Ken Cook is the President and co-founder of the Environmental Working Group. Cook is widely recognized as one of the environmental community’s most prominent and influential critics of industrial agriculture, U.S. food and farm policy and the nation’s broken approach to protecting families and children from toxic substances.
Under Cook’s leadership over the past 20 years, EWG has empowered American families with easy-to-use, data-driven tools to help reduce their exposure to potentially harmful ingredients in foods, drinking water, cosmetics and other household products. These unique digital resources are searched hundreds of millions times by consumers, journalists and policy makers.
In the last several years, Cook and EWG have been in the forefront of national and state campaigns to require the labeling of foods that contain genetically engineered ingredients.
In May 2014, Cook received the prestigious “Champion for Children Award” from the Children’s Environmental Health Center at Mount Sinai School of Medicine and Public Health.
Cook earned a B.A. in history, B.S. in agriculture and M.S. in soil science at the University of Missouri-Columbia.