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junk food processed

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see restaurant fast food

aha yikes, is this why we can't get regs?

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alternet-no lnx

The Supreme Court's wealth-driven corruption crisis

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito is seen after a swearing in ceremony for Mark Esper to be the new U.S. Secretary of Defense July 23, 2019 in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

Thom Hartmann May 17, 2024

Is there a way to reverse the decision by five Republicans on the Supreme Court that it’s OK for billionaires and big corporations to bribe politicians?

Americans are watching with increasing shock and dismay:

— President Biden tried to knock up to $20,000 off the debt of every person in the country with a student loan. Republicans decided this might somehow, someday mean fewer profits for banks — who financially support the GOP — so they sued at the Supreme Court. The Republican appointees on the Court, over the objections of the three Democratic appointees, killed the president’s effort without providing any cogent constitutional rationalization.

— Scientists have developed lab-grown meat that is healthier, easier on the planet, and, when manufactured at scale, cheaper than beef, pork, or chicken. The animal ag industry freaked out and threw a bunch of cash at Republican members of Congress, who are now trying to outlaw the product before the companies developing it can get to scale. Even the buggywhip makers back in the day didn’t think the way to protect their industry was to buy off politicians (of course that was before five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court legalized political bribery).

— Climate change is devastating our planet and fine particle emissions from trucks cause hundreds of thousands of deaths and illnesses from heart disease, COPD, asthma, and cancer every year. To solve the problem, the EPA put forward new truck emission standards that will phase in between 2027 and 2032. This week, twenty-seven Republican-controlled states whose politicians take money from the fossil fuel industry sued to block the rules and protect the profits of the trucking and petroleum industries.

— Title IX of the federal code, which forbids gender-based discrimination in education, is being extended by the Department of Education to protect members of the queer community. Rightwing Christian groups, which provide billions of dollars and millions of votes to Republicans, pinged state-level politicians, so now Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, Tennessee, and Oklahoma have filed suit before hand-picked rightwing judges to allow schools to legally trash LGBTQ+ students.

— The Consumer Finance Protection Bureau (CFPB) promulgated a new rule limiting credit card late fees to $8 each, protecting America’s most vulnerable families. The banks pulled the GOP’s chain and Republican senators Tim Scott, John Thune, John Barrasso, Jerry Moran, John Boozman, Steve Daines, Mike Rounds, Thom Tillis, Marsha Blackburn, Kevin Cramer, Mike Braun, Bill Hagerty, and Katie Britt introduced legislation to reverse the policy and allow banks to again screw low-income people.

— In 2003, George W. Bush signed legislation to privatize Medicare through the so-called Medicare Advantage scam, which last year overcharged our government more than $140 billion while denying millions of claims from Americans unfortunate enough to have signed up for it. Republicans on the take from the insurance industry are now pushing a plan to gut or even shut down real Medicare, leaving all seniors to the tender mercies of this predatory industry.

— Ultra-processed foods are accused of causing obesity, diabetes, cancer, and host of other illnesses both physical and mental: American children, who consume as much as two-thirds of their calories from these products, are experiencing an epidemic of obesity and diseases associated with it. With Republican politicians running interference for them, the processed food industry has now succeeded in getting their ultra-processed “food” products placed in thousands of school lunch programs, paid for with our tax dollars. As The Washington Post noted a few months ago, “Republicans have continued to fight stricter standards” and, “Some Republicans are now threatening to block the USDA from further limiting sodium and reducing added sugar in milk…”

Increasingly, Americans are realizing the cancer eating our democracy is the power of great wealth and Supreme Court-legalized political bribery.

But what can we do?

In a 1978 Republican-only decision written by Lewis Powell (author of the notorious “Powell Memo” which told rich people how to take over our politics, schools, media, and courts), five corrupt members of the Supreme Court ruled that corporations are “persons” with full access to the Bill of Rights, including the First Amendment right of free speech. They added that money is the same thing as “free speech,” legalizing political bribery by both billionaires and giant corporations.

