#vanihari

I take back everything I said about Jordan Younger. There's an even bigger, far far more dangerous level of food crazy out there, and her name is The Food Babe.

The takedowns that have been done on her are very timely for me. Right now, I'm taking a class in viticulture, and GMOs and its use come up from time to time. I first heard about the Food Babe from C.A. Pinkham's rant at Jezebel's Kitchenette blog. When I first heard about her, she reminded me a lot of the book Skinny Bitch that was kind of popular 8 or 10 years ago or so, which was essentially a vegan manifesto and a meat industry tirade crouched in a chick-lit framework.

What really irritates me the most about the Food Babe is at the heart of her crackpot crusade are some very valid concerns about the use and abuse of harmful food additives. As one contributor for Elle pointed out:

Hari likes to demonize the FDA, but the truth is that that organization is woefully understaffed and underfunded. I've gone down this road several times while researching safe cosmetics ingredients. We need so much more research in both food and beauty product safety because the data is just not there. Sadly, neither are the resources. With Hari's popular reach and the knowledge and know-how of the various scientists who critique her, together they could be a powerful lobby to get some real, actionable change and research happening, rather than just angry blog posts about eating "beaver butt" chemicals.

For me, it just seems like Vani Hari's approach consists of finding a random, weirdly named chemical in a popular food and then subsequently taking said company down. I actually remember reading somewhere (I'd link to if I could find it) that she basically decided to go after Subway after one of her co-workers used to bring Subway to work everyday. That screams more "disordered eating" than "consumer advocate". I think Vani Hari looks at herself as the Erin Brockovich of Food Activism, when she's more like the Ann Coulter of Food Activism. She's an orthorexic with a megalomaniacal streak.