Shocked, Shocked!! Backlash, Threats Of Violence Re. Study Of Plant-Based Diet Supported By PR Company Campaign [View all]

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It may have seemed like a fairly straightforward proposal but the backlash was ferocious, with researchers receiving personal threats and insults. Thousands of negative posts were shared on Twitter (now X), and more than 500 articles were published criticising the report. A leaked document seen by the climate website DeSmog reveals that helping to fuel this backlash was a PR firm, Red Flag, which represented the Animal Agriculture Alliance, a meat and dairy industry coalition set up to protect the sector against “emerging threats”, and which has staff from Cargill and Smithfield Foods – two of the world’s five largest meat companies – on its board.

DeSmog has seen a document from the PR firm which states: “In the two weeks following publication of the Eat-Lancet report, this campaign’s messages have continued to demonstrate remarkable success. Key stories returned time and again in traditional and social media to reach major online influencers, particularly highlighting the radical nature of the Eat-Lancet diet and hypocrisy criticisms levelled at the Eat founders.” As part of the campaign’s impact, in the weeks following publication, the document states that nearly half of the 1,315 articles about the Eat-Lancet report included Red Flag’s “campaign messages and quotes” and adds that 103 articles mentioned alleged hypocrisy of the group’s founders – “sparking a Twitter conversation that received over 1 million more views” than the top tweets posted by Eat about the report.

Red Flag’s document includes, as highlights of the campaign, an article in the UK’s Spectator magazine about plans “to change your diet by force”, and a number of social media posts claiming the report was “dangerous” and told “poor people to eat dirt”. The PR firm’s precise role in seeding or amplifying these posts, if any, is unknown.

“Targeted briefings and stakeholder activation ensured” that some framed the Eat-Lancet report, plus a subsequent report, “as radical and out of touch”. Briefings included an “advance press engagement” with the Institute of Economic Affairs, a UK libertarian thinktank, with hostile articles about the Eat-Lancet study quoting the group, which dismissed the report as an elitist attack on normal people.

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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/apr/11/pr-campaign-may-fuelled-food-study-backlash-leaked-document-eat-lancet