“People have been waiting for this information—they’re hungry for this information about what’s in our food,” says Hari, the face (and keyboard) behind the divisive blog Food Babe. “Nobody really looks into the ingredients in these new products. And that is what I am doing. I’m looking into the actual ingredients. I’m unveiling what’s behind the curtain. Once you learn it, you can’t unlearn it. And that’s what’s so powerful about it.” One thing is immediately apparent: Vani Hari knows how to make an argument. And with 5 million people reading her blog every month, I’m clearly not the only one who thinks so. Hari, known to most now as simply the Food Babe, has led a handful of wildly successful petitions (with hundreds of thousands of signatures) to remove potentially harmful additives from food products: artificial dyes in Kraft’s macaroni and cheese, a dough conditioner in Subway’s bread, antibiotics in Chick Fil-A’s chicken, and more. TIME magazine just named her one of its most influential people on the Internet. Her new book, The Food Babe Way: Break Free from the Hidden Toxins in Your Food and Lose Weight, Look Years Younger, and Get Healthy in Just 21 Days quickly became a New York Times bestseller. And Mark Hyman, MD, who penned the book’s forward, calls Hari a “a modern-day David, facing the Goliath of the trillion-dollar food industry.” That’s a heavy mantle for someone who basically became an Internet celebrity without intending to. Hari was a management consultant with no nutrition or food background and self-proclaimed Chick Fil-A addict before she began eating clean. She was overweight, suffered from eczema, and took eight prescription drugs. It wasn’t until she was struck down with appendicitis in 2002 that she began to pay attention to what was in her food. Her newfound knowledge of food dyes, preservatives, and additives—and the dramatic health improvements she experienced after eliminating them—started burning a hole in her stomach, so to speak. So she started a little blog called FoodBabe.com, a name suggested by her husband. It went live in 2011. MORE: The Scary Truth About GMO Labeling Hari blogged anonymously for about a year and a half before quitting her job to dedicate herself to the site full-time. That’s when she first published her full name and photos on the site. That’s also when her petitions and investigations started to gain traction, and her readers began to band together in a force now known as the Food Babe Army. “TIME magazine made me one of the most influential people on the Internet, and it blows my mind,” she says. “Because I wasn’t even on the Internet until four years ago. And it just goes to show once people learn what’s happening in the food industry, they can’t stay quiet about it.” While Hari’s efforts have earned her widespread attention, they haven’t exactly garnered widespread support. In fact, she is so frequently parodied, criticized, and outright ridiculed, it’s hard to keep track of her many antagonists: from qualified educators and scientists like David Gorski, a surgical oncologist and professor at Wayne State University School of Medicine, and Fergus Clydesdale, director of the Food Science Policy Alliance at University of Massachusetts Amherst, to news sites like Gawker and fellow bloggers like the Mommy PhD. Some attacks (like the ones captured here) are based solely upon Hari’s gender or appearance—and they deserve little mention other than a resounding condemnation. Others call out her lack of scientific education, her sensational presentation of issues, her consistently pejorative use of the word “chemical,” and her silencing of critics. These we can’t exactly dispute. But when I ask Hari why she thinks she is criticized so much, her answer is once again polished, immediate, and ardent. “A lot of comments are coming from people that don’t want to attack my ideas, they want to attack me as an individual, because they don’t want to reduce the amount of chemicals in our world,” she says. “They’re pro-chemical. Instead of supporting the consumer, they’re food companies and chemical advocates. But people are learning for themselves that you don’t have to be a nutritionist or scientist to know how to eat, and if you should, that’s kind of a problem.” That response speaks to the very core of Hari’s philosophy: You don’t need a degree to eat healthfully, she says—and you shouldn’t place your full trust in scientists, nutritionists, or regulatory bodies, either. MORE: What “Natural” Really Means It may sound paranoid to distrust everyone, but it’s not baseless, given the fact the food research and recommendations have been rife with conflicts of interest. For example, Hari frequently cites a study that found “ubiquitous” conflicts of interest in the FDA’s GRAS program, which judges the safety of food additives—many of the researchers designated to test additives had financial incentive to greenlight them. Another study discovered that the Sugar Association wielded huge influence over scientists in the 1970s, paying to steer research away from the connection between sugar consumption and tooth decay. And just last month, the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics—the world’s largest organization of nutrition professionals—awarded its “Kids Eat Right” seal to Kraft American Singles cheese product, even though the “product” is not actual cheese (as many Youtubers have documented, it doesn’t even melt when held to a flame) and Kraft is a well-known sponsor of the academy. With examples like these, Hari says there’s no reason to trust