Excerpt:
Vani Hari, AKA the Food Babe, has amassed a loyal following in her Food Babe Army. The recent subject of profiles and interviews in the New York Times, the New York Post and New York Magazine, Hari implores her soldiers to petition food companies to change their formulas. She’s also written a bestselling book telling you that you can change your life in 21 days by “breaking free of the hidden toxins in your life.” She and her army are out to change the world.
She’s also utterly full of shit.
I am an analytical chemist with a background in forensics and toxicology. Before working full-time as a science writer and public speaker, I worked as a chemistry professor, a toxicology chemist, and in research analyzing pesticides for safety. I now run my own blog, Science Babe, dedicated to debunking pseudoscience that tends to proliferate in the blogosphere. Reading Hari’s site, it’s rare to come across a single scientific fact. Between her egregious abuse of the word “toxin” anytime there’s a chemical she can’t pronounce and asserting that everyone who disagrees with her is a paid shill, it’s hard to pinpoint her biggest sin.
I highly recommend you go read this full piece at Gawker.
I couldn’t agree more. The Food Babe, Vani Hari, is a peddler of certifiably ignorant, and often dangerous, chemophobia. She uses a common technique of painting herself as the David speaking truth to the Goliath of power that is the industrial food complex. Granted, sometimes the food industry needs correcting, but not like this. But it’s a very effective approach, faking skepticism and replacing it with fiction, profiting off of people’s distrust of corporations and unfamiliar chemistry terms.
Some of her highlights (that I refuse to link to because I’m not interested in giving her pageviews): Claiming that beer contains antifreeze (it doesn’t). Claiming you’re eating beaver butt secretions in vanilla ice cream (you aren’t). Claiming that Starbucks’ Pumpkin Spice Latté might as well contain Satan’s armpit sweat (they’re not going to kill you, not with the pumpkin flavor anyway). Or, my personal favorite, claiming that airlines are trying to poison you by mixing nitrogen into the cabin atmosphere. Nitrogen in the air? Oh, the horror! (article thankfully screencapped here, since Hari has since taken down that gem).
Yeah. She’s full of shit.
(Is “shit” a chemical? Should she be worried? Hmm…)
Anyway, I shared the above article on my personal Facebook page yesterday, and one of my friends left a comment that really made me think. By calling her out, by trashing her ideas and shining light on her unscientific fearmongering, are we actually helping her? To paraphrase my friend Scott, by using scientific expertise as a bullying tactic and by spreading this story around in the Name of Science™, could this be the best PR she could ask for? Does this play into her hands, The Food Babe vs. The Establishment?
Misinformation like this needs to be called out. People should not be lied to and made to fear science. But do articles like this help her more than they hurt? How do we continue to battle misinformation without creating martyrs for the misinformed?
What do you think?
The "Food Babe" Blogger Is Full of Shit: