Girl Scouts Is Being Sued After Tests Find Cookies Allegedly Contain Heavy Metals and Pesticides
The annual excitement over Girl Scout Cookie season took an unexpected turn this year when a viral report alleged that the beloved treats contain heavy metals and pesticides. The claim was initially met with skepticism, but has now escalated into legal action, leaving consumers questioning the safety of the iconic cookies.
The controversy began when two consumer groups, Moms Across America and GMO Science, conducted a study analyzing 25 cookie samples from California, Iowa, and Louisiana. The report, which was published in December, claimed that 100% of the tested samples contained detectable levels of heavy metals, including aluminum, arsenic, lead, and mercury, as well as pesticides including glyphosate.
In response, the Girl Scouts of the USA quickly issued a statement on Feb. 6, posting an online response titled "An Important Update for Our Members and Supporters." The statement reassured customers that the cookies are fully safe for consumption.
'A recent report claimed that our Girl Scout Cookies contain certain levels of glyphosate and heavy metals. We want to address these allegations and share the facts,' the organization stated on its website.
The Girl Scouts explained that environmental contaminants, including heavy metals, occur naturally in soil, meaning that trace amounts can be found in many plant-based foods. It also noted that glyphosate is commonly present in agricultural environments. Additionally, small amounts of heavy metals can enter processed foods through exposure to air, water, or soil.
In summary, this isn't a Girl Scout Cookie-specific issue—it's simply a reality of the global food supply chain. But the issue wasn't been put to rest. Instead, the controversy has now moved into the legal arena.
On March 10, a New York woman filed a class-action lawsuit in federal court, citing the Moms Across America and GMO Science study. According to USA Today, the lawsuit alleges that Girl Scout Cookies contain dangerous levels of heavy metals and pesticides, and accuses the Girl Scouts of making false claims about the quality and safety of its products to the public.
The plaintiff, Amy Mayo, is seeking $5 million in damages on behalf of consumers nationwide who purchased the cookies. The lawsuit also calls for the Girl Scouts and its bakeries—Ferrero and ABC Baker—to state the presence of these substances on cookie packaging, arguing that Mayo and other consumers would not have bought the cookies had known this information.
Now, it's important to note that the commissioned study has not been peer-reviewed or published in a scientific journal, and it relied on a relatively small sample size. Additionally, it references safety limits set by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which differ from the food safety standards set by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
However, the lawsuit will likely spark more in-depth research into the cookies across all states. As the case develops, consumers and legal experts alike will be watching closely to see whether these claims hold up in court—or if the Girl Scouts' cookies can maintain their trusted reputation.
Read the original article on ALLRECIPES
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Yahoo
'Martha Stewart aesthetic' is the trend of the summer, according to Pinterest report
It's been 49 years since Martha Stewart left Wall Street, and the lifestyle maven is as influential as ever. According to the 2025 Pinterest Summer Report, the 'Martha Stewart aesthetic' is poised to take over, with searches up 2,889 per cent on the platform. From her vegetable garden (+72 per cent) to dinner recipes (+45 per cent) and chicken coop (+22 per cent), Stewart continues to inspire. 'It's going to be a Martha Girl Summer,' the Martha Stewart Instagram account posted. 'As we've seen, our founder is influencing the influencers, with many embracing her iconic lifestyle by throwing dinner parties, cultivating home-grown produce and raising backyard chickens.' The nearly three-thousand-fold increase includes Stewart-specific search terms, such as 'Martha Stewart chicken coop,' and more general ones that Pinterest attributes to her sway, including 'fresh summer recipes.' Stewart's estate in Bedford, New York, spans 153 acres. When she bought it in 2000, it was 'a blank canvas,' according to a Facebook post. Today, it's filled with rose beds, daffodils, orchards, vegetable plots and a greenhouse dedicated to begonias. 'My father taught me that you can do it all from scratch, starting from seeds or cuttings, and if you nurture them, they will produce,' she said. 'For me, gardening is all about scent, colour, and variety, variety, and more variety.' In the spirit of Stewart's DIY philosophy, Pinterest users are gravitating toward harvest recipes (+680 per cent), urban farming (+374 per cent), flower gardens (+259 per cent), small backyard vegetable gardens (+246 per cent) and garden-to-table cooking (+117 per cent). 'This back-to-basics approach not only fosters a reconnection to nature but also pairs seamlessly with the rise of summer detox drinks, with searches up 566 per cent on Pinterest,' according to the report. As people have started drinking less alcohol, especially young adults, functional beverages have filled the gap. These drinks, particularly popular among millennials and Gen Z, are designed to deliver health benefits beyond hydration and may be infused with herbs, vitamins and minerals, protein or CBD. Green juices for gut health (+316 per cent) — which Stewart drinks every morning — flavoured water drinks (+289 per cent), spinach smoothies that taste good (+227 per cent), anti-inflammatory drinks (+289 per cent) and herbal infusion recipes (+71 per cent) are among the summer detox drinks quenching Pinterest users' thirst. Whether low-alcohol, non-alcoholic or boozy, 'The popularity of savoury cocktails reflects a curiosity for innovative beverage experiences, marrying fresh produce and herbs with creative cocktail concoctions for a refreshing twist on traditional summer sips.' Cook This: 3 recipes for sharing from Family Style, including crispy devilled tea eggs These 9 restaurants gained Michelin stars in the first-ever Quebec guide Our website is the place for the latest breaking news, exclusive scoops, longreads and provocative commentary. Please bookmark and sign up for our cookbook and recipe newsletter, Cook This, here.
