Oh god, yeah, oh please, please please please Paul, keep our laughter in here as we open this one. Fellow conspiracy realists. This week's classic episode comes about due to an amazing conversation we had with a close friend of the show is basically a sibling of ours now, Lauren vogel Baum, longtime host of Savor Eric in Shadows, brain Stuff, several other things. Worked with me and you, Matt and you Paul really closely. We're running our YouTube videos.
Makes an appearance in Thirteen Days of Halloween, you.
Know, well, yeah, you're right. And we also in those halcyon days pre pandemic, we would hang out and just shoot the breeze, shoot the beans. And I'll never forget that one day I was walking by. I had a crunch bar, candy crunch bar with me, you know, the ones with the little rice in the chocolate.
I know, the one's the blue wrapper, Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, iconic.
And then our pal, our pal, Lauren V said, oh Nestley, yeah, I know.
And with that one, you see Neslie right on the front with a lot of company's products. You don't really notice the label because it's some other sub brand or something, you know.
Yeah, because it's the world's largest food and beverage company, or was it twenty eighteen when we decided to ask the question, why do so many people hate Nesli? Why has this one gigantic, gargantuan company been accused of so many conspiracies? We found the answer.
And here it is in the form of a podcast episode.
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn this stuff they don't want you to know.
Welcome back to the show.
My name is Matt, and our trustee co host Nol is on the road on an adventure. All will be revealed in time, I believe, is the party line.
Yeah, he's on the road on an adventure, just still a couple of feet away.
From us, right Exactly Who am I? They call me? Ben? We are joined with our super producer Paul Mission Control Deca. Most importantly, you are you? You are here that makes this stuff they don't want you to know.
Wait, Ben, there's somebody else in the room too.
You're right, Matt, your spider sense is, as always disturbingly accurate. We are not delving into today's topic alone, are we Matt.
No, we are not. Today we are joined by Lauren Vogelbaum that you may know from Savor brain Stuff. Oh my gosh, so many And if you are not already aware, Saveror is the new version of what was once food Stuff.
Right, Yes, it's essentially the same show, but now we go on the road sometimes and talk to actual human people aside from ourselves. We're mostly human people about food and culture and science and how all those things work together and why we eat the way that we eat.
It's an awesome new thing experience to listen to Savor. Just hearing you in places, it's been a whole lot of fun as a listener. Just wanted to say that on Mike.
Oh, thank you so much.
And we defer to you, Lauren fairly often in this show when something food related comes up. That's why we asked you to come here today.
Yeah, oh you didn't just want to hang out?
Well that too for sure, Yeah, yeah, I mean mostly Yeah, it's.
Mostly hanging out. And then you're going to know more stuff about this than we do. Maybe.
Actually, definitely, I believe you entirely.
I enjoyed that, enjoyed that strange shrug. Lorden you have been on the show in the past before you have joined us for an exploration of the diamond industry.
Oh right, yeah, specifically not food related that one. But but yeah, who, I'm still mad about diamonds.
You may notice that there's a reoccurring theme here. We bring you on for terribly depressing things.
Yeah that's why when you said hang out, I was a little taken aback. Yeah, at this point, you you pretty much know the score.
I mean, I mean hypothetically. I did some of the research here anyway.
So yeah, one of these well, I mean, one of these episodes one day maybe will be a fun and delightful one.
Do you guys do fun and delightful episodes?
We did all the time.
Yeah, nope, you just never invited me.
I see, yeah, no, we do. But we are so glad that you are here today, especially because we are catching you right before you take another trip for sav.
Oh yeah, tomorrow, I'm flying out to New Orleans with newser Dylan uh and my co Danny, and we're gonna we're gonna eat and drink some stuff. We're gonna talk to some people about it.
I'm so jealous. That is some of my favorite food that exists on the planet.
Oh, I can't eat bell peppers, so it's gonna be rough going for me. But it's gonna be just all right. I'm gonna just make up for it in cocktails.
You can also get your own parade, which I know I keep telling, keep telling everyone. Don't blow up the spot if you list if you live in New Orleans and you don't know about this, but it's not that expensive to pay outside of Marty Gross season, to pay a band to do a parade for you, and you get to walk in the front or I guess wherever you want at that point.
Impromptu parades with only two hand grenades. So that's all. That's the maximum amount of hand grenades you can have in one night. I'm telling you that's a drink, right, yes, no, not physical weapons, right you guys. Today we are talking about a major company that most people know about. They are the creators of such foods for cats and dogs as alpo benefol and fancy Feast.
That's right, that's right. Today we are exploring the disarming and perhaps surprising story of a company called Nessli. But that's not all they've created.
Yeah, I'm you know, candy from kit Kats to Butterfingers, coffee brands like Taster's Choice, nest Cafe, Coffee Mate, and Starbucks packaged coffees, baking products from Libby's incarnation, frozen infrigerated foods like Stofers, California Pizza Kitchen, Hot Pockets, Line Cuisine and Dejiorno and Tombstone, desert brands like Hogandaws, Eaties, Skinny Cow, Boost and Power Bar, nutritional supplements, Gerber Baby Foods, Purina pet Foods, and they have a thirty percent ownership of Laorel,
including cosmetics brands like Garnia, the Body Shop and Mabelene and perfume lines from Ralph Lauren, Giorgio Armani and Eve Saint Laurent.
Wow. And that's nowhere near all of it.
Did we hit Perrier and San Pellogrino.
Oh, I didn't even mention the water right right water. There are multiple brands of water as well. This company cast a large, not entirely sugary shadow. You know, for a lot of us in the US, we associate NESTLEI with maybe like nest Cafe or a Nestle crunched candy bar. But every single thing that Matt and Lauren just named is owned by Nestle. There's so much more to the story. Nestlei is huge. It's gargantuan. It is like, ah, I don't want to ruin the surprise yet, but it's big.
Let's just go with that.
It's like the Facebook of foods.
