Biography
Vegetarian activist Michele Simon, founder and director of the Center for Informed Food Choices, is a food cop who's walked the beat with several chief activists and has heaped praise upon virtually every other. In the late 1990s, Simon was a "policy analyst" for the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM), the quasi-medical front group for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals -- for whom she has also written, according to the Knight Ridder/Tribune news service. She has authored papers for the three-billion-dollar food cops at the California Endowment, and has volunteered for EarthSave, the hard-core vegetarian and quasi-environmentalist organization started by ice cream heir John Robbins
It's no surprise that Simon was a speaker at the 2004 Public Health Advocacy Institute (PHAI) conference euphemistically titled "Legal Approaches to the Obesity Epidemic." PHAI's 2003 gathering was "intended to encourage and support litigation against the food industry," a tactic Simon trumpets because it would "reframe the policy debate to incorporate proposals for increased government regulation."
Simon's words spell trouble for personal responsibility. Arguing that food is like tobacco, she has advocated a "carefully planned strategy" in which public-health activists "need to combine all the tools they have -- litigation, regulation, public relations and shame." The public relations "challenge" Simon sees for calorie control kings? The "personal responsibility mantra." In articles with titles ranging from "'Big Food' Lawsuits Can Help Trim America's Waisteline," to "Real Reasons to Be Mad About Beef," Simon attacks all foods that don't fit her vegan agenda.
Simon's website lists her favorite reading material -- and it's a who's who of food cops and anti-business activists: Kelly "Big Brother" Brownell's Food Fight; Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation; anti-technology activist Andrew Kimbrell's Fatal Harvest; Marion Nestle's Food Politics; and, of course, vegetarian activist John Robbins's The Food Revolution. Her favorite websites include those for PCRM; the food scolds at the Center for Science in the Public Interest; the anti-business Commercial Alert; anti-soda activist Harold Goldstein's California Center for Public Health Advocacy; the mad cow scaremongers at the Organic Consumers Association; and the animal-rights groups Farm Sanctuary and Farm Animal Reform Movement.
Associated Organizations and Foundations
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