In 2010, five other Republicans on the Court doubled down on that Bellotti decision with Citizens United, which overturned hundreds of good government and anti-bribery laws, some dating all the way back to the 19th century. As a result, it’s almost impossible to prosecute any but the most obvious and egregious examples of bribery (see: Menendez) of both American politicians and judges, including billionaires and religious corporations blatantly bribing Supreme Court justices.

Clarence Thomas and Sam Alito openly flaunt the gifts they receive from wealthy interests with business before the Court, as Trump fangirl Aileen Cannon and hundreds of other federal and state court judges are routinely wined and dined at luxury resorts. As long as they continue to rule the way the morbidly rich want and bribery continues to be legal, it appears the gravy train will never end.

Unless we do something about it.

Every single one of these problems — and hundreds more — continue to exist in the face of overwhelming public disapproval because one or another industry or group of rightwing billionaires has been empowered by the Supreme Court’s Bellotti and Citizens United decisions to bribe politicians and judges.

Democrats in Congress must reverse those bizarre, democracy-destroying decisions with a new law declaring an end to this American political crime spree. If they retake the House and hold the Senate and White House this fall, it’ll be their opportunity to re-criminalize bribery of elected officials.

To do that, they need to defy the Court’s declaration that money is “free speech” and corporations are “persons.” That defiance requires something called “court-stripping.”

Republicans understand exactly what I’m talking about: Since the 1950s, they’ve introduced hundreds of pieces of court-stripping legislation. They tried to do the same thing most recently in 2005 with the Marriage Protection Act, which passed the House of Representatives on July 22, 2004.

That law, designed to override Supreme Court protections of LGBTQ+ people, contained the following court-stripping paragraph:

“No court created by Act of Congress shall have any jurisdiction, and the Supreme Court shall have no appellate jurisdiction, to hear or decide any question pertaining to the interpretation of, or the validity under the Constitution of, section 1738C or this section.”

In other words, Congress wrote, the Supreme Court has no say in the matter of this particular legislation.

The Marriage Protection Act died in the Senate, but it’s one of hundreds of pieces of court-stripping legislation introduced — almost all by Republicans (House Whip Tom Delay was the master of this) — in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decisions in Brown v Board and Roe v Wade.

This process of “court-stripping” is based in Article 3, Section 2 of the US Constitution, which says:

“[T]he supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make.”

Regulations? Exceptions?!?

Turns out, the Constitution says Congress can regulate the Court by, for example, expanding the number of its members, determining if Court hearings must be public/televised, or if they must live by a Judicial Code of Conduct (among other things).

Congress should be doing all these things as soon as possible.

Additionally, Congress can create what the Constitution calls “Exceptions” to the things the Court can rule on.

In today’s crisis, Congress could say, “Supreme Court, you may no longer rule on whether money in politics is ‘free speech.’ We’re taking that power from you because the Constitution gives it to us and you have screwed it up so badly.”

And, it turns out, Congress has already gone there, most recently creating exceptions to what our courts may do in a law that was passed and signed by President Bush the very next year: The Detainee Treatment Act of 2005.

That law explicitly strips from federal courts — including the Supreme Court — their power to hear appeals against the Bush administration detaining, torturing, imprisoning in Guantanamo, or even killing suspected Muslim terrorists. It says:

“[N]o court, justice, or judge shall have jurisdiction to hear or consider an application for a writ of habeas corpus filed by or on behalf of an alien detained by the Department of Defense at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba…”

And that’s just the beginning. There’s even, as the Brennan Center notes, a court-stripping provision in the PATRIOT act of 2001. I lay out dozens of other examples and a history of court-stripping that extends back to the presidency of Thomas Jefferson — an outspoken advocate or reducing the power of the Supreme Court — in The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America.

As House Speaker Tom Delay said back in the days of his court-stripping Marriage Protection Act: “Judges need to be intimidated” and “Congress should take no prisoners in dealing with the courts.”