You know what. That is disturbingly accurate, But this is true. When Nesli first started out, they only made one thing, one real breakthrough. It was condensed milk and baby formula.
Yeah, which was massively important, and that's why it became such a big company. They started in a place which was a good place to start babies.
Right right, just like Wu Tang, nesle was for the kids.
Yeah.
So here's us, like, here's a terrible joke that we weren't proud of, but we're going to do anyway. Matt, would you like to do the condensed history of Neslei grown because it's condensed like the milk? Yes, okay, milk.
Wait, we saw what you did there.
I feel like this joke only gets better the more that we try to over explain it.
Let it hang there. Yeah, So Neslei is named for its primary food wizard on Ree. Nestlei He was born August tenth, eighteen fourteen, on ree Neslei. Begins his career as a pharmacist's assistant before moving to Switzerland and qualifying to practice as a pharmacist and chemist. So that's pretty cool. He moves on to become a pharmacist and chemist. That's a great job to have. Sure, that's chemist, that's cool.
Yeah, and this was a This was a much broader term back in the eighteen hundreds, right, A chemist could be mixing any sort of thing, you know, an agglomeration of potions. For Henri, one of his primary focuses was always food science. He experimented with other stuff like cement, which hopefully was not a food experiment, but he also experiment with lemonade, cooking oils. Eventually he moves towards this idea of condensed milk or some sort of replacement for
breast milk for nursing parents. Yeah.
Condensed milk was developed by Gail Borden, Yes, that Borden in the United States in the eighteen fifties and was hugely important in feeding Civil War troops.
Right.
Yeah, it's weird because nowadays I don't know about everyone. I can't speak for everyone. But nowadays condensed milk seems like it has a bit of a niche, you know what I mean. It's not super widespread. No one's going to a restaurant and saying, you know, I'll have the number three with condensed milk to drink.
Yeah, yeah, well it's it was a much needed for a lot of people at the time.
Sure, you know, these days, I think it's mostly a baking ingredient. You're buying sweet and condensed milk to put in like a pumpkin pie or something like that. But yeah, you know, this was back in the what like eighteen sixties, eighteen seventies. This was before refrigeration technology was a thing, and it was also a time when industrialization was on the rise, and along with that this increase in concern
about food purity. You know, more people were moving into cities away from sources of fresh foods, more foods were being manufactured, but regulations had not been set up yet. And there was also this religiously influenced temperance movement or a series of movements going on in both America and Europe where people were thinking harder about what they put
in their bodies. So, like all of this led to this thing where condensed milk being marketed and to be fair generally created to be safe and long lasting, and so they were considered good.
Yeah products, right, yeah, because it's dependable too, it's consistent, which I think was a huge deal. So in eighteen sixty seven, just like a year after saying I'm going to work with condensed milk, Nesley develops this milk based baby food that he calls faurine lechti, which is I'm woefully mispronouncing that it means flour with milk in English, so it's cow's milk, wheat, flour and sugar to you know,
I guess sweeten the whole contraption. And as we know, whenever you hear stories about inventors or inventions, it's usually pretty difficult to pin an entire invention on a single person.
Yeah, I think there were two or three people who were developing a very similar product around the same time, first in the form of a liquid condensed food, and then very shortly afterwards in terms of like a powdered condensed food.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, And we remember Nesle as a pioneer of baby formula because this baby formula was a catalyst for his company, really propelled the growth of the entire operation Nesley. Originally, according to the story, Nesley develops this because he knows that some new mothers cannot breastfeed or some infants cannot be breastfed for one reason or another, and this invention, if he can get it off the ground, will help mitigate the cartoonishly high infant mortality rates of the time.
Yeah, things were bad for infants back then. And this is a real thing where once children, once very young children, start eating any formula of this kind, it's very very difficult for them to get back onto like a breast milk or something if you're trying to switch back. I'm not saying this is a terrible they need a great thing to stop babies from dying, but it also creates this whole other problem that we're going to maybe talk about a little bit later on.
Sure. Yeah, and there's also the issue of once a mother stops producing milk for her infant because of the switch to a formula, then it's hard for her to kickstart it again. And previous to this technology, to this food technology being invented, your only recourse if you couldn't personally breastfeed your child was to hire a wet nurse, and of course that's not a thing that everyone had financial access.
To, and this would be essentially someone who breastfeeds your baby for you, right.
Yes, yeah, absolutely, you can see how difficult that would be for a ton of people in this area in Switzerland, but also throughout the world, most people, I think it's safe to say most people. And in eighteen seventy five, sales are taking off. He's doing super well, gangbusters. Neslei sells his company and his factory to three local businessmen who aggressively expand both the research and the sales departments.
Around this time, even before that expansion, Neslei products are sold everywhere from Indonesia to Argentina, again a globe supply chain, which, as you point out, Lauren, is super difficult to pull off without refrigeration or planes. They're just I guess going by boat, huh, and train probably rail. But where's the chocolate you're wondering? Right? Possibly. In eighteen seventy nine, Nesley merges with Daniel Peter, who is arguably the inventor of
milk chocolate. I mean, at least he's the one who gets the credit for it.
Right before then, they had been selling some of their condensed milk products to that guy, and that's kind of how his milk chocolate business started off. And it's kind of rolled up into each other.
Yeah, which makes sense. That's the way a lot of business relationships tend to.
Go, right. So thank you Daniel Peter for milk chocolate.
I think it's weird that you have two first names, but yes, thank you.
Hey, some of us just have that affliction.
Okay, Oh Matt, I'm so sorry. I just realized that. I guess it feels normal because we hang out all the time. Yeah, but Daniel Peter, it's just it's a weird name. It's the name I would use as a fake name. So my profound apologies if you if I have made you feel slighted. My old friend, h Daniel Peter did some great stuff. He you know, invented milk chocolate. People generally like.
That because of him. Kitkats exist, Yes, they're delicious, they're great.
The Japanese ones farms, the green.
Tea one was so much better than I thought it would be.
