From Slate:
The Food Babe Says There’s Beaver Butt in Your Ice Cream
“I couldn’t believe there was beaver’s ass in my vanilla ice cream, coal tar in my mac and cheese, yoga mat and shoe rubber in my bread,” says Vani Hari, also known as the Food Babe. That’s why she started blogging about food additives, she explains in the introduction to her new book, The Food Babe Way. I can’t believe it either. But that would be because none of it is true.
There is no coal tar in mac and cheese, and there never was, even before Hari led her Food Baby army on a crusade to get Kraft to remove tartrazine, a yellow dye, from its products. Bread does not contain crumbled-up pieces of yoga mat and shoe rubber. And there really isn’t any beaver’s ass in your ice cream cone, though it’s the Food Babe way to tell you there is at every turn. I counted more than 60 references to beaver secretions on her blog, and it appears as No. 10 on her book’s list of “The Sickening 15.”
Hari tirelessly reminds her blog readers that the next time they take licks of vanilla ice cream or spoonfuls of strawberry oatmeal, “there’s a chance you’ll be swirling secretions from a beaver’s anal glands around in your mouth.” It surely drives traffic: Tell me you wouldn’t click on a link to “Do You Eat Beaver Butt?” She is referring to castoreum, which is indeed extracted from a pair of sacs found on the rear end of a beaver, though not from the anal glands. Castoreum has been used in unguents and medicines for more than 2,000 years, but the Food Babe was appalled to discover the Food and Drug Administration considers castoreum to be not gross but GRAS—“generally recognized as safe” for both food and pharmaceutical uses.
While in low concentrations castoreum reputedly tastes of vanilla with a hint of raspberry, I’ll admit I’ve never tasted it. Not because I’m particularly disgusted by the source—I eat animal products and am inordinately fond of the fermented genitalia of Theobroma cacao—but because of its scarcity and cost. Enough castoreum extract to replace the vanilla in a half-gallon of ice cream would cost $120. Worldwide, less than 500 pounds of castoreum is harvested annually from beaver pelts, compared with the more than 20 million pounds of vanilla extracted from the ovaries of Vanilla planifolia orchids each year. Perfumers, not ice cream manufacturers, are the real market for castoreum. So while beaver secretions just might be in the expensive perfume you dabbed on your pulse points or in the aftershave you splashed on your face—did you just touch that with your hands, yuck—rest easy, there is no chance that the pint of ice cream you picked up at the store contains it. Not at the price you paid for it.
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The Food Babe is a business, just like Kraft, and one that is far less grounded in science—see her infamous microwave post and the now disappeared post about the airlines craftily adding nitrogen to the air in planes. Frankly, if Hari were really so worried about animal butts in the food supply, I imagine she wouldn’t have enjoyed this meal quite so much—when you eat shrimp tails, you are eating a shrimp’s anus, secretions and all. But beaver butt brings in advertising dollars and sells books, and that keeps the Food Babe in business.
That last paragraph points out the staggering hypocrisy of woos everywhere: the Woo Industry makes millions of dollars lying to consumers.
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