Vani Hari, who branded herself the Food Babe back in 2011 when she started blogging about green smoothies and buttocks-firming exercises, stood at a podium in the great hall of the Department of Health and Human Services last month in a sequined white tweed suit.
The stage behind her was filled with mothers like herself who have become the face of the “Make America Healthy Again” movement. In front of her were reporters assembled to hear the government’s strategy to eradicate petroleum-based food dyes.
And there, gazing up at her from the front row, was the nation’s health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who helped transform Ms. Hari, once voted one of the sexiest Democrats in Charlotte, N.C., into the Taylor Swift of the MAHA moms.
Ms. Hari took a deep and very audible breath.
“For over a decade I said the F.D.A. is asleep at the wheel,” she said. “Now I can stop saying that.”
Ms. Hari, a 46-year-old former business consultant with a computer science degree, can barely believe that after 14 years of food activism in which she chewed a yoga mat to make a point about the chemicals in Subway sandwich bread, she has surfed the wellness wave all the way to the center of the Trump administration’s food agenda.
Her ascent has thrilled her millions of social-media followers. “She completely empowered me to take a moment and just scan the ingredients and eat real food,” said Christina McGuire, 38, who lives in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., with her two daughters.
But that newfound power has stunned executives of food companies like Starbucks and WK Kellogg, which for years have been in the cross hairs of Food Babe public-shaming campaigns for using ingredients she deems toxic. It has surprised the scientists who have accused her of profiting from pseudoscience and scare tactics.
And it has bewildered many on the progressive left who felt they owned what food historians call the good-food movement. Now, Trump supporters who once dismissed dietary interventions as part of the “nanny state” school of government are championing organic produce and trying to rid schools of ultraprocessed foods.
Neither side can completely agree if Ms. Hari is an enemy or an ally. Can liberals who loathe President Trump get behind her mission? Can MAGA loyalists trust a former supporter of President Obama who was a delegate to the Democratic National Convention in 2012?
The far-right conspiracy theorist and sometime Trump adviser Laura Loomer doesn’t think so. On social media this month, she called Ms. Hari and another Kennedy associate “opportunistic liberal women” and “subversive infiltrators.”
The transformation of the food-policy landscape is “jaw-dropping,” said Marion Nestle, the retired New York University nutrition professor whose best-selling 2002 book, “Food Politics,” exposed the power the food industry has over government agencies.
She met Ms. Hari about a decade ago, after Dr. Nestle made a derogatory comment about her on a news program. Ms. Hari confronted her in a phone call. We should be working together, Ms. Hari said, because we’re on the same side.
Dr. Nestle advised her to be more scientifically rigorous in choosing her targets. “It’s an eye roll, a lot of it,” Dr. Nestle said. “But she’s been on message from the very beginning, and the message has gotten clearer.”
Dr. Nestle likes Ms. Hari’s chutzpah. She is also impressed with the MAHA movement’s dedication to making America’s food healthier — though so far, she said, “They haven’t done anything except to cut the budget.”
Just wait, Ms. Hari said. She’s been in strategy meetings and read early drafts of the “Make America Healthy Again Assessment,” Mr. Kennedy’s report on the causes of chronic childhood disease that will be presented to President Trump on Thursday. Ms. Hari will be in the room.
A Fast-Food Childhood
In her airy kitchen, with a fancy espresso machine and a fridge covered in her children’s art, Ms. Hari set out spring water in a glass bottle and surprisingly good madeleines she made from acorn flour and coconut sugar. Copies of her cookbook were on the counter, and Food Babe articles framed in acrylic covered the wall leading to her office.
Still, she is more warm Montessori mom than strident food cop. She won’t eat beef, but like any good Southerner, she enjoys good barbecue and fried chicken. She turns down almost all of the things she gets asked to do, preferring to spend time with her family while her two children are young.
She met her husband, Finley Clarke, when they worked at the consulting firm Accenture. Their first date was at the Cheesecake Factory. Now they run the lucrative Food Babe enterprise, which includes books and a snack and supplement company called Truvani, whose protein powder is in 12,000 stores nationwide. Their daughter is 8 and their son, whom she still breastfeeds, is 4.
Ms. Hari’s parents immigrated from Punjab, India. Her mother taught math at her high school, and her father was an engineering professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, the same school she graduated from. Her mother would prepare Indian food for her father, but Ms. Hari and her older brother lived on American fast food.
Ms. Hari blames that diet for her childhood stomachaches, eczema and asthma. After an appendectomy in her early 20s, her doctor explained that appendicitis was caused by an inflamed digestive system. It was her Scarlett O’Hara moment. She vowed never to eat poorly again.
She read everything she could find on nutrition. She lost weight and felt better than she ever had. A friend suggested she share it all in a blog. At first, Ms. Hari just published recipes, exercise tips and dieting advice. “Simply dip your fork in the dressing before each bite!”