Yeah, I've got some banana ones in my desk right now. They're life changing.
I see you also like to live dangerously If they're the could I could I try one after this? Awesome? So in nineteen oh five, Nestley, or the company founded rather merges with an outfit called the Anglo Swisk and Denseed Milk Company, and they form what is now known as the Nestley Group. They have a bunch of mergers and name changes, but today we call them NESTLEI s A. They are the world's largest fast moving consumer goods company in terms of revenue. They make a ton of money.
Yes, get this. In twenty seventeen there was a total revenue for Nestle SA the actual name of the company now of ninety point eight billion dollars with a B.
Holy Crapola's a that's a lot of kitcats.
Saw those dejornos?
Oh, so it's partially my fault.
They are still headquartered in Switzerland. They employ over three hundred thousand people. They own more than two thousand different brands. If you shop in a mainstream grocery store, you'll probably buy more Nestley stuff than you think. They also own almost five hundred factories in countries across the world. Their most popular products are powdered and liquid beverages still, which
I think is interesting. And this is the point where we have to encounter ethics and philosophy for a second, because we'll often hear pop philosophers say that, you know, at the heart of every fortune lay some great crime, and that's not something you could really prove. But there's an argument people make that says, no company or individual can attain this much financial success without at some point along the way engaging in unethical or at the very
least controversial activity. And Nessley's no different.
Yeah, there are a lot of critics of this company that exist that you will find online especially, and these criticisms don't just come from people who disagree with the company's strategies. They're investment strategies. There is a very deep and dark rabbit hole that we're about to go down. People. Right after a quick word from our sponsor.
Here's where it gets crazy. Nesley is accused of a ton of dastardly activities around the planet. The first one, which might be surprising to some people familiar to others, is Nesley's Neslei's water business.
Yeah, you've seen neslie Water bottled water, probably somewhere near a grocery store, in a grocery store at a and you may have also seen San Pellogrino or Perrier. They're sparkling versions somewhere on the shelves.
Yeah. In two thousand and five, a documentary called We Feed the World came out.
Oh wow, that's a little pompous, but that's okay.
And it featured the CEO of NESLEI at the time, a guy named Peter brabeck Lemete, and he made this observation that became infamous and went viral, and we have the quote today, net would you want to do the honors?
Oh? Absolutely. Water is, of course the most important raw material we have today in the world. It's a question of whether we should privatize the normal water supply for the population. And there are two different opinions on the matter. One opinion, which I think is extreme, is represented by the NGOs non governmental organizations, who bang on about declaring water a public right. That means that as a human being, you should have a right to water. That's an extreme solution.
The other view says that water is a food stuff like any other and like any other food stuff, it should have a market value. Personally, I believe it's better to give a food stuff of value so that we're all aware it has a price, and then that one should take specific measures for the part of the population that has no access to this water. And there are many different possibilities there. I added a little emphasis in there, but you can hear how sinister that could sound.
Yeah, I think the evil is there. I don't think.
All these NGOs trying to make water a public right.
A lot of Nesley critics interpreted this as an attack on the poor, attack on community suffering from drought and other people in the margins of society who cannot afford to pay this quote market price for water.
He did walk the statement back a little bit in twenty thirteen after this public outcry. As you can possibly imagine, he said. He said in a YouTube video that Nesley released, I have always supported the human right to water. Everyone should have enough safe, clean water to meet their fundamental daily needs, but not to fill a pool or wash
a car water. And then he talked for a minute about how it's a very precious resource and how we're kind of running out or I mean, you know how there's different areas that don't have a lot of back to it and any furthermore, said water should be better managed, should be better valued. If we give water value, there will be incentive to invest in looking after our supply.
Yeah, so you can see the logic. He's not he's not really changing the content of what he's saying. He's framing it in a different way.
Yeah. Ultimately, he's saying, we got to respect water enough that it's valuable enough that we're not going to pollute it too bad.
And I've heard I've heard similar arguments advanced about human life.
Oh, if there's enough of a value, we should value that as well.
If we're assigning value to things.
I mean, come on, that's that whole idea of selling bullets for more than a gun, right.
I mean, if we can't sell bullets in people, then really what are we doing?
Here's no keep it. We do want to be clear, that was not a quote from the CEO, right, No, no, no.
No, that was just my own sarcas sarcasm. So goodness, they don't know me here.
So this it's interesting too because there's a little bit of double think or a paradox here in that Nesley has a successful bottled water business because they are treating water as a public good by extracting it from land lease agreements where they just have access to the resources on the land, so they're not putting a huge value on it on their side. The value changes depending on their profit margin.
Right.
But they're the world's largest supplier of bottled water.
Yeah, seven percent of their sales come from bottled water. That's about seven point seven billion worldwide in recent years.
And seven point seven billion dollars worth of bottled.
Water just from them. Yeah, for kind of scope. I don't have a number for the whole world worth of the water industry, the bottled water industry, but just in the United States it was worth eighteen point five billion dollars in twenty seventeen and was growing.
And now they own what sixty four different bottled water brands across the planet. The big question is, oh, no, no, we got to say these, Okay, name them.
We got to say these because you're drinking these. You might have one in your hand right now. Deer Park guilty on my hand. Poland Spring also guilty. Aquapana not so much. San Pellegrino, sure, Perier sometimes, but only when I'm feeling fancy springs, water park, and water line.
I would add to that pure life, which is huge in other countries. So where do they get all this water? It turns out that they're taking it from you if you are the resident of many rural communities across the US, in Brazil, in Bangladesh, in Pakistan, in Europe. But how ben, I'm so glad you asked, Matt. Thank you. They similar to the Daniel day Lewis character, and there will be blood.
They're drinking your milkshake. They're they're buying up areas that give them access to groundwater or springs, and they're using that to they're using that to fill the bottles. But as they're draining these aquifers, they're moving the water away from where it would have naturally existed.
