Right Thinking From The Left Coast
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Monday, August 08, 2005

Breaking Bread
by Lee

Yaay for science and technological capitalism.

Looks like white bread. Tastes like it, too. But is it? It took scientists eight long years and millions of dollars to sneak whole grains into that spongy, yeasty icon of U.S. health-unconscious consumerism. Now that they’ve done it, food manufacturers have begun releasing a bevy of products they hope will get people to eat whole grains.

The thinking was to get more health into the bread and other products people like. But in the process, they’ve created some confusion, even as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is still trying to define whole grain products.

ConAgra Foods Inc., one of the nation’s largest food makers, spent at least eight years and several million dollars developing Ultragrain White Whole Wheat. The grain was bred for its properties and is not considered genetically modified, said Garth Neuffer, a spokesman for the Omaha, Neb.-based company. The company won’t disclose its sales expectations for Ultragrain products.

Want to know why they started developing this product eight years ago?  Remember the tobacco lawsuits?  How everyone rightly predicted that the next targets of the bottom-feeding bloodsucking trial lawyers was going to be the food industry?  Well, this is ConAgra hedging their bets.  Their lawyers told them that if they didn’t do something to protect themselves from liability they were opening themselves up to massive lawsuit liability from lardasses who won’t take responsibility for their own poor eating habits.  Much better to spend a few million developing something that could potentially generate millions in revenue than pay tens of millions to buy some mass tort scumbag a new Gulfstream.

Posted by Lee on 08/08/05 at 03:00 PM in Science and Technology  • (1) Trackbacks • Permalink • Discuss this in the forums
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