Putting forward such a law would highlight how Citizen United’s SCOTUS-legalized political bribery is at the core of our political dysfunction, even if it doesn’t pass Congress and even if the Court itself strikes it down.

Rightwing oligarchs and giant corporations have now taken total control of the entire GOP and corrupted more than a few Democrats, all while polluting our public discourse with their think tanks and media outlets: such legislation would, at the very least, highlight this and pressure the Court to change their policies. “Intimidate” the Court, to quote Tom Delay.

Congress must stand up for what’s right and is consistent with American values: Legally bribed politicians and judges aren’t that.

It’s high time to end the bribery and get something done for We the People.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/inequality-in-the-trump-economy-just-keeps-getting-worse/

CEOs make more in first week of January than an average salary. Here’s the solution

Tobore Okah-Avae, The Conversation

Nobody else, apart from CEOs, has enjoyed a similar rise in their fortunes since the 1980s.

no lnx

Inequality in the Trump economy just keeps getting worse

Written by Sher Watts Spooner / Daily Kos January 5, 2020

Every month when the Bureau of Labor Statistics releases its monthly jobs report, Donald Trump and Republicans crow about the economy and the low unemployment rate. And every month, too many Americans wonder when they’re going to start feeling the effects of that “great economy.”

A recent study on poverty and a new way of measuring the quality of jobs show the shallowness of GOP claims about the U.S. economy. Poverty went up in at least one county in every state, concentrated in rural areas and the South. And a new system of measurement called the Job Quality Index shows that, although there are jobs available, for the most part, they aren’t jobs that pay well and aren’t career jobs for the long term. Often, they don’t even employ workers for a full 40 hours a week.

Combine that with the disastrous effects of the Trump tariffs and the trade war with China, especially how that trade war hurt U.S. manufacturing; the surge in bankruptcies of small farmers; the fact that American consumers now have a record $14 trillion in debt; and the 2017 GOP tax reform scam that turned into a windfall for big companies instead of helping everyday Americans, and most of us don’t feel that we’re better off than before Trump became president—a benchmark used by challengers in nearly every election.

Don’t forget that, after the GOP House and Senate passed and Trump signed the tax overhaul in late 2017, Trump’s message to his rich cronies at Mar-a-Lago gathered for the Christmas holidays was, “You all just got a lot richer.”

That was not a message that trickled down to average Americans. The supposed tax savings didn’t do much trickling down for them, either. Since the country started coming out of the Great Recession in 2009, the overall U.S. poverty rate has decreased. But between 2016 and 2018, the poverty rate grew in 30% of counties across America, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau.

As a story from HuffPost put it:

The counties with the biggest jumps in poverty ranged across the political and demographic spectrum: from 97% white and solidly Republican-voting Carter County in Kentucky to black-majority, Democratic Bullock County in Alabama.

Most of the biggest increases were in areas both rural and Southern. Those areas generally had residents who lacked job training and skills and industries that suffered downturns.

Those industries included the coal industry in many of those poverty-stricken areas. Coal output has decreased by 27% in the last five years, and 50 coal power plants have closed across the country since Trump became president. That’s good news for the environment, but bad news for those counting on coal mining for a paycheck. It’s also a betrayal of one of Trump’s main promises in coal country.

But the unemployment rate is only 3.5%. That’s got to be great, right? Actually, considering the kinds of jobs available—and the fact that wage growth is fairly stagnant—not so much. And this isn’t a recent phenomenon.

The U.S. Private Sector Job Quality Index, or JQI, is a new economic indicator developed by academic economists that measures desirable higher-wage/higher-hour jobs versus lower-wage/lower-hour jobs. Job quality is defined as the weekly dollar-income a job generates for an employee. A paper defining the system and explaining why the detailed indicator is a more accurate reading of the economy is available at this link.

The paper’s conclusion reiterates the fact that U.S. manufacturing jobs have “declined dramatically in the last three decades,” and replacement jobs are poorer-paying, service-sector jobs with no guarantee of job stability or even a full work week. There also has been a “massive loss of market share, revenue, and jobs to foreign manufacturers.”