That's it's a it's such a perfect example there the Daniel day Lewis character from There will be blood because these aquifers are so massive underneath the land where people are walking around on all day you don't realize that they're down there. But if if you can put you know, a series of pipes down into the aquifer at one point in this massive space of water, you could just suck it right up, like that milkshake. It's such a good it's it's perfect and terrible.
And real. And to add to that, the company is so large that they have they have acquired a tremendous amount of influence, especially in smaller communities. We don't know exactly how much water they've been extracting with this method, but in twenty fifteen, some journalists found that Nessley had been illegally draining water from lands that were leased by the Marongo Band of Mission Indians in a desert area, and they'd also been taking water from the San Bernardino
National Force. They did have a permit to do this. It expired in nineteen eighty eight.
Oops.
Is that just? Is that? Is that just something that got overlooked because it's a huge operation?
Well, I mean also another number related to that instance, they had been paying five hundred and twenty four dollars a year to extract about thirty million gallons of water.
There, wow, including during the drought. So you can already see how this profit margin is going to work out right right that An independent analysis put the total water extraction at one billion gallons per year over time. And if we think about how many bottles of water, that is right, Is it twelve ounce bottle of water? Sixteen ounces something like that?
Sure, yeah, something like that.
Sure those sound like numbers. Yeah, so we can see just how little they would be pain even with the cost of transportation and infrastructure, how little they're pain to produce these, right.
And I did want to put in here that, like, while we can all agree that drinking bottled water is better for our health than drinking bottled soda, the marketing of bottled water as safer or healthier than tap water for the general population is and this is a scientific term, a bunch of hohoey. The stuff was safer in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries for like people in cities who
didn't want cholera or typhoid or dysentery. And then later, of course, in the nineteen eighties, when the EPA found a lot of lead and a lot of drinking water, but like these problems were fixable. Health movements in the early twentieth century created free, filtered chlorinated water for many developed cities, removing concerns of disease, and in most part cities rushed to solve the lead issues. In the eighties and nineties.
But they put fluoride in the water instead.
They do I'm sure that's a whole other episode that I'm sure you guys have done more than once.
It's fine, don't worry about it.
But okay, So, bottled water has roots in health and purity movements of the eighteen hundreds, kind of like I was talking about earlier. Folks then started selling bottled water from places like Saratoga Springs like to rich.
People, mostly because there's cache right right.
Yeah, yeah, it's like, oh, this is fancy mineral water and it's naturally carbonated because we don't have good carbonation technology yet, so oooh, drink it and it's healthy and stuff. But I don't know why. My ghost voice is also my true anyway. But yeah, so mostly it wasn't a
thing among people. Bottled water was not a thing among people who did have another choice until the nineteen seventies, and that's when pet Plastic went commercial and Perrier started sponsoring athletic events like the New York City Marathon in order to push the healthfulness of their water. Even today, with the aging infrastructure problems like we have in Flint
and on Canada's First Nations reserves. The majority of marketing of bottled water is bent to that like health purity image, Like what should be an emergency solution for temporarily unsafe water is being sold as a lifestyle.
Now you get bottled water in a nice glass bottle that you find in your fancy schmancy hotel rooms in Philadelphia.
That's true, that's true. There wasn't actually much water in those bottles.
Almost no water in there. I forget the name of that brand, Voss Voss Water.
Oh right, yes, ah, the bottles are pretty.
They are you know, they're a real statement that That's how I felt when I was when I got one from the hotel we were at We're on the road. It's like, oh, okay, I'm gonna walk around with this and feel like I'm I'm saying something. I don't know what it is, but I'm making a statement about something.
I think it's just a noise. And it's like, mmmm, that's what I'm saying, That's what the noise is. Yeah.
Uh So this continues this there's more to this water story. But let's bracket that for a second and look at another huge controversy with NESLEI, which is the idea of baby formula. Just like back in the late eighteen hundreds, Nesley remains invested in formula and baby food products. But the problem nowadays sinners less on the product itself and more on the marketing. And I'm using that term in a very generous way.
Well, well, by the first decade of the twentieth century, Nesley ads, we're saying stuff like, don't wait too long before you wean the baby. If you do, the little one is likely to be weak in anemic. They admitted in these ads that breast milk was the best for young babies, but for baby six months and up, they said that their product was.
The fest thing in the world. And this splendid triumph of care and science is so like mother's milk that the tiny stomach won't notice the difference. Nestley, that which is wrong, so wrong, so so wrong.
On multiple levels.
Oh sure, and we've we've done a lot of not us personally, but but researchers have done a lot into looking into this in the past few decades. And yeah, brea breast milk is better.
Breast milk is like the best thing if we could all right now, everybody listening to this be just drinking breast milk instead of coffee, we'd be good to go. This is this is for real.
Well, certainly you can. You can get some some antibodies.
I like that you're passionate.
I learned a lot about it when we had a kid. It's just it's incredible stuff.
But not everyone has evolved the genetic mutation to drink milk into adulthood.
Oh true.
And just something.
There are a lot of problems with the thing that I said. It's just I was being hyperbolic. I'm sorry. I don't everyone do that ever, please. I mean.
Also, until men really start figuring out how to lactate more regularly, I think I think we're going to have a supply chain problem.
Yeah, just logistically really tried. And Nesley also wanted to lactate. Well, they guess they're kind of your nemesis here. They wanted people to stop lactating. Oh right, They became big formula. These ads are categorically wrong, right, someone say it, it's ethically wrong, but it's definitely the science doesn't bear out, is the problem.
And in the.
Nineteen nineties, probably knowing this already, Nesley began pushing formula aggressively in developing and poor countries, specifically targeting the poorest among them, and they had campaigns that were meant to make formula seem equal as as good for the kid, if not better than breast milk. But the first problem
here that crops up is in a medical sphere. A lot of these countries don't have great water infrastructure, and you have to have sanitary water to use this powdered formula I believe was powdered at that time.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
So if you don't have access to clean water, or you don't have access to the technology to boil the water, or you don't speak the language that in which the instructions are printed on the container, what good is uh? What good are English instructions if there's a place where the country has thirty different languages and the main one is Portuguese.
