November 21, 2018 • 63 mins
Nestlé is the world's largest food and beverage company, and it's no surprise that an entity this large would, at some point over the decades, become embroiled in a controversy or two. However, according to critics and numerous advocacy groups, Nestlé has a dark side that goes far beyond the occasional ethical misstep. Join the guys and special guest Lauren Vogelbaum, host of Savor, as they unravel the story of Nestlé's cover-ups and conspiracies.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. M
(00:24):
welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, and
our trustee co host Noel is on the road on
an adventure. All will be revealed in time, I believe,
is the party line. He's on on the road on
an adventure. Just still a couple of feet away from us,
right exactly? They who am I? They call me Ben.
(00:44):
We are joined with our super producer Paul Mission controlled decade.
Most importantly, you are you. You are here that makes
this stuff they don't want you to know. Wait, Ben,
there's somebody else in the room too. You're right, Matt,
You're Spider. Since is as always disturbingly accurate, we are
not delving into today's topic alone, are we met? No,
(01:05):
we are not. Today we are joined by Lauren Vogelbaum
that you may know from Savor Brain Stuff. Oh my gosh,
so many um and if you are not already aware,
Savor is the new version of what was once food Stuff. Right, Yes,
it's essentially the same show, but now we go on
the road sometimes and talk to actual human people aside
(01:26):
from ourselves, were mostly human people about a food, food
and culture and science and how all those things work
together and why why we eat the way that we eat.
It's an awesome new thing experience to listen to savor
just hearing you in places. It's been a whole lot
of fun as a listener. Just wanted to say that
on on Mike. Oh, thank thank thank you so much.
(01:46):
And we defer to you, Lauren fairly often in the
show when something food related comes up. That's that's why
we asked you to come here today. Oh you didn't
just want to hang out? Well, that that too for sure. Yeah, yeah,
I mean mostly Yeah, it's mostly hanging out and then
(02:08):
you're going to know more stuff about this than we do. Maybe, actually, definitely,
I believe you entirely. I enjoyed, enjoyed that strange shrug, Laurden.
You have been on the show in the past before.
You have joined us for an exploration of the diamond industry.
Oh right, yeah, specifically not food related that one, but um,
(02:29):
but yeah, who, I'm still mad about diamonds. You may
notice that there's a reoccurring theme here. We bring you
on for terribly depressing things. Yeah, that's why when you
said hang out, I was a little taken aback. At
this point, you you pretty much know the score. I mean,
I mean hypothetically. I did some of the research here anyway.
So yeah, one of these well, I mean, one of
(02:50):
these episodes. One day, maybe we'll be a fun and
delightful one. Do you guys do fun and delightful episodes?
You just never invited? I see, yeah we do. But
we are so glad that you are here today, especially
because we are catching you right before you take another
trip for saver. Oh yeah, tomorrow, I'm flying out to
(03:13):
New Orleans with user Dylan and uh and my co
host Annie, and we're gonna we're gonna eat and drink
some stuff. We're going to talk to some people about it.
I'm so jealous. That's some of my favorite food that
exists on the planet. I can't eat bell peppers, so
it's gonna be rough going for me. But it's gonna
be just all right. I'm gonna just make up for
it in cocktails. You can also get your own parade,
(03:33):
which I know I keep telling, keep telling everyone. Don't
blow up the spot if you listen, if you live
in New Orleans and you don't know about this, but
it's not that expensive to pay outside of Marti Grass season,
to pay a band to do a parade for you,
and you get to walk in the front or I
guess wherever you want. At that point, I promptu parades
with only two hand grenades. And that's all. That's the
(03:54):
maximum amount of hand grenades you can have in one night.
I'm telling you. That's a drink, right, yes, not not
physical weapons. Don't drink those at all. Yeah, you guys,
Today we're talking about a major company that most people
know about. They are the creators of such foods for
(04:15):
cats and dogs as Alpo Benefit and Fancy Feast. That's right,
that's right. Today we are exploring the disarming and perhaps
surprising story of a company called Nesslie. But that's not
all they've created. Yeah, I'm you know, candy from kit
Cats to Butterfingers, coffee brands like Taster's Choice, Nest Cafe,
(04:36):
Coffee Mate, and Starbucks, packaged coffees, baking products from Libby's Incarnation,
frozen infrigerated foods like Staffers, California Pizza Kitchen, Hot Pockets, Linquisine,
and the Journo and Tombstone. Uh, dessert brands like Hog
and Dogs, Eaties, Skinny Cow, Boost and Power Bar, nutritional supplements,
Gerber Baby Foods, Purina pet Foods, and they have a
thirty percent ownership of Loureal, including cosmetics brands like Garnier,
(04:59):
the Body Shop and maybe Lene and perfume lines from
Ralph Lauren, Georgio Armani and Eve st Laurent. Wow, and
that's nowhere near all of it. Did we hit perry
A and San Pelagreno. Oh? I didn't even mention the
water right right water there There are multiple brands of
water as well. This company cast a large, not entirely
sugary shadow. You know, for a lot of us in
(05:22):
the US, we associate nestleie with maybe like nest Cafe
or like a Nestley Crunch candy bar. But every single
thing that Matt and Lauren just named is owned by Nestley.
There's so much more to the story. Nestle is huge.
It's gargantuan. It is like, I don't want to ruin
the surprise yet, but it's big. Let's just go with that.
(05:45):
It's like the Facebook of foods. You know what that
is disturbingly accurate. But this, this is true. When Nestley
first started out, they only made one thing, one real breakthrough.
It was it was condensed milk and baby formula, which
was massively important, and that's why it became such a
big company. They started in a place which was a
(06:08):
good place to start babies, right right, just like Wu Tang,
Nestlee was for the kids. Yea, So here's here's a
terrible joke that we we weren't proud of, but we're
going to do anyway. Matt, would you like to do
the condensed history of Nestlee grown because it's condensed like
(06:28):
the milk. Yes. I feel like this joke only gets
better the more that we try to over explain it.
Let it hang there. Yeah. So Nestlee is named for
its primary food wizard, on Re Nestle. He was born
August tenth, eighteen fourteen. On Red. Nestle begins his career
(06:49):
as a pharmacist assistant before moving to Switzerland and qualifying
to practice as a pharmacist and chemist. So that's pretty cool.
He moves on to become a pharmacist and chemist. That's
a great job to have. Sure, that's chemist that's cool. Yeah,
and this was a this was a much broader term
(07:11):
back in the eight hundreds, right, a chemist could be
mixing any sort of thing, you know, an agglomeration of potions.
For for ri Uh, one of his primary focuses was
always food science. He experimented with other stuff like cement,
which hopefully was not a food experiment, but he also
experiment with lemonade, cooking oils. Eventually he moves towards this
(07:35):
idea of condensed milk or some sort of replacement for
breast milk for nursing parents. Yeah. Condensed milk was developed
by Gail Borden, Yes, that Borden in the United States
and the eighteen fifties, and was hugely important in feeding
Civil War troops. Right. Yeah, it's weird because nowadays, I
don't I don't know about everyone. It can't speak for everyone,
(07:56):
but nowadays condensed milk seems like it has a bit
of a a niche, you know what I mean. It's
not super widespread. No one's no one's going to a
restaurant and saying, you know, I'll have the number three
with condensed milk to drink. Yeah, and well it's it
was a much needed product for a lot of people
(08:17):
at the time. Sure, you know these days, I think
it's mostly a baking ingredient. You're buying sweeten and condensed
milk to put in like a pumpkin pie or something
like that. But um, yeah, you know that this was
back in the what like eighteen sixties eighteen seventies. This
was before refrigeration technology was a thing, and it was
also a time when industrialization was on the rise, and
along with that this increase in concern about food purity.
(08:41):
You know, more people were moving into cities away from
sources of fresh foods. Um, more foods were being manufactured,
but regulations had not been set up yet. And there
was also this religiously influenced temperance movement UM or a
series of movements going on in both America and Europe
where people were thinking harder about what they put in
their bodies. So like, all of this lead to this thing.
(09:03):
We're condensed milk being marketed and to be fair generally
created to be safe and long lasting, um and so
they were considered good products, right yeah, because it's dependable too,
and it's consistent, which I think was a huge deal.
So in eighteen sixty seven, Just like a year after
saying I'm gonna work with condensed milk, nestlely develops this
(09:28):
milk based baby food that he calls farine lecti, which
is I'm woefully mispronouncing that it means flour with milk
in English. So it's cow's milk, wheat flour and sugar too,
you know, I guess sweeten the whole contraption. And as
we know, whenever you hear stories about inventors or inventions,
(09:48):
it's usually pretty difficult to pin an entire invention on
a single person. Yeah. I think there were two or
three people who were developing a very similar product around
the same time, first in the form of a liquidn
densed food, and then very shortly afterwards in terms of
like a powdered condensed food. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And we
remember nest Lee as a pioneer of baby formula because
(10:12):
this baby formula was a catalyst for his company, really
propelled the growth of the entire operation nest Lee. Originally,
according to this story, nest Lee develops this because he
knows that some new mothers cannot breastfeed or some infants
cannot be breast fed. For one reason or another, and
(10:33):
this invention, if he can get it off the ground,
will help mitigate the cartoonishly high infant mortality rates of
the time. Yeah, things were bad for infants back then.
And this is a real thing where once children, once
very young children, start eating any formula of this kind,
(10:53):
it's very very difficult for them to get back onto
like a breast milk or something if you're trying to
switch back. Um, I'm not saying this is a terrible
They did a great thing to stop babies from dying,
but it also creates this whole other problem that we're
going to maybe talk about a little bit later on. Sure. Yeah,
and there's also the issue of once a mother stops
(11:15):
producing milk for her infant because of the switch to
a formula, then it's hard for her to kick start
it again. Um. And previous to this technology, to this
food technology being invented, your your only recourse if you
couldn't personally breastfeed your child was to hire a wet nurse.
And of course that's not a thing that everyone had
financial access to. And this would be essentially someone who
(11:37):
breastfeeds your baby for you, right, Yes, yeah, absolutely, you
can see how difficult. That would be for a ton
of people in this area in Switzerland, but also throughout
the world most people, I think it's safe to say
most people. And in eighteen sales are taking off. He's
doing super well, gangbusters. Uh. Nestleie sells his company and
(12:00):
his factory to three local businessmen who aggressively expand both
the research and the sales departments. Around this time, even
before that expansion, Nestle products are sold everywhere from Indonesia
to Argentina, again a global supply chain which, as as
you point out, Lauren, is super difficult to pull off
(12:21):
without refrigeration or planes. They're just I guess going by
boat huh and train probably rail. But where's the chocolate
you're wondering right? Possibly? Uh. In eighteen seventy nine, Nestle
merges with Daniel Peter, who is arguably the inventor of
milk chocolate, at least he's the one and gets the
credit for it. Right before then, they had been selling
(12:44):
some of their condensed milk products to that guy, and
that's kind of how his milk chocolate isness started off.
And it's gonna rolled up into each other, yeah, which
which makes sense. That's the way a lot of business
relationships tend to go right. So thank you Daniel Peter
for milk chocolate. I think it's weird that you have
two first names, but yes, thank you. Hey, some of
(13:06):
us just have that affliction. Okay, Oh Matt, I am
so sorry. I just realized that. I guess it feels
normal because we hang out all the time. But Daniel Peter,
it's just it's a weird name. It's the name I
would use as a fake name. So my profound apologies
if you if I've made you feel slighted. My old friend, uh,
(13:29):
Daniel Peter did some great stuff. He you know, invented
milk chocolate. People generally like that because of him. Kit
cats exist. Yes, they're delicious, they're great. The Japanese ones,
the green tea one was so much better than I
thought it would be. Yeah, I've got some banana ones
in my desk right now. Their life changing. I see
(13:51):
you also like to live dangerously. If they're that, could
I could I try one? After a So. In nineteen
o five, nest Lee or the company founded rather merges
with an outfit called the Anglo Swiss con Densed Milk
Company and they form what is now known as the
Nestle Group. They have a bunch of mergers and name changes,
(14:13):
but today we call them nestlely s A. And they
are the world's largest fast moving consumer goods company in
terms of revenue. They make a ton of money. Yes,
get this. In sen there was a total revenue for
Nestle s A, the actual name of the company now
(14:34):
of ninety point eight billion dollars with a B. Holy cropola,
that's a that's a lot of kit cats saw those.
