The Food Companies Spending the Most to Hide the Facts

Which food companies are trying to keep you in the dark about what's in your food?

Surveys repeatedly show that more than 90 percent of Americans want genetically modified (GM) foodslabeled. That overwhelming majority of the public wants to know if it's eating ingredients derived from lab-created plants that have been genetically modified to resist (and sometime even create their own) toxic pesticides, withstand drought, or produce higher yields.

Considering that GM ingredients have infiltrated more than 75 percent of processed foods, however, food manufacturers have successfully defeated (or threatened to defeat) law after law that would have required these ingredients to be labeled. Once people know that a product contains GM ingredients, the thinking goes, they won't buy it.

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One Million Americans Demand Labeling for GMOs

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This November, the tug-of-war between food companies and food eaters is coming to a head in California. For the first time, voters—not senators, representatives, or corporate lobbyists—get to decide whether labels like "This product contains GMOs" or "Contains GMO Corn" will appear on food packages. Labeling advocates successfully garnered more than 1 million signatures on a petition to get the California Right to Know Genetically Engineered Food Act (also known as Prop 37) on the November ballot.

Needless to say, food companies have been out in full force, funding ads against the measure. The "No on 37: Coalition Against the Deceptive Food Labeling Scheme" has been collecting money from the obvious (biotech companies like Monsanto) and the surprising, including a number of food companies that market and sell organic foods (by definition, organic foods are prohibited from containingGM ingredients).

The California Right to Know Campaign just issued the dollar amounts spent by major food-industry groups and companies to defeat the ballot initiative. The numbers are collected by California's Department of Campaign Finance and reflect donations made between April and July 2012.

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The 20th Anniversary of the FDA's Biggest Mistake

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Not surprisingly, the biggest donors represent packaged-food manufacturers and the companies that manufacture GM seeds:

• Grocery Manufacturers Association: $375,000
This is a trade group representing packaged-food manufacturers. In a recent speech to the American Soybean Association, the group's president stated that defeating this ballot initiative was "the single highest priority for GMA this year." This same group actively lobbied to defeat an amendment in the Food Safety and Modernization Act of 2011 that would have banned the hormone-disrupting chemical bisphenol A from canned foods.

• DuPont Pioneer: $310,000 
DuPont rakes in about $19 million every year from sales related to its genetically modified seeds, pesticides, and food-processing chemicals.

• Biotechnology Industry Organization: $250,000
Another trade group, the BIO represents DuPont, Monsanto, Dow, and other companies that manufacture pesticides and the genetically modified seeds designed to withstand them.

• BASF: $126,600
The world's largest chemical company, BASF recently abandoned its attempts at marketing GMO crops in Europe, where consumer rejection of GMOs has kept them largely out of the food system, and relocated its plant-science division from Germany to Raleigh, North Carolina. There, the company is working with Monsanto to develop a drought-resistant corn and a strain of genetically modified wheat.

• Syngenta: $63,000
Syngenta's big push is GMO corn, but the company is also notorious for fudging science on the safety of its best-selling corn pesticide atrazine.

Now for the food companies (ironically, many of these same companies have purchased organic brands in the past few decades, so in essence they're supporting organic food and keeping customers in the dark about their conventional products):

• Pepsico: $90,220

• Nestlé: $61,471 
Owns Tribe Mediterranean Foods, which has a line of certified-organic hummus

• Coca Cola: $61,208
Owns Odwalla, which manufacturers a line of certified-organic smoothies and juices

• ConAgra Foods: $56,598

• Kellogg's: $33,248
Owns Morningstar Farms veggie burgers and Kashi, its cereal and granola brand that recently caught flack from customers for using GMO ingredients in products advertised as "natural"; Kashi does make some certified-organic cereals and Kellogg's is even working to certify all Kashi products under the Non-GMO Project Verified label—even as it tries to defeat GM labeling.

• J.M. Smucker: $20,396
Sells two types of certified-organic peanut butter

• Dean Foods: $5,424.94
Even though it didn't spend as much as other companies to defeat the bill, Dean Foods owns the nation's two largest certified-organic dairy operations, Horizon Organic and Alta Dena.

With the exception of Dean Foods, this list reflects only donors who've spent more than $20,000. A number of other big food companies have spent smaller amounts, including Hormel Foods, Hershey, General Mills (which owns the Cascadian Farms and Muir Glen organic brands), and Sara Lee.