dailybeast | Americans get riled up about
creationists and climate change deniers, but lap up the quasi-religious
snake oil at Whole Foods. It’s all pseudoscience—so why are some kinds
of pseudoscience more equal than others?
If
you want to write about spiritually-motivated pseudoscience in America,
you head to the Creation Museum in Kentucky. It’s 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’s liberal, coastal
journalists are so many piles of iron fillings.
But you don’t have
to schlep all the way to Kentucky in order to visit America’s greatest
shrine to pseudoscience. In fact, that shrine is a 15-minute trip away
from most American urbanites.
I’m 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’s really no better place to go. Because anti-science isn’t just a
religious, conservative phenomenon—and 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’t.
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’s
visited by a predominantly liberal clientele that skews academic, with
more science PhDs per capita than a Mensa convention.
Still,
there’s a lot in your average Whole Foods that’s 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—yep, Whole Foods sells books—boasts many M.D.’s 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.