So it's partially my fault. They they're still headquartered in Switzerland.
They employ over three thousand people. They own more than
(14:55):
two thousand different brands. If you shop in a mainstream
grocery store, you're probably by more Nestly stuff than you think.
They also own almost factories in countries across the world.
Their most popular products are powdered and liquid beverages. Still,
(15:15):
which is which I think is interesting and and this
is the point where we have to encounter ethics and
philosophy for a second, because we'll often hear pop philosophers
say that you know, at the heart of every fortune
lay some great crime. Uh, and that's it's not something
you could really prove. But there's an argument people make
(15:35):
that says, no company or individual can attain this much
financial success without at some point along the way engaging
in unethical or at the very least controversial activity, and
Nestle is no different. Yeah. Um, there are a lot
of critics of this company that exists that you will
(15:57):
find online especially, and theseis ms don't just come from
people who disagree with the company's um strategies, their investment strategies.
There there is a very deep and dark rabbit hole
that we're about to go down. People. Right after a
quick word from our sponsor, here's where it gets crazy.
(16:24):
Nest Lee is accused of a ton of dastardly activities
around the planet. The first one, which might be surprising
to some people familiar to others is nest Lee's uh,
Nestle's water business. Yeah, you've seen Nestlee water bottled water,
probably somewhere near a grocery store, in a grocery store
(16:47):
at a queen um. And you may have also seen
San Pellegrino or Peria, their sparkling versions somewhere on the shelves. Yeah.
In two thousand and five, a documentary called We Feed
the world came out. Wow, that's a little pompous, but
that's okay, and it featured the CEO of Nesley at
the time, a guy named Peter bra bec Limite, and
(17:10):
he made this observation that became infamous and went viral,
and we have the quote today Utt Matt, would you
want to do the honors? Water is, of course the
most important raw material we have today in the world.
It's a question of whether we should privatize the normal
water supply for the population, and there are two different
(17:32):
opinions on the matter. One opinion, which I think is extreme,
is represented by the NGOs non governmental organizations, who bang
on about declaring water a public right. That means that
as a human being, you should have a right to water.
That's an extreme solution. The other view says that water
(17:53):
is a food stuff like any other and like any
other food stuff, it should have a market value person only.
I believe it's better to give a food stuff of
value so that we are all aware it has a price,
and then that one should take specific measures for the
part of the population that has no access to this water.
And there are many different possibilities there. I added a
(18:18):
little emphasis in there, but you can hear how sinister
that could sound. I think the evil it's there. I
don't think these NGOs trying to make water a public right.
A lot of Nestleie critics interpreted this as an attack
on the poor, attack on community suffering from drought and
(18:41):
other people in the margins of society who cannot afford
to pay this quote market price for water. He did
walk the statement back a little bit in after this
public outcry, as you can possibly imagine, um, he said.
He said in a YouTube video that Ale released, I
have always supported the human right to water. Everyone should
(19:04):
have enough safe, clean water to meet their fundamental daily needs,
but not to fill a pool or wash a car water.
And then he talked for a minute about how it's
a very precious resource and how we're kind of running
out or I mean, you know how there's different areas
that don't have a lot of access to it and
any furthermore, said water should be better managed, should be
better valued. If we give water value, they will be
(19:24):
incentive to invest in looking after our supply. Yeah, so
you can see the logic. He's not he's not really
changing the content of what he's saying. He's framing it
in a different way. Ultimately, he's saying, we got to
respect water enough that it's valuable enough that we're not
going to pollute it too bad. And I've heard I've
(19:46):
heard similar arguments advanced about human life. Oh, if there's
enough of a value, we should value that as well.
If we're assigning value to things, I mean, that's that
whole idea of selling bullets for more than a gun.
I mean, if we can't sell bullets and people, then
really what are we doing here? No, keep it. We
(20:11):
do want to be clear, that was not a quote
from the CEO, right, No, no, no, no, that was
just my own sarcasm. Sarcasm folks, Oh goodness, they don't
know me here. So this it's interesting too because there's
a little bit of double think or a paradox here
in that nest Lee has a successful bottled water business
because they are treating water as a public good by
(20:34):
extracting it from land lease agreements where they just have
access to the resources on the land. So they're not
putting a huge value on it on their side. The
value changes depending on their profit margin. Right, But they're
the world's largest supplier of bottled water. Yeah, seven percent
of their sales come from bottled water. That's about seven
(20:56):
point seven billion worldwide in recent years, and seven point
seven billion dollars worth of bottled water just from them. Yeah,
for kind of scope, I don't have a number for
the whole world worth of water, of the water industry,
the bottled water industry, but just in the United States
it was worth eighteen point five billion dollars in and
(21:17):
was growing, and now they own what sixty four different
bottled water brands across the planet. The big question is, oh, no, no,
we gotta say these. We gotta say these because you
you're drinking these, you might have one in your hand
right now. Deer Park guilty on my end. Poland Spring
also guilty. Aquapana not so much. San Pellegrino. Sure, perry
(21:41):
A sometimes, but only when I'm feeling fancy springs, water park,
and waterline. I would add to that pure life, which
is huge in other countries. So where do they get
all this water? It turns out that they're taking it
from you if you are the resident of many rural
communities cross the US, in Brazil, in Bangladesh, in Pakistan,
(22:06):
in Europe. But how Ben I'm so glad you asked, Matt.
Thank you. They similar to the Daniel day Lewis character,
and there will be blood. They're drinking your milkshake. They're
they're buying up areas that give them access to groundwater
or springs, and they're using that to they're using that
to fill the bottles. But as they're draining these aquifers,
(22:29):
they're moving the water away from where it would have
naturally existed. That's it's a it's such a perfect example
there and the Daniel day Lewis character from there will
be blood because these aquifers are so massive underneath the
land where people are walking around on all day. You
don't realize that they're down there. But if if you
can put, you know, a series of pipes down into
(22:51):
the aquifer at one point in this massive space of water,
you could just suck it right up like that milkshake.
It's such a good it's it's perfect and terrible and real.
And and to add to that there, the company is
so large that they have um they have acquired a
(23:14):
tremendous amount of influence, especially in smaller communities. We don't
know exactly how much water that they've been extracting with
this method. But in some journalists found that Nestley had
been illegally draining water from lands that were leased by
the Morongo Band of Mission Indians in a desert area.
(23:36):
And they've also been taken water from the San Bernardino
National Forest. They did have a permit to do this,
it expired in Is that just? Is that? Is that
just something that got overlooked because it's a huge operation. Well,
I mean also another number related to that instance, they
had been paying five four dollars a year to extract
(23:59):
about thirty million gallons of water there, including during the drought.
So you can already see how this profit margin is
going to work out, right that an independent analysis put
the total water extraction at UM one billion gallons per
(24:19):
year over time. And if we think about how many
bottles of water that is, right, what what was it?
Twelve ounce bottle of water, sixteen ounces something like that? Sure, yeah,
something like that. Sure that those sound like numbers, So
so we can see just how little they would be paying,
even with the cost of transportation infrastructure, how little they're
(24:41):
paying to produce these, right, And I and I did
want to put in here that like, while we can
all agree that drinking bottled water is better for our
health than drinking bottled soda. The marketing of bottled water
as safer or healthier than tap water for for the
general population is, and this is a scientific term, a
bunch of huei. Um. The stuff was safer in the
(25:04):
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries for like people instead in cities
who didn't want cholera or typhoid or dysentery um. And
then later, of course, in the nineteen eighties, when the
EPA found a lot of lead and a lot of
drinking water, but like these problems were fixable. Public health
movements in the early twentieth century created free, filtered chlorinated
water for many developed cities, removing concerns of disease, and
(25:25):
in most part cities rushed to solve the lead issues
in the eighties and nineties, but they put fluoride in
the water instead. They do I'm sure that's a whole
other episode that I'm sure you guys have done more
than once. It's fine, but okay, so, but bottled water
has roots in health impurity movements of the eighteen hundreds,
(25:47):
kind of like I was talking about earlier. Um, folks
then started selling bottled water from places like Saratoga Springs
like to rich people. Um, mostly because right, yeah, yeah,
it's likely this is fan to mineral water and it's
naturally carbonated because we don't have good carbonation technology yet,
so we'll drink it and it's healthy and stuff. Um
(26:07):
but I don't know why my ghost voice is also
my true anyway. Um. But yeah, so mostly it wasn't
a thing among people. Bottled water was not a thing
among people who didn't have another choice until the nineteen seventies,
and that's when pet plastic went commercial and Perier started
sponsoring athletic events like the New York City Marathon in
(26:28):
order to push the healthfulness of their water. Um. Even today,
with the aging infrastructure problems like we have in Flint
and on Canada's First Nations reserves, the majority of marketing
of bottled water is bent to that like health purity image,
Like what should be an emergency solution for temporarily unsafe
water is being sold as a lifestyle. Now you get
(26:49):
bottled water in a nice glass bottle that you find
in your fancy schmancy hotel rooms in Philadelphia. That's true.
That's true. There wasn't actually much water in those bottles,
almost no water in there. I forget the name of
that brand, Voss Voss Water. Yes, the bottles are pretty.
(27:09):
They are you know, they're They're a real statement. That's
how That's how I felt when I was when I
got one from the hotel we're at we're on the road.
It's like, Okay, I'm gonna walk around with this and
feel like I'm I'm saying something. I don't know what
it is, but I'm making a statement about something. I
think it's just a noise. And it's like, that's what
I'm saying. So this continues this there's more to this
(27:36):
water story. But let's bracket that for a second and
look at another huge controversy with Nestley, which is the
idea of baby formula. Just like back in the late
eighteen hundreds, Nestlie remains invested in formula and baby food products,
but the problem nowadays centers less on the product itself
and more on the marketing. And I'm using that term
(27:57):
in a very generous way. Well, by the first decade
of the twentieth century, Nestle ads were saying stuff like
don't wait too long before you wean the baby. If
you do, the little one is likely to be weak
in anemic. They admitted in these ads that breast milk
was the best for young babies, but for babies six
months and up, they said that their product was the
(28:17):
nearest thing in the world. And this splendid triumph of
care and science. It's so like mother's milk that the
tiny stomach won't notice the difference. Nest lee that which
is wrong, so wrong, so so wrong. Oh sure, and
(28:39):
we've we've done a lot of not us personally, but
but researchers have done a lot into looking into this
in the past few decades. And yeah, breat breast milk
is better. Breast milk is like the best thing. If
we could, all right now, everybody listening to this be
just drinking breast milk instead of coffee, we'd be good
to go. This is this is for real. Well, well,
certainly you can. You can get some some antibody is
(29:00):
I like that he's passionate. I like that your passionate.
I learned a lot about it when we had a kid.
It's just it's incredible stuff. But not everyone has evolved
the genetic mutation to drink milk into adulthood. It's just something.
There are a lot of problems with the thing that
I said. It's just I was being hyperbolic. I'm sorry.
Don't don't everyone do that ever? Please? I mean, also,
(29:21):
until until men really start figuring out how to lactate
more regularly, I think I think we're going to have
a supply chain problem. Yeah, just gragistically really tried. And
nest Lee also wanted to um lacktate. Well, they guess
they're kind of your nemesis here. They wanted people to
stop lactating. Right, they became big formula. These ads are
(29:44):
categorically wrong, right, someone say it. It's ethically wrong, but
it's definitely the science doesn't bear out, is the problem.
And in the nine nineties, probably knowing this already, Nestley
began pushing formula aggressively in developing and poor countries, specifically
targeting the poorest among them, and they had campaigns that
(30:06):
were meant to make formulas seem um equally as as
good for the kid, if not better than breast milk.
But the first problem here that crops up is in
a medical sphere. A lot of these countries don't have
great water infrastructure, and you have to have sanitary water
to use this powdered formula. I believe it was powdered
(30:29):
at that time. So if you don't have access to
clean water, or you don't have access to the technology
to boil the water, or you don't speak the language
that uh in which the instructions are printed on the container,
what good is uh? What good are English instructions If
there's a place where the country has thirty different languages
(30:52):
and the main one is Portuguese. Yeah, I know, Hey,
I think NESTLEI needed to get on that hobo code.
