Criticism
From May 1, 2007, many Mars products made in the UK became unsuitable for vegetarians. The company announced that it would be using whey made with animal rennet (material from a calf's stomach lining, and a byproduct of veal), instead of using rennet made by microorganisms, in products including Mars, Twix, Snickers, Maltesers, Bounty, Minstrels and Milky Way. The response from many thousands of consumers, particularly the Vegetarian Society's request for UK vegetarians to register their protests with Mars, generated a lot of press, and caused the company to abandon these plans shortly thereafter. It has reportedly decided to switch to all-vegetarian sources in the near future in the UK. On 18-Sep-2012, the 15-Jan-2010 press release could not be found in the "Press Releases" section of the Mars website; in Canada, the URL redirected to the webpage, . In January 2008, the Metro newspaper reported that Mars had allegedly begun to incorporate animal-derived rennet.
Mars has come under criticism by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals for funding animal tests which the group alleges are inhumane. One study was conducted in collaboration with the Salk Institute regarding angiogenesis and spatial memory in which mice were given an ad libitum diet that included epicatechin, plant-derived flavonoid. One of the experiments involved groups of control and experimental animals, the latter of which were housed in a cage that included a running wheel for optional exercise for two hours a day, the former did not have access to a running wheel. Another experiment was the classical spacial memory assay, the Morris water maze. The study showed that the inclusion of epicatechin in the diet improved memory and angiogenesis, and more so if coupled with exercise.
Mars has been criticized for buying cocoa beans from West African farmers who reportedly use unpaid or poorly paid child laborers. In 2009, Mars announced that, as of 2010, the company would only purchase cocoa from suppliers who meet environmental, labor and production standards. TransFair USA, an organization which certifies products as Fair Trade, applauded the move and expressed hope that it would include a provision for fair wages for laborers and farmers. In 2010, Mars Inc. received the U.S. Secretary of State’s Award for Corporate Excellence. In April 2010, Mars launched the MyCocoaPaper initiative, which claims to provide economic opportunities to women and families in Indonesia by making paper products out of cocoa bark and recycled office paper.
In 2011, Mars and Fairtrade International announced an agreement to introduce the first Fairtrade labeled Mars product and to work together to enable farmers to have sustainable livelihoods and substantially increased productivity. The first Mars product to carry the Fairtrade mark will be Maltesers, to appear in stores in 2012 in the UK and Ireland.
Read more about this topic: Mars, Incorporated
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“Unless criticism refuses to take itself quite so seriously or at least to permit its readers not to, it will inevitably continue to reflect the finicky canons of the genteel tradition and the depressing pieties of the Culture Religion of Modernism.”
—Leslie Fiedler (b. 1917)
“The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art—and, by analogy, our own experience—more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.”
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