experts—but there is reason to trust her, since she doesn’t have biased interest. “Right now, I can actually find out information that’s not biased or funded by the food industry,” she says. “I have my spent life researching information that they don’t teach in schools…You have the ability to learn this information, and I’m going to teach you how.” That’s where Kevin Folta disagrees. Professor and chairman of the Horticultural Sciences Department at the University of Florida, Folta first became engaged with the Food Babe when he posted a “very kind and scientific” comment on her site, saying that no plants (even organic ones) are truly natural, since humans have bred and domesticated crops for so long. Within hours, he says, the post was deleted and he was banned from posting further comments. “When simple science about non-GMO plant breeding is found unacceptable, there’s a serious problem,” he told me. For Folta, whose main area of research is plant genomics, part of the problem is Hari’s staunch anti-GMO stance. He believes that Americans’ demand for GMO labeling will drive up the cost of food for the poor and limit the potential of biotech to improve food security worldwide. (Folta is a contributor to GMOAnswers.org, a forum funded by the biotech industry, a fact Hari has used to discredit his attacks). But that’s not all he’s worried about with Hari. “Her heart is in the right place—she has the ability to mobilize people and help change opinions, which is quite a talent and a skill,” Folta says of Hari. “But she is not well trained enough to avoid being deceived by the [scientific] literature. For example, she can look at a study that was done by adding chemicals to cells in a petri dish, and the cells respond negatively. But the levels they respond to would never occur through the consumption of food, and the human body is so good at eliminating compounds that those cells never really see it. So she’s good at taking a grain of truth from the literature and really bending it to fit her agenda.” Folta is right in some regards. In the past, Hari has cited scientific studies to back up some dubious information, including her diatribe against flu shots and post about microwaves (cached here), which incorrectly claimed that microwaves destroy nutrients in food more than other methods of cooking. Other times, she has simply offered no reputable sources, as in her post about air travel (cached here), which doles out advice but cites no evidence. She’s also been widely inaccurate, too, seen in her video about castoreum, a natural flavoring derived from a beavers’ castor sacs, not its anal glands, as the video claims. Asked why some of these questionable posts no longer appear on her site, Hari gracefully acknowledges their removal admits to error. “Any blog post that wasn’t thoroughly backed up, I took down,” she says. “We all make mistakes. It’s important to admit them and just move on.” To that point, her investigations have also increased in legitimacy—or at least in thoroughness of research—since her early days. For her most recent campaign against Kellogg’s and General Mills regarding the use of the potentially harmful chemical BHT in food packaging, she says she consulted with Environmental Working Group senior scientist Johanna Congleton, who reviewed the language of Hari’s petition. But these efforts haven’t changed the most disquieting thing about Hari’s philosophy: her absolutism. Either it’s natural, organic, and good for you, or it’s laced with chemicals and therefore toxic. Adages like “Everything in moderation” or “the dose makes the poison” don’t seem to be a part of her nutritional psyche. And she lives this life, allegedly, 24-7, never caving to buy a bag of peanut M&Ms; in a moment of desperation, but actually going so far as to recommend bringing a cooler of organic food on flights to avoid presumably toxic airline snacks. MORE: Are Nestle’s New Artificial-Free Candy Bars Actually Healthy Now? Hari’s devotion to pure food isn’t a bad thing: Why shouldn’t we question the use of additives that serve no nutritional purpose and may present health risks, especially if they’re banned for safety reasons in other countries? But, over the years, she has amplified and stretched and inflated that concept to the extreme, to the point that the mere idea of consuming a chemical incites feelings of fear and shame. “If more people admonished their grocery stores for carrying poisons, there’d be less of this stuff on the shelves,” she writes in her book. “To think that we could have been eating potentially toxic food for a week,” she muses in a later chapter, recalling a vacation during which she and her husband narrowly avoided eating a tofu dish containing MSG. “She will extrapolate and create risk when they really is zero risk or very low risk,” Folta says. “And she uses that basis to mobilize a 5 million person self-described army that goes after the reputations of the companies that use those products.” But that raises even more questions, like: Why should we care about the reputations of hugely profitable companies like Kraft or Subway that Hari has exposed or is trying to expose to be nutritionally evil? And, even if the risks are minimal, isn’t it ultimately better that our processed cheese or mac and cheese is free of petroleum-based food dyes and that the plastic that stores boxed cereal for months and months be free of BHT? We know what Vani Hari thinks. And we’ll probably be hearing about it for a very long time. MORE: Editors’ Picks: 15 New Clean Packaged Foods We Can’t Stop Eating
