To many people the Girl Scouts and cookies are synonymous, but liberal environmentalist and anti-obesity crusader Laurie David was unhappy with a recent announcement for Girl Scout branded, cookie-flavored drinks by Nestle.
David criticized the Girl Scouts of America for partnering with Nestle, especially for a new chocolate milk drink flavored with cookies. She wrote a piece for Huffington Post attacking the Girl Scouts for joining the “Sugar Bomb Beverage Business,” and appeared on HuffPost Live [1] on Oct. 9, to blast the scouts.
“[T]he drink itself has forty-eight grams of sugar in it. Now nobody knows what a gram is and I don’t, but I can tell you that’s twelve teaspoons of sugar. That is more than a child should have in four days. This is their on-the-go drink. But the thing that is really driving me crazy about it is that they stamped the little bottle with the Girl Scout logo, and that’s not right, it’s immoral to do that,” David exclaimed.
According to David, marketing to children is “exploitation,” a problem she also tackled in the film “Fed Up.” She was an executive producer for the film, released in January 2014, that took aim at food companies and blamed them for much of the obesity problem. The Grocery Manufacturer’s Association [2] said the film “adopts a short-sighted, confrontational and misleading approach by cherry-picking facts to fit a narrative, getting the facts wrong, and simply ignoring the progress that has been made over the last decade in providing families with healthier options at home and at school.”
Reason.com also pointed out how one-sided the movie was, with a large crop of food regulation proponents and very little of the other side, and a “gotcha [3]” moment with Professor David Allison that the professor said never happened. He told Reason he spoke on camera with the filmmakers for at least an hour and answered every question.
In her Huffington Post blog, David warned that children [1] suffer from “prematurely raging hormones [that] also impair our children's impulse control, making them easy prey for marketers.” But ultimately, children shouldn’t be making the purchasing decisions. That’s what parents are for.
Like many liberals before her, David tried to make the faulty argument that marketing sugary drinks to kids was the same as marketing cigarettes to kids. She asked “would we sell cigarettes to our girls [4]?”
David’s opposition to celebrity endorsement has been selective. She had a problem with using celebrities to market products like Pepsi [5] and cartoon characters to market sugary products, but had no problem using celebrity endorsements to promote her agenda-driven films. Yahoo! News global anchor Katie Couric, formerly of CBS and NBC, was also an executive producer as well as the narrator for “Fed Up [6].”
Celebrities were also heavily involved in two of her other projects including the global warming alarmist and factually inaccurate film, “An Inconvenient Truth [7]”, which starred former Vice President Al Gore. Her made for television film on the same subject, “Earth to America [8]” also starred many celebrities including her former husband Larry David, Jason Alexander, Steve Martin and Leonardo DiCaprio.