Yahoo
6 days ago
- Yahoo
Meta's Platforms Have Become a Cesspool of Hatred Against Queer People
In front of hundreds of Georgetown students back in 2019, a clean-cut Mark Zuckerberg delivered an impassioned sermon on the importance of empowerment and free speech. The Meta CEO called civil rights advocate Elijah Cummings a "powerful voice for equality," credited Facebook as ground zero for #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo, and even cited radical abolitionist Frederick Douglass. "More people being able to share their perspectives has always been necessary to build a more inclusive society," Zuckerberg said at the time. "But this view is increasingly being challenged." Just a few short years, one right-wing turn and a bizarre makeover later, it's become clear that Zuckerberg had a very specific brand of free speech absolutism in mind. A recent report by the prominent LGBTQ advocacy organization Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) found definitive evidence that six major social media platforms consistently refuse to develop and enforce policies protecting LGBTQ users, while simultaneously subjecting them to disproportionate moderation. While this issue is found across the biggest social media sites, GLAAD notes that major shifts in Meta's ideological stance under the New Zuckerberg were "particularly extreme." Assembled every year since 2021, the GLAAD report assigns each major social media site a "Platform Scorecard," which grades platforms on a 1-to-100 scale based on 14 LGBTQ-specific standards ranging from policies preventing targeted misgendering to LGBTQ-safety content moderator training to data gathering based on sexual orientation. Meta's Threads scored a paltry 40 on the platform scorecard, while both Facebook and Instagram managed 45. One major concern was Meta's recent revision to its Hateful Conduct policy, which affects all three platforms. Under Meta's new terms, content "encouraging hate, harassment, and discrimination against LGBTQ people" is completely acceptable. For example, Meta's new guidelines allow "allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and religious discourse about transgenderism [sic] and homosexuality and common non-serious usage of words like 'weird.'" That goes hand in hand with the tech giant's vague Bullying and Harassment policy. Though Meta users are theoretically protected from "claims about romantic involvement, sexual orientation, or gender identity," the company doesn't bother to clarify whether targeted misgendering is included under those rules. That's a strange omission, considering the way Meta stresses that it's cool with calling LGBTQ people "mentally ill." Thanks to the new policy, ominous groups are thriving on Meta platforms. Shining examples include "Transvestigation Disclosure NOW," a public Facebook group pedaling anti-trans conspiracy theories with over 32,000 members, and "Alliance Defending Freedom," a right-wing anti-LGBTQ Instagram page boasting 74,000 followers. Yet as hate speech grows under Zuckerberg's watch, GLAAD Social Media Safety Director Jenni Olson notes that Meta's policy erosion has been years in the making. One particularly effective yardstick for measuring this is the rise of LibsOfTikTok, a far-right anti-LGBTQ conspiracy account which been linked to a growing portfolio of offline extremism, including 21 bomb threats. "The account is extremely active on Meta platforms, which I think people forget," Olson observed. "For years, the account was not active on Meta platforms, because it could not have gotten away with the things it posts. Obviously since January there's been this significant shift, but Meta has been shifting even prior to that, particularly last year, allowing more and more extreme hate, including LibsOfTikTok." As this content proliferates on Meta, LGBTQ users are being suppressed. In the past few months, Meta has blocked users under 18 from using LGBTQ hashtags, removed transgender users' posts under "sexual solicitation" guidelines, and suspended the organizer of the San Francisco Trans March citing "human exploitation" violations. "Because LGBTQ people end up being defined by our sexual orientation and gender identify in relation to sex, there's this scrutiny of content that doesn't have anything to do with sex," says Olson. "We just happen to be gay... You don't scrutinize somebody's content as 'sexual' just because they're straight." While Zuckerberg's Meta is