Andrew Kimbrell
Key Player

Founder, International Center for Technology Assessment; Secretary, Center for Food Safety; president, Turning Point Project; director, International Forum on Globalization; former staffer, Foundation on Economic TrendsAndrew Kimbrell runs the Center for Food Safety (CFS) as well as its parent organization, the International Center for Technology Assessment. He got his start working for noted anti-technology zealot Jeremy Rifkin, as a policy director at Rifkin’s Foundation on Economic Trends. At CFS Kimbrell has run campaigns against various food technologies; he has also been on the forefront of the mad-cow scare campaign in the United States. Like most of the anti-food-technology movement, Kimbrell’s efforts have focused on securing mandatory labels for genetically improved foods. In July of 1997 he told readers of the North Coast Xpress (an on-line magazine): “We are going to force them to label this food. If we have it labeled, then we can organize people not to buy it.”

Kimbrell and his legal director (Joseph Mendelson) hold two out of the five seats on the board of the Turning Point Project, which runs its operations out of a Washington, DC office suite leased by Kimbrell. His various organizations get such a large amount of money from the quasi-green-religious Foundation for Deep Ecology that it would be reasonable to think of Kimbrell as Deep Ecology’s East-coast high priest.

At the height of the American mad-cow scare, Kimbrell co-wrote a lawsuit aimed at forcing the federal government to expand its definition of the kinds of animal by-products that could be linked to the then-nascent disease. The lawsuits coincided with an elaborate scare campaign designed to make Americans think that mad cow disease was already present in the United States, in the form of diseased deer in Western states. Despite his bias and activist slant on the subject (or, perhaps, because of it), Kimbrell was one of only four mad-cow “experts” offered to the media by Fenton Communications’ media arm, Environmental Media Services.