In 2012, she investigated a local frozen yogurt chain that used the slogan “organic tastes better.” Ms. Hari discovered that the milk was organic but some of the flavorings and coloring were artificial. Her online exposé went viral, at least in Charlotte.
The formula was set: Write about chemicals in a popular food, then engage what she had begun to call her Food Babe Army to pressure a company with petitions.
In 2015, Kraft stopped coloring its macaroni and cheese with artificial yellow dye after Ms. Hari delivered more than 350,000 online signatures, although the company said the change had already been in the works. Subway said the same after it removed the dough conditioner azodicarbonamide from its bread following a Food Babe campaign.
Ms. Hari’s first book, “The Food Babe Way: Break Free from the Hidden Toxins in Your Food and Lose Weight, Look Years Younger, and Get Healthy in Just 21 Days!” landed on the New York Times best-seller list and drew a wave of scrutiny. Detractors spoofed her with social media accounts like Food Hunk, and mocked her methods under the hashtag #FoodBabeLogic: “Water is used in industrial coolant. You drink water. Therefore, you’re drinking coolant.”
Kavin Senapathy, who co-wrote “The Fear Babe: Shattering Vani Hari’s Glass House,” said she’s not surprised by Ms. Hari’s trajectory. “The desire to oversimplify and demonize what seems scary dovetails really well with a right-wing worldview.”
Ms. Hari acknowledges that she has made mistakes, but says she has corrected every one. Some of her adversaries, she points out, have been paid by Monsanto and other chemical companies.
“This whole idea that I’m not scientifically accurate? OK, fine. If you want to say that,” she said. “But I’m translating stuff so that the layman can understand it, and that’s why I’m so effective.”
The ‘Spark’ in Kennedy’s Eyes
Ms. Hari once considered running for office. With the effortless charm of a popular girl and the analytical drive of the state debate champion she once was, she would have made a good candidate.
Her father was a Dukakis Democrat. Ms. Hari worked so hard on Mr. Obama’s 2008 campaign that he gave her a kiss of thanks. He had campaigned on the promise to require labels on genetically modified foods, but it hadn’t happened. At the 2012 Democratic convention in Charlotte, she snagged a front-row seat during the agriculture secretary’s speech and held up a “Label GMOs!” sign. The cameras turned from him to her.
The former president wasn’t the only Obama to disappoint her. Ms. Hari had been a fan of Michelle Obama until the first lady embraced Subway when the company joined her Partnership for a Healthier America.
“It was, like, these empty promises over and over again from the political leaders that I really looked up to,” Ms. Hari said.
Last July, a friend asked if she would support Mr. Kennedy’s run for the presidency. Ms. Hari texted back, “I like him — but don’t do politics.”
Within weeks, she changed her mind. She had become friends with Calley Means, the food and pharmaceutical lobbyist turned holistic health advocate who is now a key adviser to Mr. Kennedy. (His sister, Casey Means, is President Trump’s latest pick for surgeon general.)
Ms. Hari and Mr. Means bonded over her long-simmering fight to pressure Kellogg to remove artificial ingredients from children’s cereal. When Mr. Means asked if she would testify with Mr. Kennedy and others at a Senate round table on health issues in September, she decided to jump back in.
At the event, Ms. Hari was electric. She held up boxes of Froot Loops. She waved charts showing how America’s biggest food companies sold versions of their products in other countries without chemicals that she found problematic. She finished by inviting everyone watching to help her hand-deliver more than 400,000 signatures to Kellogg the following month.
Mr. Kennedy joined the standing ovation. They had met only the night before over stone crab at a Washington restaurant. After she finished testifying, she looked at him.
“At that moment I saw the spark in his eyes,” she said. Her connection to him felt spiritual: He, too, had been vilified for his beliefs. (Mr. Kennedy did not respond to questions about Ms. Hari, but called her an “extraordinary leader” at the food-dye news conference.)
Although she’s an advocate for transparency, Ms. Hari wouldn’t discuss her views on Mr. Kennedy’s vaccine skepticism, budget cuts to food programs or other parts of the Trump agenda.
Ken Cook, president of the Environmental Working Group and a friend who has joined her in the battle against food dyes, said “she should be speaking out about all the assaults on the environment, science and public health.”
Ms. Hari countered that supporting healthy food doesn’t mean you have to agree with everything the administration is doing. “I don’t understand why it has to be all or nothing.” she said. “My mission is my missionWhat about the Diet Coke-fueled diet of the president himself? She said he fully supports changing the food system. “We never had a president talk about these issues like this before,” she said.
That support has added even more swagger to the Food Babe’s message.
“Dear Food Industry,” she wrote in a Facebook post after the food-dye event, “I know you didn’t want to do this. But it’s OK. You’ll have to anyway. I hope you enjoy this clip of me on the White House lawn with the head of the F.D.A. Love, Food Babe and her Army.”
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Kim Severson is an Atlanta-based reporter who covers the nation’s food culture and contributes to NYT Cooking.
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