Yeah? I know, Hey, I think Neslie needed to get on that hobo code. You know what I mean, like, oh, hobo code.
Yeah, this this comes out after right, so we can say hobo code and don't have to explain what it is. Perfect, it's you know what we're talking about.
I was at your show.
Yes, Oh wait, oh sorry, thanks for coming problem anytime.
I can tell it mental lot.
Too, Yeah, procleped. But Nesley does seem to have knowingly ignored these risks, the risk of improper creation of the formula, the risk of unsanitary water, the health the health complications that arrive when a child is put on formula.
And.
This, this concern was cast aside. UNICEF estimates that a formula fed child, by the way, just for some facts, living in a disease ridden in unhygienic condition is going to be between six and twenty five times more likely to die of diarrhea and four times more likely to die of pneumonia in comparison to a child that has been breastfed.
So wow, because well, there is a there's a natural filter there, which is the mom. She filters a lot of that bad stuff out, it's true.
Yeah. And there's another problem, which is that if we're talking about destitute communities, often mothers would tend to use less formula than was needed because they wanted to make it last longer. Because you see, all right, So there's this thing called the International Baby Food Action Network. It's a real thing. I think it's a great name for an extremist group. They are not.
It sounds like a kid's TV show or something Baby Action.
Network, you know what I mean.
I would watch that show.
I would check it out. I would give it a chance.
Fair.
I don't know if I would make it through the whole season, but I'll just ask you.
But dude, they've got some crazy allegations, right, and not crazy, they're just intense.
Right because Neslei they according to their belief for their allegations. Nesli distributes free formula samples and hospitals and maternity wards across these countries, knowing that this will interfere with the natural actation process.
And not only in these in these less developed countries, but also in the United States also in places where we don't need that.
Wow, yeah, we got a bunch of samples when when we had our child. Yeah, a ton of stuff sent home with us for free formulas.
All that's the thing. That's the thing, because once this has interfered with the natural actation process and you go away from the hospital or the maternity ward or what have you, you find out that the formula is no longer free. So the Baby Food Action Network says that Nesley is operating under the guise of humanitarian aid. But what they're really trying to do is to create a market,
a captive market. At that they say Nestley is purposefully Nesley is aware that this interference with natural milk production can occur, and they want it to that's the argument.
Yikes, that's a that's a heavy accusation. I wish it didn't feel so real. So like, correct, I wish it didn't.
So you think you think it was nefarious in some way, like you think it was not.
Just it was nefarious, whether they meant to or not. Right, I mean, if this is actually happening, if they're giving all these free samples, which we have seen I have seen personally, it's not so great.
Well, and then the argument could be that maybe the corporate heart is in the right place.
Yeah, we're just giving you free things.
But we just neglected to understand the long term consequences.
Well right up until someone said, hey, there's long term consequences, at.
Which point you know, they did keep going.
They did keep going. They did keep going, and they could certainly have a program where they offer these supplies for free to hospitals and maternity wards for patients who need them for patients who request them for specific cases where for whatever reason, the mother or the baby cannot breastfeed.
And there have been there have been doctors in some developing countries who say that the way this stuff should work is that they should have to write prescriptions for format. Wow, they should put that filter up. That's because writing a prescription on their end would be free, but it would also be a way to keep the doctor involved.
Yeah, the you know, medical provider for there.
We go, that's the one. I don't know why that was difficult for me, but but it's true. This has been something that's been brewing for a long long time. Nesli, for their part, denies all the accusations, all the accusations across the board, and they said, we don't even know where to start looking to figure out if this is true, because there's no you haven't given us anything specific enough. But still this led to a large push for boycotts.
The first US boycott of Nesli begins in July of seventy seven, nineteen seventy seven, and then it spreads to Europe and in nineteen eighty one, the World Health Assembly adopts a code a policy on the marketing of breast milk substitutes, which sounds very specific when they say it is a minimum requirement that has to be adopted in its entirety. In eighty four, Nestle as sense and they
implement the code. Boycott gets suspended, but surprise, surprise, it came back in nineteen eighty eight because most people who had a problem with it pre boycott said that they didn't fix anything post boycott.
So that's the story of Nesle and infant formula.
Well, I like that we start with kids. Do you want to stick with kids?
I think we should, but I think we need an ad break between this, just as a bit of a palate cleanser. If that's okay, share, okay, let's hear from some sponsors.
We're back with a twisted segue. I believe we set this up as we enjoyed, not the right word for our conversation about formula. But we do want to stick with kids, because it turns out that there's more to the story. Nesley isn't just participating in a cover up or a conspiracy to extract water from small communities. It's not just through either incompetence or nefarious designs, forcing children
to drink baby formula. It's it's also cutting out the middle man of exploitation entirely and diving right into, as we established earlier, slavery, human trafficking, child labor, you know what I mean.
At least it's being accused of such, and there are some there's some evidence to show that it's it's been.
Happening in the supply chain, right chocolate, right now, We're not saying it's not like we're saying there's some crazy corporate psychopath with like a monocle and a candy bar top hat slugging down Sam Pellegrinos as he snatches children
off the street. But hopefully not, hopefully not. But it is true, like you said, Lauren, with chocolate, and like you said, Matt, with the supply chain, there's compelling evidence that the people they are buying products from cocoa beans and some that those folks are engaging in slavery, child labor, human trafficking, and pretty gruesome acts of abuse.
Oh yeah. In two thousand and five, the International Labor Rights Fund filed one of those lawsuits against Nestley and several other companies on behalf of three children from Molly in the pseudo edge that these kids were trafficked to the Ivory Coast where they were enslaved, where they were abused on a regular basis and forced to work on a cocoa plantation. Not great.
Case went on for years, right.
