Carol Tucker Foreman

Carol Tucker Foreman is director of Consumer Federation of America's (CFA) Food Policy Institute. Between 1973 and 1977 she was the executive director of the CFA. She was Assistant Secretary of Agriculture in the Jimmy Carter administration (1977-81).

John Stauber, managing editor of PR Watch, calls Foreman "someone who has the incredible ability to sell herself inside the beltway as a 'consumer advocate' while pulling in huge money as a biotech and food industry lobbyist".

Foreman was president of the lobbying firm Foreman Heidepriem & Mager from 1982 to 1999. The firm's clients included: Aetna Life and Casualty Company; Alliance for Justice, American Home Products, CIGNA, Hoffmann--La Roche, Independent Sector, Monsanto, Procter & Gamble, the Rockefeller Foundation (which has been instrumental in funding GM projects around the world), and the 1988 Dukakis/Bentsen and 1992 Clinton/Gore presidential campaigns.

Stauber writes:

Her old lobby firm, now called Heidepriem & Mager, has as some of its current clients American Home Products Corporation, Dow Chemical, SmithKline Beecham, Wyeth-Ayerst Laboratories and Monsanto and Upjohn's parent company Pharmacia.

GM bovine growth hormone

An article for the Agribusiness Examiner calls Foreman a former "outspoken lobbyist on behalf of Monsanto's rBGH: (a GM bovine growth hormone that is banned in Europe and Canada but allowed in the US).

Poultry contamination

Rod Leonard, a consumer activist and executive director of the Community Nutrition Institute, writes in an article for the Agribusiness Examiner that Foreman made a food safety decision in her role as Assistant Secretary of Agriculture that led to the presence of dangerous bacteria in poultry:

Carol Foreman ... approved ... a change in food safety procedures that would have far reaching consequences. Foreman, one of only a few consumer advocates to reach so high a federal post, decided that poultry visibly smeared with fecal matter could be safely eaten after the feces was washed away.

Any expert on bacteria could have told her then feces carry harmful bacteria which are invisible and which remain, clinging tightly to surfaces, despite repeated washing. Federal inspectors, until Foreman's ruling, would condemn the contaminated bird as unsafe or require the visible contaminated part to be cut away. The washing rule was a profitable boon to poultry processors who no longer faced the loss of unsafe product.

The new Foreman policy also sent a clear message to the poultry industry that the federal government had no major concern with invisible fecal contamination. The response was predictable. Within a year, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) reported a substantial jump in the incidence of food poisoning that rose each following year.

At a press conference about poultry contamination convened by Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), according to a CSPI press release, Carol Tucker Foreman

declared that she erred in 1978 by permitting poultry producers to wash, rather than destroy, chickens and turkeys contaminated with feces. Foreman and CSPI today called on the current USDA leadership to tighten those "reprocessing" rules, since fecal contamination is a prime cause of bacterial infestation of poultry.

Affiliations

• Director, Food Policy Institute, Consumer Federation of America
• 2002-2006 Advisory Panel member, DuPont Biotechnology
• 1977-1981 Assistant Secretary of Agriculture for Consumer Affairs in the Jimmy Carter administration

Publications, Contact, Resources and Notes

Resources

John Stauber, managing editor, PR Watch, "[Clinton Appoints Former Monsanto & Tobacco Lobbyist as 'Consumer Representative' to Global Biotech Forum: Carol Tucker Foreman to the Rescue of Biotech]", PR Watch, 2 June 2000, accessed May 4 2009

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