The Food Babe

One blogger bravely pushes back against Starbucks, Subway and basic scientific facts. Support us: Hear bonus episodes on PatreonWatch Aubrey's documentaryBuy Aubrey's bookListen to Mike's other podcastGet Maintenance Phase T-shirts, stickers and more Links! Taking On the Food Industry, One Blog Post at a TimeHow the ‘Food Babe’ Went From Obama Ally to Trump CrusaderActivist or Capitalist? How the 'Food Babe' Makes MoneyLatest Food Scare: What Is The 'Yoga Mat' Chemical - And Why Is It In Yo...

• 0:11Speaker 00

  Hey, Michael.

• 0:12Speaker 01

  Aubrey.

• 0:13Speaker 00

  Wait. Are you ready to tag us in?

• 0:15Speaker 01

  Oh, I thought we were doing the if posts could kill. I thought you were about to ask me, what do I know about the food babe? Very little.

• 0:22Speaker 00

  Oh, do you want me to? I'll be Peter today. Michael.

• 0:26Speaker 01

  Aubrey.

• 0:27Speaker 00

  What do you know about the food babe?

• 0:29Speaker 01

  Well, I already said very little. Welcome to maintenance phase, the podcast where we know very little about what we're talking about. Boom.

• 0:38Speaker 01

  It doesn't cut in in the same way. Welcome to maintenance phase, the podcast that is made from the same material as yoga mats. This was like all I know of this person. So I'm gonna be just killing time till we get to that controversy.

• 0:51Speaker 00

  It was also almost all I knew of this person as well.

• 0:55Speaker 01

  Cause you mentioned her real name the other day and I was like, what?

• 0:57Speaker 00

  Yes, her name is Vani Hari. She has been running campaigns, usually petition drives that are focused on food corporations for more than a decade.

• 1:08Speaker 01

  Interesting.

• 1:09Speaker 00

  That approach has garnered her quite a following. She has currently 1.2 million followers on Facebook and 2.3 million followers on Instagram. She has targeted Anheuser-Busch, Kraft, General Mills, Kellogg's, Chipotle, Chick-fil-A, Subway, Starbucks, In-N-Out, just it's a really long list. That all sounds bitchin' to me, except for the goals that she sets and how she achieves.

• 1:37Speaker 01

  Except for what she's doing and who she is as a person.

• 1:40Speaker 00

  So today, Michael.

• 1:42Speaker 01

  Uh, I'm Michael Humps.

• 1:43Speaker 00

  Oh, my God.

• 1:46Speaker 00

  She got too far into it.

• 1:48Speaker 01

  It's not like we even say like what our like little qualifications are. Just like, here's my name as a person.

• 1:52Speaker 00

  We don't even have really a schedule anymore.

• 1:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, we don't, it's not a real show.

• 1:58Speaker 01

  It started with a fake tagline and then it just gotten less real from there.

• 2:02Speaker 00

  If you would like to support the show, you can do that at patreon.com/maintenancephase. You can also subscribe through Apple Podcasts premium subscription. It's the same audio content.

• 2:12Speaker 01

  Same stuff.

• 2:13Speaker 00

  Michael.

• 2:14Speaker 01

  Aubrey.

• 2:14Speaker 00

  Today.

• 2:15Speaker 01

  Today.

• 2:16Speaker 00

  I'm taking you into the world of the food babe.

• 2:18Speaker 01

  You're taking me back to the blogosphere.

• 2:20Speaker 00

  And I think that, uh, oh my God, shit is leaving my brain again, Michael. This sucks.

• 2:27Speaker 01

  Cognitive decline, the podcast. We are in our 40s.

• 2:32Speaker 00

  A bunch of the sort of rhetorical devices that she uses are used by lots of folks in this space. So it seemed useful to sort of break down and think about like, what are the components of what she's doing here? And what are the red flags that folks might be able to apply to other health and wellness media and go, oh, wait a minute.

• 2:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:50Speaker 00

  So, Michael.

• 2:51Speaker 01

  Aubrey.

• 2:52Speaker 00

  Vani Hari was born in 1979 in Charlotte, North Carolina. Her parents immigrated to the US from India. Her dad was an engineering professor at UNC Charlotte and her mom was a high school math teacher. Vani herself goes on to graduate from UNC Charlotte with a degree in computer science. And when I read that, I was like, I don't know why, but this makes intuitive sense. There's something going on with computer science majors.

• 3:21Speaker 01

  I know.

• 3:21Speaker 00

  Having like a bizarre sense of certainty that they excel at, at lots of fields.

• 3:26Speaker 01

  We need to get kids like reading like liberal arts shit again. We need more wokeness in the schools.

• 3:31Speaker 00

  After college, she goes on to work as a consultant, a management consultant at Accenture.

• 3:36Speaker 01

  That's also foreshadowing.

• 3:40Speaker 01

  No offense to the management consultants out there, but it's like, if you look at the trajectory of something, it's real bad.

• 3:47Speaker 00

  Her origin story as the quote unquote food babe is similar to many, many, many we have heard before. She talks about getting sick. She talks about changing what she ate and she talks about feeling better. And then she says, I started looking into nutrition. So here is a synopsis. Of that origin story from a New York Times.

• 4:09Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 4:10Speaker 00

  Piece.

• 4:10Speaker 01

  It says she had eczema, asthma, stomach problems and severe food allergies, the last of which critics and at least one person who said she knew her growing up dispute because Ms. Hari has advocated lying to servers about allergies to butter, dairy, corn and soy to avoid possible sources of genetically modified food. At age 23, she had appendicitis, something she said was caused by her lifestyle of poor nutrition, though most experts say it is a random occurrence. She read books like spiritual nutrition and conscious eating and applied the skills she learned as an award-winning debater in high school to food. She read labels, cleaned up her diet and saw results. Her eczema, asthma and allergies went away and she said she was off all prescription drugs, up to eight or nine, depending on the season, within three to four years.

• 4:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is like all of the greatest hits of maintenance phase.

• 4:57Speaker 00

  It's like a Voltron.

• 4:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, she's got a condition without sort of clear causes or clear treatments, which often sends people Googling and then Google gets you into the like, swim with dolphins to cure everything rabbit hole. And then she gets into this like, my diet will save me kind of thing. My lifestyle was killing me stuff. And then into like spiritual world and then these weird claims of like, I was on prescription drugs.

• 5:22Speaker 00

  Right.

• 5:23Speaker 01

  But then I stopped eating seed oils and now I'm not on any.

• 5:25Speaker 00

  What she does with that experience is go, ah, this made me feel better. We need to change the law.

• 5:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:31Speaker 00

  I feel better because I stopped eating this thing. So we should change how they make this thing that I don't eat anymore.

• 5:36Speaker 01

  What was the actual diet that she switched to? Was it anything specific or just certain foods?

• 5:40Speaker 00

  She's a little bit Dave Asprey style in that it's like a real sampler platter.

• 5:45Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 5:45Speaker 00

  It's GMOs, it's food colorings, it's additives.

• 5:49Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 5:50Speaker 00

  I always feel like there's this moment in an episode where I go like, do we just tip our hand and go, this person isn't good? And I think this is the moment where I go.

• 5:59Speaker 01

  You're not, you're not pretending to be like, this is a sympathetic protagonist.

• 6:03Speaker 00

  This person isn't good. She's not good.

• 6:05Speaker 01

  I mean, we're already getting like some of the woo woo stuff and some of the exaggeration. So like, I knew this was coming.

• 6:11Speaker 00

  What I will say, what we'll see in her pattern is that she reaches for like the biggest, scariest and least understood. Concepts amongst her audience.

• 6:19Speaker 01

  Okay, nice.

• 6:19Speaker 00

  She's written two books and I read both of her books, Michael.

• 6:23Speaker 01

  Did you really?

• 6:24Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 6:24Speaker 01

  Aubrey.

• 6:25Speaker 00

  I know.

• 6:25Speaker 01

  Are you okay?

• 6:26Speaker 00

  I'm fine. They didn't end up being super relevant to the actual episodes.

• 6:31Speaker 01

  You wasted your time?

• 6:32Speaker 00

  I read these for nothing.

• 6:34Speaker 01

  You stopped eating seed oils months ago and you're like, why? What was it all for?

• 6:38Speaker 00

  I've cut out all the GMOs. What am I supposed to do now?

• 6:42Speaker 01

  But you feel amazing. Your energy is off the charts.

• 6:44Speaker 00

  She doesn't say this, but reading her work, I was left with the distinct impression that her, what she calls here, sort of like looking into health and nutrition stuff in that phase of her origin story, was much more her Googling from a place of like, I feel better. Why did this thing make me feel better?

• 7:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 7:05Speaker 00

  Than a, I want to understand the full landscape of this issue and understand the nuances in the body of research, right?

• 7:12Speaker 01

  Right. You're gathering ammunition for something you already believe, rather than doing like an open ended, like, oh, what does the science say about this? Yeah.

• 7:18Speaker 00

  It's the kind of Googling that most of us do most of the time. Right? It's just to be totally honest, right?

• 7:26Speaker 01

  You're like, you're Googling like e-bike benefits.

• 7:30Speaker 01

  Rather than like, okay, what are the pros and cons?

• 7:33Speaker 00

  She's not Googling like eczema.

• 7:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:36Speaker 00

  What are the treatments that are available? What's the body of research? She's Googling quit GMOs treatment for eczema or like improved eczema. You're right. Like, that's my, I don't know that. I don't have her search terms in front of me.

• 7:50Speaker 01

  Right.

• 7:50Speaker 00

  Of course I don't. But like, that's the impression that I got from reading her work was being like, I feel better. Why do I feel better?

• 7:57Speaker 01

  Yeah. I feel like anytime somebody says like, I do my own research, like 90% of the time, that's what I assume they're doing.

• 8:03Speaker 00

  100%. From there, she starts blogging under the name The Food Babe in 2011.

• 8:10Speaker 01

  Is she like 25 at this point?

• 8:12Speaker 00

  She's born in 79. So what are we talking? Yeah, 32.

• 8:15Speaker 01

  So she has like a whole life as like a management consultant before she starts this like influencing stuff?

• 8:19Speaker 00

  She's been a management consultant for like the better part of a decade at this point. She's doing well enough with the blog within. In one year that she is able to leave her full-time corporate consulting job.

• 8:33Speaker 01

  Dude, AdSense, getting that AdSense dollars.

• 8:36Speaker 00

  Truly. So she's getting money from AdSense. She's getting money from affiliate marketing of products that she says are safe and above board. And, uh oh, Michael, she also now sells her own line of protein powder called Truvani, which you can get at Target and Whole Foods.

• 8:55Speaker 01

  Truvani? That's almost Truvada.

• 8:58Speaker 00

  No, it's the word true and then her first name.

• 9:01Speaker 01

  Oh, so mine would be True Michael.

• 9:03Speaker 00

  True Michael Trabri.

• 9:08Speaker 00

  So the early days on the Food Babe blog are frankly wild as fuck. There was one post, I only found synopses of this one. It didn't get archived on the Wayback Machine, so I couldn't find the original post. But there was one post that has been much discussed and much reported on called "Food Babe Travel Essentials: No Reason to Panic on the Plane."

• 9:32Speaker 01

  Okay, we were just talking about this. I'm an anxious flyer in a way that I didn't used to be, so maybe I can benefit from these tips.

• 9:37Speaker 00

  Okay, Michael, did you know, according to Vani Hari, that the air on a plane, quote, "isn't pure oxygen either, it's mixed with nitrogen"?

• 9:46Speaker 01

  Oh, what? This is very alarming.

• 9:49Speaker 00

  It is alarming because air itself is about 78% nitrogen and she just like, didn't know?

• 9:57Speaker 01

  This is a wild thing to publish without like, a very cursory Google.

• 10:01Speaker 00

  Just a Google. So people started to critique it, both in the comments and also like on Reddit. It sort of made its way kind of far and wide to be like, what is going on with this lady? The New York Times interviewed her about this post. This was in 2015, so several years later. And here is what happened.

• 10:25Speaker 01

  She says, "All you seed oil guzzlers in my mentions right now stay metabolically impaired and torpid." That's interesting.

• 10:33Speaker 00

  You're afraid of sunflowers!

• 10:36Speaker 00

  That's never not going to be funny to me.

• 10:39Speaker 01

  It says, "In an interview, Ms. Hari said she didn't remember the post." Okay, which Mr. Cook brought up by name. She then said it would have disappeared from the blog because it was old. Weeks later, in an email, she admitted that it had been removed because of mistakes, and said that she planned to start noting when she clarified or corrected posts. Ms. Hari said that these particular posts, which she wouldn't acknowledge as having been discredited, were a feeble exercise in nitpicking that detracted from her mission. "If you're gonna pick apart every little sentence I've written," she said, her voice trailing off, she added of her critics, "they have to dig so far and deep to find something that will make me look crazy, because what I'm saying now is so sane and so real."

• 11:20Speaker 01

  That's good. I'm too real, and my haters are going back through my posts. She is doing seed guzzlers in my mentions. This is what these people always do.

• 11:31Speaker 00

  She's doing all my haters are my-

• 11:33Speaker 01

  Become my waiters at the table of success?

• 11:37Speaker 01

  Another good quote from a terrible person. That's all this show is now.

• 11:41Speaker 00

  Oh my god, I don't know why that one gets me so hard every time.

• 11:47Speaker 01

  You could've just said that and saved us both some time, and I wouldn't have had to read this fucking alarmingly weird quote.

• 11:52Speaker 00

  That's a really, really strange response to just like a factual error.

• 11:57Speaker 01

  Also, like factual errors get through. Like, people, we've said dumb things on this show too. Like, factual errors happen. I feel like the bigger thing with like, if you're following an influencer or something, if they can't just admit to a mistake, and be like, "Yeah, that was really dumb. I don't know why I said that. Thank you to everybody who pointed it out." Like, the fact that she can't even admit, like, "Oh, they're nitpicking and finding all this garbage, but also it wasn't even, it wasn't wrong, and also I deleted it without saying anything." All of this stuff is just like weird. Just say that you made a mistake and move on. It's not that big of a deal.

• 12:23Speaker 00

  To me, these are the reactions and the comments of someone who is seeing this as like an attack on their character and not as like, "This is a thing that happens." Every reporter under the sun has published something that was like incorrect in retrospect, or you didn't catch it at the time, or whatever.

• 12:40Speaker 01

  I heard of a podcaster recently who called colostrum moon juice.

• 12:43Speaker 00

  I heard about that one too.

• 12:45Speaker 01

  Unclear who.

