{"id":144586,"date":"2014-03-01T10:00:25","date_gmt":"2014-03-01T15:00:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.prosebeforehos.com\/?p=144586"},"modified":"2021-07-08T18:57:28","modified_gmt":"2021-07-08T22:57:28","slug":"whole-foods-american-temple-pseudoscience","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.prosebeforehos.com\/article-of-the-day\/03\/01\/whole-foods-american-temple-pseudoscience\/","title":{"rendered":"Whole Foods Is An American Temple Of Pseudoscience"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Whole<\/p>\n

The Article:<\/strong> Whole Foods: America\u2019s Temple of Pseudoscience<\/a> by Michael Schulson in The Daily Beast.<\/p>\n

The Text:<\/strong> If you want to write about spiritually-motivated pseudoscience in America, you head to the Creation Museum in Kentucky. It\u2019s like a Law of Journalism. The museum has inspired hundreds of book chapters and articles (some of them, admittedly, mine) since it opened up in 2007. The place is like media magnet. And our nation\u2019s liberal, coastal journalists are so many piles of iron fillings.<\/p>\n

But you don\u2019t have to schlep all the way to Kentucky in order to visit America\u2019s greatest shrine to pseudoscience. In fact, that shrine is a 15-minute trip away from most American urbanites.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m talking, of course, about Whole Foods Market. From the probiotics aisle to the vaguely ridiculous Organic Integrity outreach effort (more on that later), Whole Foods has all the ingredients necessary to give Richard Dawkins nightmares. And if you want a sense of how weird, and how fraught, the relationship between science, politics, and commerce is in our modern world, then there\u2019s really no better place to go. Because anti-science isn\u2019t just a religious, conservative phenomenon\u2014and the way in which it crosses cultural lines can tell us a lot about why places like the Creation Museum inspire so much rage, while places like Whole Foods don\u2019t.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

My own local Whole Foods is just a block away from the campus of Duke University. Like almost everything else near downtown Durham, N.C., it\u2019s visited by a predominantly liberal clientele that skews academic, with more science PhDs per capita than a Mensa convention.<\/p>\n

Still, there\u2019s a lot in your average Whole Foods that\u2019s resolutely pseudoscientific. The homeopathy section has plenty of Latin words and mathematical terms, but many of its remedies are so diluted that, statistically speaking, they may not contain a single molecule of the substance they purport to deliver. The book section\u2014yep, Whole Foods sells books\u2014boasts many M.D.\u2019s among its authors, along with titles like The Coconut Oil Miracle and Herbal Medicine, Healing, and Cancer, which was written by a theologian and based on what the author calls the Eclectic Triphasic Medical System.<\/p>\n

You can buy chocolate with \u201ca meld of rich goji berries and ashwagandha root to strengthen your immune system,\u201d and bottles of ChlorOxygen chlorophyll concentrate, which \u201cbuilds better blood.\u201d There\u2019s cereal with the kind of ingredients that are \u201cmade in a kitchen\u2014not in a lab,\u201d and tea designed to heal the human heart.<\/p>\n

Nearby are eight full shelves of probiotics\u2014live bacteria intended to improve general health. I invited a biologist friend who studies human gut bacteria to come take a look with me. She read the healing claims printed on a handful of bottles and frowned. \u201cThis is bullshit,\u201d she said, and went off to buy some vegetables. Later, while purchasing a bag of chickpeas, I browsed among the magazine racks. There was Paleo Living, and, not far away, the latest issue of What Doctors Don\u2019t Tell You. Pseudoscience bubbles over into anti-science. A sample headline: \u201cStay sharp till the end: the secret cause of Alzheimer\u2019s.\u201d A sample opening sentence: \u201cWe like to think that medicine works.\u201d<\/p>\n

