How to Bring Investigative Journalism into Food Lifestyle Media

Food and cooking videos are some of the most watched content across all social media platforms. According to a Meta survey of Instagram users, 43% named food and drink as their top interest on the platform, placing third after only travel (45%) and music (44%).

Yet much of this content — recipes, restaurant reviews, cooking advice from chefs or food influencers —  is consumed as entertainment, and comparatively little of it explores the broader issues — such as agriculture, environment, policy, and industry — that shape what and how we eat.

A panel at the 2024 iMEdD International Journalism Forum in Athens titled Bringing Investigative Journalism into Food Lifestyle Media and moderated by Thin Lei Win — lead reporter for Lighthouse Reports’ Food Systems newsroom — addressed how to bridge the food lifestyle and investigative worlds and explored ways investigative journalists can capitalize on the huge interest in food content.

Thin Lei Win pointed out that there are excellent investigations into the powerful forces that play a role in what we eat — but they often struggle to make an impact outside the “policy bubble.” The dilemma: “How do we get the hundreds of millions of people interested in food to become interested in the problems within our food systems without bumming everyone out?” she asked. “There’s a massive disconnect between Chef’s Table TikTok cucumber salads and the kind of hard-hitting investigations that we tend to do, whether it’s about supply chain problems or the Amazon being deforested for animal feed, or the after-effects of nutrient runoffs from fertilizers or pesticide use. How can we bridge that gap?”

Familiar Playbook 

According to a 2023 UN trade and development report, four companies control nearly 70% of the global food trade — and also profit greatly from the volatility of food commodity prices. Further, one-third of total global greenhouse gas emissions come from food production.

Panelists noted that these food companies and producers fight against changes that could disrupt their market dominance with a playbook remarkably similar to the one Big Tobacco and fossil fuel majors have used to fight for their interests — and the status quo. These include lobbying governments against law or policy changes, or attempts to improve standards in environmental impacts, advertising, or food itself, and more recently, deploying social media and PR campaigns to discredit activism, education, and scrutiny into their business practices.

Thin Lei Win invited the panelists — Tessa Pang, impact producer for Lighthouse Reports; Miriam Wells, impact editor and deputy director at The Examination; and Silvia Lazzaris, science reporter and author — to share how they made more impact with food investigations, such as finding creative angles to dry topics, innovative social media campaigns, and finding partners for reaching audiences outside the investigative beat.

Case Studies

Animal Welfare Wrecked — Lighthouse Reports, IRPI, the Guardian, Food Unfolded, Factanza, EU Scream

Lighthouse Reports’ Tessa Pang discussed the multi-outlet partnership investigation into how the meat industry has managed to “derail historic democratic demand to improve animal welfare standards in the EU.”

According to the investigation, in 2020 over 1.5 million people in the European Union signed petitions asking the European Commission to improve animal welfare legislation, such as banning the use of cages, slaughtering one-day-old chicks, and the sale of fur. These proposals had broad public and political support, and the EU Commission was due to implement a set of new regulations by 2023. However, all but one of these policies, on caging animals, have been dropped, thanks to lobbying by meat and livestock interest groups, who lobbied policymakers to water down laws and attacked scientific opinions they thought were contrary to their goals.

One challenge her team had, Pang explained, is that it’s “hard to engage people in a story about lobbying,” which can be “technical… boring, and unsexy.” It also often happens behind closed doors and at informal meetings — a challenge for journalists using freedom-of-information requests to drive their reporting. So rather than cover the lobbying, they put together a team to gather evidence of the more aggressive strategies the European meat lobby was developing — including methods tried in the US.

Pang explained that because one of the issues at stake — cage farming — and the related topic of ethical shopping choices — such as buying free-range eggs — was something a lot of people in food media were talking about, they were able to link the investigation to this issue in a novel way: by stressing that lobbying interests and industries are actively trying to prevent people from buying more ethically.

“The opportunity here is to demonstrate to people who do care about shopping more ethically that, behind closed doors, industries and lobbies working against you being able to make that decision,” said Pang. “Rather than being angry at people for not buying free-range eggs, it’s better to direct that anger and energy towards the big lobby groups and industry groups that are actually changing policies to prevent you from doing so.”

An important part of Lighthouse Reports’ strategy for maximizing investigative impact is with whom they choose to partner. “We select partners based not only on their investigative skills and capacity but also the audiences that those partners speak to, and if those audiences are strategic and important for an investigation,” she explained. Instead of working with traditional longform text partners for this investigation, they partnered with Factanza — an Italian social media page for discussing news topics and geared towards young people — and consulted with them on how they could best engage their audience.

“They made the story about ‘What is lobbying?’ and used food as a lens to educate people about the structures and powers that make decisions around food policies,” added Tang.

 

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Truths, Tactics, and the Mist of Meat Lobby Science — Food Unfolded, Lighthouse Reports

For the digital platform FoodUnfolded, Italian reporter and author Silvia Lazzaris partnered with Lighthouse Reports to produce an article and social media video investigating a specific document used by the meat lobby — the Dublin Declaration of Scientists on the Societal Role of Livestock — to tell a more compelling story about the practice — and impact — of lobbying.

The Dublin Declaration, first published in October 2022, argues for the nutritional, environmental, and social benefits of meat, and claims to be an independent research paper, signed by 1,100 scientists and researchers around the world and published in a peer-reviewed journal.

“It’s a document that meat industry lobbyists bring to EU institutions and policymakers to downplay the science that has, for many years now, exposed the environmental and health issues related to meat production and consumption,” explained Lazzaris.

Lazzaris discovered that the scientific journal in question is, in fact, owned by an animal production industry association. They also checked the backgrounds of the 1,100 signatories, and discovered that 60% had ties to the industry — “their research was either directly funded by industry, or they had been consultants for many years.”

As Lazzaris observes in the article, casting doubt on science is a technique that has been successfully used for decades by lobbyists from various sectors. The reporting challenge she faced was how to make this set of facts both newsworthy and compelling to audiences.

“I think we know these mechanisms so well that sometimes we lose our ability to understand what could be interesting to an audience,” she said. “And we made this bet. We decided to kind of explode this bit of research we did, for an audience, especially on social media, and that worked really well.” Lazzaris noted that their content went viral in Italy, and was seen by almost one million young people aged 18-35.

“We took a lobby and policy story that can be quite dry and made it reach an audience through a lens, which is meat, which can be polarizing, but instead of talking about how bad the meat industry lobby is, we focused on the process that it took for us to understand and unveil this… we diffused the polarization,” she added.

 

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Big Food and Dieticians Push Anti-Diet Advice — The Examination, The Washington Post

Miriam Wells, impact editor at The Examination — a New York-based nonprofit focusing on public health issues, and a new GIJN member — discussed its two-part investigation, published with The Washington Post, that revealed how major food companies have co-opted dietitians and harnessed the anti-diet movement to promote their unhealthy products. Their reporting method included analyzing 6,000 social media posts from dozens of registered dietitians. (Read more about The Examination’s role in countering health misinformation.) 

The team found one food giant had a multi-pronged campaign that included, among its tactics: backing a team of lobbyists to fight against nutritional labeling on food products; touring the US discrediting diet research and science; and sponsoring anti-diet dietitians and influencers to promote unhealthy snacks on TikTok. They found that online dietitians who have built huge followings — and revenue — from anti-diet messaging are often discreetly backed by food and beverage companies.

Anti-diet messaging hashtags used by food industry-backed dietitians and influencers across thousands of social media posts. Image: Screenshot, The Washington Post illustration/The Examination

Wells pointed out that “diets are the biggest killing industry in the world,” with around 11 million deaths a year caused by diet-related diseases — more than by smoking — yet the topic gets relatively little investigative journalism attention.

Wells explained that to get their reporting to bridge the food systems and food lifestyle worlds, The Washington Post published the joint reports not in its investigations section, but in the newspaper’s “Well + Being” section, which offers advice and guidance on food, fitness, and health. The report also provided practical, actionable information, such as videos explaining how readers can determine if a paid partnership — for instance between a dietician and a food company — hasn’t been revealed.

“There’s no reason why somebody who enjoys the Well + Being section of the Washington Post is not interested in hardcore corporate accountability reporting if it affects them, and if you put the story out in a way that’s going to really engage them and meet their information needs,” Wells said.

‘Bring Dignity to the Food Beat’

To conclude the session, panelists shared some general advice for making a better and broader investigative impact on the food lifestyle beat.

“How do we avoid shaming consumers, and not destroy the joy of food and watching cooking shows?” asked Thin Lei Win. “The system is stacked against consumers who want to do the right thing.” She explained that at Lighthouse Reports they want to look at structural inequalities within food systems, because there is so much consumer blaming and consumer shaming when it comes to food.

“Collaborations and alliances are key,” said Wells, adding that we can learn from the industries we report on — whether Big Tobacco or soft drink giants — who have been able to maximize their profits by building partnerships and relationships across other fields, such as sports or the arts.

Lazzaris notes that the landscape of contradictory theories and conclusions in food media creates massive confusion. To tackle the science versus newsworthiness dilemma, she suggests being “radically honest” about processes: “Instead of telling people what to do, show audiences how you did the reporting, and how you reached a conclusion — people respond to that.”

She also observed that there is also space to convey more of an investigation and maximize impact on social media. “A lot of social media pages of big media who do amazing reporting just don’t manage to convey the depth and importance of the investigations, and the few times that I’ve seen that happen it’s worked really well,” said Lazzaris.

“Through food you can see where power lies. You can explain conflicts and wars, the rise and the end of empires,” Lazzaris added. “Instead of thinking of food reporting as the advice section, we should really give more dignity to the beat, and as reporters we should see food as a way to tell a lot of stories about politics and economics.”

Alexa van Sickle is a journalist and editor with experience across digital and print journalism, publishing, and think tanks and nonprofits. Before joining GIJN, she was senior editor and podcast producer for the foreign correspondence and travel magazine, Roads & Kingdoms.