Pesticide Foes Turn to Ads; Battle Flares

The attack ad, a staple of the national political scene, entered the food world last week. Instead of bashing candidates, the campaign takes on farm chemicals.

The ad, titled “Pesticides for Dinner,” begins with an announcer asking, “What if you found out that those fresh fruits and vegetables everyone keeps telling you to eat more of might kill you? And what if we told you that everyone knows this: the government, the farmers and even the supermarkets where you buy them. The fact is, if you buy fresh peas, peppers, squash, strawberries, apples, pears or even canned baby food, you may have put toxic pesticides on your table and not even known it.”

The commercial goes on to state that the Environmental Protection Agency has identified more than 50 ingredients in pesticides that are “suspected” carcinogens and urges consumers to take action against the use of these chemicals.

The 60-second radio spots debuted in Los Angeles and 10 other cities March 7 in an effort to generate public support for reducing pesticide levels in produce and baby foods.

“Our priority is to educate citizens and then get them to sound off in the marketplace,” says Michael Colby, executive director of Food & Water Inc. in Walden, Vt. “We have been encouraged by the response, and our phones have been ringing off the hook.”

Colby’s group joined with the Environmental Research Foundation based in Annapolis, Md., to create the ads. The strategy, in the short term, is to generate enough consumer support to lobby supermarket chains to offer more produce items without pesticide residues.

A produce trade group representative says she hopes consumers can see past these “blatant scare tactics.”

“Fruit and vegetables won’t kill you, and everyone knows that they won’t,” says Kathy Means, public affairs vice president for the Produce Marketing Assn. in Newark, Del. “Fruits and vegetables are one of the best things to eat to stay healthy. . . . Most have no residues. . . . All reputable authorities say to eat five servings of produce a day for better health, and that recommendation takes into account pesticide residues.”

Food & Water hopes to bring pressure on Congress to maintain the Delaney Clause, a federal law that prohibits the presence of carcinogens--at any level--in processed food. Republicans in the House of Representatives sponsored legislation last fall that would have killed Delaney and replaced it with a more lenient regulation, one that would have allowed some levels of carcinogens in processed food. (The bills being circulated would permit carcinogens at levels of one part per million.)

Colby hopes the pesticide ads spark a grass-roots movement of activists that will get the food industry’s attention and alter farming practices.

“Citizens today are no longer concerned about what the Environmental Protection Agency or the Food and Drug Administration say about food safety. Instead, they want the food industry to respond directly to their concerns because it is not good enough for supermarket chains to just say that these chemicals are approved,” he says.

A supermarket industry representative says that the nation’s major retail chains have always been responsive to customer requests and that the current controversy will be no exception.

“We also have a specific policy on pesticides, including supporting efforts to reduce the amount of chemicals used on crops,” says Karen H. Brown, vice president of the Food Marketing Institute in Washington. The institute’s policy statement calls for “aggressive measures to safeguard food from pesticide hazards, increased government inspections of produce for unsafe residues and the promotion of organic farming and other safe alternative methods to minimize pesticide use.”

The radio ads, heard locally on KIIS-FM (102.7), are actually the second stage in a $140,000 anti-pesticide campaign. In July, Food & Water placed full-page advertisements in the New York Times, the Nation and Supermarket News that claimed: “More people are killed by their salad [than by assault rifles].” A large picture of a semiautomatic rifle was prominently displayed the length of the page.

The ad created such an uproar in the produce industry that Supermarket News, a trade publication, stated in a subsequent editor’s note that the ad did not represent the view of the magazine and that the publication would not print it a second time.

The Produce Marketing Assn. asked the Federal Trade Commission to investigate the Food & Water assault rifle ad on the grounds that it was “unfair and deceptive.” Colby says his group has never heard from the FTC and would welcome any such review.

Means, of the Produce Marketing Assn., says the print and radio advertisements “unfairly play on the emotions of the consuming public, particularly those without knowledge of the regulation and use of agriculture chemicals.”

Food & Water gained recognition with its campaign to eliminate irradiation as a method of sterilizing food. Since 1986, 100 major food corporations have pledged that they will not use the process, Colby says. The commitments were given despite the fact that federal agencies have approved irradiation for use on fruit, vegetables, poultry, pork, grains and spices.