The Angry Chef: Bad Science and the Truth About Healthy Eating by Anthony Warner

Author:Anthony Warner [Warner, Anthony]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Oneworld Publications
Published: 2017-06-28T17:00:00+00:00

The Quack-Baiter General

As for the quack medicines, that industry flourished throughout the Victorian era and in doing so it developed many of the tricks and techniques still used by pseudoscience today – the fake testimonials, the celebrity endorsements, the wild claims of cure-all ubiquity, the power of advertising and media.

In 1905 the industry came under the scrutiny of the journalist Samuel Hopkins Adams in a series of articles for Collier’s Weekly entitled ‘The Great American Fraud’. In them, he brilliantly exposed this industry to the world, showing its dangers and revealing the dirty tricks used to mislead the public. Such was Adams’s influence and the power of his writing that action was taken, with the Pure Food and Drug Act passed just a year later. Adams was perhaps the first great quack-buster, exposing an issue of huge danger to public health and campaigning for change to protect people from harm. One cannot help but think that if he was around today there are a few battles he would enjoy fighting.

‘The Great American Fraud’ is fascinating to read now as it exposes practices that will be familiar to anyone interested in modern quackery. Although the Victorian panaceas and snake oils have disappeared from shelves, the same language and techniques are used to sell diet books, detox smoothies, herbal treatments, homeopathy and many other quack therapies. One of my favourite sections reads:

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