You know what I mean in hobo code? Yeah, this
this comes out after after right, so we can say
hobo code and don't have to explain what it is. Perfect,
it's just what we're talking about. I was at your show. Yes,
oh why oh, sorry, thanks for coming problem anytime. I
(31:17):
can tell it meant a lot to you. Yeah. But
Neslee does seem to have knowingly ignored these risks, the
risk of improper creation of the formula, the risk of
unsanitary water, the health the health complications that arrive when
a child is put on formula, and this was this
(31:42):
concern was cast aside EUNICEF estimates that a formula fed child,
by the way, just for some facts, living in a
disease written and unhygienic condition is going to be between
six and twenty five times more likely to die of
diarrhea and four times more likely to die of pneumonia
in comparison to a child that has been breastfed, because well,
there's a there's a natural filter there, which is the
(32:05):
mom so you filter is a lot of that bad
stuff out, It's true. Yeah, And there's another problem, which
is that if we're talking about destitute communities, often mothers
would tend to use less formula than was needed because
they wanted to make it last longer, because you see,
all right, So there's this thing called the International Baby
Food Action Network. It's a real thing. I think it's
(32:27):
a great name for an extremist group. They are not.
It sounds like a kid's TV show or something, Baby
Action Network, you know what I mean. I would watch
that show. I would I would check it out. I
would give it a chance. I don't know if I
would make it through the whole season, but I'll just
ask you. But dude, they've got some crazy allegations. Right,
it's not crazy, they're just intense, right because Nestleie, they
(32:51):
according to their belief for their allegations, Nestleie distributes free
formula samples in hospitals and maternity wards across these countries,
knowing that this will interfere with the natural actation process,
and not only in these in these less developed countries,
but also in the United States also in places where
(33:12):
we don't need that. Wow, yeah, we got a bunch
of samples when when we had our child, a ton
of stuff sent home with us for free uh formulas.
That's the thing. That's the thing, because once this has
interfered with the natural actation process and you go away
(33:33):
from the hospital of the maternity world or what have you,
you find out that the formula is no longer free.
So the Baby Food Action Network says that Nestlee is
operating under the guise of humanitarian aid, but what they're
really trying to do is to create market, a captive market.
At that they say, nest Lee is purposefully Nestle is
(33:56):
aware that this interference with natural note production can occur,
and they wanted to that's the argument. Yeah, that's a
that's a heavy accusation. Um, I wish it didn't feel
so real. So like correct, I wish it didn't. So
(34:17):
you think it you think it was nefarious in some way,
like you think it was not just it was nefarious,
whether they meant to or not. Right, I mean, if
this is actually happening, if they're giving all these free
examples which we have seen I have seen personally, it's
it's not so great. Well, and then the argument could
be that maybe the corporate heart is in the right place. Yeah,
(34:40):
we're just giving you free things, but we just neglected
to understand the long term consequences. Well right up until
someone said, hey, there's long term consequences, at which point
you know, they did keep going. They did keep going.
They did keep going. And they could certainly have a
program where they offer these supplies for free to hospitals
and maternity awards for patients who need them, for patients
(35:01):
who request them for specific cases where for whatever reason,
the mother or the baby cannot breastfeed. And there have
been there have been doctors in some developing countries who
say that the way the way this stuff should work
is that they should have to write prescriptions for former
they should put that filter up because writing a prescription
(35:21):
on their end would be free, but it would also
be a way to keep the doctor involved, the the
you know, medical provider of there we go. That's the one.
I don't know why that was difficult for me, but
but it's it's true. This has been something that's been
brewing for a long long time. Nestlee, for their part,
denies all the accusations, all the accusations across the board,
(35:45):
and they said, we don't even know where to start
looking to figure out if this is true, because there's
no you haven't given us anything specific enough. But still
this led to a large push for Boycott's. The first
US boycott off Nestley begins in July of seventy nine,
seventy seven, and then it spreads to Europe and in
(36:08):
one the World Health Assembly adopts a code um a
policy on the marketing of breast milk substitutes, which sounds
very specific, and they say it is a minimum requirement
that has to be adopted in its entirety. In eighty four,
Nestle ascents and they can implement the code. Boycott gets suspended,
(36:28):
but surprise, surprise, it came back in nineteen because most
people who had a problem with it pre boycott said
that they didn't fix anything post boycott. So that's the
story of Nestle and infant formula. Well, I like that
we start with kids. Let's do you want to stick
(36:49):
with kids? I think we should, but I think we
need an ad break between this, just as a bit
of a palate cleanser. Um. If that's okay, okay, let's
hear for from some sponsors. We're back with a twisted segue.
(37:12):
I believe we set this up as UM. We we enjoy.
It's not the right word for our conversation about formula.
But we do want to stick with kids because it
turns out that there's more to the story. Nest Lee
isn't just participating in a cover up or a conspiracy
to UH to extract water from small communities. It's not
(37:36):
just through either incompetence or nefarious designs UM forcing children
to drink baby formula. It's it's also cutting out the
middleman of exploitation entirely and and diving right into UM
as we established earlier, UH slavery, human trafficking, child labor,
(37:57):
you know what I mean. At least it's being a
used of such, and there are some there's some evidence
to show that it's it's been happening in the supply chain,
right chocolate, right now, We're not saying it's it's not
like we're saying there's some crazy corporate psychopath with like
a monocle and a candy bar top hats lugging down
(38:18):
sam Pello Grenos as he snatches children off the street.
But hopefully not, hopefully not. But it is true, like
you said, Lauren, with chocolate, and like you said, Matt,
with the supply chain, there's compelling evidence that they're the
people they are buying products from, cocoa beans and so on,
that those folks are engaging in slavery, child labor, human trafficking,
(38:42):
and pretty gruesome acts of abuse. In two thousand and five,
the International Labor Rights Fund filed one of those lawsuits
against Nestley and several other companies on behalf of three
children from Molly in the sud allege that these kids
were traffic of the Ivory Coast, where they were enslaved,
where they were abused on a regular basis, and forced
(39:05):
to work on a cocoa plantation. Uh not great. Case
went on for years right exactly. In two thousand ten,
the U. S. District Court for the Central District of California,
they determined that corporations cannot be held liable for violations
of international law and dismissed this suit. Isn't that isn't
(39:28):
that special as they say, Uh, this was of course
a controversial decision when since then it has been appealed.
But isn't it isn't that crazy that and a corporation
cannot be or at least the thought at the time
was that this corporation can't be held liable for violations
of international law through its practices of creating products, right,
(39:51):
especially when it's an international corporation. Yeah, that's a good point.
I guess The logic there is that it would be
a huge hindrance to business operations and a huge expense
to have to send people to every place physically to
check on these things. And people need needs, you know
people everyone, people everywhere need needs. Yeah, oh man, everyone
(40:17):
everyone needs. Now this isn't restricted to a single incident,
that's the problem. There was a report done by an
independent auditor, a group called the Fair Labor Association, and
they said that they found Nestleie committed multiple serious violations
of its own internal labor code. So it's corporate laws,
let alone the laws of the land and the state.
(40:39):
This was at the very least a large degree of negligence,
if not tacit approval of slavery and child labor. And
here's the thing. Nestlely commissioned the study. Nestie said, show
us what we need to know. And the fair labor
folks came back and they're like, wow, this is monstrous
and they're like, whoa, really, it's crazy, no way, no
(41:03):
what not us And uh, we have a quote from
then executive vice president for operations, Jose Lopez, the use
of child labor in our coco supply chain it goes
against everything we stand for. No company sourcing cocoa from
the Ivory Coast can guarantee that it doesn't happen, but
we can say that tackling child labor is a top
priority for our company. Okay. So again, the argument is
(41:26):
that no company of that size, especially could be certain
of how their suppliers are behaving, especially they seem to
say in this area of the world. It's not surprising
that critics remained unsatisfied with that response, and as of
this recording and estimated one point eight million children in
West Africa Loan are at risk of becoming a victim
(41:48):
of child labor. Yeah, Okay, he's gonna take a breather
here for a second. Yeah, maybe it was too much
to have another child related one. But maybe we should stay.
Maybe we should stay geopolitical, Maybe we should go to
another country. So should we talk about like corporations going
(42:08):
in and strong arming countries by making them payback massive debts.
So this is a weird one. In two thousand and two,
Ethiopia was in the grips of a nationwide brutal famine
and nest Lee came to Ethiopia in its time of
need and said, you owe us six million dollars. Uh.
(42:31):
This claim dates back to nineties seventies when the military
of Ethiopius sees the assets of foreign companies. But things
took a turn because the public found out about this
and they began to speak up. Oh yes, the company
received over forty thousand letters from people who were absolutely outraged. UH.
In one of the most famous cases of public opinion
(42:52):
beat corporate greed that exists on the planet. UH. In
the end, Nestley took a U turn. They settled for
I guess, uh, partially money. Definitely. They're like, okay, okay, guys,
look just give us some of it, will meet you halfway. Yeah.
In the end, Nestley did take a U turn and
(43:13):
they settled for just some of the debt. They still
took some cash. Yeah, we'll meet you halfway, right, right right,
and uh. In their defense, they also took that money
that Ethiopia gave them and invested a portion of it too,
in the country to help it bounce back from famine.
That's very nice. It's really weird. It's it's they could
(43:35):
have just not taken the money. I don't know, but
maybe there's an argument that they had better international development
experience and so would be better stewards of that money.
That's that's an argument you would hear. I could tell
it's very politely worded. I can I can read the
room here in the podcast studio. I could tell that
you all are not persuaded. I'll check in with Paul
(43:56):
and see what he thinks. But while they were in
Ethiopia around the same time, roughly, they made a deal
with the wife of the infamous dictator from Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe.
May deal was wife Grace Mugabe to buy one million
liters of milk a year from farms that she had
taken over, because you see, Grace Mugabe had a booming
(44:20):
side business of taking over large farms in Zimbabwe that
were white owned, at least six of them since two Yeah. Yeah,
and so this is building a farming empire from these
legally confiscated farmlands. And you know, Zimbabwe has a very
(44:42):
very upsetting history of racial tension, colonialism, resource extraction, and
so on. But these farms were taken illegally, at least
as far as the international community thinks. Well. Yeah, it
led to another series of boycotts yet yet another um
as well as sanctions and both the European Union and
the United States. Yeah, I know, it sounds like we're
(45:04):
picking on Nestlie. These are just things that you probably
don't know about a candy company. Even Canada got beefed
up with him. Dude. They're a lean cuisine company. Okay,
they're a dog food company. That's right, there are all things.
They're a hot pockets company, come on, and that at
the end of the day, that's what it is. At
the end of the day. What matters more than hot
(45:25):
pockets podcasts You can put anything in them. So let's
talk about price fixing. Price fixing is a fun thing
where companies work together, people who were in the same
market share to uh to control the prices of things.
A lot of times it's to keep them high. Keep
(45:47):
prices high. That way, everybody gets a lot of that moolah.
Sometimes it's too strategically keep the prices low. Either way
it's strategized. Well, guess what. Nestlee has been accused of
this and they even got rated. Yeah, Nestlee Canada got
rated along with Hershey Canada and Mars Canada. They all
(46:08):
have the word Canada in their names because they're the
Canadian branch of the company. I feel like I'm over
explaining that. It makes sense though, So these uh this company,
nest Lee and other companies the ones we just mentioned
they're subject to a class action lawsuit are several of
them per company, And ultimately they settled for nine million
dollars without accepting as per usual, as we've learned on
(46:30):
this show, without accepting any liability, without admitting any guilt
or any issues there is like, we did nothing wrong,
but here's a lot of money. It's is it a
lot of money to them? How much do they make?
Ninety point eight billion in total revenue though that's not profit. Yeah,
and this is yeah Nestlee Canada doesn't rake in all
that cash, but they rake in quite a bit, I'm assuming. Yeah,
(46:54):
but they you know this, this happens a lot of
lawsuits are settled out of court this way, right. Uh,
they all so have been Look, they they're not hurting
for money, that's true. Uh. They are a business though,
and they need to be quite aware of where a
profit can be found. That is why they have been
involved in like the weirdest round of criticism regarding pollution.
