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PORTSIDE CULTURE

FIGHTING FOOD MISINFORMATION  
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Ed Finkel
July 16, 2025
ift.org
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_ To counter science denial, lead with empathy, communication experts
advise. _

From left: Mary Ellen Kuhn, Charlie Arnot, and Veronica Jaramillo,
Food technology

 

To successfully combat science denial and misinformation in the age of
social media and online influencers, food scientists need to connect
on an emotional level and find shared values before attempting to
pepper people with facts, said panelists during a Hot Topics Studio
session on Wednesday at IFT FIRST.

“You can’t just talk louder and harder, and offer more facts. You
can do that, but that’s not strategic,” said Charlie Arnot,
founder and CEO of both The Center for Food Integrity and the Look
East strategic communications firm, during the session titled “Myth
Busting Misinformation: How to Combat Science Denial,” moderated by
Mary Ellen Kuhn, executive editor at _Food Technology_ magazine.
“You can embrace and validate someone’s concerns without
validating their misinformation. That gives you permission to engage
as a trusted, credible authority that they will then interpret as
being relevant and valuable to them.”

As fewer people get their news from traditional sources and more turn
to online and social media outlets—especially true among younger
generations—everyone ends up in an echo chamber of their own
preexisting beliefs, said Veronica Jaramillo, cofounder of The Food
Truth Project and a food science graduate student at McGill
University.

“The algorithm is working a little too well for our own good,” she
said. “You’re teaching the algorithm to bring on this information
that you’re already believing. It’s very rare that you find
something in your feed that’s contrary to your own beliefs.” And
when people do, they often greet that information with skepticism or
outright hostility, she added.

From the time of Galileo in the 1600s until the dawn of the 21st
century, science was widely regarded as the arbiter of truth, yet
reliant on communications technologies to spread those truths—such
as print publications, radio, or television—which had “some level
of informal or formal social control,” Arnot said. The launch of
Facebook in 2004 fundamentally changed communication patterns to a
“many-to-many” dynamic, which provided “the opportunity to have
an infinite number of microcultures” and a “dispersion of
authority,” he said.

In spite of that, a recent survey of consumers that asked who they
trusted the most on food and nutrition information found that the top
three answers were registered dietitians, primary care physicians, and
food scientists—a result that heartened Jaramillo. “I thought No.
1 would be social media influencers,” she said. “We’re still in
the game. Does that mean people are getting most information from
[those three groups]? No.”

To nudge their way toward being more front-of-mind, food scientists
need to listen and ask questions—and then share information, Arnot
said. “It’s not about correcting individuals,” he said. “If
your pitch is, ‘You’re wrong, and here’s why,’ you’re going
to immediately alienate the person. If you listen, ask, listen, ask,
and then share, you will find a point of connection. … It’s about
finding that point of connection and engaging in meaningful dialogue.
That takes practice because we’ve been trained to communicate the
science: ‘Here’s what the research says.’”

Scientists communicate with each other by sharing data findings and
meta-analyses, Jaramillo agreed. “We’re not taught, as scientists,
to communicate with the general public. People don’t respond to
that,” she said. “If you say, ‘Look at this data,’ [they
respond by saying], ‘Why should I care? This doesn’t impact me.
Science is for scientists.’ It feeds into the narrative that science
and scientists are not accessible. People think scientists are on this
high horse and only able to speak to each other.”

Instead of saying “look at this data,” scientists need to tell a
story, Jaramillo said, recalling a person who buttonholed her after a
workshop to say they didn’t like GMOs because, “I think it changes
our DNA.” She listened, asked questions, and understood better what
made the person wary—and then told them about Golden Rice, a
genetically modified strain that has saved the lives of an estimated
40,000 to 100,000 children who had been facing severe vitamin A
deficiency. “That’s a tangible story that connects with their
values,” she said. “It’s an example of something we can give
them that’s not just, ‘Here are the facts; here are the
facts.’”

Another piece of advice Jaramillo shared: don’t get too emotionally
invested or take people’s reactions too personally, which she
acknowledged struggling with herself. “I felt like an attack against
science was an attack against me: ‘You don’t believe in the work
I’m doing,’” she said. “I wanted to scream at the top of my
lungs. … I get frustrated with people who don’t understand the
safety protocols behind our food. But I can’t expect everyone to
have the food science background I do. It’s our job—not just the
communicators, but everyone in the food industry—to communicate
better about what we do.”ft

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ED FINKEL is a freelance journalist based in Evanston, Ill.
([email protected]).

 

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