Two former food industry websites -- Best Food Nation and the Grow America Project -- are being merged and re-birthed as a new front group, the Center for Food Integrity (CFI). CFI's web domain was registered earlier this month by Charlie Arnot, who runs a small Missouri-based PR firm, CMA Consulting. CFI, which lists Monsanto as one of its supporters, states that it aims "to build consumer trust and confidence in the contemporary U.S. food system." Joseph Mendelson, the legal director of the Center for Food Safety, a consumer group, told Food NavigatorUSA.com that CFI is simply "a PR entity to try and battle regulations designed to create a safer food supply ... This is a way for it to promote its agenda under a green wash label." Mendelson also believes that the CFI's name was "chosen to try to distract attention from groups like ours and to confuse consumers." (Note: Mendelson is on the Center for Media and Democracy's Board of Directors.)

The spin-driven restaurant and beverage industry front group, the Center for Consumer Freedom (CCF), has created a grass roots compilation of city, county and state efforts to ban added trans fats in restaurant food. From Boston's Health Commissioner to Cleveland's City Council to Washington State's Board of Health, various government agencies nationwide are sponsoring ordinances, regulations and laws to forbid partially hydrogenated oils. "We know that trans fat consumption leads to serious health problems and we believe that it's government's role...to do what we can to encourage people to consume healthy food," CCF's "Daily Headlines" quotes Boston Public Health Commission executive director John Auerbach. CCF also notes budding Chicago action and quotes Alderman Edward Burke--once famous for stalling progressive ordinance proposals under the late Mayor Harold Washington--calling trans fats "cruelty to human beings." CCF calls New York City's landmark December 2006 ban "outrageous" and derides all the anti-trans fat lawmakers as "having nothing better to do."

"Fast Food Nation" mega-selling author Eric Schlosser must be doing something right. He's under vicious attack from food industry lobbyists and front groups mimicking his book title in their website smearing him. Long time Fleishman-Hillard food flack Becky Johnson and her fellow spinmeisters risk publicizing Schlosser's writings in their over-the-top efforts to condemn him.

The industrial food lobby is freaking-out over "Chew On This", his new book with Charles Wilson aimed at youngsters, and the fact that his "Fast Food Nation" is being made into a major Hollywood movie with the same title. Best Food Nation is the food industry's sound-alike website funded by the American Farm Bureau Federation, American Meat Institute, National Cattlemen's Beef Association, National Council of Chain Restaurants, and 14 other food lobbies. The website highlights anti-Schlosser rants by industry-funded front groups including Heartland Institute and the American Council on Science and Health.

Washington, DC lobbyist Rick Berman must have a new client. Recently his front group, the Center for Consumer Freedom, launched a new website called FishScam.com along with a multimedia PR blitz including billboard and radio ads decrying the "hype" about health hazards of mercury in fish. "It's really extraordinary and extremely irresponsible," says Consumers Union director of food policy Jean Halloran. "Many people have educated themselves about this issue, but I'm concerned that less-educated women who don't realize he is industry-funded will take his advice."

As the anti-fast food documentary "Super Size Me" hits theaters, McDonald's is fighting back. "We're responding aggressively because the film is a gross misrepresentation," said a company spokesperson. Helping defend McDonald's are "global nutritionist" Cathy Kapica and the corporate-funded American Council on Science and Health. According to PR Week, ACSH's "aggressive independent third-party response" includes editorials on Tech Central Station, a website published by Republican lobbyists. Also under attack is Coca-Cola, for alleged "complicity in gross human rights violations" in Colombia, reports O'Dwyer's PR Daily. "We plan to destroy the image of Coca-Cola, for which it has spent millions to cultivate," said the Campaign to Stop Killer Coke's director. To "get the facts to all concerned parties," the soft drink giant launched www.cokefacts.org and www.killercoke.com -- the latter to "capture" people seeking the Campaign's website, www.killercoke.org.

The Center for Consumer Freedom, a front group for the restaurant, alcohol and tobacco industries, has been forced to give up the domain names of two web sites used to attack the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), in what CSPI called an "Orwellian" effort to create confusion among Internet users looking for CSPI's websites. CCF, part of a "shadowy trio of tax-exempt front groups run by Washington lobbyist Richard Berman" has been involved in several other failed attempts to impersonate web sites owned by health, consumer and enviromental groups.

For years the tobacco industry has been using restaurant trade associations as front groups in its battle to keep Americans puffing. Now this strategy is documented on a new web site hosted by the University of California-San Franciso. "If Big Tobacco can't buy hospitality groups to serve as fronts, it sets up its own," the site states. Examples include the "California Business and Restaurant Alliance" and the ""Beverly Hills Restaurant Association" (created by a Tobacco Institute PR firm). In other cases, the industry uses offers of funding to buy the loyalty of groups like the National Restaurant Association and the American Beverage Institute. Ironically, the victims of this flackery include restaurant owners themselves, who are hoodwinked by bogus research into believing that tobacco restrictions will cost them money -- even though restaurants end up footing the bill for insurance, maintenance and expensive ventilation systems to accommodate smokers.

The Canadian government, working closely with the biotech industry, is spending millions getting Canadians to accept genetically modified foods. Lyle Stewart describes the "spider's web of influence" that brings together the biotech and agri-food industries, large grocery distributors, the Hill & Knowlton PR firm, and industry-created front groups such as the Food Biotechnology Communications Network, and co-opted NGOs including the Consumers' Association of Canada.