An important question surrounding the decline of manufacturing is whether those leaving manufacturing are transitioning into better or worse jobs. …

With other countries targeting what they see as high-value industries, the US is not just in danger of, but actually has been, forced into greater reliance on low-value, low-growth industries, offering lower-wage, lower-hours jobs. The success of superstar companies like Google or Apple or Pfizer should not blind us to the fact that today Leisure & Hospitality is our largest sector with 14.7 million non-management employees. It’s a sector that pays  such workers $16.58 an hour and the average worker works just  25.8 hours a week — resulting in average weekly income of $428. …

When all that a country has left is the domestic manufacture of processed foodstuffs, you end up with a lot of unhealthy and unwealthy workers who are in dire shortage of security, much less dignity. A republic that offers no better than this cannot long endure.

“When U.S. unemployment is at a 50-year low, why do so many people have trouble finding work with decent pay and adequate predictable hours?” asks a story from Forbes on the JQI. Answer: Few non-specialized good jobs are available.

Tens of millions of working-aged Americans are still not formally employed and have no apparent interest in sending out a resume. If the job market is so hot, why are so many people sitting on the sidelines? One frequently cited explanation is the growing proportion of older generation workers. Now we have another more important element. Workers don’t re-enter the workforce because many of the jobs themselves are rotten. …

Many looked to the category of jobs known as Professional and Technical Services as a path for the economy to “move to higher ground.” Professional and Technical Services were supposed to offer high pay, growth in employee numbers, and an opportunity to increase productivity. In fact, the JQI does report that employment is up 41% in this sector and the average weekly pay for non-managerial workers of $1,575 exceeds the pay of many other industries. But that’s not enough to rescue what the economy lost in manufacturing.

To recap:

Many of the jobs available are poorer, with stagnant wages and little job stability or full employment guarantees.

The tax bills of many big companies ended up being even smaller than what was anticipated in the GOP tax scam law. This has caused a ballooning federal deficit that could reach $1 trillion in 2020.

Trump’s trade war with China led to a loss of U.S. manufacturing jobs and higher prices. No matter what he claims about a new agreement, it’s not a done deal, and it’s only “Phase One” of a partial deal with few specifics released.

After Trump’s tariffs against China, China retaliated with tariffs that were devastating to U.S. farmers. Despite $28 billion in farm subsidies in the last two years (many of which went to large agriculture suppliers, some foreign-owned), farm bankruptcies surged, especially in the Midwest.

The record $14 trillion in debt that Americans owe is spread across mortgages, auto loans, credit cards, student loans, and other forms of debt. By themselves, student loans make up $1.5 trillion of the debt total. And medical costs are still growing faster than income—medical costs have gone up 33% since 2009.

It doesn’t matter if the stock market had its best annual gain in six years. When only those at the top are benefiting from those stock market gains—not every worker has a 401(k) or fat IRA account—then there’s no trickle down from a bloated stock market. Although 20 states and 26 cities and counties are raising the minimum wage in 2020, the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour hasn’t gone up since 2009.

This is a message that all Democratic candidates should be repeating over and over, whether they’re running for president, the House, the Senate, or a state office: The Trump economy isn’t helping most Americans.

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why it can be hard to stop eating even when you’re full: Some foods may be designed that way

Tera Fazzino, Kaitlyn Rohde, The Conversation

Everyone knows it’s hard to stop eating potato chips or chocolate chip cookies. New research shows why: Certain combinations of fat, sodium, sugar or carbohydrates make them irresistible.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/how-corporate-profiteers-use-the-ideology-of-greed-to-win-big-while-killing-our-jobs-and-livelihoods/

no lnx

How corporate profiteers use the ideology of greed to win big — while killing our jobs and livelihoods

Mike Mozart

Written by Jim Hightower October 9, 2019

Here’s a recipe for you: Chop up 6 Oscar Meyer wieners, stir in 1 cup of Heinz ketchup, blend with 1/2 cup each of Cool Whip and Maxwell House Coffee, sprinkle a 1/2 cup of Planters peanuts over the mixture, add 3 spoonfuls of A.1. Steak Sauce and then top it off with a jar of Cheez Whiz and blast it in the microwave.

