→ Exercise 1C: Corporate Influence

The Industry Documents Archive is housed at the University of California, San Francisco. Visit the Industry Documents Archive Blog to get a sense of the scope. Look for the Food Industry Documents collections in particular. (The initial entry is several pages in–in November 2018, with additional food-related industry documents being released at various points since.)

The Food Industry Documents Archive itself is located at:
https://www.industrydocuments.ucsf.edu/food/
But starting at a blog entry offers a little more context.

Topics include:

Activities of the International Life Sciences Institute (ILSI), a global organization funded by large multinational food and beverage companies • the link between tobacco and junk-food marketing • Personal papers of nutritionists, such as the D. Mark Hegsted Papers • Sugar Research Foundation   • Sugar-sweetened beverages • Sugared snack foods advertised to children • Leaked Coca-Cola emails

Primary documents are usually a challenge for the casual reader to easily piece together into a whole story. But it can certainly be interesting to poke around to see how industries market to kids, for instance, or how war-time conscientious objectors were tasked with enduring temperature-controlled sugar research… (“from 30 degrees below to 130 degrees above zero Fahrenheit”), or to see estimated worldwide retail sales in billions of potato chips and Pepsi-Cola.

Feel free, as well, to do a standard internet search of: “Food Industry Documents Archive” to see what stories you might be able to surface.

Share something that you learned (and optionally, how you feel about it) in your public Telegram or Facebook group.