At times, the Whole Foods selection slips from the pseudoscientific into the quasi-religious. It\u2019s not just the Ezekiel 4:9 bread (its recipe drawn from the eponymous Bible verse), or Dr. Bronner\u2019s Magic Soaps, or Vitamineral Earth\u2019s \u201cSacred Healing Food.\u201d It\u2019s also, at least for Jewish shoppers, the taboos that have grown up around the company\u2019s Organic Integrity effort, all of which sound eerily like kosher law. There\u2019s a sign in the Durham store suggesting that shoppers bag their organic and conventional fruit separately\u2014lest one rub off on the other\u2014and grind their organic coffees at home\u2014because the Whole Foods grinders process conventional coffee, too, and so might transfer some non-organic dust. \u201cThis slicer used for cutting both CONVENTIONAL and ORGANIC breads\u201d warns a sign above the Durham location\u2019s bread slicer. Synagogue kitchens are the only other places in which I\u2019ve seen signs implying that level of food-separation purity.<\/p>\n

Look, if homeopathic remedies or the best fat burner<\/a> make you feel better, take them. If the Paleo diet helps you eat fewer TV dinners, that\u2019s great\u2014even if the Paleo diet is probably premised more on The Flintstones than it is on any actual evidence about human evolutionary history. If non-organic crumbs bother you, avoid them. And there\u2019s much to praise in Whole Foods\u2019 commitment to sustainability and healthful foods.<\/p>\n

Still: a significant portion of what Whole Foods sells is based on simple pseudoscience. And sometimes that can spill over into outright anti-science (think What Doctors Don\u2019t Tell You, or Whole Foods\u2019 overblown GMO campaign, which could merit its own article). If scientific accuracy in the public sphere is your jam, is there really that much of a difference between Creation Museum founder Ken Ham, who seems to have made a career marketing pseudoscience about the origins of the world, and John Mackey, a founder and CEO of Whole Foods Market, who seems to have made a career, in part, out of marketing pseudoscience about health?<\/p>\n

Well, no\u2014there isn\u2019t really much difference, if the promulgation of pseudoscience in the public sphere is, strictly speaking, the only issue at play. By the total lack of outrage over Whole Foods\u2019 existence, and by the total saturation of outrage over the Creation Museum, it\u2019s clear that strict scientific accuracy in the public sphere isn\u2019t quite as important to many of us as we might believe. Just ask all those scientists in the aisles of my local Whole Foods.<\/p>\n

So, why do many of us perceive Whole Foods and the Creation Museum so differently? The most common liberal answer to that question isn\u2019t quite correct: namely, that creationists harm society in a way that homeopaths don\u2019t. I\u2019m not saying that homeopathy is especially harmful; I\u2019m saying that creationism may be relatively harmless. In isolation, unless you\u2019re a biologist, your thoughts on creation don\u2019t matter terribly much to your fellow citizens; and unless you\u2019re a physician, your reliance on Sacred Healing Food to cure all ills is your own business.<\/p>\n

The danger is when these ideas get tied up with other, more politically muscular ideologies. Creationism often does, of course\u2014that\u2019s when we should worry. But as vaccine skeptics start to prompt public health crises, and GMO opponents block projects that could save lives in the developing world, it\u2019s fair to ask how much we can disentangle Whole Foods\u2019 pseudoscientific wares from very real, very worrying antiscientific outbursts.<\/p>\n

Still, we let it off the hook. Why? Two reasons come to mind. The first is that Whole Foods is a for-profit business, while the Creation Museum is the manifestation of an explicitly religious and political movement. For some reason, there\u2019s a special stream of American rage directed at ideological attacks on science that seems to evaporate when the offender is a for-profit corporation. It wasn\u2019t especially surprising that Bill Nye would go and debate Ken Ham; it would have been unusual had he, say, challenged executives at the biotech company Syngenta\u2014which has seemingly been running a smear campaign against a Berkeley biologist\u2014to a conversation about scientific integrity, or challenged Paleo Magazine\u2019s editors to a debate about archaeology. For those of us outside the fundamentalist world, I imagine that the Creation Museum gift shop is the one part of the museum that makes some kind of sense. Well, okay, they\u2019re trying to make money with this stuff. Meanwhile, Whole Foods responds to its customers, as any good business should.<\/p>\n

