No justice, no coleslaw!

It may sound ridiculous to you, but this isn’t funny at all. It turns out that there has been a federal conspiracy to destroy a legitimate business that produces an egg-free mayonnaise for vegans (whose number includes Orthodox Christians like me during fasting periods). Look:

Newly released documents show high-level members of the American Egg Board, a USDA employee, and an outside PR firm discussing strategies for dealing with Just Mayo, Hampton Creek’s plant-based mayonnaise substitute, the Associated Press first reported. In an August 2013 email, Joanne Ivy, president of the American Egg Board, refers to Just Mayo as “a crisis and major threat to the future of the egg product business.” The email concluded with the line: “‘What are we doing at AEB with regard to this competing product??’ We need to have an answer!” The records were disclosed in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request made by Ryan Noah Shapiro, a public records expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and his lawyer, Jeffrey Light, who specializes in FOIA matters, according to the AP.

Among their tactics:

In January 2014, Roger Glasshoff of the USDA proposed challenging Just Mayo’s labeling claims with the US Food and Drug Administration. “I would forward the information to the FDA District Office responsible for the location where the product was marketed,” he wrote. Ivy responded with the green light. The FDA issued a warning letter in August 2015. It declined to comment on its motivations to Quartz, but the letter listed violations including making unauthorized health claims and misleading consumers by using the term “mayo” along with a picture of an egg, when the product is actually not standardized, egg-based mayonnaise.

Read the whole thing. I hope the Just Mayo people sue the pants off the feds. Somebody ought to lose their job over this. Their product may or may not be tasty, but it is neither illegal nor harmful. It’s unconscionable that our government behaved this way towards a business. If you read the piece, e-mails indicate that the government even intervened to support a lawsuit (later withdrawn) by the conventional mayo behemoth Hellmann’s, which attempted to quash Just Mayo by claiming it wasn’t really mayonnaise. So big government teams up with big business to try to destroy a small businessman. I love eggs and eat them all the time, but I’m tempted to buy a jar of Just Mayo out of solidarity.

UPDATE: Lots of pushback in the comments from people saying that Just Mayo is falsely labeled, so the government was right to go after them. It’s a fair complaint, the one that Just Mayo is inaccurately labeled, and if the government had gone after the company on those grounds alone, telling them to change their product labeling, I would have had no problem with it, and in fact would have supported it. But as the e-mails indicate, the motivation for the federal action was to protect the egg industry, not the consumer. Big difference, don’t you think?