Singer Neil Young boycotts Starbucks over Vermont’s GMO Labeling Law
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Protect wild, tomorrow's child Protect land from greed of man Take out dams, stand up to oil Protect plants and renew soil gonna stand up and save Earth? gonna say that she's had enough? gonna take on big machine? gonna stand up and save Earth? This all starts with you and me Lyrics from Neil Young's Who's Gonna Stand Up? Introduction Kyle Roberson joked that if you cut him he'd bleed Starbucks. In fact, Roberson's loyalty to Seattle-based company earned him Gold Level membership in Starbucks' Customer Rewards Program. I would describe myself as a loyal customer and a regular visitor to Starbucks both locally and when traveling, he said. They brew a consistently good cup of coffee no matter where you go and that can't always be said for other coffee shops which can be hit or miss with their roasts. To keep up with news about Starbucks, Roberson followed company on social media. I follow both Starbucks US and Canada on social media via Facebook, Twitter, Swarm, and Instagram, he said. That's how he learned about singer-songwriter Neil Young's call for a boycott of Starbucks in November 2014. He later read more about Young's boycott online and in newspapers. Those news articles led Roberson to understand that Neil Young opposed genetically engineered foods. In calling for boycott, Young, a longtime environmentalist, accused Starbucks of suing Vermont over landmark legislation state enacted mandating labeling of food products made with Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs). Roberson, a former Vermonter who lived in Seattle, supported Vermont's GMO labeling law and was concerned about Young's claims. Could he continue to patronize Starbucks if what Neil Young said was true? Roberson, a librarian, decided to learn more about issue and began researching Vermont's GMO labeling law, GMO producer Monsanto, and Starbucks' relationship with Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA), a trade group for food and beverage companies. Vermont's GMO Labeling Law The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) described genetic engineering as the name for certain methods that scientists use to introduce new traits or characteristics to an organism. For example, plants may be genetically engineered to produce characteristics to enhance growth or nutritional profile of food crops (U.S. Food, 2014). Genetically engineered foods were sometimes referred to as GMOs, or genetically modified organisms. Genetically modified and genetically engineered foods first came to light in 1999 when U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) submitted a statement to U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee on Basic Research on importance of regulating genetically engineered foods (U.S. Food, 1999). Though FDA did not support nor oppose genetically modified foods as of 2015, federal agency did play a role in overseeing and regulating them (U.S. Food, 2013). The topic of genetically engineered foods was not present in politics again until January 2013, when bill H.112 was proposed in Vermont Legislature, requiring products made with genetically modified foods to include a label (Ford & Ferrigno, 2014). According to bill, intent of legislation was to provide that food is misbranded if it is entirely or partially produced with genetic engineering and it is not labeled as genetically engineered. This bill was signed into law by Vermont Governor Peter Shumlin in May 2013 and required foods made with GMOs to be labeled by July 2016 (Ford & Ferrigno, 2014). Monsanto, a U.S.-based agriculture company, was leading producer of genetically modified seeds at center of GMO controversy. The company had more than 21,000 employees in 66 countries and was committed to helping to bring a broad range of solutions to help nourish our growing world (Monsanto, 2015). …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".