Exactly, in twenty ten, the US District Court for the Central District of California, they deter in that corporations cannot be held liable for violations of international law and dismissed this suit. Isn't that isn't that special? As they say, this was of course a controversial decision when since then
it has been appealed. But isn't it isn't that crazy that and a corporation cannot be or at least the thought at the time was that this corporation can't be held liable for violations of international law through its practices of creating products, right.
Especially when it's an international corporation.
Yeah, that's a good point. I guess the logic there is that it would be a huge hindrance to business operations and a huge expense to have to send people to every place physically to check on these things.
And people need needs, you know, people, everyone, people everywhere need needs.
We need our kit cats.
Yeah that's right.
Oh man, everyone everyone.
Needs Now this isn't restricted to a single incident, that's the problem. There was a report done by an independent auditor, a group called the Fair Labor Association, and they said that they found Nesle committed multiple serious violations of its own internal labor code. So it's corporate laws, let alone the laws of the land and the state. This was at the very least a large degree of negligence, if not tacit approval of slavery and child labor. And here's
the thing. Nesle commissioned the study. Nesle said, show us what we need to know. And the Fair Labor folks came back and they were like, wow, this is monstrous And they're like, whoa, really that's crazy. Yeah, no way, no, not us. And we have a quote from then executive vice president for Operations, Jose Lopez, the use of.
Child labor in our Coco supply chain goes against everything we stand for. No company sourcing Coco from the Ivory Coast can guarantee that it doesn't happen, but we can say that tackling child labor is a top priority for our company.
Okay, So again the argument is that no company of that size, especially could be one hundred percent certain of how their suppliers are behaving, especially they seem to say in this area of the world. It's not surprising that critics remain unsatisfied with that response. And as of this recording and estimated one point eight million children in West Africa alone are at risk of becoming a victim of child labor.
Yeah, Okay, it's going to take a breather here for a second.
Yeah, maybe it was too much to have another child related one. But maybe we should stay. Maybe we should stay geopolitical, Maybe we should go to another country.
Who should we talk about like corporations going in and strong arming countries by making them payback massive debts.
So this is a weird one. In two thousand and two, Ethiopia was in the grips of a nationwide brutal famine and Nesle came to Ethiopia in its time of need and said, you owe us six million dollars. This claim dates back to nineteen seventies when the military of Ethiopia seized the assets of foreign companies. But things took a turn because the public found out about this and they began to speak up.
Oh yes. The company received over forty thousand letters from people who were absolutely outraged in one of the most famous cases of public opinion beat corporate greed that exists on the planet. In the end, Nesli took a U turn. They settled for I guess partially.
They still took some money.
Oh definitely. They're like, okay, okay, guys, look, will it just give us some of it?
Will meet you halfway.
Yeah. In the end, Neslei did take a U turn and they settled for just some of the debt.
They still took some cash, yeah, will meet you halfway.
Right, right right. And in their defense, they also took that money that Ethiopia gave them and invested a portion of it to in the country to help it bounce back from famine.
That's very nice.
It's really weird. It's it's they could have just not taken the money. I don't know, but maybe there's an argument that they had better international development experience and so would be better stewards of that money. That's that's an argument you would hear. I could tell.
I'm very politely worded.
I could I can read the room here in the podcast studio. I could tell that you all are not persuaded. I'll check in with Paul and see what he thinks.
But while they were in Ethiopia around the same time, roughly, they made a deal with the wife of the infamous dictator from Zimbabwe, Robert mcgabe Mayial his wife, Grace Mugabe, to buy one million liters of milk a year from farms that she had taken over, because you see, Grace mcgabe had a booming side business of taking over large farms in Zimbabwe that were white.
Owned, well at least six of them since two thousand and two.
Yeah, yeah, and so this is building a farming empire from these legally confiscated farm lands. And you know, Zimbabwe has a very very upsetting history of racial tension, colonialism, resource extraction and so on. But these farms were taken illegally, at least as far as the international community things.
Well, yeah, it led to another series of boycotts yet yet another as well as sanctions in both the European Union and the United States.
Yeah, I know, it sounds like we're picking on Nesli. These are just things that you probably don't know about. A candy company, even Canada got beefed up with them.
Dude. They're a lean cuisine company.
Okay, they're a dog food company. That's right, There are all things.
They're a hot pockets company.
Come on and that at the end of the day, that's what it is. At the end of the day. What matters more than hot pockets. You can put anything in them.
So let's talk about price fixing. Price fixing is a fun thing where companies work together people who were in the same market share to control the prices of things. A lot of times it's to keep them high, keep prices high. That way, everybody gets a lot of that. Move lah. Sometimes it's to strategically keep the prices low. Either way, it's strategized. Well, guess what. Nestley has been accused of this and they even got raided.
Yeah, Nestley Canada got raided, along with Hershey Canada and Mars Canada. They all have the word Canada in their names because they're the Canadian branch of the company. I feel like I'm over explaining that.
It makes sense though. So these this company, Nestle and other companies the ones we just mentioned they're subject to a class action lawsuit. Are several of them. Per company, and ultimately they settled for nine million dollars without accepting as per usual, as we've learned on this show, without accepting any liability, without admitting any guilt or any issues there. It's like, we did no things wrong, but here's a lot of money.
Isn't a lot of money to them?
How much do they make?
Ninety zero point eight billion in total revenue though, that's not profit?
Yeah, and this is yeah, Nicelie Canada doesn't rake in all that cash, but they rake in quite a bit, I'm assuming.
Yeah, but they you know this, this happens. A lot of lawsuits are settled out at court this way, right. They also have been Look, they they're not hurting for money, that's true. They are a business, though, and they need to be quite aware of where a profit can be found. That is why they have been involved in like the weirdest round of criticism regarding pollution. It's nuts in a circuitous way. Nesley actually makes some some real scratch, some solid cheese off of pollution.
They sorry, what now? Yeah?
