A story by Michael Schulson on the Daily Beast, a US Web daily.
“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?”
Michael Schulson is a freelance writer based in Durham, North Carolina. He holds a B.A. in Religious Studies from Yale.
The story is about psychology, sociology, and politics.
“There’s a lot in your average Whole Foods that’s resolutely pseudoscientific”.
But must of us think it’s not dangerous, not dangerous as creationnism.
In fact, “The danger is when these ideas get tied up with other, more politically muscular ideologies. Creationism often does, of course—that’s 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’s fair to ask how much we can disentangle Whole Foods’ pseudoscientific wares from very real, very worrying antiscientific outbursts.”
Michael Schulson’s conclusion : “Bringing sound data into political conversations and consumer decisions is a huge, ongoing challenge. It’s not limited to one side of the public debate. The moral is not that we should all boycott Whole Foods. It’s 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.”