Picture this: you wake up one fine Saturday morning and brush your teeth. Then you pour yourself some Cheerios. After eating the cereal, you find yourself dehydrated, so you decide to take a sip of some Ozarka water you found lying around in your house. As you get ready to go to class, you find yourself wanting some coffee for energy, because morning classes, ugh. You quickly make yourself a quick cup of Nescafé. As you go to classes throughout the day and eat food at the UC, you find yourself craving some snacks. You stop by the POD to get some Kit Kat or Nerds or Butterfingers, or anything of the sort. Then you go home, tired, and decide to heat up those frozen pizzas you bought. You open the pantry and find a box of DiGiorno and heat it up. Content with your day, you call it a night. Now, there is one thing that is common in these endeavors: all the products mentioned are manufactured by Nestlé.
Nestlé is one of those companies that has their hands in everything, yet the majority of the public don’t seem to realize its existence. From cereal to yogurt to pet care, Nestlé is heavily involved in almost every aspect of a regular consumer. However, unknown to most regular consumers, Nestlé is almost comically evil in some of its business practices.
In the 1970s, Nestlé garnered international backlash after it came to light that they were exploiting new mothers in third-world countries. Basically, they were sending representatives of the company, dressed in nurse and doctor outfits, to the third-world countries to sell their expensive infant formula. These representatives would then get the newborns addicted to the formula, forcing the mothers to either keep purchasing the formula or run the risk of the newborns starving to death. Opponents of this act argued that formula dependence could cause permanent health complications in the newborns. The company was literally using babies to make profits, often at the cost of the babies’ health.
As is customary when it comes to making a huge profit through low-labour costs, Nestlé is a staunch supporter of child slavery. While working inhuman hours and making inhuman pay, child labour lets companies like Nestlé make a huge profit at their expense. Now Nestlé doesn’t directly employ child labourers, but the cocoa plantations that it gets its cocoa from for its chocolate products have a vast number of child slaves working away. Nestlé has been accused of turning a blind eye to the plights of these poor children, but through the works of crafty lawyers, they’ve been able to avoid all charges. Considering the fact that cocoa production is a $60 billion dollar industry, Nestlé is not too concerned with the well-being of its workers.
Perhaps the worst thing Nestlé is doing right now is happening in the United States itself. Many people are suffering in the droughts in California, and many people seem to be blaming Nestlé. While the drought itself is caused by the scarcity of rain, Nestlé has been accused of water thieving, which means that they’ve been taking up the limited clean water in California, bottling it and selling it back to the California people for profit. This act is done exponentially more and worse in third world countries. They’ve been accused of buying watering holes in Africa and forbidding the locals from using it for their daily needs. Their CEO at one point has gone on record to state that “water is not a basic human right.”
Realistically, the boycott of Nestlé is not a possible endeavor. They’ve simply got too much money and too little care for humanity. Their hundreds of products ensure that if consumers boycott eating their cereal, they’ll end up buying, if accidentally, their desserts or snacks. In situations like this, the only possible option is to write to your congressmen or write to the Better Business Bureau, no matter how inconvenient that is. The water controversy is eerily similar to the plot of ‘Quantum of Solace,’ which goes to show that the line between a Bond villain and Nestlé becomes increasingly blurry.