Sound like a gloppy mess? It would be if anyone could stomach the idea of making it, but an even messier version of the glop was cooked up in 2015 by corporate profiteers. That’s when Kraft Foods Group was merged with H. J. Heinz,thus conglomerating more than 200 brand-name food products — including all of the above — into one $28 billion-a-year behemoth. The combination was hailed at the time as a whiz-bang deal, a product of sheer corporate and financial genius that would generate extraordinary efficiencies, growth and profits, proving that bigger is always better.

Um … apparently not. Four years later, Kraft Heinz’s sales have slumped, profits are tumbling, its stock price has plummeted by half in the last year, investors are bailing out, its products are losing market share, shareholders are suing, regulators are investigating, employees are increasingly dispirited, and … well, as some business journalists have put it, the megamerger is a megamess.

This is not the work of inexperienced, incompetent corporate managers inside Kraft or Heinz but of a couple of highly touted Wall Street “geniuses” who’ve amassed personal fortunes in the global corporate merger game. The Kraft Heinz consolidation was engineered from outside by a Brazilian corporate takeover outfit named 3G, in cahoots with U.S. buyout buccaneer Warren Buffett.They are ideological disciples of the old orthodoxy that the sole responsibility of corporate executives is to jack up the stock price and profits for big shareholders — in this case, themselves. Their self-serving approach to increasing Kraft Heinz’s profits was to squeeze “costs,” meaning squeezing out experienced managers, workers, product development and the vibrancy of the corporation itself — which has steadily squeezed out their own profits.

This old model of self-enrichment through corporate takeover, consolidation and contraction turns out to be not just bad morals but bad business. It’s time for us, the media and public officials to start saying “NO!” to merger mania.

Last spring, a lawn care company advertised a special deal: “$50 OFF.” Off of what? In small print, the ad explained: “Off of free services.”

I think of that twisted advertising hustle when I see yet another corporate megamerger being announced with great hoopla.

The grinning CEOs of the merging giants promise everything, but — as we’ve learned from promises made by merging airlines, banks, drugmakers, etc. — they’ll most likely deliver less than nothing. Four years after the Kraft Heinz colossus merged, it has become a shamble, far less than either had been separately. What happened? Greed and Wall Street’s cost-cutting BS took over the executive suite.

3G had been the primary driver of the Kraft Heinz merger, and its top honchos quickly replaced the previous managerial teams with their own financial hotshots, who imposed a rigid bit of business school humbuggery called “zero-based budgeting.” It amounted to the practice of corporate thuggery — cut employees, slash expenses, divert revenues to the new owners, buy up other corporations … and repeat the plunder.

Suddenly, instead of focusing on improving products and customer satisfaction, Kraft Heinz employees were riveted on the minutia of cost-cutting. (The regime’s miserliness was exemplified by its removal of company-made nut and cheese snacks that had been offered for free at employee meetings). Research and new-product development budgets were whacked, seven processing plants were closed, thousands of workers were offed, and employee morale plummeted.

Also, 3G’s money manipulators had no clue about sweeping changes that were remaking the packaged food industry, especially the rise of smaller, more innovative companies that were delivering the healthier, less processed, better-tasting products consumers wanted. So Kraft Heinz’s “iconic” brands soon became perceived as simply old, losing consumer appeal, market share and profits. Adding insult to injury, last month, 3G started bailing out of its disastrous corporate creation, selling 25 million of its shares at a loss.

In June, 3G installed a new CEO, promising to right the ship, but he seems to be offering more of the same old corporate BS. “To truly change the direction of a business like ours,” he recently babbled, “we need to understand the future.”