• 12:46Speaker 00

  The next post we're gonna talk about is from July 2012. It focused on microwaves. The previous one was not archived on the Wayback Machine. This one is archived in the Wayback Machine. And have I got a fucking screenshot for you.

• 13:06Speaker 01

  Ooh, it's got an arrow, okay.

• 13:08Speaker 00

  It's got images, so I would like for you to describe.

• 13:12Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 13:14Speaker 00

  The images.

• 13:14Speaker 01

  Oh my god, what?

• 13:18Speaker 01

  I didn't know she was like this off the rails this early.

• 13:20Speaker 00

  Michael, Michael, we're doing it.

• 13:22Speaker 01

  There's a before and after image, and the before looks like some sort of like snowflake type of thing. And then there's an after. There's a giant red arrow pointing at the after, and I don't know why. And then alongside the arrow, it says, "Harmful effects of electromagnetic waves as illustrated by Dr. Mizaru Emoto in book, 'The Hidden Messages in Water.'" And then under the after image, which also has a microwave oven, so this is like a snowflake being microwaved, I guess.

• 13:50Speaker 00

  It just looks like a water droplet.

• 13:52Speaker 01

  It says, "The distilled water heated in the microwave resulted in a crystal similar to that created by the word Satan."

• 14:02Speaker 01

  I'm not seeing Satan in this image, though. Do we have to look upside down?

• 14:05Speaker 00

  No, read the paragraph.

• 14:07Speaker 01

  Okay, and then we get this big brick of text.

• 14:09Speaker 00

  The paragraph that we're about to read is from Vani Hari's post.

• 14:13Speaker 01

  She says, "Last but not least..." Okay. "Dr. Mizaru Emoto, who's famous for taking photos of various types of waters and the crystals that they formed in the book called 'Hidden Messages in Water,' found water that was microwaved did not form beautiful crystals, but instead formed crystals similar to those formed when exposed to negative thoughts or beliefs."

• 14:37Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 14:38Speaker 01

  If this is happening to just water, and then an M dash, which doesn't make sense, I can only imagine what a microwave is doing to the nutrients, energy of our food, and to our bodies when we consume microwaved food. I didn't know what a bad writer she is.

• 14:51Speaker 00

  It's not great.

• 14:51Speaker 01

  For the experiment pictured above, microwaved water produced a similar physical structure to when the words Satan and Hitler were repeatedly exposed to the water.

• 15:02Speaker 00

  Yep, yep, yep.

• 15:03Speaker 01

  This fact is probably too hokey for most people. Again, a weird M dash, but I wanted to include it because sometimes the things we can't see with the naked eye, or even fully comprehend, could be the most powerful way to unlock spontaneous healing. What does it mean the words Hitler and Satan were exposed to the water? Like, the water was nearby?

• 15:25Speaker 00

  He just said Hitler, Satan, Satan, Hitler.

• 15:30Speaker 01

  Is that real? He just chanced it at the water and then he looks at it under a microscope? This is the first thing we've talked about on the show, Aubrey, where I'm like, don't bother, like, debunking this.

• 15:41Speaker 01

  He's just, like, so off the rails, and it's like, this isn't even like a real, like, what possibly could he be fucking talking about?

• 15:47Speaker 00

  So the author of this book is Masaru Emoto. He is a pseudoscience entrepreneur.

• 15:54Speaker 01

  You're kidding? Pseudoscience?

• 15:55Speaker 00

  One of his inventions is called the vibrationometer.

• 16:01Speaker 00

  Got his degree in alternative medicine from a disgraced and discredited institution that no longer exists.

• 16:08Speaker 01

  Hell, yeah.

• 16:08Speaker 00

  His fucking Wikipedia page is listed under pseudoscience, and I gotta say, if Wikipedia as a whole is like, this is garbage.

• 16:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 16:20Speaker 00

  Then like, that is the fucking dregs, right?

• 16:22Speaker 01

  I love the ones that are like, early life, and it's like a paragraph, and it's like, controversies, like, six pages.

• 16:30Speaker 00

  So his belief was that water's structure responded to human consciousness.

• 16:37Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 16:38Speaker 00

  And that its structure changed when exposed to curse words and words like Satan and Hitler.

• 16:46Speaker 01

  Is it only like curse words in English or is the water multilingual?

• 16:50Speaker 00

  Mike, I'm gonna blow your mind. I didn't read this book.

• 16:53Speaker 01

  She's slipping.

• 16:55Speaker 00

  When asked about these, she said, quote, "These were before I decided to make this my career. It's like saying that the New York Times or whoever aren't allowed to make mistakes. Back then, I was blogging as a hobby."

• 17:07Speaker 01

  It's so funny to be like, how was I to know that the guy who exposed water to Satan and found crystals in it was lying? This was only a part-time thing.

• 17:16Speaker 00

  It's my hobby. Of course I'm allowed to lie.

• 17:18Speaker 01

  Right.

• 17:19Speaker 00

  There's a part of me that read that. It's like, you don't get mad at the New York Times for having its little hobby wordle?

• 17:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:27Speaker 00

  Her profile continues to grow. In 2015, she was named one of the 30 most influential people on the internet by Time Magazine. Michael, do you want to know who else is on the 30 most influential?

• 17:41Speaker 01

  I was just gonna ask you this. I'd be like, give me the list. Are they all like discredited, like crypto weirdos now?

• 17:47Speaker 00

  I'm gonna go rapid fire. PewDiePie, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Matt Drudge, Anita Sarkisian, Shakira, J.K. Rowling, Narendra Modi.

• 17:59Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 17:59Speaker 00

  Taylor Swift, and Caitlin McNeil, the woman who took the picture of the blue and black slash golden yellow, golden white dress.

• 18:08Speaker 01

  Let's, uh, let's do it again, but do Mary Boff kill for each one of them. It's very important to me. We have to rank these people.

• 18:15Speaker 00

  Oh, it's gonna be so many kills.

• 18:16Speaker 01

  What? I know. It's mostly kills on that.

• 18:18Speaker 00

  So all the while, while her profile is rising, there is more and more and more overt criticism from scientists. Uh, Yale neurologist named Steven Novella has called her the Jenny McCarthy of food.

• 18:35Speaker 01

  That's a good dig.

• 18:37Speaker 00

  Kevin Folta, who leads Horticultural Sciences at the University of Florida, said, quote, "She found that a popular social media site was more powerful than science itself, more powerful than reason, more powerful than actually knowing what you're talking about."

• 18:52Speaker 01

  That is accurate and very sad.

• 18:54Speaker 00

  Marion Nessel told one reporter, quote, "I think she means well, but I wish she would pick more important issues and pay closer attention to the science."

• 19:02Speaker 01

  Classic Marion Nessel. She's saying the same thing, but like way nicer. Yeah.

• 19:06Speaker 00

  Trying to put it in a nice way. It is like, pick better goals and also look at science.

• 19:11Speaker 01

  I love your energy, but if you were a different person, it would be better.

• 19:16Speaker 00

  When asked to respond to her critics, she generally responds in one of a few different ways. Her most common one is by asserting that the scientist in question is a paid industry shill.

• 19:30Speaker 01

  Classic, classic.

• 19:32Speaker 00

  Another one comes from a quote that she provided to the New York Times. She said, quote, "This whole idea that I'm not scientifically accurate, okay, fine, if you want to say that, but I'm translating stuff so that the layman can understand it, and that's why I'm so effective."

• 19:46Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, how else would we know that the water exposed to Satan and Hitler is poisoning us?

• 19:50Speaker 00

  She's like, "I'm trying to make this available to the people."

• 19:54Speaker 01

  Right.

• 19:54Speaker 00

  As a retort to, "Your information for the people is incorrect."

• 19:59Speaker 01

  And also, we are the scientists that you are allegedly interpreting, and we are saying that this is wrong.

• 20:04Speaker 00

  In addition to those sort of more public responses to criticism, a lot of the media around Vani Hari includes references to her penchant for blocking people who expressed discomfort with her marketing, or who are like, "Hey, wait, what are your credentials for talking about this?"

• 20:21Speaker 01

  Although, as someone who blocks extremely liberally, I'm inclined to like, slightly defend her on this.

• 20:28Speaker 00

  Do you have a Facebook group called Banned by Food Babe with over 10,000 members?

• 20:34Speaker 01

  Oh, my God, is that true? No way.

• 20:37Speaker 00

  I definitely think there's like a point at which it just became like a little hater factory and all the people who disliked her joined in, but like it seems like initially it really was like a shit ton of people who had been blocked by her.

• 20:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:50Speaker 00

  This was also summarized in one of the Times profiles, quote, Ms. Hari said that people are only blocked for obscenities, but Dr. Schwartz, who is among the band, though not a Facebook group member, said he merely questioned her credentials.

• 21:05Speaker 01

  I block people for being annoying mostly.

• 21:08Speaker 00

  10 years ago, I was like a zero block purist, like no blocks, not doing it.

• 21:13Speaker 01

  You can't do that. You can't do that on the internet.

• 21:14Speaker 00

  Today, I'm not a responsive blocker. I'm like a preemptive blocker.

• 21:21Speaker 01

  You're like, this is only to get more annoying.

• 21:23Speaker 00

  100%. Like if I see someone doing some real fucking bad behavior in someone else's comment section, I'm just like, cool, block.

• 21:30Speaker 01

  So we stan a queen, a blocking queen.

• 21:33Speaker 00

  A blocking queen. Join that Facebook group, everybody.

• 21:37Speaker 01

  The thing is, there is a Block by Michael Hobbs Facebook group, but it's just Mumsnet.

• 21:41Speaker 00

  Where she really starts getting traction is by running a series of campaigns focused on food corporations.

• 21:48Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 21:48Speaker 00

  So in 2013, Michael, Vani Hari set her sights on Kraft Foods' crown jewel, its boxed mac and cheese.

• 21:59Speaker 01

  Which, to be honest, is like the most ultra-processed food imaginable.

• 22:02Speaker 00

  Yes, all of these are. All of these are. And I think this is one of the things that like absolutely blew my mind about her work is that she is targeting things like Chick-fil-A sandwiches, Kraft mac and cheese. She had a whole Fruit Loops campaign.

• 22:18Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 22:18Speaker 00

  All of them are like, can you believe they're putting this in there?

• 22:22Speaker 01

  Right.

• 22:22Speaker 00

  We deserve healthy, safe food. And I'm like, why are you campaigning around boxed mac and cheese?

• 22:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 22:29Speaker 00

  Like, do you not want to advocate for higher levels of money in food stamps programs?

• 22:35Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 22:35Speaker 00

  There's like a bunch of stuff that you can do that isn't focused on like Kraft mac and cheese is poisoning you or what, like it's an odd path to take.

• 22:44Speaker 01

  Although, to be fair, it is powdered cheese.

• 22:47Speaker 00

  Dude, I'm on record, cheese dust is delicious. How dare you.

• 22:51Speaker 01

  It is delicious, but it's like, there are, there are some like mega ultra-processed foods that I'm like, yeah, this stuff is killing us.

• 22:58Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 22:59Speaker 01

  That if there was real evidence for it, I would buy in wholeheartedly.

• 23:02Speaker 00

  Again, I think this is sort of her model, right?

• 23:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 23:04Speaker 00

  Is pick things where you're like, that sounds about right.

• 23:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:07Speaker 00

  And then say the scariest version of the thing about that. And get a bunch of people on board, right?

• 23:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:14Speaker 00

  With that and then on her list and then buying into her framework and so on.

• 23:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 23:19Speaker 00

  So her complaint with Kraft Mac and Cheese was the use of artificial food dyes.

• 23:25Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 23:26Speaker 00

  She wanted them to remove artificial dyes from Kraft Mac and Cheese, particularly yellow five and yellow six.

• 23:32Speaker 01

  Because they shrink your balls.

• 23:33Speaker 00

  Oh, good.

• 23:34Speaker 01

  That was what I learned in middle school. Yellow five, which was in Mountain Dew, shrinks your balls. And also the last sip of Mountain Dew is 80% backwash.

• 23:41Speaker 00

  Richard Gere gerbils.

• 23:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, these are, these are true facts.

• 23:45Speaker 00

  There's just community knowledge.

• 23:47Speaker 01

  My sincere goal in high school was to start a nationwide rumor.

• 23:50Speaker 00

  You fucking gremlin. Of course you started a fucking podcast.

• 23:55Speaker 01

  I know. This is what I'm, this is, spreading misinformation. This is all I want.

• 23:59Speaker 00

  So in this Kraft Mac and Cheese campaign, she did what would become a real sort of classic tactic of hers, which is she launched a petition on her website. And according to her, she got 350,000 signatures.

• 24:13Speaker 01

  Oh, wow. So she's a huge audience, yeah.

• 24:15Speaker 00

  And each one of these campaigns grows her audience considerably, right? She gathered all of these signatures. She did a big theatrical petition delivery, like physical petition delivery at Kraft HQ and had a meeting with executives there. Kraft initially said that they weren't going to change the recipe, but two years later, they announced that they would remove artificial coloring from all of its mac and cheese products.

• 24:43Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 24:44Speaker 00

  But they said the change had been in the works since 2012.

• 24:47Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 24:47Speaker 00

  It's not because of this lady.

• 24:48Speaker 01

  Although that could also be PR stuff on their part.

• 24:51Speaker 00

  Yes, absolutely.

• 24:52Speaker 01

  Both of these actors involved have an incentive to lie. Yeah.

• 24:54Speaker 00

  Also, this is a common response from businesses.

• 24:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 24:57Speaker 00

  They're just like, we're doing the thing. I don't want to talk about it.

• 25:00Speaker 01

  We didn't really get into the seed oils, but like fundamentally, like I don't care. If they've removed food dyes, it's not like I'm like married to food dyes. It's like, I think evidence should guide these discussions, but ultimately like if Kraft removed yellow five, like, okay, fine.

• 25:14Speaker 00

  Do you know what the concern is with food dyes? When people are like, get artificial food coloring out of our food.

• 25:21Speaker 01

  Shrinking your balls.

• 25:22Speaker 00

  No.

• 25:23Speaker 01

  That's all I've ever heard about. I've never heard anything specific.

• 25:25Speaker 00

  This one dates back to the 1970s with something called the Fine Gold Diet.

• 25:30Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 25:31Speaker 00

  The core idea behind the Fine Gold Diet, it was the like, strip all of the additives out of your kids diet.

• 25:38Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 25:38Speaker 00

  The assertion behind this and the Fine Gold Diet was that additives and food dyes caused ADHD.

• 25:46Speaker 01

  Was it like a line go up thing that like rates of ADHD have increased at the same time as yellow five consumption has increased kind of thing?

• 25:52Speaker 00

  No, the Fine Gold Diet came out in the 70s. So even our language around ADHD was very different than what it was.

• 25:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:59Speaker 00

  There is some evidence today that in kids who already have ADHD, some of those kids, when consuming foods that have food coloring in them, will sometimes experience a temporary increase in their hyperactivity symptoms.

• 26:16Speaker 01

  Really?

• 26:17Speaker 00

  Yes, it's very strange. So as a result, some countries require a warning label on foods with food coloring.

• 26:25Speaker 01

  Wow, okay.

• 26:25Speaker 00

  The US does not require that warning label. But that body of research did not exist when the Fine Gold Diet came out. This was somebody who was just like, on fucking vibes. Here's what I think, right? And again, this is like 70s natural food freak out sort of suspicion about newer foods kind of stuff. So this fit right into a worldview and a discomfort with sort of like the modern world as a whole.

• 26:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:51Speaker 00

  And also a fundamental discomfort with. Neurodivergence.

• 26:55Speaker 01

  Also like yellow five and red 40 and these things do sound kind of like sci fi dystopian.

• 27:00Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 27:01Speaker 01

  Cause what happened to the first 39 reds?

• 27:03Speaker 00

  Yeah. Oh, no.

• 27:05Speaker 01

  We've had to iterate on this. We're finally at the decent one after 39 tries?

• 27:09Speaker 00

  The idea that food dyes cause ADHD has long, long, long since been discredited. The other concern with food dyes that pops up is about cancer in rats.

• 27:20Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 27:21Speaker 00

  That is a result of a dye called red three. The FDA has banned red three. You can't use red three in the US.

• 27:28Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 27:29Speaker 00

  However, the amount of dye that exists in food for people is way lower than the dose given to rats in these studies, right? This is the diet coke aspartame conundrum where it's like, yeah, yeah, you're drinking aspartame. You're worried about like brain cancer from rats. Are you having aspartame directly injected into your brain?

• 27:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 27:53Speaker 00

  At like double your body weight. No? Okay, cool.

• 27:56Speaker 01

  It's always like an indicative mechanism, not necessarily like a, a direct danger. On the other hand, like, fine, we don't have the cancer causing dye in our food anymore. It seems fine to me.

• 28:04Speaker 00

  Um, I think the other thing to know about food dye regulation in the US is that the FDA, quote, "requires evidence that a color additive is safe at its intended level of use before it may be added to foods."

• 28:16Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 28:16Speaker 00

  And it adds a maximum allowable amount. So it's not just you can use unlimited red 40, right?

• 28:21Speaker 01

  Right.

• 28:22Speaker 00

  It is, you can use up to X amount of red 40.

• 28:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 28:25Speaker 00

  According to one scientist, uh, interviewed by New York Magazine, a 60 pound child would have to eat eight bags of Skittles a day to get to harmful levels of red 40.

• 28:38Speaker 01

  Okay, yeah.

• 28:39Speaker 00

  It really is being regulated, right? Like there is a regulatory mechanism there.

• 28:42Speaker 01

  Make Skittles beef tallow again.

• 28:44Speaker 00

  So a big part of Vani Hari's pitch around craft is the idea that these food colorings are banned in the EU. So why are they allowed in the US? This comes up all the time in these conversations.

• 28:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, that came up with the seed oils thing too.

• 28:59Speaker 00

  It sort of sounds right that the EU would have a stronger regulatory. Food system than the US, but that is not the case.

• 29:09Speaker 01

  Oh, interesting. Okay.

• 29:10Speaker 00

  Every food coloring that is allowed in the US is used in the EU.

• 29:15Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 29:15Speaker 00

  Yellow five used in the EU, red forty used in the EU, blue two used in the EU. They are just named differently.

• 29:26Speaker 01

  Oh, is it like red forty one?

• 29:27Speaker 00

  Red forty is called Alura red.

• 29:30Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 29:30Speaker 00

  And when it shows up in ingredient lists, it is listed under its E code name. So all of these have like an E dash.

• 29:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 29:40Speaker 00

  So people are looking for red forty on a label of food from like the UK and they're like, where is it? And it's E one twenty nine. That's red forty.

• 29:50Speaker 01

  Right.

• 29:50Speaker 00

  Yellow five is E one oh two, blue two is E one thirty two. These are labeling differences between the US and the EU. The EU is more likely to use technical names or these sort of code names for ingredients and labeling, but regulation in the US prioritizes consumers' ability to understand what's in their food. So we're more likely to use and to require language that's more accessible to more people, right?

• 30:21Speaker 01

  And more direct, like this is a food dye rather than just like a random number.

• 30:24Speaker 00

  I think it's also worth noting that there are like a number of food dyes that are allowed in the EU that are banned by the FDA and are not allowed in the US. Ponso four R is a red food coloring that is allowed in the EU, but not approved by the FDA. That doesn't mean it's necessarily unsafe. It just means that these two sort of regulatory systems deal with them differently. I think there's a temptation to go, this food system is doing a better job on every measure and not like, hey, these are different countries with different needs and different priorities about how this stuff ought to get disseminated.

• 30:59Speaker 01

  Right.

• 31:00Speaker 00

  Reasonable minds can differ. Different systems can make sense for different places, right?

• 31:03Speaker 01

  This is actually one of the most enriching things about living abroad for many years. I feel like when I moved to Denmark, I was like, they're better at everything. Socialism is cool. And then you get there and you're like, oh, we actually do a couple of things better than them and they do some things better than us.

• 31:16Speaker 00

  So, Michael.

• 31:18Speaker 00

  The craft campaign was in 2013. In 2014, she sets her sights on Starbucks.

• 31:25Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 31:26Speaker 00

  She writes a blog post called, "You'll never guess what's in a Starbucks pumpkin spice latte."

• 31:33Speaker 01

  Is it union busting? Is it union busting?

• 31:34Speaker 00

  No, there are two main claims that she makes. One of them, we're gonna dig in on, and one of them, we're not. The one we're gonna dig in on is that the caramel coloring used in pumpkin spice lattes is quote unquote, "linked to cancer."

• 31:49Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 31:50Speaker 00

  The other big bombshell that she drops in this blog post is that pumpkin spice lattes contain no pumpkin!

• 31:56Speaker 01

  Is she the one that originated this? This has been driving me insane for like, a decade.

• 32:00Speaker 00

  It's nutso. I don't know if she's the one who originated it, but she is definitely a big force in popularizing it. This made me laugh because I just always assumed that a pumpkin spice latte did not contain pumpkin, that it was pumpkin spice.

• 32:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, we're both bakers. We both understand that the pumpkin spice is the spice you put on the pumpkin. It doesn't contain pumpkin!

• 32:22Speaker 00

  So, here's the thing that I find fascinating.

• 32:24Speaker 01

  How worked up I am about this?

• 32:25Speaker 00

  According to Vani Hari, it took Starbucks one year to announce that they had removed caramel coloring from their pumpkin spice lattes. Again, each of these campaigns, she gets what she wants.

• 32:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's weird.

• 32:38Speaker 00

  But often, what she wants is not the full picture, or not correct, or whatever.

• 32:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, like physically incorrect. Like, they, I remember this. They added pumpkin to pumpkin spice lattes. I was like, why?

• 32:49Speaker 00

  So I looked this up, because I was like, is there fucking, I've never, I don't think I've ever had a pumpkin spice latte.

• 32:55Speaker 01

  They're so good.

• 32:56Speaker 00

  Are they really? I bet it's delicious.

• 32:57Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 32:58Speaker 00

  All of those Starbucks, like, we just, like, poured a pound of sugar in here.

• 33:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It's basically a pie in liquid form. Of course, it tastes amazing.

• 33:05Speaker 00

  It's a milkshake. We made you a milkshake?

• 33:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:08Speaker 00

  Well, here's the other thing. When you get a can of pumpkin puree, that's mostly not pumpkin.

• 33:13Speaker 01

  Oh, because butternut squash, a lot of it?

• 33:14Speaker 00

  It's butternut squash. So I'm also like, well, now, who's hiding things? Is it real pumpkin? I don't know.

• 33:20Speaker 01

  Well, I would know Aubrey, because I always bake my own pumpkins when I make pumpkin pie.

• 33:26Speaker 00

  He's farm- Two table.

• 33:30Speaker 01

  I did live in Europe. You know what? I did live in Europe. I just like eat like this. That's why I'm like so healthy.

• 33:35Speaker 00

  He's got the superiority complex to prove it.

• 33:38Speaker 01

  That's why I'm like so masculine. Like the internet is saying like he's so masculine and like it's mostly like the vegetables that I eat from Europe, the way that I make my vegetables.

• 33:45Speaker 00

  She gets hooked on this caramel coloring thing as being like a source of carcinogens. In pumpkin spice latte. I'm going to send you a quote here that is from an analytical chemist named Yvette Dentremont. Who wrote a piece for Gawker called, "The Food Babe Blogger Is Full Of Shit."

• 34:05Speaker 01

  Nice. Okay.

• 34:06Speaker 00

  So here is that chemist's breakdown of the PSL of it all.

• 34:13Speaker 01

  It says, "And what about that carcinogenic caramel color? Well, it turns out that it's not the only thing in your pumpkin spice latte that's in carcinogen class 2B. There's also coffee. Coffee is class 2B because of the acrylamide accumulated during the roasting process. Coffee, before Starbucks turns it into a milkshake, is pretty healthy for you. Class 2B means that all possible carcinogenic effects haven't been ruled out, but that it hasn't been shown to cause a single case of cancer." Okay, so it's like a maybe. We can't say it doesn't cause cancer, but there's no affirmative evidence that it causes cancer.

• 34:44Speaker 00

  Right. The evidence doesn't allow us to prove a negative that it absolutely never causes cancer. This is a sort of classic thing where health and wellness influencers will pull from these rankings of carcinogens.

• 34:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:57Speaker 00

  And will assume that they are ranked by their likelihood to give you cancer.

• 35:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 35:02Speaker 00

  Those rankings are instead rankings of the strength and state of the evidence.

• 35:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know. The science could be way better at communicating this, to be honest, but like, yes, this is so easy to misinterpret.

• 35:13Speaker 00

  But also, this is like directly the result of people who are untrained, sort of Googling around, tromping around, and not attempting to understand the science on the science's terms.

• 35:24Speaker 01

  Because I wish scientists were better at communicating this stuff, but also ultimately the responsibility is of the influencers or whoever, the pundits, who are saying like this causes cancer without like reading the documents in question, which are always very clear about like what these terms mean.

• 35:37Speaker 00

  Right. And meanwhile, Vani Hari is out here in the press repeatedly saying, you don't need to be an expert to understand this stuff.

• 35:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, but you don't understand it.

• 35:45Speaker 00

  Really fundamentally misunderstanding like big, big, big parts.

• 35:48Speaker 01

  And not even caring to like check in with experts. Be like, hey, do I have this right?

• 35:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 35:52Speaker 01

  This is what like we do with our episodes very frequently. It's like, we'll send a rough cut to somebody and be like, are we saying anything boneheaded here? Does this sound roughly true? And like, it's really useful to check in with experts on that stuff.

• 36:02Speaker 00

  And we will absolutely get very useful feedback.

• 36:04Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 36:04Speaker 00

  Being like, ah, this part's not quite it.

• 36:07Speaker 01

  I think the only way you can do this and not bother to reach out to people is if you think scientists are like fundamentally part of the problem.

• 36:13Speaker 00

  Paid industry shills, right?

• 36:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 36:16Speaker 00

  Michael.

• 36:16Speaker 01

  I agree.

• 36:17Speaker 00

  Are you ready for our next campaign?

• 36:18Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 36:19Speaker 00

  This is the way that both you and I first heard about the food babe. Yogamat bread.

• 36:24Speaker 01

  Yogamats.

• 36:25Speaker 00

  We're talking 2015. We're talking the campaign against Subway bread.

• 36:30Speaker 01

  I will say, every Subway in the whole world has the same weird smell when you walk in there, which does have like a sort of formaldehyde kind of quality to it. So I get why this sounded true to people. There's something weird about the way that it smells because it doesn't smell like baking bread, even though they are baking bread in there.

• 36:46Speaker 00

  Subway is not a top tier fast food place in the US.

• 36:51Speaker 01

  You're coming, you're going for it. You're coming for Subway. You're like, we don't care about what you eat, how you live your life. However, if you go to Subway, you're trash.

• 36:59Speaker 00

  No, no, no, not at all. Not at all. I just mean like, she's reaching for a restaurant that not very many people are going to defend, right?

• 37:07Speaker 01

  Right.

• 37:08Speaker 00

  Last week tonight did an excellent piece on their like extremely predatory business practices.

• 37:14Speaker 01

  Oh, really?

• 37:14Speaker 00

  Which is why we have like three times as many Subways in the US as any other fast food restaurant.

• 37:19Speaker 01

  Oh, really?

• 37:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

• 37:22Speaker 01

  Did he talk about how six inches isn't enough food and 12 inches is too much? That's my beef with Subway.

• 37:26Speaker 00

  So this was the first campaign of hers that sort of made its way onto my radar. The allegation sort of at its core was that Subway's bread used ingredients that were used to make Yogamats.

• 37:40Speaker 01

  Love it.

• 37:41Speaker 00

  A friend of mine told me this at the time. And I remember being like, that doesn't sound right.

• 37:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, I remember that too.

• 37:48Speaker 00

  Like, hmm. Like, it really felt like scientific information that had been delivered by like, one of the minions memes on Facebook or something where you're just like, the packaging of this alone is suspect, right?

• 38:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:01Speaker 00

  It's a little bit like the American bread is cake thing, which is also just about Subway bread and about its tax status in Ireland or something.

• 38:09Speaker 01

  Also, just such a like, on its face, facile comparison. You could say like, I washed all my towels in vinegar and then I made a salad dressing.

• 38:17Speaker 00

  Right, you use baking soda to clean things, but you also use it to put in your like, quick breads or whatever, or your cookies.

• 38:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:27Speaker 00

  So, Vani Hari went about looking at Subway's ingredient lists, and she found one ingredient in particular that troubled her. It's called azodicarbonamide. We'll call it ADA, that's what it's shortened to.

• 38:40Speaker 01

  Sounds bad.

• 38:41Speaker 00

  Sounds scary. Vani Hari launched a petition in February of 2014, demanding that Subway remove ADA from their bread. And she made a video to go along with that petition. And Michael, we are gonna watch that video.

• 38:55Speaker 01

  Okay, we're gonna see this woman, okay?

• 38:56Speaker 00

  We are gonna see this woman.

• 39:01Speaker 02

  Oh, hi there, I'm the food babe. I love yoga. It is so amazing for your body and stress and well-being, but it really does make me really hungry.

• 39:13Speaker 01

  Oh my god.

• 39:13Speaker 00

  She's taking a bite out of the yoga mat.

• 39:16Speaker 02

  Wake up, people. Take a look at the ingredients in Subway's nine-grain bread.

• 39:21Speaker 01

  Wake up, people.

• 39:21Speaker 02

  Did you know that one of them is the same ingredients found in yoga mat? This stuff called azocarbon, you know, it's this stuff here. The name's on the screen. It's banned across the globe. If you get caught using it in Singapore, you get fined and put in jail.

• 39:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:37Speaker 02

  This is a very hazardous substance that is linked to lung issues and workers who are exposed to it. If it isn't even safe to be around and breathe in, how could it be deemed safe to eat? Well, the US is one of the only countries in the world that still allows this ingredient to be used here in the United States. In the US, big food companies use this as a flour bleaching agent. In other countries, they wait a week to turn their flour white. Not only is it on the screen and Subway's nine-grain bread, but you'll find it in the food at McDonald's, Wendy's, and even Starbucks Croissants. Oh, Starbucks. Keep the Yogamat out of your mouth and on the floor. Do you know friends and family that eat Yogamat? Then share this video with them and go to foodbabe.com for updates.

• 40:21Speaker 02

  Until then, I'm the Food Babe.

• 40:27Speaker 01

  You have no real enemies. You're afraid of Yogamats. I shouldn't be, but I'm so annoyed at how she's pretending not to know how to pronounce it.

• 40:35Speaker 00

  Totally.

• 40:36Speaker 01

  You've written numerous posts, it's like a whole campaign and you're like, oh, whatever. You could see it on the screen, like, come on.

• 40:42Speaker 00

  One of her sort of core rules about food is if a third grader can't pronounce it, you shouldn't eat it.

• 40:49Speaker 01

  Third graders can't pronounce very much. I couldn't say refrigerator when I was in third grade.

• 40:53Speaker 00

  She relies really heavily on this sort of proposed binary of like chemical versus natural.

• 41:00Speaker 01

  Right.

• 41:01Speaker 00

  Which is like, that doesn't exist.

• 41:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:04Speaker 00

  Almost everything in the natural world is also chemical, has a chemical name. This is, once again, I would say neophobia in sheep's clothing, right? The assumption is that new techniques and new ingredients and new foods are inherently sinister.

• 41:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:20Speaker 00

  I thought that this quote from a professor of food science at UMass was a really good sort of encapsulation of what she's doing here. This is from a New York Times piece.

• 41:33Speaker 01

  It says, "Science splutter with frustration that to Ms. Hari, the word chemical is always a pejorative and that she yells fire about toxins, but ignores that fruits and vegetables are full of naturally occurring toxins. Peach pits, for example, are very natural, but they contain cyanide, said Fergus M. Clydesdale, a professor of food science at the University of Massachusetts. Oranges have methanol, which is very toxic, and we've been eating those for thousands of years. Professor Clydesdale also pointed out that the body is made of chemicals and that we eat partly to replenish those chemicals with chemicals from food."

• 42:04Speaker 00

  Ayy!

• 42:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:06Speaker 00

  Everything is chemicals.

• 42:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm against chemicals and I'm for natural foods. Like neither one of those things mean anything.

• 42:12Speaker 00

  So ADA, what it does is that it's essentially like a foaming agent. It helps foams retain their structure and bread is a fucking foam.

• 42:22Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 42:23Speaker 00

  So this is an additive that helps you sort of maintain that like bread foamy kind of structure. She does point this out in her video that like, the core reason that this is banned in other places is because of worker safety.

• 42:40Speaker 01

  Right.

• 42:40Speaker 00

  It doesn't have anything to do with consumer consumption.

• 42:44Speaker 01

  Right.

• 42:44Speaker 00

  It's just like completely apples to oranges. And again, she's reaching for sort of the scariest thing. It's also wild to look at that and not to frame this as, hey, the people who make your food deserve safe working conditions.

• 43:00Speaker 01

  Right.

• 43:00Speaker 00

  I want food that's made by people who are able to be safe at work.

• 43:03Speaker 01

  Right.

• 43:04Speaker 00

  You could run this whole campaign as is, but swap out sort of like, aren't you afraid of what's in your food, what's lurking in your food?

• 43:13Speaker 01

  Right.

• 43:13Speaker 00

  For, hey, workers are underprotected in this country.

• 43:17Speaker 01

  Right.

• 43:17Speaker 00

  That's fucking true.

• 43:18Speaker 01

  Hey, like food processing is like a notoriously exploitative sector.

• 43:22Speaker 00

  The leap from if it's not safe to inhale, why would it be safe to ingest without looking into what we know?

• 43:30Speaker 01

  Right.

• 43:30Speaker 00

  About whether or not it's safe to ingest, right? Like, that's sort of an unhinged thing. Again, like, part of the way that she talks about this stuff is completely devoid of context. She doesn't talk about like, why is this used?

• 43:43Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 43:43Speaker 00

  Here is a little write-up from Forbes.

• 43:47Speaker 01

  So how dangerous is this latest red flag food additive? Honestly, not so bad. At least when compared to some of the other chemicals like BPA that have raised a hue and cry in the past few years. Interestingly, ADA was actually brought in as a substitute for a much worse chemical, potassium bromate, which was phased out after California's Proposition 65 called it into question as possibly dangerous to human health. Right, so this was an attempt to actually improve the safety of the food system.

• 44:13Speaker 00

  Yes, and there's no real acknowledgement of that. There's just the like, look how sinister this shit is.

• 44:18Speaker 01

  Right.

• 44:19Speaker 00

  She genuinely just makes it seem like they are straight up out to get you.

• 44:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:23Speaker 00

  And not like they're solving a problem in an inelegant way, or they could solve that problem in a better way.

• 44:29Speaker 01

  Right.

• 44:29Speaker 00

  According to her website, the petition garnered more than 50 50,000 signatures just in the first 24 hours.

• 44:36Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 44:36Speaker 00

  Which is also how long it took Subway to respond and agree to remove ADA from its bread within the next two months.

• 44:44Speaker 01

  That's actually fascinating that they caved so quickly.

• 44:46Speaker 00

  They said that the removal was already underway, which tracks to me, right? If it's coming out in the next two months.

• 44:52Speaker 01

  Right.

• 44:53Speaker 00

  I don't know enough about industrial, like, food creation, food manufacturing. So I couldn't say for sure, but I'm like, two months is a really quick turnaround for something that is part of the structural integrity of the bread that you serve in every dish at your place.

• 45:11Speaker 01

  Because you'd have to, like, reformulate it and then, like, do a bunch of testing to make sure that the product is not going to be meaningfully different, which, like, takes time.

• 45:17Speaker 00

  There may be different equipment that's required. There may be different staff training.

• 45:21Speaker 01

  Right.

• 45:21Speaker 00

  It just seems like a big undertaking to me to get done in, like, 60 days or less just because there was a petition.

• 45:29Speaker 01

  But I'm sure she declared victory anyway.

• 45:31Speaker 00

  Absolutely. For all of these, she claims credit pretty unilaterally.

• 45:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:36Speaker 00

  But again, it's sort of Goop style where, like, as Gwyneth Paltrow said, like, each of those little cultural firestorms.