Wait, yeah, okay, the main the main part of that this is going to go back to water. But they have historically and sometimes still do source inexpensive palm oil, and palm oil is a vegetable oil made from the
fruit of oil palm trees. Makes sense, right. It goes into a lot of their candies and other products that include processed fats, and it's a crop that fuels a lot of deforestation, endangers a lot of species, like the cute ones like like tigers and orangon tang stuff like that, and it creates a lot of pollution in the areas where they're grown and processed Africa, Asia and South America primarily.
Are you saying tigers are cute. Yeah, tigers are terrified.
Tigers are amazing.
They're majestic kitters.
I didn't mean to sounds so definitive about that.
I yeah, did you have a bad time with tigers?
I mean, I have a three year old and I've been reading about tigers everywhere and just I've been to the zoo a lot lately. The tiger is crazy, scary, it's huge, it would eat you, just bite your face off.
I mean, so with cats, Yeah, it's just a size thing. Yeah, tigers are also brilliant. They have this is a this does have anything to do with this episode, but tigers who have been wounded in the wild and Siberia and stuff. If they manage to escape, they are able to, like corvids, remember the smell and the appearance of the person who wounded them. And there's been at least one proven case where a tiger was attacked escaped in Siberia waited for
winter to hit when it knew it. It stalked the guy for months what and just waited for it to get too cold for to leave his house. And then you can see the footprints that the tiger walked around in increasingly closer spirals, and then it came through his back window, snatched him, drug him out, and I don't remember what parts of the body they found.
I'm not saying Richard Parker isn't a badass assassin. I'm just saying, yikes, that's all. It's just I just take issue with them being cute, because I agree there are kitty cats, and kitty cats are cute, but they're big, old, scared cats that will assassinate you after waiting a long tizing.
Okay, I think this isn't my new personality test.
Oh no. Also, Annie Research cost the Saver has a very fascinating personality test that. I believe she was entirely making up on the spot.
I can't think of what it might be, but that doesn't mean that it didn't exist previously.
I'll love to ask her about it. I love to ask her about it. It's a it's a good road trip conversation.
Oh yeah, so so palm oil bad, palm oil bad?
Palm oil is bad, Tiger's good.
Tiger's okay, But what about plastic bottles?
How are they well? In the US and the West at large. Increasing concern over plastic bottles that sent more and more customers back to reusable bottles or tap water, you know, And this is not Nesley's profits down a bit, And I do want to point out there's something very clever and very calculated at play here in the US at least concerning consumer plastic. Ninety percent of all the plastic pollution that we hear about in the oceans of
the world comes from commercial fisheries. It comes from gigantic nets and things of that nature.
Yeah, the straws that you use are not contributing that seriously compared to those items, to the great Pacific raft and stuff like that.
Right, right, And plastic bottles do play a huge role and pollution. But again, don't let people run this sort of shell game on you. It's I think it's brilliant that so many corporations have have had this change of heart moment, such great pr where they're like, you know what, we decided to be the change. We're gonna make a difference here at canglom Co. No more straws yea. And people are like, oh, that's great.
And you guys are really brave. But the one other major, just because we're kind of a major contributing factor though, that I've been reading about more and more, are these little food pouches that people are buying for kids and adults, like the exactly that have a little plastic top, and that plastic top in particular is becoming a massive problem. And the other thing is, you guys have seen the water bottle refillers around Atlanta and a lot of other cities.
Have you seen these? It looks like a water fountain where you just put your water bottle up to it and you can refill your water bottle. Yeah, so smart. That just that makes me so happy when we're thinking about the pollution that even though it's not as bad as commercial fisheries. The pollution that is generated from plastic products like that.
Absolutely, so how does how does Nesley end up making a profit off of this? To find the answer there, we have to travel across the Pacific because sales may be down in the US and the West, but in China sales are up in part due to pollution. About seventy percent in China's lakes and rivers have been polluted. Although people will tell you virtually all the surface water is now unsafe to drink in that country unless it's
been treated. I don't know how much of that is exaggeration and how much of that bears up to the scrutiny, but they have a ton of industrial facilities, power and chemical plants, paper and textile factories, and this means that a lot of the people living in the country don't trust the water or the purification infrastructure in China, so they buy more and more bottled water from companies like Nestley, who, again,
they make a huge margin out of this stuff. What did you say earlier about California, They pay like five hundred something a year five twenty four.
Five hundred and twenty four dollars for every three hundred million.
Gallons and you pay like minimum, what dollar twenty nine per bottle? Yeah, for twelve to sixty ounces.
What do you think that twenty nine cents is about?
It's to make it, you know, you know how this didn't you and I do something about pricing, like why there are so many nines? Yeah, yeah, it's aspirational, but you're also saving a penny. I don't think it works on us anymore because now thirty seems like less to a lot of people because there's a zero at the end. Yeah, that's ridiculous.
Right, So this whole idea goes back. I think the most perhaps the most important thing here, is that ness Lee is a company that makes food stuffs. For the most part, they also make you know, we've talked about all the other companies they have hand in, but for the most part, they're creating products which you buy, you open up, throw away the packaging, and then eat the part that's edible. Right. That creates a lot of waste,
a lot of trash. And it doesn't mean that, you know, Neslee is for some nefarious purpose trying to take on Captain Planet because they're bad guys.
It's not like they're sitting around like Montgomery Burns doing the you know, rubbing their hands together. There's a better word for that, like like a little.
Like like raccoony.
Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah yeah, just sort of just sort of rubbing their own palms together and saying, how how how should we ruin the world today?
Yeah?
What Someone's like, well, we could I don't know, ah, got me on the spot here, manty. We could uh, we could start war, we could poison the food. And it's like no, no, no, something more nuanced. And then they're like okay, okay, um um uh pollute everything and they're like.
Oh, have you considered single use packaging?
There we go exactly. It's not that they're not some super villain, righting evil like that, right, they're the onceler They're a giant corporation now making tons and tons of products with tons and tons of packaging, and that is just what happens when you do.