And, second, we often have it stuck in our heads that science communicators have only failed to speak to the religious right. But while issues of science-and-society are always tied up, in some ways, with politics, they\u2019re not bound to any particular part of the spectrum. Just ask Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., liberal political scion and vaccine skeptic extraordinaire, or Prince Charles, who pushed British health ministers to embrace homeopathic medicine.<\/p>\n

Bringing sound data into political conversations and consumer decisions is a huge, ongoing challenge. It\u2019s not limited to one side of the public debate. The moral is not that we should all boycott Whole Foods. It\u2019s that whenever we talk about science and society, it helps to keep two rather humbling premises in mind: very few of us are anywhere near rational. And pretty much all of us are hypocrites.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Article: Whole Foods: America\u2019s Temple of Pseudoscience by Michael Schulson in The Daily Beast. The Text: If you want to write about spiritually-motivated pseudoscience in America, you head to the Creation Museum in Kentucky. It\u2019s like a Law of Journalism. The museum has inspired hundreds of book chapters and articles (some of them, admittedly, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":49,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[259],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\nWhole Foods Is An American Temple Of Pseudoscience<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Why are some kinds of pseudoscience more equal than others?\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.prosebeforehos.com\/article-of-the-day\/03\/01\/whole-foods-american-temple-pseudoscience\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Whole Foods Is An American Temple Of Pseudoscience\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Why are some kinds of pseudoscience more equal than others?\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.prosebeforehos.com\/article-of-the-day\/03\/01\/whole-foods-american-temple-pseudoscience\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Prose Before Hos\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2014-03-01T15:00:25+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2021-07-08T22:57:28+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"http:\/\/www.prosebeforehos.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/02\/whole-foods.jpg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Article of the Day\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:creator\" content=\"@pbhnetwork\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:site\" content=\"@pbhnetwork\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Article of the Day\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"7 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.prosebeforehos.com\/article-of-the-day\/03\/01\/whole-foods-american-temple-pseudoscience\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.prosebeforehos.com\/article-of-the-day\/03\/01\/whole-foods-american-temple-pseudoscience\/\",\"name\":\"Whole Foods Is An American Temple Of Pseudoscience\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.prosebeforehos.com\/#website\"},\"datePublished\":\"2014-03-01T15:00:25+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2021-07-08T22:57:28+00:00\",\"author\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.prosebeforehos.com\/#\/schema\/person\/1e19d7cf2b1a9aea1805fd7b4b4b2b4e\"},\"description\":\"Why are some kinds of pseudoscience more equal than others?\",\"breadcrumb\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.prosebeforehos.com\/article-of-the-day\/03\/01\/whole-foods-american-temple-pseudoscience\/#breadcrumb\"},\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"ReadAction\",\"target\":[\"https:\/\/www.prosebeforehos.com\/article-of-the-day\/03\/01\/whole-foods-american-temple-pseudoscience\/\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"BreadcrumbList\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.prosebeforehos.com\/article-of-the-day\/03\/01\/whole-foods-american-temple-pseudoscience\/#breadcrumb\",\"itemListElement\":[{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":1,\"name\":\"Home\",\"item\":\"https:\/\/www.prosebeforehos.com\/\"},{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":2,\"name\":\"Whole Foods Is An American Temple Of Pseudoscience\"}]},{\"@type\":\"WebSite\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.prosebeforehos.com\/#website\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.prosebeforehos.com\/\",\"name\":\"Prose Before Hos\",\"description\":\"The Far Side Of Politics\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"SearchAction\",\"target\":{\"@type\":\"EntryPoint\",\"urlTemplate\":\"https:\/\/www.prosebeforehos.com\/?s={search_term_string}\"},\"query-input\":\"required