(47:16):
It's nuts in a cercuitous way. Nestley actually makes some
some real scratch, some solid cheese off of pollution. They now, yeah, yeah, okay,
the main the main part of that this is going
to go back to water. But they have historically and
sometimes still do source inexpensive palm oil, and palm oil
(47:40):
is is a vegetable oil made from the fruit of
oil palm trees. Makes sense, right, Uh. It goes into
a lot of their candies and other products that include
processed fats, and it's a crop that fuels a lot
of deforestation, endangers a lot of species, like the cute
ones like like tigers and rang tang stuff like that,
and it creates a lot of pollution in the areas
where they're grown and process to Africa, Asia and South
(48:01):
America primarily. Are you saying tigers are cute? Yeah, tigers
are terrifying. Tigers are amazing. They're majestic. Kidders, I didn't
mean that sounds so definitive about that. I yeah, did
you have a bad time with tigers? I mean, I
have a three year old and I've been reading about
(48:22):
tigers everywhere, and uh, just I've been to the zoo
a lot lately. The tiger is crazy scary, It's huge.
It would eat you, just your face off. With cats, Yeah,
it's just the size thing. Tigers are also brilliant. They
have This is a too of this does have anything
(48:43):
to do with this episode, but um tigers who have
been wounded in the wild and Siberian stuff. If they
managed to escape, they are able to like Corvid's remember
the smell and the appearance of the person who wounded them.
And there's been at least one proven case where a
(49:03):
tiger was attacked escaped in Siberia waited for winter to
hit when it knew it. It stalked the guy for
months and just waited for it to get too cold
for to leave his house. And then you can see
the footprints that the tiger walked around and increasingly closer spirals,
and then it came through his back window, snatched him, uh,
drug him out, and I don't remember what parts of
(49:27):
the body they found. I'm not saying Richard Parker isn't
a badass assassin. I'm just saying, uh, yikes, that's all.
It's just I just take issue with them being cute,
because I agree there are kitty cats, and kitty cats
are cute, but they're big ole scare kitty cats that
will assassinate you after waiting. Okay, I think this isn't
(49:52):
my new personality test. Oh no, uh also any research coast,
the savior has a very fascinating personality test that I
believe she was entirely making up on the spot. I
can't think of what it might be, but that doesn't
mean that it didn't exist previously. I love to ask
you about it. I love to ask you about it.
(50:13):
It's a good it's a good road trip conversation. So
palm oil bad, palm oil is bad. Tigers, good tigers. Okay,
but um, what about plastic bottles? How are they well?
In the US and the West at large, increasing concern
(50:34):
over plastic bottles has sent more and more customers back
to reusable bottles or tap water, you know, And this
is not Nestlie's profits down a bit. And I do
want to point out there's something very clever and very
calculated at play here in the U S at least
concerning consumer plastic. Of all, the plastic pollution that we
(50:55):
hear about in the oceans of the world comes from
commercial fisheries. It comes from gigantic nets and things of
that nature. Yeah, the straws that you use are not
contributing that seriously compared to those items, to the great
Pacific raft and stuff like that. Right, right, And plastic
bottles do play a huge role in pollution. But again,
(51:17):
don't let people run this sort of shell game on you.
It's I think it's brilliant that so many corporations have
have had this change of heart moment, such great pr
where they're like you know what we decided to be
the change. We're going to make a difference here at
can Glomco. No more straws, and people are like, oh,
(51:37):
that's great, and you guys are really brave. But the
one other major, just because we're kind of a major
contributing factor though, that I've been reading about more and
more are these little food pouches the people are buying
where for kids and adults, like the kind of exactly
that have a little plastic tip, and that plastic top
(51:59):
in particular is becoming a massive problem. And the other
thing is have you guys have seen the the water
bottle refillers around Atlanta and a lot of other cities.
Have you seen these? It looks like a water fountaine.
You just put your water bottle up to it and
you can refill your water bottle. Yeah, so smart. I'm
just that makes me so happy when we're thinking about
(52:22):
the pollution that, even though it's not as bad as
commercial fisheries, the pollution that is generated from plastic products
like that. So how does how does nest Lee end
up making a profit off of this? To find the
answer there, we have to travel across the Pacific because
sales maybe down in the US and the West, but
in China sales are up in part due to pollution.
(52:45):
About seventy in China's lakes and rivers have been polluted.
Although people will tell you virtually all the surface water
is now unsafe to drink in that country unless it's
been treated. I don't know how much of that is
exaggeration and how much of that bears up to scrutiny.
But have a ton of industrial facilities, power and chemical plants,
paper and textile factories, and this means that a lot
(53:07):
of the people living in the country don't trust the
water or the purification infrastructure in China, so they buy
more and more bottled water from companies like Nestley, who again,
they make a huge margin out of this stuff. What
did you say earlier about California? They pay like five
hundred something a year, four dollars for every three hundred
(53:28):
million gallons, and you pay like minimum what dollar twenty
nine per bottle for twelve to six ounces. What do
you think that twenty nine cents is about? It's to
make it. You know? You know how this we didn't
you and I do something about pricing, Like why there
are so many nines. It's aspirational, but you're also saving
(53:48):
a penny. I don't think it works on us anymore
because now, uh, thirty seems like less to a lot
of people because there's a zero at the end. Yeah,
that's ridiculous, right, So so this whole idea goes back.
I think the most perhaps the most important thing here,
is that Nestily is a company that makes food stuffs.
(54:09):
For the most part, they also make you know, we've
talked about all the other companies they have hand in,
but for the most part, they're creating products which you buy,
you open up, throw away the packaging, and then eat
the part that's edible. Right. That creates a lot of waste,
a lot of trash. And it doesn't mean that, you know,
(54:30):
Nestle is for some nefarious purpose trying to take on
Captain Planet because they're bad guys. It's not like they're
seeing around like Montgomery Burns doing the you know, rubbing
their hands together. There's a better word for that, like
like a little like like raccoon, yeah yeah, yeah, yeah,
yeah yeah, just sort of just sort of rubbing their
own palms together and saying, how how how should we
(54:53):
ruin the world today. Yeah what what Someone's like, well,
we could I don't know. Um ah, got me on
the spot here, Monty. We could uh, we could start war,
we could poison the food. It's like no, no, no,
something more nuance. And then they're like okay, okay, um
um um uh pollute everything and they're like, have you
(55:18):
considered single use packaging? There you go exactly. It's not
that they're not some super villain being evil like that.
They're the onesler. They're a giant corporation now making tons
and tons of products with tons and tons of packaging,
and that is just what happens when you do that,
(55:39):
and as people are you providing a huge boost to
economies and uh job opportunities. Those are another that's another
PC argument you'll hear watch the los although, hey, we're
not even talking about the industrial runoff from the industrial factories.
Who are who are creating these plastic products. That's true, Yeah,
(56:01):
that's absolutely true, and and unfortunately, unfortunately, you know, they
don't have to be a purposefully malevolent entity. If if
you're a corporation, job, as Matt said, to pursue a profit,
and that means that everything to a certain degree is
going to be a lower priority, including pollution. There are
(56:24):
very few companies in the world that would say we're
going to operate at a loss for ten years to
help make the world a better place. That's just not
a viable tenure plan. That's not something a company does.
So maybe not immoral, but immoral, And there we have it.
The world's largest food and beverage company is the subject
of numerous controversies, boycotts, criticisms, and arguably, yes, cover ups.
(56:47):
One thing we did cut from this episode was the
the delightful tale of the Fluoride Mafia, which is, yeah,
we found this. It's this group of people who believe
that Nestleie is so large because it is secretly charged
by some elite cabal with the task of putting fluoride
and everything. That's their big master plan. Fluoride and everything,
(57:12):
not not just the usual water, no, every everything, florid
flavored cats, floride flavored purina, biniful. It seems extreme. Hey,
do you have no comments on that one? I don't know.
I haven't researched to that. You wanna get involved with
(57:33):
big fluoride? Right? We all dose ourselves at least two
times a day, if we're good adults and our children. Yeah,
there you go, that's a bright side. Brush your teeth,
there you go. So, so what happens now? What does
this mean for anyone who was already familiar with this
stuff or anyone who just learned about it? M If
(57:55):
you support Nestlie and disagree with its critics, if you
think they're being alarmist, or you think they're trying to
create problems where none really exists, then kudos, congrat you
you locked out? Life goes on as normal. Yeah, Eat
as many kit cats as you want. Yeah. Yeah, get
that purina and feed it your dogs and then put
that to Jorno in the oven. Crack open a nice
(58:17):
sand pelle Greno and watch the world burn. That's great.
Let's put that on a T shirt. Okay, tell us
if that should be a T shirt. Yeah, so we
should be doing more I GU commercials too. Yeah. I
believe Global Unlimited, the illuminated ones they have, they've got
something coming out or they've like like co sponsored something
that's coming out on Saver. Yeah. Over on Saver, we're
(58:39):
doing a reading of the Grim Brothers story The Almond Tree.
It's you know, it's about cannibalism. So we thought it
would be perfect for Thanksgiving. Um, so it's coming out
the Friday after Thanksgiving for our non American listeners, that
is November. Books for it. Share it with your loved ones,
don't give them a context, just like walk in during
Thanksgiving dinner, knock some stuff off the table, slam down
(59:03):
a boom box. You do need a boom box for this,
and then just just play it and pick one person
and make weirdly hostile eye contact with them. So so
definitely do that. Um you can. If you have any
questions or comments about Nestlee and any of the things
we've talked about today, you can find us on Twitter.
(59:24):
You can find us on Facebook and Instagram conspiracy stuff.
With most of those conspiracy stuff show on Instagram, you
can you can call us. That's true, Matt. We are
one eight three three st d w y t K. Yeah.
I gotta always highlight that STD because the most important
is to be transparent about that. People know it's the
(59:44):
responsible thing to do. The other thing you can do
is join our Facebook group. Here's where it gets crazy.
That's where you can join a lot of us and
our fellow conspiracy realists. And just discuss things. Post some
dope memes. What kind of memes, dank I for get
the cool hip memes? You can post those there. Um.
(01:00:06):
That's so, that's where you can find us for the
most part. And we know what you're probably asking yourself.
You're probably like, guys, I know because you say this
stuff at the end of every show, right, I don't
care how to contact you. I already know how to
do it. Stop yelling std at me at the end
of the episode. But but you are probably wondering how
(01:00:28):
you can get in contact with Savor. Oh goodness, you
can find us. Yes, it's Savor the podcast. You can
look us up via any Internet search engine. You can
also find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook at savor
pod uh or email us at hello at savor pod
dot com. We we would we would love to hear
from you. And we occasionally get angry about giant corporations
(01:00:50):
on our show too, So I don't know, come tune
in listen to our sugar episodes. We get really angry.
I am a big fan of One of your more
recent pisodes has this title. I don't know if you've
heard this mayonnaise or mayonnaise like I don't want to
any why Yeah, yeah, any Annie strongly dislikes mann It's
(01:01:13):
it's one of her top five least favorite foods. It's
so fascinating, the story of mayonnaise and some of the
things you're talking about in the episode. It is genuinely fascinating.
And I love Manna. It's the European whatever blood I
have in me. I just want to dip my fries
in it. Just want to slather it on my sandwiches.
I do not care. I'll put it on a P
(01:01:33):
B and J what I'll do it. There's I mean,
live your life. I got your back. There's also a
a group of people that believes there is, for lack
of a better term, of Mayo conspiracy, right, Yeah, there
was just a Twitter message about this, Yeah, that um
that Big Mayo is like part of Big Agra, and
that this is a problem specifically in the way that
(01:01:56):
vegan mayonnaise companies have been have been treated in the
larger market. And I will say that mostly that's an
issue of the definition, the legal definition from the FDA
of mayonnaise, which includes eggs. So that's a that's a
reason why vegan Mayo has not been allowed to market
itself as mayonnaise. Yeah, so that's part of the problem,
because vegan mayonnaise isn't mayonnaise. Mayonnaise is fat and eggs,
(01:02:20):
delicious oil. Yeah, vegetable oil. Vegetable oil and eggs. Mostly.
I need I need my mayonnaise to be made out
of bacon grease that also cannot be marketed as mayonnaise.
Oh yes, it's like bacon aise at that point, some
sort of a only. But you know what, man, you
gotta be the change, right if you want that bacon
(01:02:41):
mayonnaise to happen, I have full faith that you will do.