That, and as people are you providing a huge boost to economies and job opportunities. Those are another that's another piec argument you'll hear watch the Lorix.
Although hey, we're not even talking about the industrial runoff from the industrial factories. Who are who are creating these plastic products.
Read that's true.
Oh, yeah, that's absolutely true. Yes, and unfortunately, unfortunately, you know, they don't have to be a purposefully malevolent entity if it. If you're a corporation, job is, as Matt said, to pursue a profit, and that means that everything to a certain is going to be a lower priority, including pollution. There are very few companies in the world that would say we're going to operate at a loss for ten years to help make the world a better place. That's just not a viable tenure plan.
That's not something a company does.
So maybe not immoral, but amoral, And there we have it. The world's largest food and beverage company is the subject of numerous controversies, boycotts, criticisms, and arguably, yes, cover ups. One thing we did cut from this episode was the delightful tale of the Fluoride Mafia, which is, yeah, we found this. It's this group of people who believe that Nesley is so large because it is secretly charged by some elite cabal with the task of putting fluoride in everything. Ooh,
that's their big master plan. Fluoride and everything, not just the usual water, no, everything florid flavored Kit Cats, fluoride flavored purina ben a full Yeah, it seems extreme. Hey, do you have no comment on that one?
No, I don't know.
I haven't researched to that.
You don't want to get involved with big fluoride?
Right? We all dose ourselves at least two times a day if we're good adults and or children.
Yeah, there you go. That's a bright side. Brush your teeth.
See, there you go.
So what happens? Now? What does this mean for anyone who was already familiar with this stuff or anyone who just learned about it. If you support NESLI and disagree with its critics, if you think they're being alarmist, or you think they're trying to create problems where none really exists, then kudos, congrat you lucked out. Life goes on as normal.
Yeah, Eat as many Kitcats as you want.
Yeah. Yeah, get that purina and feed it your dogs and then put that to Giorno in the oven. Crack open a nice sand pell of Grino and watch the wor world burn.
That's great. Let's put that on a T shirt. Okay, tell us if that should be a T shirt? Yeah, so we should be doing more IGU commercials too.
Yeah, I believe Global Unlimited, the Illuminated ones, they've got something coming out or they're like like co sponsored something that's coming out on Savor. Yeah.
Over on Saver, we're doing a reading of the Grim Brothers story The Almond Tree. Oh it's you know, it's about cannibalism. So we thought it would be perfect for Thanksgiving. So it's coming out the Friday after Thanksgiving for our non American listeners, that is November twenty third.
Looks for it.
Share it with your loved ones, don't give them a context. Just like walk in during Thanksgiving dinner, knock some stuff off the table, slam down a boombox. You do need a boombox for this, and then just just play it and pick one person and make weirdly hostile eye contact with them.
Oh yeah, so so definitely do that. You can. If you have any questions or comments about Nesle and any of the things we've talked about today, you can find us on Twitter. You can find us on Facebook and Instagram. Conspiracy stuff with most of those conspiracy stuff show on Instagram, you can you can call us.
That's true, Matt, we are one eight three three.
STD w y t K. Yeah, I gotta always highlight that STD because it's the most important.
Transparent about that. Yeah, let people know it's the responsible thing to do.
The other thing you could do is join our Facebook group. Here's where it gets crazy. That's where you can join a lot of us and our fellow conspiracy realists and just discuss things. Post some dope memes. What kind of memes? Dank I forget the cool hip memes? You can post those there. So that's where you can find us for the most part.
And we know what you're probably asking yourself here, probably like guys, I know because you say this stuff at the end of every show, right, I don't care how to contact g I already know how to do it. Stop yelling STD at me at the end of the episode. But but you are probably wondering how you can get in contact with Savor.
Oh goodness, you can find us. Yes, it's Savor the Podcast. You can look us up via any Internet search engine. You can also find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook at savor pod or email us at hello at saverpod dot com. We would love to hear from you, and we occasionally get angry about giant corporations on our show too, So I don't know. Come tune in listen to our sugar episodes. We get really angry.
I am a big fan of One of your more recent episodes has this title. I don't know if you heard this, Matt Mayo naise or Mayo naise like I don't want to Annie.
Annie strongly dislikes mayonaise. It's one of her top five least favorite foods.
It's so fascinating. The story of mayonnaise and some of the things you talked about in the episode is genuinely fascinating, and I love mayonnaise. Yeah, it's the European whatever blood I have in me, I just want to dip my fries in it, slather out on my sandwiches. I do not care. I'll put it on a PB and J what I'll do it.
There's a I mean, live your life. I got your back. There's also a a group of people that believes, there is, for lack of a better term, a Mayo conspiracy.
Right, Yeah, there was just a Twitter message about this, Yeah, that that Big Mayo is like part of Big Agra and that this is a problem, specifically in the way that Vegan mayonnaise have been have been treated in the larger market, and I will say that mostly that's an issue of the definition, the legal definition from the FDA of mayonnaise, which includes eggs. So that's a that's a reason why vegan mayo has not been allowed to market itself as mayonnaise. Yeah, so that's part of the problem.
Because vegan mayonnaise isn't mayonnaise. Mayonnaise is fat and eggs, delicious oil.
Yeah, yeah, vegetable oil. Vegetable oil and eggs.
Mostly, I need I need my mayonnaise to be made out of.
Bacon grease that also cannot be marketed as mayonnaise.
Oh yes, it's like bacon A's at that point, some sort of ali But you know what, man, you gotta be the change, right if you want that bacon mayonnaise to happen, I have full faith that you will do.
So.
Paul is going to turn us into bacon A's if we don't get that.
That's true.
That's true, And that's the end of this classic episode. If you have any thoughts or questions about this episode, you can get into contact with us in a number of different ways. One of the best is to give us a call. Our number is one eight three three std WYTK. If you don't want to do that, you can send us a good old fashioned email.
We are conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com.
Stuff they don't want you to know. Is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.