A Credibility Crisis in Food Science
Your life has almost certainly been affected by Brian Wansink.
Wansink is a professor at Cornell University—for nine more months, before he is to retire, as he described it to me Sunday evening, “sooner and under different circumstances than I expected.”
Others describe it as disgrace, an abrupt fall from a position of great prestige that casts a shadow on a highly consequential but already widely distrusted area of science: how food affects our health.
Wansink has been the director of Cornell’s Food and Brand Lab for a decade, where he studied how our environments determine what and how we eat. He was integral in leading the narrative that obesity and diabetes have less to do with individual willpower or flawed personhood than with psychological manipulation by a food industry that wants to sell as many cheap calories as possible.
He published hundreds of studies that were aimed, from conception through execution, at changing the food environment to help make the more healthful decision easier. In painting the picture of people as highly vulnerable to environmental cues, he famously demonstrated how when eating from —secretly replenished with soup from the inside—people tend to eat more. The act of eating was apparently, and so the takeaway was that people should use smaller bowls and take smaller portions.
