What's the deal with Moms Across America?

pixelfed.crimedad.work CrimeDad (@crimedad@pixelfed.crimedad.work)

These "Mom" organizations make the hair on the back of my neck stand up. Why is my uncle messaging me to let me know that *Moms Across America* commissioned testing that found glyphosate and heavy metal contamination in Girl Scout cookies? I mean, he did just buy some from my kid (no refunds!) and ...

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Edit: the screenshot isn't uploading correctly, so I changed it to a link to the Pixelfed post I originally made.

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Hey I'm making a new comment so I can make sure you see it.
Remind the person posting that stuff that there are lots of ways to support the Girl Scouts and he could just make a charitable contribution if he wants.
I'd wait until cookie time next year, and if this is the excuse he uses for not buying cookies, have a locked-and-loaded event he could help volunteer for instead.
- I saw your previous comment and I appreciate you digging into it! To be clear, I don't have a special affinity to Girl Scouts of America and I agree that the cookies probably are contaminated, although not enough to really matter. It's just a fun activity for my kid. If my uncle or whoever doesn't want to give them money that's fine. I just don't want it to be because he was influenced by some organization with an ulterior motive. I don't think it's really about the cookies.

I thought it was moms for liberty for a second, but after searching looks like they're some crazy antivax group. I found a 2019 interview (I dunno anything about that site but it has her just quoted at length) with the founder (Zen Honeycutt) and it seems like she's one of the "natural equals good" types of kook. She goes on about toxins and GMOs and such. I didn't read the whole thing but looks like she's moved from trying natural foods to help her kid's allergies to the antivax pipeline.
I'm not sure how much clout they have but after 5 mins reading up about them I wouldn't trust their word about the color of the sky.

Anything starting with "Moms" is right wing astroturf, guaranteed.
- Are moms okay?
  
  The ones that are ok are not starting reactionary political groups.
- Does MADD count?
  
  Some have argued that their successful campaign to raise the drinking age is responsible for relatively high rates of intoxicated driving among young adults, citing that if those consuming could experiment with their limits before being handed responsibility of a vehicle, they would more likely understand when they are too intoxicated to be driving
  
  I think the m is "mothers" so they're OK.
  
  I think so.

I'm not saying any group with the word mom in its name is inherently bad, just usually bad.
- Yeah, fuck off MADD! Leave me abs my road sodas alone! /s
  
  There's a fair argument to be made that MADD is also one of these bad Mom organizations. The temperance, surveillance, and tough-on-crime aspects of their advocacy are plainly regressive. On top that they never seem to advocate for better public transit. Their website has one sentence mentioning public transportation, but proudly boasts of the lives saved by ride-sharing companies like Lyft and Uber. No me gusta.

My bias makes me immediately think that anything they're claiming should be considered suspect.
Frankly, if an antivaxxer told me the sky was blue, I'd go outside to check.
This is a case where you should find a second or third source making the same claims, as well as a better source that says how much and specifically what was found in the cookies because it's entirely possible to have dangerous things in something but at levels that are not actually dangerous, and I see no specific units being claimed anywhere.
And I mean, glyphosphate is something we've sprayed on every inch of the globe at this point anyways and is on every single thing you're going to eat, so sure, it's bad, but it's only bad at certain concentrations. (It's Roundup)
- Here's MAA's article about the findings. It does include numbers, but offers no comparison to similar treats on the market. For contrast, this Consumer Reports article addresses lead contamination in Lunchables type products from several manufacturers and does a decent job explaining what their findings mean. The CR article references California's daily read consumption limit, which I think properly relevant for foods, but the MAA article references the EPA limit for lead in water. I can probably do the math to better understand MAA's findings, but I have a feeling that they're presenting them this way in order to make them seem more alarming.

I don't care what is in them. If I die from eating thin mints then let it be.
- You know that you can make the filling easily right? Its just sweetened condensed milk, peppermint essence and an assload of icing sugar.
  A tip from someone who made way too much, start small and add small amounts of each until you get a feel for the ratios.
  
  Weekend plans secured, thanks bro
- I volunteer to be the first person to assert, "Leave Jimmy alone! He died doing what he loved!"

I was under the impression that Girl Scout cookies are locally sourced, meaning that any contamination (if there really was any) would be a local issue, and not national. Unless, of course, one of the actual ingredients was lead, which to me seems ridiculously unlikely.
- 3 eggs
  4 cups whole grain flour
  8 tbsp butter, melted
  3 cups brown sugar
  1/8 tsp water
  2 tbsp baking soda
  1 bottle (8oz) vanilla
  3/4 tsp lead powder (organic!)
  A dash of mercury (to taste)
  Mix ingredients together well, roll into 1" balls, and place on a greased (ideally barium complex for best flavor) cookie sheet. Bake at 350° Freedom Units for 20 minutes, and allow to cool before selling.
- I'm not sure what locally sourced means. Girl Scout cookies come from a factory somewhere. I'll check the boxes when ours arrive, but I always assumed that Girl Scout cookies were just like any other processed junk food: probably containing trace amounts of various types of contamination, but unhealthy in the first place for their sugar content.
  I'm not trying to defend Girl Scout cookies or Girl Scouts of America. My suspicion is that this awareness campaign by MAA isn't really about the cookies. I think it might be a rouse to rope people into their anti-vax agenda.
  
  Sorry -- by locally sourced, I mean that they locate some sort of cookie maker in the area (state? region? county?) to produce the cookies for them. It isn't a single organization/location that creates the cookies, so contamination wouldn't be across all cookies distributed. At least, that's how I recall hearing it, long ago.

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".

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