So haul is going to turn us into bacon aise
if we don't get that's true, that's true. So what
do you do if you if you're familiar with all
these different social media shenanigans and you care for none
of them, we have good news for you. You can
send us a good old fashioned email. We are conspiracy
(01:03:02):
at how stuff Works dot com.
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. M
(00:24):
welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, and
our trustee co host Noel is on the road on
an adventure. All will be revealed in time, I believe,
is the party line. He's on on the road on
an adventure. Just still a couple of feet away from us,
right exactly? They who am I? They call me Ben.
(00:44):
We are joined with our super producer Paul Mission controlled decade.
Most importantly, you are you. You are here that makes
this stuff they don't want you to know. Wait, Ben,
there's somebody else in the room too. You're right, Matt,
You're Spider. Since is as always disturbingly accurate, we are
not delving into today's topic alone, are we met? No,
(01:05):
we are not. Today we are joined by Lauren Vogelbaum
that you may know from Savor Brain Stuff. Oh my gosh,
so many um and if you are not already aware,
Savor is the new version of what was once food Stuff. Right, Yes,
it's essentially the same show, but now we go on
the road sometimes and talk to actual human people aside
(01:26):
from ourselves, were mostly human people about a food, food
and culture and science and how all those things work
together and why why we eat the way that we eat.
It's an awesome new thing experience to listen to savor
just hearing you in places. It's been a whole lot
of fun as a listener. Just wanted to say that
on on Mike. Oh, thank thank thank you so much.
(01:46):
And we defer to you, Lauren fairly often in the
show when something food related comes up. That's that's why
we asked you to come here today. Oh you didn't
just want to hang out? Well, that that too for sure. Yeah, yeah,
I mean mostly Yeah, it's mostly hanging out and then
(02:08):
you're going to know more stuff about this than we do. Maybe, actually, definitely,
I believe you entirely. I enjoyed, enjoyed that strange shrug, Laurden.
You have been on the show in the past before.
You have joined us for an exploration of the diamond industry.
Oh right, yeah, specifically not food related that one, but um,
(02:29):
but yeah, who, I'm still mad about diamonds. You may
notice that there's a reoccurring theme here. We bring you
on for terribly depressing things. Yeah, that's why when you
said hang out, I was a little taken aback. At
this point, you you pretty much know the score. I mean,
I mean hypothetically. I did some of the research here anyway.
So yeah, one of these well, I mean, one of
(02:50):
these episodes. One day, maybe we'll be a fun and
delightful one. Do you guys do fun and delightful episodes?
You just never invited? I see, yeah we do. But
we are so glad that you are here today, especially
because we are catching you right before you take another
trip for saver. Oh yeah, tomorrow, I'm flying out to
(03:13):
New Orleans with user Dylan and uh and my co
host Annie, and we're gonna we're gonna eat and drink
some stuff. We're going to talk to some people about it.
I'm so jealous. That's some of my favorite food that
exists on the planet. I can't eat bell peppers, so
it's gonna be rough going for me. But it's gonna
be just all right. I'm gonna just make up for
it in cocktails. You can also get your own parade,
(03:33):
which I know I keep telling, keep telling everyone. Don't
blow up the spot if you listen, if you live
in New Orleans and you don't know about this, but
it's not that expensive to pay outside of Marti Grass season,
to pay a band to do a parade for you,
and you get to walk in the front or I
guess wherever you want. At that point, I promptu parades
with only two hand grenades. And that's all. That's the
(03:54):
maximum amount of hand grenades you can have in one night.
I'm telling you. That's a drink, right, yes, not not
physical weapons. Don't drink those at all. Yeah, you guys,
Today we're talking about a major company that most people
know about. They are the creators of such foods for
(04:15):
cats and dogs as Alpo Benefit and Fancy Feast. That's right,
that's right. Today we are exploring the disarming and perhaps
surprising story of a company called Nesslie. But that's not
all they've created. Yeah, I'm you know, candy from kit
Cats to Butterfingers, coffee brands like Taster's Choice, Nest Cafe,
(04:36):
Coffee Mate, and Starbucks, packaged coffees, baking products from Libby's Incarnation,
frozen infrigerated foods like Staffers, California Pizza Kitchen, Hot Pockets, Linquisine,
and the Journo and Tombstone. Uh, dessert brands like Hog
and Dogs, Eaties, Skinny Cow, Boost and Power Bar, nutritional supplements,
Gerber Baby Foods, Purina pet Foods, and they have a
thirty percent ownership of Loureal, including cosmetics brands like Garnier,
(04:59):
the Body Shop and maybe Lene and perfume lines from
Ralph Lauren, Georgio Armani and Eve st Laurent. Wow, and
that's nowhere near all of it. Did we hit perry
A and San Pelagreno. Oh? I didn't even mention the
water right right water there There are multiple brands of
water as well. This company cast a large, not entirely
sugary shadow. You know, for a lot of us in
(05:22):
the US, we associate nestleie with maybe like nest Cafe
or like a Nestley Crunch candy bar. But every single
thing that Matt and Lauren just named is owned by Nestley.
There's so much more to the story. Nestle is huge.
It's gargantuan. It is like, I don't want to ruin
the surprise yet, but it's big. Let's just go with that.
(05:45):
It's like the Facebook of foods. You know what that
is disturbingly accurate. But this, this is true. When Nestley
first started out, they only made one thing, one real breakthrough.
It was it was condensed milk and baby formula, which
was massively important, and that's why it became such a
big company. They started in a place which was a
(06:08):
good place to start babies, right right, just like Wu Tang,
Nestlee was for the kids. Yea, So here's here's a
terrible joke that we we weren't proud of, but we're
going to do anyway. Matt, would you like to do
the condensed history of Nestlee grown because it's condensed like
(06:28):
the milk. Yes. I feel like this joke only gets
better the more that we try to over explain it.
Let it hang there. Yeah. So Nestlee is named for
its primary food wizard, on Re Nestle. He was born
August tenth, eighteen fourteen. On Red. Nestle begins his career
(06:49):
as a pharmacist assistant before moving to Switzerland and qualifying
to practice as a pharmacist and chemist. So that's pretty cool.
He moves on to become a pharmacist and chemist. That's
a great job to have. Sure, that's chemist that's cool. Yeah,
and this was a this was a much broader term
(07:11):
back in the eight hundreds, right, a chemist could be
mixing any sort of thing, you know, an agglomeration of potions.
For for ri Uh, one of his primary focuses was
always food science. He experimented with other stuff like cement,
which hopefully was not a food experiment, but he also
experiment with lemonade, cooking oils. Eventually he moves towards this
(07:35):
idea of condensed milk or some sort of replacement for
breast milk for nursing parents. Yeah. Condensed milk was developed
by Gail Borden, Yes, that Borden in the United States
and the eighteen fifties, and was hugely important in feeding
Civil War troops. Right. Yeah, it's weird because nowadays, I
don't I don't know about everyone. It can't speak for everyone,
(07:56):
but nowadays condensed milk seems like it has a bit
of a a niche, you know what I mean. It's
not super widespread. No one's no one's going to a
restaurant and saying, you know, I'll have the number three
with condensed milk to drink. Yeah, and well it's it
was a much needed product for a lot of people
(08:17):
at the time. Sure, you know these days, I think
it's mostly a baking ingredient. You're buying sweeten and condensed
milk to put in like a pumpkin pie or something
like that. But um, yeah, you know that this was
back in the what like eighteen sixties eighteen seventies. This
was before refrigeration technology was a thing, and it was
also a time when industrialization was on the rise, and
along with that this increase in concern about food purity.
(08:41):
You know, more people were moving into cities away from
sources of fresh foods. Um, more foods were being manufactured,
but regulations had not been set up yet. And there
was also this religiously influenced temperance movement UM or a
series of movements going on in both America and Europe
where people were thinking harder about what they put in
their bodies. So like, all of this lead to this thing.
(09:03):
We're condensed milk being marketed and to be fair generally
created to be safe and long lasting, um and so
they were considered good products, right yeah, because it's dependable too,
and it's consistent, which I think was a huge deal.
So in eighteen sixty seven, Just like a year after
saying I'm gonna work with condensed milk, nestlely develops this
(09:28):
milk based baby food that he calls farine lecti, which
is I'm woefully mispronouncing that it means flour with milk
in English. So it's cow's milk, wheat flour and sugar too,
you know, I guess sweeten the whole contraption. And as
we know, whenever you hear stories about inventors or inventions,
(09:48):
it's usually pretty difficult to pin an entire invention on
a single person. Yeah. I think there were two or
three people who were developing a very similar product around
the same time, first in the form of a liquidn
densed food, and then very shortly afterwards in terms of
like a powdered condensed food. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And we
remember nest Lee as a pioneer of baby formula because
(10:12):
this baby formula was a catalyst for his company, really
propelled the growth of the entire operation nest Lee. Originally,
according to this story, nest Lee develops this because he
knows that some new mothers cannot breastfeed or some infants
cannot be breast fed. For one reason or another, and
(10:33):
this invention, if he can get it off the ground,
will help mitigate the cartoonishly high infant mortality rates of
the time. Yeah, things were bad for infants back then.
And this is a real thing where once children, once
very young children, start eating any formula of this kind,
(10:53):
it's very very difficult for them to get back onto
like a breast milk or something if you're trying to
switch back. Um, I'm not saying this is a terrible
They did a great thing to stop babies from dying,
but it also creates this whole other problem that we're
going to maybe talk about a little bit later on. Sure. Yeah,
and there's also the issue of once a mother stops
(11:15):
producing milk for her infant because of the switch to
a formula, then it's hard for her to kick start
it again. Um. And previous to this technology, to this
food technology being invented, your your only recourse if you
couldn't personally breastfeed your child was to hire a wet nurse.
And of course that's not a thing that everyone had
financial access to. And this would be essentially someone who
(11:37):
breastfeeds your baby for you, right, Yes, yeah, absolutely, you
can see how difficult. That would be for a ton
of people in this area in Switzerland, but also throughout
the world most people, I think it's safe to say
most people. And in eighteen sales are taking off. He's
doing super well, gangbusters. Uh. Nestleie sells his company and
(12:00):
his factory to three local businessmen who aggressively expand both
the research and the sales departments. Around this time, even
before that expansion, Nestle products are sold everywhere from Indonesia
to Argentina, again a global supply chain which, as as
you point out, Lauren, is super difficult to pull off
(12:21):
without refrigeration or planes. They're just I guess going by
boat huh and train probably rail. But where's the chocolate
you're wondering right? Possibly? Uh. In eighteen seventy nine, Nestle
merges with Daniel Peter, who is arguably the inventor of
milk chocolate, at least he's the one and gets the
credit for it. Right before then, they had been selling
(12:44):
some of their condensed milk products to that guy, and
that's kind of how his milk chocolate isness started off.
And it's gonna rolled up into each other, yeah, which
which makes sense. That's the way a lot of business
relationships tend to go right. So thank you Daniel Peter
for milk chocolate. I think it's weird that you have
two first names, but yes, thank you. Hey, some of
(13:06):
us just have that affliction. Okay, Oh Matt, I am
so sorry. I just realized that. I guess it feels
normal because we hang out all the time. But Daniel Peter,
it's just it's a weird name. It's the name I
would use as a fake name. So my profound apologies
if you if I've made you feel slighted. My old friend, uh,
(13:29):
Daniel Peter did some great stuff. He you know, invented
milk chocolate. People generally like that because of him. Kit
cats exist. Yes, they're delicious, they're great. The Japanese ones,
the green tea one was so much better than I
thought it would be. Yeah, I've got some banana ones
in my desk right now. Their life changing. I see
(13:51):
you also like to live dangerously. If they're that, could
I could I try one? After a So. In nineteen
o five, nest Lee or the company founded rather merges
with an outfit called the Anglo Swiss con Densed Milk
Company and they form what is now known as the
Nestle Group. They have a bunch of mergers and name changes,
(14:13):
but today we call them nestlely s A. And they
are the world's largest fast moving consumer goods company in
terms of revenue. They make a ton of money. Yes,
get this. In sen there was a total revenue for
Nestle s A, the actual name of the company now
(14:34):
of ninety point eight billion dollars with a B. Holy cropola,
that's a that's a lot of kit cats saw those.
So it's partially my fault. They they're still headquartered in Switzerland.
