Coca Cola have partnered up with a dairy firm called Fairlife to launch a new brand of milk. “Who knew milk could be so spectacular?” purrs Fairlife CEO in this puke-inducing marketing video. Lactose free, with 50% more protein and calcium and half the sugar of regular milk, it seems Coca Cola hopes to re-brand itself as a caring, family-friendly firm with ties to small dairy farmers. Marketing campaigns use words like `natural´, `health´and `wellness´ to dupe us into thinking this milk is the best thing ever. It´s twice the price of the normal stuff, and they´ve designed some strange adverts to convince you that you really, really need to buy this. But don´t believe the hype, no matter how sexy their new ads are.
Fairlife has done a great job of convincing the public their product is safe, nutritious and natural. But a quick internet search exposes the pair as pro-GMO campaigners, like here in this short article by Sue Beckwith of enterprisingfarmers.com. Beckwith attended a conference called “How Technology is Bringing Back the Family Farm”, where Mike McCloskey of Fairlife gave a speech saying the organic industry should “embrace GMOs”. It wasn´t at all what she had expected from an event about sustainability and organic farming.
“Seriously, where is George Orwell when we need him?” Mused Beckwith on her site. “In my first day at the conference, I had many positive experiences. This panel wasn’t one of them. Mike McCloskey said today that he believes that the organic industry should embrace GMOs. I didn’t hear any others on the panel disagree with him.”
Beckwith smelled a rat and did some digging. She found that three of the four panelists on the conference work at Fairlife (they hadn´t disclosed this to the audience). “So this wasn’t really a panel discussion of differing perspectives at all and I feel cheated,” Beckwith writes. “It was a sales job for GMOs in organic foods (which was validated by the Monsanto Company tweeting approvingly of the panel at #farmfeed).”
The McCloskeys may masquerade as pro-natural, family farmers but this is clearly nothing more than a propaganda campaign to cover up their pro-GMO agenda. Sue Beckwith summed up the conference as “an hour long pseudo-discussion about how we can only feed the world with GMO’s”.
Suddenly, Coca Cola´s new product doesn´t seem so nutritious after all.
