Toxic Sludge is Good For You

This book was a really good read. It is simple yet very informative on the PR industry. Today I was really surprised to find out that Mark Lipton worked for Hill & Knowlton. This made me almost completely change my mind about the PR industry, it made me realize that not every single PR firm out there is evil. If they were, Mark would be considered evil to, wouldn't he? Or maybe he got out of it because of the evilness eminating from the PR industry? During my high school career I worked on a dairy farm, which was on campus at my boarding school. The barn consists of, I'm pretty sure, 50 milking cows which are graded some of the best in the country. Some have quadruple E 90's, which is an extremely high genetic score of a dairy cow. At this school I took many agriculture classes and learned a ton about the agricultural industry. Monsanto is one of the biggest corporations that now owns a huge chunk of the agriculture market. Although they are the biggest, they are considered the enemy of many farmers. Monsanto has created a pesticide called Round-up Ready. When this is bought by a farmer it can genetically change your crop. If the seeds from this crop fly to another field, which is the way nature words, that crop will incorporate the genetics into its own. Once this has happened that field is now legally Monsanto's. They have put a patent on that gene, so when it is found in other crops, Monsanto accuses them of stealing their crop. It has been like this for many years and is the driving factor in the anti-GMO movement.
In the book it talks about bovine growth hormones, rGBH, which were not used at my school. We went around to many other dairy farms in the area and found out that people who have used it have higher still born rates and an increase in the udder infection, mastitis. rGBH has done no good for the dairy industry, It has just created more problems. With the increase in milk production farmers must now compete with this new technology in an already struggling industry. Dairy farms all over the place are going out of business because of huge dairy operations where rGBH is widely used. Theres also a health concern surrounding bovine growth hormones. If a cow is injected with a hormone, who's to say that it is not in the milk? Who's to say it's not being drunk by people's children? There is still no way of knowing completely what this does to people. In my opinion it should not be used at all.
Although I've had a general knowledge that the PR industry advocates for their companies causes, I still learned a ton of specific information about it. I never knew of the extent to which companies will go to prevent a tarnishing of their name. PR firms are sneaky, smart and know exactly how to manipulate an audience to believe whatever they want them to believe.