Bowl of yogurt topped with blueberries

Hillary Clinton Is in Thrall to America’s Yogurt Overlord

The Anti-GMO Founder of Stonyfield Farms Raised Big Bucks for Clinton's Campaign—and Then Clinton Changed Her Mind about GMO Labeling.

October 12, 2016 | Source: Mother Jones | by Tom Philpott

As I reported last month, Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton draws broad financial support from the food and agriculture industries, including the fast-growing organic-foods sector. The latest WikiLeaks dump of Democratic Party emails shows that one prominent Big Organic player gets his emails answered by Clinton's campaign manager, John Podesta.

WikiLeaks has posted a searchable database of what are purported to be Podesta's hacked emails, though the Clinton campaign has neither confirmed nor denied they're authentic. As Politico reported Tuesday morning, Gary Hirshberg, the founder, chairman, and former CEO of organic-yogurt giant Stonyfield, exchanged several emails with Podesta, the Wikileaks database suggests. In an interview with Politico, Hirshberg acknowledged the emails were his.

The emails, which can be found here, are from October 2015 to March 2016 and largely involve two storylines that played out simultaneously: Clinton's hard-fought primary campaign with her Democratic challenger, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, and a battle in Congress over whether and how to label genetically modified foods, which I covered at the time. The issues intersected because Sanders quite publicly supported labeling.

And though, like all food issues, GMO labeling has not been much of an issue in a campaign dominated for several months now by Trump's wild-card antics, Hirshberg managed to get Podesta's ear.

Hirshberg is a leader of the Just Label It campaign, a coalition pushing for a mandatory federal GMO label. He's also a Clinton supporter who has served as a "bundler" of donations for her campaign—he has raised $600,000 for Clinton's campaign, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. To make a long story short, Hirshberg pushes Podesta to have Clinton support mandatory labeling, against a fierce biotech-industry lobbying effort to push through a federal law that would annul state-level labeling legislation and make GMO disclosure voluntary.

Hirshberg uses both the Sanders challenge to Clinton and his own fundraising prowess as a spur to promote his labeling position. In an October 28, 2015, email to Podesta, Hirshberg suggests that Clinton declare publicly that she supports mandatory GMO labeling, on the grounds that "everyone has the right to know whether they are in your foods." Hirshberg adds several benefits of such a position, including, "Bernie is absolutely firm about supporting mandatory labeling, so this would not give him an advantage on this topic."