at all.
No wonder, chairs are being made ( & there is demand for them ) to accomodate people of 70 stone!
It has been a shameful amount of time since my last post on this site. This has been due to a few things out with my control, such as neighbours from hell living above me, making sleep & normal everyday function in my home more than a bit difficult. They have now left & I have peace in my home again.
Also, I recently changed my work life & worked for the last 3 months in a care home, which I really enjoyed & although I was promised a full time contract ( as they were well aware that I am registered disabled with spinal damage ) It never transpired, so I was unfairly dismissed last week from a job that I believed would be ethical.
So much can be out with our control in this world, but consumer supply & demand is shamefully misleading & I am now going to be concentrating on adding regular content to this site as we all have the right to know what we are consuming.
Apologies for the long absence to anyone who may have wondered why my blog had stopped. I intend to post 2-3 times a week as from today.
There is an increadible book that I first read a couple of years ago. The book is NOT ON THE LABEL by FELICITY LAWRENCE. Reading this book WILL make you think twice about what you buy to consume & may put you off eating some things completely, for life.
I re-read the chapter on chicken this week & want to share some of the information given in this book. Felicity exposes some of the grossly unethical conduct of the meat industry, by doing undercover investigations & even taking low paid shifts in meat production factories to gain the inside knowledge of what actually happens to the meat that we eat. So often blissfully unaware , we often are, of what has happened to our meat before it goes anywhere near a packing factory or supermarket shelf. Felicity is /was a reporter for The Guardian Newspaper & writes very factually about her investigations.
In the early stages of poultry processing, the birds are put into a scold bath. 180 dead birds a minute are dipped into this to make the plucking process easier. The water in the scald bath is changed, just once a day so try to imagine if you wish, the amount of excrement & feathers that float around in the bath for hours. The temperature of the bath is 52 degrees, which is an ideal temperature for salmonella & campylobacter contamination.
During the next stage our chickens are ridded of what feathers are left by a rubber fingered plucking machiene. Lots of faeces gets squashed out of the carcasses during this process. If just one of these birds is colonised with campylobacter the rest will be contaminated also. Organic & free range birds go through the same process, same machienes, same day, no less at risk of contamination than mass the produced, cheap, factory chicks.
Felicity went undercover, on shift, at a family run, Devon factory whilst doing a report for The Guardian. This factory supplied to Sainsburys & also produced West Country & Organic Poultry for supermarket sales. Their website quotes ” total control & traceability “. Word had gotten out that chicken breasts from Dutch crates had been seen there, re packed, labeled with new use by dates & sent out for a Sainsburys special offer. A Brittish red tractor logo stuck onto them to identify the meat for un suspecting shopper to buy. Under UK food labeling law it is NOT ILLEGAL to label foreign meat with a Brittish red tractor logo as long as the meat is from the EU.
Annother company, Denby Poultry was annonymosly tipped off to Derbyshires Chief Envorionmental Officer. The caller reported that Denby Poultry was taking condemned chicken, diseased & contaminated birds ( which should have been sent for rendering or for pet food production ) . Denby Poultry was trimming it, washing it with bleach and selling it back to the human food chain. Denby poultry products was a pet food processing plant. It sold, cleaned up, waste meats to annother company who applied illigitamate health marks before selling it again to other companies. The owner of Denby poultry was found guilty in his absence at Nottingham Crown Court ( suspected of having fled the country ).
The tumbling industry is even more scary. Tumbling is the process where the ” bulking up ” of a chicken takes place. Most of this takes place in The Netherlands as chickens arrive their from Thailand & Brazil via Dutch ports.The chickens are often salted, as the tarrif on salted meats is significantly lower than that of unsalted. Tumbling helps to dilute the salt. During the tumbling process chickens are defrosted, then injected with additives & water & tumbled in huge, concrete mixer type machienes. Then they are re frozed and shipped for further processing. Tests conducted by Hull City Council & The FSA have found chicken breasts that have contained pork & beef waste & hydrolyzed proteins. Hydrolyzed proteins are skin, hyde, bone even ligaments and feathers, where the proteins are extracted through exposure to high temperatures or by chemical hydrolysis. Yep! then it’s injected into a chicken. Yum! By the way, adding proteins from other animals is NOT ILLEGAL either. Some of the concerns & implications of this are, with alduterated beef waste in our chickens, could that spread BSE ? With antibotics being injected into our chickens, is that lowering our human tollerance to antibotics ? And with pork being added to chickens that have even been labeled ” halal ” is that not an outragous abuse & insult to Hindus & Muslims?
We have the right to know what is in our food. The governments do not protect us on this issue and despot supermarkets have outragous levels of control.
The chapters in this book are: 1) chicken, 2) salad, 3) beans, 4) bread, 5) apples and bananas, 6) coffee & prawns 7) the ready meal. All the chapters listed have raised my eyebrow several times at what the food industry gets away with.
I remembered one of my favorite stories earlier, and as it is about a rabbit, and a rabbit can be food, so I saw no reason not to share this story in my blog.
It is a true story, told to me by an ex work collegue.
My friend James went to visit his sister in Lake Tahoe.
One night when he was there, he was in the pub and a bunch of guys invited him to go hunting with them in the bush the following day.
James accepted the offer and in the morning met up with the 5 men. They headed off on a long drive into the middle of nowhere, then eventually stopped at a cicular clearing surrounded by bush.
James got on well with the other 4 passengers, but did not take so well to the fat, obnoctious driver.
The driver got out of his landrover & said to the other guys ” wouldn’t it be funny to strap a stick of dynamite to a rabbit & blow it up”.
The other guys were all appauled at the comment & suggested that it would be a really sick thing to do & ” please don’t ”
The driver ignored them & got a stick of dynamite from the back of the veich. He then went around the edge of the bush & soon went back to the other 4 men with a rabbit in his hands.
He proceeded to tape the stick of dynamite to the poor rabbits back, then lit the fuse & put the rabit on the ground.
The rabbit went hop, hop, hop, hop, hop went underneath the landrover & blew it to pieces.
Ha, Ha, got to love that bunnies style. I’m going to die but i’m going to stuff you first!
Every day over 1 billion bottles or cans of coca-cola are comsumed, that equals 12,500 every second. Thats a lot of cola! They spend a whopping $2 billion a year promoting themselves with a healthy, wholesome image. Sponoring a range of sporting events such as the world cup and the olympic games. Remember the world cup 2002 & they were exposed for using child labour for stitching the “coca-cola footballs”. As if adding aspartame to their diet drinks wasn’t apauling enough coca-cola are responsible for a lot more when it comes down to sickening entire nations from the production & comsumption of their “oh so lovelly fizzy drinks. ” live on the coke side of life” NO THANKS.
It takes almost 3 litres of water to produce 1 litre of coke. Think of all the industrial cleaning involved,and they control aquifiers in communities around the globe. They give a very negative impact on farmers & communities where there is short enough rainfall for the peoples needs. Protesters in Varanasi in India peacefully marched to a coca-cola plant to demand it’s closure and were beaten & jailed by armed police in November 2004. The people of Varanasi in Utta Pradesh said that the companys activities were causing wells to dry & harvests to be poor. And that is alongside the fact that coca-cola plants produce a sludge like waste that contains toxic chemicals like cadmium and lead and levels of DDT 9 times higher than the EU limit. Yep, no wonder there are so many starving people in this world. Greedy, corporate suckers taking peoples livelyhoods & health with no shame.
Shame on them.
There is a free booklet report on coca-cola and it’s conduct on the “war on want” website. This will also go into coca-colas conduct in Guatemala and mentions, threats, arrests, kidnaps, shootings and torture.A bit of light reading. But the adverts for this wholesome, happy drink that shares the love around the world still work. I am feeling a little uptight now… To read more about coca-cola here are a couple of webistes:
