Aaron Landry

As many readers of this site know, I’m the producer at the Heavy Table. As we describe ourselves, “the Heavy Table is a Twin Cities-based magazine passionately telling the stories of food and drink — from roots to table — in the Upper Midwest.” We tend to lean towards covering the local and sustainable while generally avoiding the large chains and national corporations. We have a couple links where people can submit tips for us. Here’s one we received today:

From: kris b [alekalumnus@yahoo.com]
Subject: MACA Attacks White House Kitchen Garden
Date: April 29, 2009 10:29:30 CDT

Dear Heavy Table,

I was one of the people delighted to hear that a kitchen garden was being dug at the White House which would supply a small amount of food for certain functions. Michelle Obama, who is credited with the idea of the installing the garden space, was recently criticized for doing so by the Mid-America Croplife Association. Reference the article as it appears on the BBC website:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8023087.stm

Relevant portion:

More recently she was criticised by a US farming group for her decision to grow organic vegetables.

The Mid-America CropLife Association (MACA) wrote to the First Lady to encourage her to support their technological methods of farming.

“If Americans were still required to farm to support their family’s basic food and fibre needs, would the US have been leaders in the advancement of science, communication, education, medicine, transportation and the arts?” the group said.

Mid-America Croplife Assoc. (maca.org) is based in St Louis, but these local organizations are affiliated with it:

Minnesota Crop Production Retailers
7500 Flying Cloud Drive, Ste. 900
Eden Prairie, MN 55344

Wisconsin Agribusiness Council
P.O. Box 46100
Madison, WI 53744-6100

MN Agri-Growth Council
408 Saint Peter St. #20
St. Paul, MN 55102-1130

Wisconsin Crop Production Association
2317 International Ln. Ste. 102
Madison, WI 53704-3154

My chief concern is that their assertions are false, and they appear to be attacking not only local sustainable/organic growers and methods, but every gardener for not using maca “technological methods” and apparently pulling America back to the 18th century.

Thought you might be interested, thank you for your time,

Kris

Mr KRIS Burmes
Director Insterswitch Unit
Zenith Bank of Nigeria
+234 8038 989 123
by the Instruction The President
of Federal Repubic of Nigeria

Even though the phone number has been reported being involved in fraud and using a Yahoo! account with a Nigerian bank signature sets off every red flag, the body of the email is a completely legitimate tip and is not unlike many we receive. The story referenced from the BBC is also from within the last 24-36 hours — it isn’t stale news. There was some time and effort done to give us a local angle very specific to our audience. It’s exactly something we may have considered putting a blurb up about.

After extensive searching online with few results matching any pattern of the email, Heavy Table’s Editor, James Norton and I have been scratching our heads on where this came from and who did this little bit of research. My best theory thus far: they’re using a service like Mechanical Turk where one can farm out tons of individual tasks to thousands of people at once. First, compile a list of contact email addresses associated with websites by asking workers to go to a particular website and then find a contact email address. A task like that would cost about 1¢ per website. Using that list, get people to write pieces geared for those specific online publishers. For example, the question to the worker could be phrased: “Visit this website, find a current news story and write how they may be interested in that news.” I’d imagine that task would be worth around 5¢ to 10¢ but most of the results would probably not be great. Even for the good ones, I’d wager that most people that publish a website online are also familiar with emails claiming to be from Nigerian banks. Either way, I’m fairly impressed.

If you have any other ideas on how this happened, please drop a comment.