Fediverse vs Disinformation

I thought it was moms for liberty for a second, but after searching looks like they're some crazy antivax group. I found a 2019 interview (I dunno anything about that site but it has her just quoted at length) with the founder (Zen Honeycutt) and it seems like she's one of the "natural equals good" types of kook. She goes on about toxins and GMOs and such. I didn't read the whole thing but looks like she's moved from trying natural foods to help her kid's allergies to the antivax pipeline.

I'm not sure how much clout they have but after 5 mins reading up about them I wouldn't trust their word about the color of the sky.

Anything starting with "Moms" is right wing astroturf, guaranteed.

I'm not saying any group with the word mom in its name is inherently bad, just usually bad.

My bias makes me immediately think that anything they're claiming should be considered suspect.

Frankly, if an antivaxxer told me the sky was blue, I'd go outside to check.

This is a case where you should find a second or third source making the same claims, as well as a better source that says how much and specifically what was found in the cookies because it's entirely possible to have dangerous things in something but at levels that are not actually dangerous, and I see no specific units being claimed anywhere.

And I mean, glyphosphate is something we've sprayed on every inch of the globe at this point anyways and is on every single thing you're going to eat, so sure, it's bad, but it's only bad at certain concentrations. (It's Roundup)

I was under the impression that Girl Scout cookies are locally sourced, meaning that any contamination (if there really was any) would be a local issue, and not national. Unless, of course, one of the actual ingredients was lead, which to me seems ridiculously unlikely.

I don't care what is in them. If I die from eating thin mints then let it be.

Okay I went digging.

The article in question links to another site as the source of this report.

Clicking through, the website that this one is citing is https://gmoscience.org/. The whole article is about the Girl Scouts and how they need to realize that the cause of this contamination is factory farming. The pdfs are from a laboratory in New Jersey which does say at the bottom that they can't verify the source of the samples provided, and then there are 25 pages going over the findings for each cookie.

On the one hand, I find it fishy that the originating article is clearly coming from an interest group.

On the other hand, I find it easy to believe that food being sold in America is contaminated (I say this as an American).

I checked Snopes because usually they do the legwork and help come up with answers, but they don't have an article on this yet (which is odd, since I've seen this article a couple of times now). So I submitted a request for them to cover it. In the meantime... I don't eat Girl Scout cookies as it is. I'm a hobby baker, and I like what I bake, better than I can get elsewhere, so if I was going to financially support an institution, I'd do it by way of direct donation or volunteering.

I know people who talk about these cookies as if they're the most delicious thing on Earth, and I guess if I was one of them, my answer would be... how much do you care? Do you care enough to not eat them? If you do, then do. If you don't, then who cares?

There are always going to be people like this (anti-GMO people) who will hate on what you're eating if it doesn't conform to their idea of "good." I don't expect articles like this to impact the sales of cookies. I know it's n=1, but I reached out to a friend of mine who loves Thin Mints like they're some kind of miracle food and his answer was "everything we eat is poison, at least I like thin mints".

Hey I'm making a new comment so I can make sure you see it.

Remind the person posting that stuff that there are lots of ways to support the Girl Scouts and he could just make a charitable contribution if he wants.

I'd wait until cookie time next year, and if this is the excuse he uses for not buying cookies, have a locked-and-loaded event he could help volunteer for instead.