They employ over three thousand people. They own more than
(14:55):
two thousand different brands. If you shop in a mainstream
grocery store, you're probably by more Nestly stuff than you think.
They also own almost factories in countries across the world.
Their most popular products are powdered and liquid beverages. Still,
(15:15):
which is which I think is interesting and and this
is the point where we have to encounter ethics and
philosophy for a second, because we'll often hear pop philosophers
say that you know, at the heart of every fortune
lay some great crime. Uh, and that's it's not something
you could really prove. But there's an argument people make
(15:35):
that says, no company or individual can attain this much
financial success without at some point along the way engaging
in unethical or at the very least controversial activity, and
Nestle is no different. Yeah. Um, there are a lot
of critics of this company that exists that you will
(15:57):
find online especially, and theseis ms don't just come from
people who disagree with the company's um strategies, their investment strategies.
There there is a very deep and dark rabbit hole
that we're about to go down. People. Right after a
quick word from our sponsor, here's where it gets crazy.
(16:24):
Nest Lee is accused of a ton of dastardly activities
around the planet. The first one, which might be surprising
to some people familiar to others is nest Lee's uh,
Nestle's water business. Yeah, you've seen Nestlee water bottled water,
probably somewhere near a grocery store, in a grocery store
(16:47):
at a queen um. And you may have also seen
San Pellegrino or Peria, their sparkling versions somewhere on the shelves. Yeah.
In two thousand and five, a documentary called We Feed
the world came out. Wow, that's a little pompous, but
that's okay, and it featured the CEO of Nesley at
the time, a guy named Peter bra bec Limite, and
(17:10):
he made this observation that became infamous and went viral,
and we have the quote today Utt Matt, would you
want to do the honors? Water is, of course the
most important raw material we have today in the world.
It's a question of whether we should privatize the normal
water supply for the population, and there are two different
(17:32):
opinions on the matter. One opinion, which I think is extreme,
is represented by the NGOs non governmental organizations, who bang
on about declaring water a public right. That means that
as a human being, you should have a right to water.
That's an extreme solution. The other view says that water
(17:53):
is a food stuff like any other and like any
other food stuff, it should have a market value person only.
I believe it's better to give a food stuff of
value so that we are all aware it has a price,
and then that one should take specific measures for the
part of the population that has no access to this water.
And there are many different possibilities there. I added a
(18:18):
little emphasis in there, but you can hear how sinister
that could sound. I think the evil it's there. I
don't think these NGOs trying to make water a public right.
A lot of Nestleie critics interpreted this as an attack
on the poor, attack on community suffering from drought and
(18:41):
other people in the margins of society who cannot afford
to pay this quote market price for water. He did
walk the statement back a little bit in after this
public outcry, as you can possibly imagine, um, he said.
He said in a YouTube video that Ale released, I
have always supported the human right to water. Everyone should
(19:04):
have enough safe, clean water to meet their fundamental daily needs,
but not to fill a pool or wash a car water.
And then he talked for a minute about how it's
a very precious resource and how we're kind of running
out or I mean, you know how there's different areas
that don't have a lot of access to it and
any furthermore, said water should be better managed, should be
better valued. If we give water value, they will be
(19:24):
incentive to invest in looking after our supply. Yeah, so
you can see the logic. He's not he's not really
changing the content of what he's saying. He's framing it
in a different way. Ultimately, he's saying, we got to
respect water enough that it's valuable enough that we're not
going to pollute it too bad. And I've heard I've
(19:46):
heard similar arguments advanced about human life. Oh, if there's
enough of a value, we should value that as well.
If we're assigning value to things, I mean, that's that
whole idea of selling bullets for more than a gun.
I mean, if we can't sell bullets and people, then
really what are we doing here? No, keep it. We
(20:11):
do want to be clear, that was not a quote
from the CEO, right, No, no, no, no, that was
just my own sarcasm. Sarcasm folks, Oh goodness, they don't
know me here. So this it's interesting too because there's
a little bit of double think or a paradox here
in that nest Lee has a successful bottled water business
because they are treating water as a public good by
(20:34):
extracting it from land lease agreements where they just have
access to the resources on the land. So they're not
putting a huge value on it on their side. The
value changes depending on their profit margin. Right, But they're
the world's largest supplier of bottled water. Yeah, seven percent
of their sales come from bottled water. That's about seven
(20:56):
point seven billion worldwide in recent years, and seven point
seven billion dollars worth of bottled water just from them. Yeah,
for kind of scope, I don't have a number for
the whole world worth of water, of the water industry,
the bottled water industry, but just in the United States
it was worth eighteen point five billion dollars in and
(21:17):
was growing, and now they own what sixty four different
bottled water brands across the planet. The big question is, oh, no, no,
we gotta say these. We gotta say these because you
you're drinking these, you might have one in your hand
right now. Deer Park guilty on my end. Poland Spring
also guilty. Aquapana not so much. San Pellegrino. Sure, perry
(21:41):
A sometimes, but only when I'm feeling fancy springs, water park,
and waterline. I would add to that pure life, which
is huge in other countries. So where do they get
all this water? It turns out that they're taking it
from you if you are the resident of many rural
communities cross the US, in Brazil, in Bangladesh, in Pakistan,
(22:06):
in Europe. But how Ben I'm so glad you asked, Matt.
Thank you. They similar to the Daniel day Lewis character,
and there will be blood. They're drinking your milkshake. They're
they're buying up areas that give them access to groundwater
or springs, and they're using that to they're using that
to fill the bottles. But as they're draining these aquifers,
(22:29):
they're moving the water away from where it would have
naturally existed. That's it's a it's such a perfect example
there and the Daniel day Lewis character from there will
be blood because these aquifers are so massive underneath the
land where people are walking around on all day. You
don't realize that they're down there. But if if you
can put, you know, a series of pipes down into
(22:51):
the aquifer at one point in this massive space of water,
you could just suck it right up like that milkshake.
It's such a good it's it's perfect and terrible and real.
And and to add to that there, the company is
so large that they have um they have acquired a
(23:14):
tremendous amount of influence, especially in smaller communities. We don't
know exactly how much water that they've been extracting with
this method. But in some journalists found that Nestley had
been illegally draining water from lands that were leased by
the Morongo Band of Mission Indians in a desert area.
(23:36):
And they've also been taken water from the San Bernardino
National Forest. They did have a permit to do this,
it expired in Is that just? Is that? Is that
just something that got overlooked because it's a huge operation. Well,
I mean also another number related to that instance, they
had been paying five four dollars a year to extract
(23:59):
about thirty million gallons of water there, including during the drought.
So you can already see how this profit margin is
going to work out, right that an independent analysis put
the total water extraction at UM one billion gallons per
(24:19):
year over time. And if we think about how many
bottles of water that is, right, what what was it?
Twelve ounce bottle of water, sixteen ounces something like that? Sure, yeah,
something like that. Sure that those sound like numbers, So
so we can see just how little they would be paying,
even with the cost of transportation infrastructure, how little they're
(24:41):
paying to produce these, right, And I and I did
want to put in here that like, while we can
all agree that drinking bottled water is better for our
health than drinking bottled soda. The marketing of bottled water
as safer or healthier than tap water for for the
general population is, and this is a scientific term, a
bunch of huei. Um. The stuff was safer in the
(25:04):
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries for like people instead in cities
who didn't want cholera or typhoid or dysentery um. And
then later, of course, in the nineteen eighties, when the
EPA found a lot of lead and a lot of
drinking water, but like these problems were fixable. Public health
movements in the early twentieth century created free, filtered chlorinated
water for many developed cities, removing concerns of disease, and
(25:25):
in most part cities rushed to solve the lead issues
in the eighties and nineties, but they put fluoride in
the water instead. They do I'm sure that's a whole
other episode that I'm sure you guys have done more
than once. It's fine, but okay, so, but bottled water
has roots in health impurity movements of the eighteen hundreds,
(25:47):
kind of like I was talking about earlier. Um, folks
then started selling bottled water from places like Saratoga Springs
like to rich people. Um, mostly because right, yeah, yeah,
it's likely this is fan to mineral water and it's
naturally carbonated because we don't have good carbonation technology yet,
so we'll drink it and it's healthy and stuff. Um
(26:07):
but I don't know why my ghost voice is also
my true anyway. Um. But yeah, so mostly it wasn't
a thing among people. Bottled water was not a thing
among people who didn't have another choice until the nineteen seventies,
and that's when pet plastic went commercial and Perier started
sponsoring athletic events like the New York City Marathon in
(26:28):
order to push the healthfulness of their water. Um. Even today,
with the aging infrastructure problems like we have in Flint
and on Canada's First Nations reserves, the majority of marketing
of bottled water is bent to that like health purity image,
Like what should be an emergency solution for temporarily unsafe
water is being sold as a lifestyle. Now you get
(26:49):
bottled water in a nice glass bottle that you find
in your fancy schmancy hotel rooms in Philadelphia. That's true.
That's true. There wasn't actually much water in those bottles,
almost no water in there. I forget the name of
that brand, Voss Voss Water. Yes, the bottles are pretty.
(27:09):
They are you know, they're They're a real statement. That's
how That's how I felt when I was when I
got one from the hotel we're at we're on the road.
It's like, Okay, I'm gonna walk around with this and
feel like I'm I'm saying something. I don't know what
it is, but I'm making a statement about something. I
think it's just a noise. And it's like, that's what
I'm saying. So this continues this there's more to this
(27:36):
water story. But let's bracket that for a second and
look at another huge controversy with Nestley, which is the
idea of baby formula. Just like back in the late
eighteen hundreds, Nestlie remains invested in formula and baby food products,
but the problem nowadays centers less on the product itself
and more on the marketing. And I'm using that term
(27:57):
in a very generous way. Well, by the first decade
of the twentieth century, Nestle ads were saying stuff like
don't wait too long before you wean the baby. If
you do, the little one is likely to be weak
in anemic. They admitted in these ads that breast milk
was the best for young babies, but for babies six
months and up, they said that their product was the
(28:17):
nearest thing in the world. And this splendid triumph of
care and science. It's so like mother's milk that the
tiny stomach won't notice the difference. Nest lee that which
is wrong, so wrong, so so wrong. Oh sure, and
(28:39):
we've we've done a lot of not us personally, but
but researchers have done a lot into looking into this
in the past few decades. And yeah, breat breast milk
is better. Breast milk is like the best thing. If
we could, all right now, everybody listening to this be
just drinking breast milk instead of coffee, we'd be good
to go. This is this is for real. Well, well,
certainly you can. You can get some some antibody is
(29:00):
I like that he's passionate. I like that your passionate.
I learned a lot about it when we had a kid.
It's just it's incredible stuff. But not everyone has evolved
the genetic mutation to drink milk into adulthood. It's just something.
There are a lot of problems with the thing that
I said. It's just I was being hyperbolic. I'm sorry.
Don't don't everyone do that ever? Please? I mean, also,
(29:21):
until until men really start figuring out how to lactate
more regularly, I think I think we're going to have
a supply chain problem. Yeah, just gragistically really tried. And
nest Lee also wanted to um lacktate. Well, they guess
they're kind of your nemesis here. They wanted people to
stop lactating. Right, they became big formula. These ads are
(29:44):
categorically wrong, right, someone say it. It's ethically wrong, but
it's definitely the science doesn't bear out, is the problem.
And in the nine nineties, probably knowing this already, Nestley
began pushing formula aggressively in developing and poor countries, specifically
targeting the poorest among them, and they had campaigns that
(30:06):
were meant to make formulas seem um equally as as
good for the kid, if not better than breast milk.
But the first problem here that crops up is in
a medical sphere. A lot of these countries don't have
great water infrastructure, and you have to have sanitary water
to use this powdered formula. I believe it was powdered
(30:29):
at that time. So if you don't have access to
clean water, or you don't have access to the technology
to boil the water, or you don't speak the language
that uh in which the instructions are printed on the container,
what good is uh? What good are English instructions If
there's a place where the country has thirty different languages
(30:52):
and the main one is Portuguese. Yeah, I know, Hey,
I think NESTLEI needed to get on that hobo code.
You know what I mean in hobo code? Yeah, this
this comes out after after right, so we can say
hobo code and don't have to explain what it is. Perfect,
it's just what we're talking about. I was at your show. Yes,
oh why oh, sorry, thanks for coming problem anytime. I
(31:17):
can tell it meant a lot to you. Yeah. But
Neslee does seem to have knowingly ignored these risks, the
risk of improper creation of the formula, the risk of
unsanitary water, the health the health complications that arrive when
a child is put on formula, and this was this
(31:42):
concern was cast aside EUNICEF estimates that a formula fed child,
by the way, just for some facts, living in a
disease written and unhygienic condition is going to be between
six and twenty five times more likely to die of
diarrhea and four times more likely to die of pneumonia
in comparison to a child that has been breastfed, because well,
there's a there's a natural filter there, which is the
(32:05):
mom so you filter is a lot of that bad
stuff out, It's true. Yeah, And there's another problem, which
is that if we're talking about destitute communities, often mothers
would tend to use less formula than was needed because
they wanted to make it last longer, because you see,
all right, So there's this thing called the International Baby
Food Action Network. It's a real thing. I think it's
(32:27):
a great name for an extremist group. They are not.
It sounds like a kid's TV show or something, Baby
Action Network, you know what I mean. I would watch
that show. I would I would check it out. I
would give it a chance. I don't know if I
would make it through the whole season, but I'll just
ask you. But dude, they've got some crazy allegations. Right,
it's not crazy, they're just intense, right because Nestleie, they
(32:51):
according to their belief for their allegations, Nestleie distributes free
formula samples in hospitals and maternity wards across these countries,
knowing that this will interfere with the natural actation process,
and not only in these in these less developed countries,
but also in the United States also in places where
(33:12):
we don't need that. Wow, yeah, we got a bunch
of samples when when we had our child, a ton
of stuff sent home with us for free uh formulas.
That's the thing. That's the thing, because once this has
interfered with the natural actation process and you go away
(33:33):
from the hospital of the maternity world or what have you,
you find out that the formula is no longer free.
So the Baby Food Action Network says that Nestlee is
operating under the guise of humanitarian aid, but what they're
really trying to do is to create market, a captive market.
At that they say, nest Lee is purposefully Nestle is
(33:56):
aware that this interference with natural note production can occur,
and they wanted to that's the argument. Yeah, that's a
that's a heavy accusation. Um, I wish it didn't feel
so real. So like correct, I wish it didn't. So
(34:17):
you think it you think it was nefarious in some way,
like you think it was not just it was nefarious,
whether they meant to or not. Right, I mean, if
this is actually happening, if they're giving all these free
examples which we have seen I have seen personally, it's
it's not so great. Well, and then the argument could
be that maybe the corporate heart is in the right place. Yeah,
(34:40):
we're just giving you free things, but we just neglected
to understand the long term consequences. Well right up until
someone said, hey, there's long term consequences, at which point
you know, they did keep going. They did keep going.
They did keep going. And they could certainly have a
program where they offer these supplies for free to hospitals
and maternity awards for patients who need them, for patients
(35:01):
who request them for specific cases where for whatever reason,
the mother or the baby cannot breastfeed. And there have
been there have been doctors in some developing countries who
say that the way the way this stuff should work
is that they should have to write prescriptions for former
they should put that filter up because writing a prescription
(35:21):
on their end would be free, but it would also
be a way to keep the doctor involved, the the
you know, medical provider of there we go. That's the one.
I don't know why that was difficult for me, but
but it's it's true. This has been something that's been
brewing for a long long time. Nestlee, for their part,
denies all the accusations, all the accusations across the board,
(35:45):
and they said, we don't even know where to start
looking to figure out if this is true, because there's
no you haven't given us anything specific enough. But still
this led to a large push for Boycott's. The first
US boycott off Nestley begins in July of seventy nine,
seventy seven, and then it spreads to Europe and in
(36:08):
one the World Health Assembly adopts a code um a
policy on the marketing of breast milk substitutes, which sounds
very specific, and they say it is a minimum requirement
that has to be adopted in its entirety. In eighty four,
Nestle ascents and they can implement the code. Boycott gets suspended,
(36:28):
but surprise, surprise, it came back in nineteen because most
people who had a problem with it pre boycott said
that they didn't fix anything post boycott. So that's the
story of Nestle and infant formula. Well, I like that
we start with kids. Let's do you want to stick
(36:49):
with kids? I think we should, but I think we
need an ad break between this, just as a bit
of a palate cleanser. Um. If that's okay, okay, let's
hear for from some sponsors. We're back with a twisted segue.
(37:12):
I believe we set this up as UM. We we enjoy.
It's not the right word for our conversation about formula.
But we do want to stick with kids because it
turns out that there's more to the story. Nest Lee
isn't just participating in a cover up or a conspiracy
to UH to extract water from small communities. It's not
(37:36):
just through either incompetence or nefarious designs UM forcing children
to drink baby formula. It's it's also cutting out the
middleman of exploitation entirely and and diving right into UM
as we established earlier, UH slavery, human trafficking, child labor,
(37:57):
you know what I mean. At least it's being a
used of such, and there are some there's some evidence
to show that it's it's been happening in the supply chain,
right chocolate, right now, We're not saying it's it's not
like we're saying there's some crazy corporate psychopath with like
a monocle and a candy bar top hats lugging down
(38:18):
sam Pello Grenos as he snatches children off the street.
But hopefully not, hopefully not. But it is true, like
you said, Lauren, with chocolate, and like you said, Matt,
with the supply chain, there's compelling evidence that they're the
people they are buying products from, cocoa beans and so on,
that those folks are engaging in slavery, child labor, human trafficking,
(38:42):
and pretty gruesome acts of abuse. In two thousand and five,
the International Labor Rights Fund filed one of those lawsuits
against Nestley and several other companies on behalf of three
children from Molly in the sud allege that these kids
were traffic of the Ivory Coast, where they were enslaved,
where they were abused on a regular basis, and forced
(39:05):
to work on a cocoa plantation. Uh not great. Case
went on for years right exactly. In two thousand ten,
the U. S. District Court for the Central District of California,
they determined that corporations cannot be held liable for violations
of international law and dismissed this suit. Isn't that isn't
(39:28):
that special as they say, Uh, this was of course
a controversial decision when since then it has been appealed.
But isn't it isn't that crazy that and a corporation
cannot be or at least the thought at the time
was that this corporation can't be held liable for violations
of international law through its practices of creating products, right,
(39:51):
especially when it's an international corporation. Yeah, that's a good point.
I guess The logic there is that it would be
a huge hindrance to business operations and a huge expense
to have to send people to every place physically to
check on these things. And people need needs, you know
people everyone, people everywhere need needs. Yeah, oh man, everyone
(40:17):
everyone needs. Now this isn't restricted to a single incident,
that's the problem. There was a report done by an
independent auditor, a group called the Fair Labor Association, and
they said that they found Nestleie committed multiple serious violations
of its own internal labor code. So it's corporate laws,
let alone the laws of the land and the state.
(40:39):
This was at the very least a large degree of negligence,
if not tacit approval of slavery and child labor. And
here's the thing. Nestlely commissioned the study. Nestie said, show
us what we need to know. And the fair labor
folks came back and they're like, wow, this is monstrous
and they're like, whoa, really, it's crazy, no way, no
(41:03):
what not us And uh, we have a quote from
then executive vice president for operations, Jose Lopez, the use
of child labor in our coco supply chain it goes
against everything we stand for. No company sourcing cocoa from
the Ivory Coast can guarantee that it doesn't happen, but
we can say that tackling child labor is a top
priority for our company. Okay. So again, the argument is
(41:26):
that no company of that size, especially could be certain
of how their suppliers are behaving, especially they seem to
say in this area of the world. It's not surprising
that critics remained unsatisfied with that response, and as of
this recording and estimated one point eight million children in
West Africa Loan are at risk of becoming a victim
(41:48):
of child labor. Yeah, Okay, he's gonna take a breather
here for a second. Yeah, maybe it was too much
to have another child related one. But maybe we should stay.
Maybe we should stay geopolitical, Maybe we should go to
another country. So should we talk about like corporations going
(42:08):
in and strong arming countries by making them payback massive debts.
So this is a weird one. In two thousand and two,
Ethiopia was in the grips of a nationwide brutal famine
and nest Lee came to Ethiopia in its time of
need and said, you owe us six million dollars. Uh.
(42:31):
This claim dates back to nineties seventies when the military
of Ethiopius sees the assets of foreign companies. But things
took a turn because the public found out about this
and they began to speak up. Oh yes, the company
received over forty thousand letters from people who were absolutely outraged. UH.
In one of the most famous cases of public opinion
(42:52):
beat corporate greed that exists on the planet. UH. In
the end, Nestley took a U turn. They settled for
I guess, uh, partially money. Definitely. They're like, okay, okay, guys,
look just give us some of it, will meet you halfway. Yeah.
In the end, Nestley did take a U turn and
(43:13):
they settled for just some of the debt. They still
took some cash. Yeah, we'll meet you halfway, right, right right,
and uh. In their defense, they also took that money
that Ethiopia gave them and invested a portion of it too,
in the country to help it bounce back from famine.
That's very nice. It's really weird. It's it's they could
(43:35):
have just not taken the money. I don't know, but
maybe there's an argument that they had better international development
experience and so would be better stewards of that money.
That's that's an argument you would hear. I could tell
it's very politely worded. I can I can read the
room here in the podcast studio. I could tell that
you all are not persuaded. I'll check in with Paul
(43:56):
and see what he thinks. But while they were in
Ethiopia around the same time, roughly, they made a deal
with the wife of the infamous dictator from Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe.
May deal was wife Grace Mugabe to buy one million
liters of milk a year from farms that she had
taken over, because you see, Grace Mugabe had a booming
(44:20):
side business of taking over large farms in Zimbabwe that
were white owned, at least six of them since two Yeah. Yeah,
and so this is building a farming empire from these
legally confiscated farmlands. And you know, Zimbabwe has a very
(44:42):
very upsetting history of racial tension, colonialism, resource extraction, and
so on. But these farms were taken illegally, at least
as far as the international community thinks. Well. Yeah, it
led to another series of boycotts yet yet another um
as well as sanctions and both the European Union and
the United States. Yeah, I know, it sounds like we're
(45:04):
picking on Nestlie. These are just things that you probably
don't know about a candy company. Even Canada got beefed
up with him. Dude. They're a lean cuisine company. Okay,
they're a dog food company. That's right, there are all things.
They're a hot pockets company, come on, and that at
the end of the day, that's what it is. At
the end of the day. What matters more than hot
(45:25):
pockets podcasts You can put anything in them. So let's
talk about price fixing. Price fixing is a fun thing
where companies work together, people who were in the same
market share to uh to control the prices of things.
A lot of times it's to keep them high. Keep
(45:47):
prices high. That way, everybody gets a lot of that moolah.
Sometimes it's too strategically keep the prices low. Either way
it's strategized. Well, guess what. Nestlee has been accused of
this and they even got rated. Yeah, Nestlee Canada got
rated along with Hershey Canada and Mars Canada. They all
(46:08):
have the word Canada in their names because they're the
Canadian branch of the company. I feel like I'm over
explaining that. It makes sense though, So these uh this company,
nest Lee and other companies the ones we just mentioned
they're subject to a class action lawsuit are several of
them per company, And ultimately they settled for nine million
dollars without accepting as per usual, as we've learned on
(46:30):
this show, without accepting any liability, without admitting any guilt
or any issues there is like, we did nothing wrong,
but here's a lot of money. It's is it a
lot of money to them? How much do they make?
Ninety point eight billion in total revenue though that's not profit. Yeah,
and this is yeah Nestlee Canada doesn't rake in all
that cash, but they rake in quite a bit, I'm assuming. Yeah,
(46:54):
but they you know this, this happens a lot of
lawsuits are settled out of court this way, right. Uh,
they all so have been Look, they they're not hurting
for money, that's true. Uh. They are a business though,
and they need to be quite aware of where a
profit can be found. That is why they have been
involved in like the weirdest round of criticism regarding pollution.
(47:16):
It's nuts in a cercuitous way. Nestley actually makes some
some real scratch, some solid cheese off of pollution. They now, yeah, yeah, okay,
the main the main part of that this is going
to go back to water. But they have historically and
sometimes still do source inexpensive palm oil, and palm oil
(47:40):
is is a vegetable oil made from the fruit of
oil palm trees. Makes sense, right, Uh. It goes into
a lot of their candies and other products that include
processed fats, and it's a crop that fuels a lot
of deforestation, endangers a lot of species, like the cute
ones like like tigers and rang tang stuff like that,
and it creates a lot of pollution in the areas
where they're grown and process to Africa, Asia and South
(48:01):
America primarily. Are you saying tigers are cute? Yeah, tigers
are terrifying. Tigers are amazing. They're majestic. Kidders, I didn't
mean that sounds so definitive about that. I yeah, did
you have a bad time with tigers? I mean, I
have a three year old and I've been reading about
(48:22):
tigers everywhere, and uh, just I've been to the zoo
a lot lately. The tiger is crazy scary, It's huge.
It would eat you, just your face off. With cats, Yeah,
it's just the size thing. Tigers are also brilliant. They
have This is a too of this does have anything
(48:43):
to do with this episode, but um tigers who have
been wounded in the wild and Siberian stuff. If they
managed to escape, they are able to like Corvid's remember
the smell and the appearance of the person who wounded them.
And there's been at least one proven case where a
(49:03):
tiger was attacked escaped in Siberia waited for winter to
hit when it knew it. It stalked the guy for
months and just waited for it to get too cold
for to leave his house. And then you can see
the footprints that the tiger walked around and increasingly closer spirals,
and then it came through his back window, snatched him, uh,
drug him out, and I don't remember what parts of
(49:27):
the body they found. I'm not saying Richard Parker isn't
a badass assassin. I'm just saying, uh, yikes, that's all.
It's just I just take issue with them being cute,
because I agree there are kitty cats, and kitty cats
are cute, but they're big ole scare kitty cats that
will assassinate you after waiting. Okay, I think this isn't
(49:52):
my new personality test. Oh no, uh also any research coast,
the savior has a very fascinating personality test that I
believe she was entirely making up on the spot. I
can't think of what it might be, but that doesn't
mean that it didn't exist previously. I love to ask
you about it. I love to ask you about it.
(50:13):
It's a good it's a good road trip conversation. So
palm oil bad, palm oil is bad. Tigers, good tigers. Okay,
but um, what about plastic bottles? How are they well?
In the US and the West at large, increasing concern
(50:34):
over plastic bottles has sent more and more customers back
to reusable bottles or tap water, you know, And this
is not Nestlie's profits down a bit. And I do
want to point out there's something very clever and very
calculated at play here in the U S at least
concerning consumer plastic. Of all, the plastic pollution that we
(50:55):
hear about in the oceans of the world comes from
commercial fisheries. It comes from gigantic nets and things of
that nature. Yeah, the straws that you use are not
contributing that seriously compared to those items, to the great
Pacific raft and stuff like that. Right, right, And plastic
bottles do play a huge role in pollution. But again,
(51:17):
don't let people run this sort of shell game on you.
It's I think it's brilliant that so many corporations have
have had this change of heart moment, such great pr
where they're like you know what we decided to be
the change. We're going to make a difference here at
can Glomco. No more straws, and people are like, oh,
(51:37):
that's great, and you guys are really brave. But the
one other major, just because we're kind of a major
contributing factor though, that I've been reading about more and
more are these little food pouches the people are buying
where for kids and adults, like the kind of exactly
that have a little plastic tip, and that plastic top
(51:59):
in particular is becoming a massive problem. And the other
thing is have you guys have seen the the water
bottle refillers around Atlanta and a lot of other cities.
Have you seen these? It looks like a water fountaine.
You just put your water bottle up to it and
you can refill your water bottle. Yeah, so smart. I'm
just that makes me so happy when we're thinking about
(52:22):
the pollution that, even though it's not as bad as
commercial fisheries, the pollution that is generated from plastic products
like that. So how does how does nest Lee end
up making a profit off of this? To find the
answer there, we have to travel across the Pacific because
sales maybe down in the US and the West, but
in China sales are up in part due to pollution.
(52:45):
About seventy in China's lakes and rivers have been polluted.
Although people will tell you virtually all the surface water
is now unsafe to drink in that country unless it's
been treated. I don't know how much of that is
exaggeration and how much of that bears up to scrutiny.
But have a ton of industrial facilities, power and chemical plants,
paper and textile factories, and this means that a lot
(53:07):
of the people living in the country don't trust the
water or the purification infrastructure in China, so they buy
more and more bottled water from companies like Nestley, who again,
they make a huge margin out of this stuff. What
did you say earlier about California? They pay like five
hundred something a year, four dollars for every three hundred
(53:28):
million gallons, and you pay like minimum what dollar twenty
nine per bottle for twelve to six ounces. What do
you think that twenty nine cents is about? It's to
make it. You know? You know how this we didn't
you and I do something about pricing, Like why there
are so many nines. It's aspirational, but you're also saving
(53:48):
a penny. I don't think it works on us anymore
because now, uh, thirty seems like less to a lot
of people because there's a zero at the end. Yeah,
that's ridiculous, right, So so this whole idea goes back.
I think the most perhaps the most important thing here,
is that Nestily is a company that makes food stuffs.
(54:09):
For the most part, they also make you know, we've
talked about all the other companies they have hand in,
but for the most part, they're creating products which you buy,
you open up, throw away the packaging, and then eat
the part that's edible. Right. That creates a lot of waste,
a lot of trash. And it doesn't mean that, you know,
(54:30):
Nestle is for some nefarious purpose trying to take on
Captain Planet because they're bad guys. It's not like they're
seeing around like Montgomery Burns doing the you know, rubbing
their hands together. There's a better word for that, like
like a little like like raccoon, yeah yeah, yeah, yeah,
yeah yeah, just sort of just sort of rubbing their
own palms together and saying, how how how should we
(54:53):
ruin the world today. Yeah what what Someone's like, well,
we could I don't know. Um ah, got me on
the spot here, Monty. We could uh, we could start war,
we could poison the food. It's like no, no, no,
something more nuance. And then they're like okay, okay, um
um um uh pollute everything and they're like, have you
(55:18):
considered single use packaging? There you go exactly. It's not
that they're not some super villain being evil like that.
They're the onesler. They're a giant corporation now making tons
and tons of products with tons and tons of packaging,
and that is just what happens when you do that,
(55:39):
and as people are you providing a huge boost to
economies and uh job opportunities. Those are another that's another
PC argument you'll hear watch the los although, hey, we're
not even talking about the industrial runoff from the industrial factories.
Who are who are creating these plastic products. That's true, Yeah,
(56:01):
that's absolutely true, and and unfortunately, unfortunately, you know, they
don't have to be a purposefully malevolent entity. If if
you're a corporation, job, as Matt said, to pursue a profit,
and that means that everything to a certain degree is
going to be a lower priority, including pollution. There are
(56:24):
very few companies in the world that would say we're
going to operate at a loss for ten years to
help make the world a better place. That's just not
a viable tenure plan. That's not something a company does.
So maybe not immoral, but immoral, And there we have it.
The world's largest food and beverage company is the subject
of numerous controversies, boycotts, criticisms, and arguably, yes, cover ups.
(56:47):
One thing we did cut from this episode was the
the delightful tale of the Fluoride Mafia, which is, yeah,
we found this. It's this group of people who believe
that Nestleie is so large because it is secretly charged
by some elite cabal with the task of putting fluoride
and everything. That's their big master plan. Fluoride and everything,
(57:12):
not not just the usual water, no, every everything, florid
flavored cats, floride flavored purina, biniful. It seems extreme. Hey,
do you have no comments on that one? I don't know.
I haven't researched to that. You wanna get involved with
(57:33):
big fluoride? Right? We all dose ourselves at least two
times a day, if we're good adults and our children. Yeah,
there you go, that's a bright side. Brush your teeth,
there you go. So, so what happens now? What does
this mean for anyone who was already familiar with this
stuff or anyone who just learned about it? M If
(57:55):
you support Nestlie and disagree with its critics, if you
think they're being alarmist, or you think they're trying to
create problems where none really exists, then kudos, congrat you
you locked out? Life goes on as normal. Yeah, Eat
as many kit cats as you want. Yeah. Yeah, get
that purina and feed it your dogs and then put
that to Jorno in the oven. Crack open a nice
(58:17):
sand pelle Greno and watch the world burn. That's great.
Let's put that on a T shirt. Okay, tell us
if that should be a T shirt. Yeah, so we
should be doing more I GU commercials too. Yeah. I
believe Global Unlimited, the illuminated ones they have, they've got
something coming out or they've like like co sponsored something
that's coming out on Saver. Yeah. Over on Saver, we're
(58:39):
doing a reading of the Grim Brothers story The Almond Tree.
It's you know, it's about cannibalism. So we thought it
would be perfect for Thanksgiving. Um, so it's coming out
the Friday after Thanksgiving for our non American listeners, that
is November. Books for it. Share it with your loved ones,
don't give them a context, just like walk in during
Thanksgiving dinner, knock some stuff off the table, slam down
(59:03):
a boom box. You do need a boom box for this,
and then just just play it and pick one person
and make weirdly hostile eye contact with them. So so
definitely do that. Um you can. If you have any
questions or comments about Nestlee and any of the things
we've talked about today, you can find us on Twitter.
(59:24):
You can find us on Facebook and Instagram conspiracy stuff.
With most of those conspiracy stuff show on Instagram, you
can you can call us. That's true, Matt. We are
one eight three three st d w y t K. Yeah.
I gotta always highlight that STD because the most important
is to be transparent about that. People know it's the
(59:44):
responsible thing to do. The other thing you can do
is join our Facebook group. Here's where it gets crazy.
That's where you can join a lot of us and
our fellow conspiracy realists. And just discuss things. Post some
dope memes. What kind of memes, dank I for get
the cool hip memes? You can post those there. Um.
(01:00:06):
That's so, that's where you can find us for the
most part. And we know what you're probably asking yourself.
You're probably like, guys, I know because you say this
stuff at the end of every show, right, I don't
care how to contact you. I already know how to
do it. Stop yelling std at me at the end
of the episode. But but you are probably wondering how
(01:00:28):
you can get in contact with Savor. Oh goodness, you
can find us. Yes, it's Savor the podcast. You can
look us up via any Internet search engine. You can
also find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook at savor
pod uh or email us at hello at savor pod
dot com. We we would we would love to hear
from you. And we occasionally get angry about giant corporations
(01:00:50):
on our show too, So I don't know, come tune
in listen to our sugar episodes. We get really angry.
I am a big fan of One of your more
recent pisodes has this title. I don't know if you've
heard this mayonnaise or mayonnaise like I don't want to
any why Yeah, yeah, any Annie strongly dislikes mann It's
(01:01:13):
it's one of her top five least favorite foods. It's
so fascinating, the story of mayonnaise and some of the
things you're talking about in the episode. It is genuinely fascinating.
And I love Manna. It's the European whatever blood I
have in me. I just want to dip my fries
in it. Just want to slather it on my sandwiches.
I do not care. I'll put it on a P
(01:01:33):
B and J what I'll do it. There's I mean,
live your life. I got your back. There's also a
a group of people that believes there is, for lack
of a better term, of Mayo conspiracy, right, Yeah, there
was just a Twitter message about this, Yeah, that um
that Big Mayo is like part of Big Agra, and
that this is a problem specifically in the way that
(01:01:56):
vegan mayonnaise companies have been have been treated in the
larger market. And I will say that mostly that's an
issue of the definition, the legal definition from the FDA
of mayonnaise, which includes eggs. So that's a that's a
reason why vegan Mayo has not been allowed to market
itself as mayonnaise. Yeah, so that's part of the problem,
because vegan mayonnaise isn't mayonnaise. Mayonnaise is fat and eggs,
(01:02:20):
delicious oil. Yeah, vegetable oil. Vegetable oil and eggs. Mostly.
I need I need my mayonnaise to be made out
of bacon grease that also cannot be marketed as mayonnaise.
Oh yes, it's like bacon aise at that point, some
sort of a only. But you know what, man, you
gotta be the change, right if you want that bacon
(01:02:41):
mayonnaise to happen, I have full faith that you will do.
So haul is going to turn us into bacon aise
if we don't get that's true, that's true. So what
do you do if you if you're familiar with all
these different social media shenanigans and you care for none
of them, we have good news for you. You can
send us a good old fashioned email. We are conspiracy
(01:03:02):
at how stuff Works dot com.
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