This evening my uncle messaged me to let me know that Moms Across America commissioned testing that found glyphosate and heavy metal contamination in Girl Scout cookies. To be fair, he did just buy some from my kid (no refunds!) and I understand the concern about food contamination, but something is off. What’s the deal with Moms Across America? Why is their CEO a vaccine skeptic hoping to get hired by RFK Jr.? It seems like an organic food/anti-vax lobbying organization, but I wonder if there’s more to it than that. Is she just that effective as an individual mom influencer?
Edit: the screenshot isn’t uploading correctly, so I changed it to a link to the Pixelfed post I originally made.
Okay I went digging.
The article in question links to another site as the source of this report.
Clicking through, the website that this one is citing is https://gmoscience.org/. The whole article is about the Girl Scouts and how they need to realize that the cause of this contamination is factory farming. The pdfs are from a laboratory in New Jersey which does say at the bottom that they can’t verify the source of the samples provided, and then there are 25 pages going over the findings for each cookie.
On the one hand, I find it fishy that the originating article is clearly coming from an interest group.
On the other hand, I find it easy to believe that food being sold in America is contaminated (I say this as an American).
I checked Snopes because usually they do the legwork and help come up with answers, but they don’t have an article on this yet (which is odd, since I’ve seen this article a couple of times now). So I submitted a request for them to cover it. In the meantime… I don’t eat Girl Scout cookies as it is. I’m a hobby baker, and I like what I bake, better than I can get elsewhere, so if I was going to financially support an institution, I’d do it by way of direct donation or volunteering.
I know people who talk about these cookies as if they’re the most delicious thing on Earth, and I guess if I was one of them, my answer would be… how much do you care? Do you care enough to not eat them? If you do, then do. If you don’t, then who cares?
There are always going to be people like this (anti-GMO people) who will hate on what you’re eating if it doesn’t conform to their idea of “good.” I don’t expect articles like this to impact the sales of cookies. I know it’s n=1, but I reached out to a friend of mine who loves Thin Mints like they’re some kind of miracle food and his answer was “everything we eat is poison, at least I like thin mints”.