Sunday, February 23, 2014

Great reading for a lazy Sunday afternoon

If you enjoy reading well written and jaunty prose you would be hard pressed to find a better post today than Michael Schulson's Whole Foods: America’s Temple of Pseudoscience at the Daily Beast.
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...
Schulson has much to say about Whole Foods and its customer base but two observations that come quickly to mind are that the left is only concerned about pseudoscience when it is practiced by non profits such as religions and embraces it when done by for profit institutions and that Whole Foods (and the left) often leap from the pseudoscientific to the religious in their zeal for their own favored nostrums and high tech snake oil.
This is a great read!

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