particularly odious, it's far from the only company ignoring its stated goal of protecting LGBTQ users from harm. Other platforms highlighted by GLAAD include YouTube, which scored 41 on its scorecard after scrubbing "gender identity" from its hate speech policy, and X-formerly-Twitter, which has transformed into a cesspit of reactionary hate since being purchased by Elon Musk. X scored just 30 out of 100 — which is probably no surprise to the 32 million users who've fled the app since its rebranding. These scores translate to real offline harms. According to The Trevor Project, 39 percent of LGBTQ youth faced a suicidal crisis in 2024. Among those aged 13 to 17, 35 percent reported experiencing cyberbullying in the past year — a factor that tripled their risk of attempting suicide. In response to the sharp influx of anti-LGBTQ policy, GLAAD is calling on social media giants to reverse their regressive policy agendas and take a hard look at the report's safety recommendations. "All the platforms should enforce or restore their policies that protect LGBTQ people and others from hate and harassment," Olson says. "Improving training for content moderators... using AI systems to flag content for human review," and "working with civil society groups like GLAAD" would go a long way toward mitigating these harms, she notes. With clear evidence of harm and strong policy solutions, the path forward is clear — but how do we get the world's biggest tech companies to act? "As you can see from the index, no one is doing a good job. And what is the cudgel to beat back on it?" asks Sarah Roberts, UCLA professor and Director of the Center for Critical Internet Inquiry. "It's not like they're unaware." In years past, it was the gloss of progressive values and democratic expression keeping platforms in check. As evidenced by Zuckerberg's new chic, that's out the window. "We've always had 'the stick' of bad PR," Roberts said, "but we're in a very different and unique moment where some of those levers have less power than they did even six months ago." Key to any change in the global social media industry, then, is "dispensing with the notion that social media firms are in the business of promulgation of social values," notes Roberts. In other words, we need to take a hard look at social media for what it is — not as a neutral service to humanity, but a conglomerate of some of the most powerful corporations on the planet. More on Meta: Zuckerberg Says in Response to Loneliness Epidemic, He Will Create Most of Your Friends Using Artificial Intelligence
Yahoo
01-06-2025
- Yahoo
'No excuses' for Tyrone in Mayo loss - O'Rourke
Tyrone manager Malachy O'Rourke felt his side did not "get to the pitch of the game" in their 2-17 to 1-13 defeat by Mayo. Coming into the All-Ireland round-robin contest off an impressive win over Ulster champions Donegal seven days prior, the Red Hands found themselves 1-9 to 0-4 down at half-time. Advertisement Although they would cut the deficit to a point in the second half, Mayo, under the charge of Stephen Rochford after Kevin McStay stepped away for health reasons, pulled away to bounce back from their opening-round loss to Cavan. "We'd a great win last week and we came here knowing, after the disappointment of the Cavan game, Mayo would be coming here with real hunger," said O'Rourke. "We knew we'd have to meet that head on and I suppose that's the most disappointing thing, we felt in the first half we didn't get to the pitch of the game. "We were a bit flat and left ourselves with a lot to do. In fairness to the boys, we dug in well, we got it back to a point but we made too many mistakes, we weren't playing well enough and Mayo deserved the victory. We've no excuses." Advertisement While Tyrone were in action on consecutive weekends, Mayo had a week's break from their last outing, although O'Rourke did not feel that was the telling reason for his side's flat performance. "There's no doubt that the week turnaround is very small and it could have some effect, but we're not using that as an excuse either," he added. "We knew what the story was, we knew exactly what Mayo would bring and we were hoping we'd be able to meet that and get another really good performance. "For all of us in the changing room, we didn't get to the level that we need to get to and the level we expect of ourselves." Tyrone will conclude their round-robin action against Cavan at a neutral venue during the weekend of 14/15 June.
