I recently read about an effort to impose ethical standards on food bloggers -- specifically, should a blogger accept free products, promising to blog about them. (Presumably any human is so grateful for free food that they would recommend the product, human nature or greed being what it is).
Guess what? Someone just offered me some free bottled sauce to blog about. No thanks. I don't need any formal code of ethics to be turned off by this idea. But I'll be wary if I see anyone recommending this product on a blog -- the would-be-free-advertiser obviously wrote to everyone in the blogosphere with a food blog.
The code of ethics also responded to a restaurant blog that normally publishes anonymous tips. They recently published something ridiculously libelous accusing a restaurant of falsifying claims about something like fresh or organic produce (I don't recall the details). The ethics people think this should be formally unethical. But that all happened in Los Angeles.
I guess everyone is by now used to google ads for diet products. If you read blogs or anything else with ads, you just know that diet ads appear if google's artificial intelligence noses out the slightest relationship to food or eating. The ethics people aren't interested in that.
Like everyone else, I received an invitation to try that sauce. I have friends who've done it. I went to the site and read the ingredients list and I believe the second ingredient was high fructose corn syrup. I've only done the free sample thing once, but that was because it was POM Wonderful and I'd heard great things about the company. I was very pleased with the product, too, but this brings up an interesting point - CAN you be unbiased when you've received free food?
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