• 45:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, just bringing more people in.

• 45:44Speaker 00

  Increased traffic, increased her business, all of that kind of stuff. And that is also, whether or not that's her intention, that is also an effect that appears to be happening here, right?

• 45:51Speaker 01

  Well, the thing is, I mean, it's also the thing that she didn't mention the actual danger with Subway sandwiches, that if you arrange them in the shape of the word Satan.

• 45:59Speaker 00

  Oh, it changes their molecular structure.

• 46:01Speaker 01

  They actually get so much worse.

• 46:03Speaker 00

  The sandwiches respond to human consciousness.

• 46:06Speaker 01

  But only in English.

• 46:09Speaker 01

  And I guess the real issue with this isn't necessarily that Subway removed this thing from their bread, because honestly, who gives a shit? It's more like it's the opportunity cost of, first of all, giving people this bizarre, like, anti-system, anti-government, everything message. And also, like, the energy of people doing petitions and lobbying the corporation could have been directed at something like bad that they're doing, like the way that they treat workers or union busting or something that's, like, actually real.

• 46:35Speaker 00

  I think that's the vibe with kind of all of her stuff.

• 46:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:38Speaker 00

  Most of the things that she lands on, I'm like, I don't care.

• 46:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 46:41Speaker 00

  But I think the issue is that she Is doing a bunch of world building that is like they're poisoning you. The food supply is out to get you that she's sort of painting this much broader picture about like most of the sources of your food are inherently suspect and are trying to hurt you. And that leads directly into like pretty profound anti-government sentiment. And erosion of trust in entities like the FDA, right?

• 47:09Speaker 01

  Right.

• 47:10Speaker 00

  You know, the FDA has a great deal of sort of power, but in terms of like a social media following, she's definitely winning that war.

• 47:18Speaker 01

  Right. And instead of educating her followers on like the actual problems in the food supply, she's essentially like uneducating them and making them afraid of all these like phantoms rather than like things that we could actually be doing something about like things like improving the ability of like the FDA to like inspect workplaces and shit like that.

• 47:34Speaker 00

  100%.

• 47:34Speaker 01

  Food safety is like a real issue. Yeah.

• 47:36Speaker 00

  The little coda to this particular campaign is that this year the FDA has announced that it's going to revisit ADA's place on the grass list.

• 47:44Speaker 01

  But isn't that just like RFK Jr. Being like whatever.

• 47:46Speaker 00

  That's what I was gonna say is like whatever the FDA does is not a measure at this point of like whether or not it's true or false.

• 47:52Speaker 01

  But also I hate this so much because we're now going into a world where basically anything the FDA does, you're like, oh, fuck it. It's RFK Jr.'s weird bullshit.

• 48:00Speaker 00

  Right.

• 48:00Speaker 01

  That's exactly the kind of distrust in institutions.

• 48:02Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 48:03Speaker 01

  That she is fomenting. However, these institutions are not trustworthy anymore because they are run by degenerate psychos.

• 48:08Speaker 00

  Right.

• 48:09Speaker 01

  It's now true what she's been saying about these government agencies for decades.

• 48:12Speaker 00

  It's true as a direct result of what she has been campaigning for.

• 48:17Speaker 01

  Yeah. And then we result in this like low trust society.

• 48:20Speaker 00

  They were trustworthy or considerably more trustworthy on a bunch of different things. And as a result of her like straightforward misinformation campaigns on a bunch of this stuff, that is now eroding public trust, at least amongst her audience and sort of adjacent audiences for institutions that were by all accounts, not doing a perfect job, but on the stuff that she was talking about, were taking those decisions. Pretty carefully, right? And we're like, really genuinely weighing consumer safety and that sort of thing.

• 48:55Speaker 01

  And also then now it puts us in a position where we're like, oh, those numbers are from the FDA. You can't trust them, which makes us sound like loons, but like that might end up being the case.

• 49:04Speaker 00

  It also puts us in the position of being like, hey, lay off Kraft. What did they ever do to you?

• 49:11Speaker 01

  I know, God.

• 49:12Speaker 00

  Right? Like, these are all sort of like institutions with very few defenders.

• 49:16Speaker 01

  Right.

• 49:17Speaker 00

  This all sort of culminates with her attending the confirmation hearing for RFK Jr.

• 49:24Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 49:24Speaker 00

  It makes a lot of sense to me. Her approach is sort of right in the pocket of RFK Jr.'s, right? So that like their alignment makes a ton of sense to me.

• 49:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:32Speaker 00

  The thing I wanted to close with is talking a little bit about sort of the rhetorical devices that Vani Hari uses that I think are pretty common amongst Maha influencers and wellness influencers, sort of regardless of their political affiliation, right?

• 49:51Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 49:51Speaker 00

  A few of these sort of rhetorical devices we've talked about before. One is anecdotal evidence, stories in place of evidence, right? Another, which we've talked about a fair amount, is designating some foods as real foods and other foods as quote unquote fake foods, right?

• 50:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:06Speaker 00

  There's also another one that we've sort of touched on in the past is this idea of like nutritional nostalgia, right? That's not an argument that relies on evidence. It relies on the sort of feeling that we weren't quote unquote meant to eat something.

• 50:18Speaker 01

  Right. We're a fallen society. Yeah.

• 50:20Speaker 00

  There are also a few devices that we haven't talked about quite as much. One is that in her work, Vani Hari does not spend much time explaining why things are the way they are.

• 50:35Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 50:36Speaker 00

  Again, there's only this sort of fallen society narrative. The last one that she uses very liberally is this deployment of questions with sort of heavily implied answers. The one that she uses the most is what are they trying to hide?

• 50:53Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, I love that. That's super conspiracy brain because it's like, we can't find evidence of this, but that's. Evidence of the conspiracy.

• 50:59Speaker 00

  Right. This is the thing that will show up sometimes where people will be like, "I called General Mills and asked them who grew the oats that are used in Cheerios, and they couldn't even tell me."

• 51:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:09Speaker 00

  That doesn't necessarily mean that someone is concealing sinister information from you.

• 51:15Speaker 01

  Right.

• 51:15Speaker 00

  It may just mean, "Hang on, I don't have that answer handy. It might take me some time to find it." Or, "I don't even know how to get that question answered. I'm so sorry, I can't do it." Right?

• 51:24Speaker 01

  Or maybe it does mean the company's evil, but you need actual evidence that the company's evil. It's not just that they won't answer a question.

• 51:29Speaker 00

  100%, right? All of that felt important to sort of lay out because I think all of these are like increasingly commonplace. As there's more and more sort of health and wellness quote unquote information being shared on social media, with the rise of Maha influencers, with like more and more sort of like algorithms tuned toward rage bait and controversial shit. It means we're just gonna keep seeing more and more and more of this stuff. So it felt like worth lifting up. Like, here's how this shit shows up, and if someone opens with like, "I didn't see this information. What are they trying to hide?" It might be worth considering that that is a person who hasn't done their due diligence or doesn't understand what's in front of them,

• 52:13Speaker 00

  rather than just the person they're pointing the finger at or the company they're pointing the finger at is necessarily doing sinister things.

• 52:21Speaker 01

  Right.

• 52:21Speaker 00

  You know?

• 52:21Speaker 01

  And the only, I mean, the only way around this stuff is to arrange your food so that it spells out Gandhi, and then it becomes more healthy for you.