Hey, chief. First, look to your past and try to learn that you don’t build by mindlessly destroying.

Populist author, public speaker and radio commentator Jim Hightower writes “The Hightower Lowdown,” a monthly newsletter chronicling the ongoing fights by America’s ordinary people against rule by plutocratic elites. Sign up at HightowerLowdown.org. COPYRIGHT 2019 CREATORS.COM

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palm oil

https://www.ecowatch.com/who-trans-fat-2568793389.html

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https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/09/16/health/brazil-obesity-nestle.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/13/health/colombia-soda-tax-obesity.html

Planet Fat

Articles in this series are exploring the causes and the consequences of rising obesity rates around the world.

NESTLÉ GOES DOOR-TO-DOOR

How Big Business Got Brazil’s Poor Hooked on Junk Food

RESHAPING AFRICAN PALATES

Obesity Was Rising as Ghana Embraced Fast Food. Then Came KFC.

THE SODA TAX SHOWDOWN

She Took On Colombia’s Soda Industry. Then She Was Silenced.

A U.S.-STYLE DIET

A Nasty, Nafta-Related Surprise: Mexico’s Soaring Obesity

STRANGE BEDFELLOWS

In Asia’s Fattest Country, Nutritionists Take Money From Food Giants

A FATHER'S FIGHT

One Man’s Stand Against Junk

She Took On Colombia’s Soda Industry. Then She Was Silenced.

The debate over taxing sugary drinks has turned into a ferocious global

policy brawl. In Colombia, proponents faced intimidation and censorship.

Leer en español

By ANDREW JACOBS and

MATT RICHTEL

NOV. 13, 2017

BOGOTÁ, Colombia — It began with menacing phone calls, strange malfunctions of the office computers, and men in parked cars photographing the entrance to the small consumer advocacy group’s offices.

Then at dusk one day last December, Dr. Esperanza Cerón, the head of the organization, said she noticed two strange men on motorcycles trailing her Chevy sedan as she headed home from work. She tried to lose them in Bogotá’s rush-hour traffic, but they edged up to her car and pounded on the windows.

“If you don’t keep your mouth shut,” one man shouted, she recalled in a recent interview, “you know what the consequences will be.”

The episode, which Dr. Cerón reported to federal investigators, was reminiscent of the intimidation often used against those who challenged the drug cartels that once dominated Colombia. But the narcotics trade was not the target of Dr. Cerón and her colleagues. Their work had upset a different multibillion-dollar industry: the makers of soda and other sugar-sweetened beverages.

Their organization, Educar Consumidores, was the most visible proponent of a proposed 20 percent tax on sugary drinks that was heading for a vote that month in Colombia’s Legislature. The group had raised money, rallied allies to the cause and produced a provocative television ad that warned consumers how sugar-laden beverages can lead to obesity and diet-related illnesses like diabetes.

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The rainforests that endangered orangutans call home are quickly disappearing, and McDonald's may be to blame.

One of the leading drivers of tropical deforestation is palm oil. At the current rate of deforestation, the Sumatran rainforest will disappear within twenty years, taking the 7,000 remaining Sumatran orangutans with it. As tropical forests are clear-cut to make way for palm oil plantations, the habitat available for endangered orangutans shrinks.

As a leader in the fast food industry, McDonald's is one of the top ten largest users of palm oil in the world. While palm oil can be produced in ways that protect orangutans and the rainforest, McDonald's has continued to use palm oil that could be wreaking havoc on our environment and orangutans' homes. 

Send a letter now to Michele Banik-Rake, McDonald's Director of Sustainability, telling her to commit to sourcing palm oil that doesn't contribute to deforestation and loss of orangutan habitat. 

Just thirty years ago Sumatra and Borneo, the homes of the only two populations of orangutans, were filled with rainforests and wildlife. Now more than half of these great forests have been felled, and plans are already in place to convert 70% of what remains into plantations. 

McDonald's palm oil policy commits the mega-corporation to 100% Verified as Supporting Sustainable Production palm oil by 2020. That sounds good, right? However, the use of so-called "sustainable" oil does not ensure that orangutans or their tropical forest homes are protected. 

According to a  report by the Rainforest Action Network (RAN), nearly half of all food found in grocery stores contains palm oil, the majority of which is directly linked to rainforest deforestation, child labor, slave labor, climate pollution and other atrocities. Millions of acres of rainforest habitat in Indonesia and Malaysia are destroyed to plant giant industrial palm oil plantations in response to increasing market demands. RAN calls these destructive palm oil products "conflict palm oil." 

Only an estimated 60,600 orangutans exist on earth today, and they are on a rapid path to extinction due to palm oil plantations' obliteration of their rainforest habitat. 

Laurel Sutherlin of RAN is heading a new campaign to combat conflict palm oil production.

“We could see orangutans go extinct as a species in our lifetimes,” he says. “If that happens, to save a few pennies per package on junk food, it would just be a tragedy that would be hard to stomach.”

While some responsible palm oil plantations do exist, international producers and food marketers like Cargill—one of the largest US suppliers—lump all of the palm oil into one mass shipment so that companies cannot delineate between conflict and non-conflict palm oil.

Sutherlin says there is no way for companies to verify that the palm oil they're using is not conflict oil as there is no traceability or transparency in the supply chain.

As a result, conflict palm oil is added to chocolate, turned into fry oil, and slipped into a plethora of snacks you would never suspect, from chips to cookies to ice cream.

Conflict palm oil is also slipped into everything from personal care products and biofuels to laundry detergent and lipstick. However, after assessing the palm oil trade in a global context RAN decided to focus their campaign on snack foods. They concluded that by targeting just 20 of the largest snack food conglomerates that use palm oil products, it would be possible to sway the entire global market away from conflict palm oil trading. They dubbed those companies the “Snack Food 20.”

As a group, the Snack Food 20 grosses more than $432 billion in revenue annually, and sells its products in dozens of countries in addition to the U.S., including southeast Asia, India, China, Japan, and Europe. 

“Each of these companies is a multibillion-dollar corporation," Sutherlin says. "Together they really do have the leverage on the market to make demands. They have the power to change the way palm oil is produced."

Most of the Snack Food 20 conglomerate companies, as well as the multitude of brands they own, are common household names:

RAN is asking that the Snack Food 20 go to their international traders and demand they eliminate conflict palm oil from the supply chain.

Instead of a boycott campaign, at least for now, Rainforest Action Network is running a "pressure" campaign focused on getting consumers to take action and push the Snack Food 20 to change their ways. Sutherlin says part of that decision is due to the staggering number of household products and foods that contain palm oil.

“It’s almost unobtainable at this point to run an effective campaign that would be about boycotting,” he says. “[Palm oil is] so widespread that it would be a little arbitrary to focus on, say, Cup O’ Noodles soup, or, say, ice cream or chocolate bars, or cookies, or crackers. It’s so pervasive and the problem is so systemic and so large-scale."

RAN has reached out to each member of the Snack Food 20. Sutherlin says most have responded in one way or another, and a handful have even sat down to speak with RAN. Another handful, he says, contacted RAN just to dismiss them and claim they've "got this covered." Others haven’t responded at all.

Sutherlin says RAN remains in the process of identifying the “leaders and laggers,” so they’re hesitant to call out specific companies as the worst or best responders. 

“When that process is able to work itself out more clearly we’ll definitely be focusing our campaign on really shaming the individual companies that are not leaving [conflict palm oil],” he says.

For now, RAN is organizing a series of efforts aimed to garner grassroots public pressure.

Food companies are sensitive to consumer feedback and public image, so Sutherlin thinks a widespread campaign with a critical mass will force a shift.

“These companies very much don’t want to have their brands associated with child labor and extinction,” he says.

Here are five ways individuals can put the pressure on the Snack Food 20 and move the global market away from conflict palm oil: