A version of this story was published by The Guardian.
In January 2019, world-renowned food and nutrition experts published a groundbreaking study. The culmination of two years’ work by 37 authors, the EAT-Lancet report set out to answer the question: how can we feed the world’s growing population without causing catastrophic climate breakdown?
The publication was high profile. Launched in the prestigious peer-reviewed Lancet medical journal, the report came out in 12 languages, and a flagship event at the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva, Switzerland was planned for March.
But in the days leading up to the launch, the WHO pulled out. The health agency’s withdrawal followed a massive online backlash, which had concentrated on one of the report’s recommendations: to cut global red meat consumption by 50 percent.
New evidence seen by DeSmog suggests this surge of outrage against the report was stoked by a PR firm that represents the meat and dairy sector.
A document seen by DeSmog appears to show the results of a campaign by the consultancy Red Flag, which catalogues the scale of the backlash to the report.
The document indicates that Red Flag briefed journalists, think tanks, and social media influencers to frame the peer-reviewed research as “radical”, “out of touch” and “hypocritical”.
It highlights that negative coverage outnumbered neutral or positive stories, with thousands of critical posts shared on X about the research, alongside more than 500 negative articles.
“Red Flag turned EAT-Lancet into a culture war issue,” Jennifer Jacquet, professor of environmental science and policy at the University of Miami, and expert in lobbying, told DeSmog. “Instead of having nuanced conversations about the data, Red Flag takes us back to mud slinging.”
“This document is a portrait of what we’re up against—as people who care about the truth, about climate change, and about the future,” she said.
Based on DeSmog’s review of the document, Red Flag’s attack campaign appears to have been conducted on behalf of the Animal Agriculture Alliance (AAA), a meat and dairy industry coalition that was set up to protect the sector against “emerging threats”. The AAA counts representatives from Cargill and Smithfield Foods—two of the world’s five largest meat companies—on its board. Red Flag is known to have previously worked for members of the AAA.
Red Flag’s campaign overview evaluates the success of social media posts from the AAA attacking the EAT-Lancet report, including a paid advertising campaign launched on behalf of the alliance that reached 780,000 people.
The surge of criticism had adverse consequences for the report’s authors. Scientists involved in the report told DeSmog that the “media storm” resulted in a swell of “nasty” comments directed at the authors. There is no suggestion that Red Flag was involved in or encouraged personal attacks against the EAT-Lancet authors .
In some cases, the backlash led them to withdraw from promoting the research in the media, and undermined their academic careers.
Livestock accounts for over 14 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions worldwide, and scientists agree that fast and drastic cuts to the sector’s pollution—which includes methane, nitrous oxide and carbon dioxide released by deforestation—are required to limit global heating.
An updated EAT-Lancet report is due to be published later this year, aiming to achieve greater “local legitimacy”.
Red Flag and the AAA did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
‘Remarkable success’
The EAT-Lancet report recommended that individuals—particularly in wealthy countries—increase their consumption of nuts, pulses and other plant-based foods, while cutting meat and sugar from their diets.
The document reviewed by DeSmog—a five page evaluation of the communications campaign launched against the EAT-Lancet study—describes the “remarkable success” of Red Flag’s efforts in undermining the findings.
The document’s meta data indicates that it was authored by Melissa San Miguel, the head of the Red Flag’s U.S. branch.
The full extent of Red Flag’s influence over the online backlash is unknown, but the document suggests that the PR firm played a key role in seeding opposition to the EAT-Lancet study.
It highlights the success of what it calls “hypocrisy criticisms” to discredit high-profile individuals involved in the report. This included Gunhild Stordalen, the CEO of environmental advocacy group EAT which funded the research alongside the Wellcome Trust.
In the document, Red Flag highlights that more than 100 articles criticized Gunhild or her husband Petter Stordalen, a Norwegian property mogul. The articles mocked Petter Stordalen for posing on Instagram eating a large burger, while other stories criticized the couple’s high-carbon lifestyle, including owning a private jet.
Red Flag also “directly briefed” research groups, even before the report was published, who publicly criticized its recommendations.
According to the document, the campaign involved “advance press engagement” with the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), with multiple hostile articles about the EAT-Lancet study quoting the libertarian think tank.
Appearing on Sky News, the IEA’s then-associate director Kate Andrews said that those involved in the study “want us to essentially move to vegan lifestyles in which we don’t eat meat, we don’t have Coca Cola, in which people who can’t afford it are taxed out of being able to do this, whilst they fly around on their jets.”
In the weeks following its publication, nearly half of the 1,315 articles about EAT-Lancet included Red Flag’s “campaign messages and quotes”, the PR firm reported.
The EAT-Lancet report was groundbreaking within the scientific community, and has been cited over 9,000 times in the four-and-a-half years since its publication.
Yet, responses online took a very different tone. Opponents of the research dominated discussions and used “misinformation, conspiracy theories, and personal attacks” to discredit the work, according to a study published in The Lancet.
Red Flag’s document highlights social media posts claiming that the report was “dangerous” and told “poor people to eat dirt”. The PR firm’s role in seeding or amplifying these posts, if any, is unknown.
Multiple experts told DeSmog that the online backlash was one of the earliest examples of a “culture war” around dietary change that has become well-recognized in more recent years.
In March 2019, Italy’s mission to the UN wrote an open letter to the WHO calling the research “extremely controversial” and urging the organization to pull out of its Swiss launch event. The Italian mission accused EAT-Lancet’s authors of advocating for “the TOTAL elimination of the freedom of choice by consumers” – echoing the negative media coverage fueled by Red Flag.
Victor Galaz—associate professor at the Stockholm Resilience Center (Stockholm University), which was involved in shaping the EAT-Lancet report—studied the online response to it.
“Everyone was shocked by the volume and tone of the tweets: the aggressiveness and degree of lying, to put it very bluntly,” he told DeSmog.
“Climate change science has faced this kind of backlash for a while,” he said. “But in this domain—diets and meat – that was new to people. Everyone was shocked.”
Undermining science
For those involved in the report, the backlash came at a high price.
One of the co-authors, Marco Springmann, said he faced serious burnout following the “media storm” that went on for a year after publication.
A senior researcher at the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford and a professorial research fellow at the Institute for Global Health at University College London (UCL), Springmann was repeatedly accused of bias against the meat industry for eating a plant-based diet.
“Usually I lead on two to three studies a year, but in the year following EAT-Lancet, I wasn’t able to lead on one,” he said.
Springmann was clear that he welcomed legitimate critiques of the report that were raised in the academic world. In the years since publication, researchers have questioned whether the recommended diet meets vital micronutrient requirements, and if the study sufficiently accounted for variations between different countries and contexts.
But online articles and social media posts often did not engage with, or overblew, these nuanced debates.
“We are not perfect. It’s good to hear constructive criticism—that’s part of academic discourse,” Springmann said. “But if it gets into an ideological shouting match, we don’t get anywhere.”
Line Gordon, another author of the EAT-Lancet study, said she was “overwhelmed” with “really nasty” comments in the immediate aftermath of its publication.
“I was excited about the research we had done and how important it was and how much work we had put into it,” she said. “However, when we launched, I remember waking up in the morning and I’ve never been attacked in so many ways.”
The backlash was “exhausting”, she added.
There is no suggestion that Red Flag was involved in personal attacks against the EAT-Lancet authors.
However, Jennifer Jacquet from University of Miami told DeSmog that the PR firm’s campaign likely helped to make the report so divisive.
“The industry doesn’t make investments like this whimsically,” Jacquet said. “They know that this affects the tenor of the conversation. It’s a really illustrative example of how PR firms operate in the 21st century.”
Industry opposition
Although the Red Flag document does not name the funder of the PR firm’s work, it contains indications that it was conducted on behalf of or at least in partnership with the Animal Agriculture Alliance.