name=search_term_string\"}],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"},{\"@type\":\"Person\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.prosebeforehos.com\/#\/schema\/person\/1e19d7cf2b1a9aea1805fd7b4b4b2b4e\",\"name\":\"Article of the Day\",\"sameAs\":[\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/pbhnetwork\"],\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.prosebeforehos.com\/author\/article-of-the-day\/\"}]}<\/script>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"Whole Foods Is An American Temple Of Pseudoscience","description":"Why are some kinds of pseudoscience more equal than others?","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/www.prosebeforehos.com\/article-of-the-day\/03\/01\/whole-foods-american-temple-pseudoscience\/","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"Whole Foods Is An American Temple Of Pseudoscience","og_description":"Why are some kinds of pseudoscience more equal than others?","og_url":"https:\/\/www.prosebeforehos.com\/article-of-the-day\/03\/01\/whole-foods-american-temple-pseudoscience\/","og_site_name":"Prose Before Hos","article_published_time":"2014-03-01T15:00:25+00:00","article_modified_time":"2021-07-08T22:57:28+00:00","og_image":[{"url":"http:\/\/www.prosebeforehos.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/02\/whole-foods.jpg"}],"author":"Article of the Day","twitter_card":"summary_large_image","twitter_creator":"@pbhnetwork","twitter_site":"@pbhnetwork","twitter_misc":{"Written by":"Article of the Day","Est. reading time":"7 minutes"},"schema":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https:\/\/www.prosebeforehos.com\/article-of-the-day\/03\/01\/whole-foods-american-temple-pseudoscience\/","url":"https:\/\/www.prosebeforehos.com\/article-of-the-day\/03\/01\/whole-foods-american-temple-pseudoscience\/","name":"Whole Foods Is An American Temple Of Pseudoscience","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.prosebeforehos.com\/#website"},"datePublished":"2014-03-01T15:00:25+00:00","dateModified":"2021-07-08T22:57:28+00:00","author":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.prosebeforehos.com\/#\/schema\/person\/1e19d7cf2b1a9aea1805fd7b4b4b2b4e"},"description":"Why are some kinds of pseudoscience more equal than others?","breadcrumb":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.prosebeforehos.com\/article-of-the-day\/03\/01\/whole-foods-american-temple-pseudoscience\/#breadcrumb"},"inLanguage":"en-US","potentialAction":[{"@type":"ReadAction","target":["https:\/\/www.prosebeforehos.com\/article-of-the-day\/03\/01\/whole-foods-american-temple-pseudoscience\/"]}]},{"@type":"BreadcrumbList","@id":"https:\/\/www.prosebeforehos.com\/article-of-the-day\/03\/01\/whole-foods-american-temple-pseudoscience\/#breadcrumb","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https:\/\/www.prosebeforehos.com\/"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"Whole Foods Is An American Temple Of Pseudoscience"}]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https:\/\/www.prosebeforehos.com\/#website","url":"https:\/\/www.prosebeforehos.com\/","name":"Prose Before Hos","description":"The Far Side Of Politics","potentialAction":[{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https:\/\/www.prosebeforehos.com\/?s={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}],"inLanguage":"en-US"},{"@type":"Person","@id":"https:\/\/www.prosebeforehos.com\/#\/schema\/person\/1e19d7cf2b1a9aea1805fd7b4b4b2b4e","name":"Article of the Day","sameAs":["https:\/\/twitter.com\/pbhnetwork"],"url":"https:\/\/www.prosebeforehos.com\/author\/article-of-the-day\/"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.prosebeforehos.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/144586"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.prosebeforehos.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.prosebeforehos.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prosebeforehos.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/49"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prosebeforehos.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=144586"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.prosebeforehos.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/144586\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":158779,"href":"https:\/\/www.prosebeforehos.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/144586\/revisions\/158779"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.prosebeforehos.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=144586"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prosebeforehos.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=144586"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prosebeforehos.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=144586"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}