The document catalogues posts from the AAA about the EAT-Lancet report that received hundreds of thousands of impressions on social media—signalling that they were produced as part of the campaign.
According to minutes of AAA meetings seen by DeSmog, the alliance was concerned about the report over a month before publication.
“We have heard that this report will be extremely negative toward animal agriculture and will encourage people to adopt a vegan diet and urge farmers to shift to growing fruits and vegetables instead of animal proteins,” the minutes stated.
So, as the report was being launched in January 2019, the AAA created a webpage and hashtag, #climatefoodfacts, criticising EAT-Lancet’s publication.
The following year, the AAA’s then vice-president for communications Hannah Thompson-Weeman told attendees at an industry event that the group had “worked with industry partners to develop statements, talking points, engaging issue experts, media and social media engagement, [and] shared intel with international stakeholders” on the EAT-Lancet report.
Red Flag’s campaign overview shows that the PR firm also led a communications campaign against a second peer-reviewed study, ‘The Global Syndemic of Obesity, Undernutrition, and Climate Change’, which was published the same month and identified red meat as a major driver of diet-related disease.
“Targeted briefings and stakeholder activation ensured the very first articles on the ‘Global Syndemic’ connected back to EAT-Lancet and framed both reports as radical and out of touch”, Red Flag stated.
This adds to a growing body of evidence showing that the livestock industry is behind attacks on academic research, including the EAT-Lancet study.
In 2022, Greenpeace’s environmental investigations outlet Unearthed found that the CLEAR Center at the University of California (UC) Davis—a U.S. research institute set up in partnership with the meat sector—had launched what it called a “massive campaign” against EAT-Lancet.
Meat and dairy clients
Indeed, the AAA and Red Flag are part of a wider web of meat and dairy industry groups that have sought to counter critical coverage of the sector.
Red Flag has worked for the Meat Institute since 2015 when it represented the U.S. industry group in consultations by the WHO on whether certain types of meat should be considered to be carcinogenic.
Until 2022, the Meat Institute claimed on its website that the “degree [to which] human activity on Earth lead[s] to climate change” is “unknown”. Its board of directors includes staff from meat packing giants JBS and Tyson Foods.
The Meat Institute’s chief strategy officer, Eric Mittenthal, sits on the board of the AAA. The institute is also part of an advisory committee for the CLEAR Center at UC Davis.
More recently, Red Flag also led the promotion of a controversial open letter in 2022 defending the livestock industry against calls for the world to reduce its meat and dairy consumption.
Known as the Dublin Declaration, the open letter was signed by over 1,000 scientists, but faced fierce criticism from other academics who accused it of being deliberately misleading.
An investigation by Greenpeace’s investigative division Unearthed found that the declaration had been penned by academics with “close ties” to the industry, including those at the CLEAR Center. It’s unknown who funded Red Flag’s campaign to promote the letter.
Melissa San Miguel, the head of Red Flag’s U.S. branch and the author of the Eat-Lancet campaign overview, has also repeatedly represented the meat sector.
San Miguel attended the 2024 United Nations (UN) COP28 climate summit in Dubai as part of the AAA’s delegation, and was involved in lobbying efforts coordinated by multiple livestock industry groups. She has also spoken at events held by the Meat Institute and, in 2021, referred to efforts by intergovernmental organizations like the UN to support dietary change as “death by a thousand paper cuts”.
New opportunities
The industry’s campaign against EAT-Lancet appears to have been successful.
Yet – in spite of the online backlash—the report has also been one of the most influential of its kind in recent decades. It is among the papers most often cited by governments and in policy briefs across all topics, used in over 600 such documents since its launch.
With the second EAT-Lancet report due out this year, Marco Springmann—who joined the second research group despite having reservations—told DeSmog he hoped the new research could spark a more constructive conversation.
“It’s a big opportunity to put the debate back on a better track,” he said.
COMMENTS