Dismantling food fear-mongering

To anyone,

Food is one of the most universal things about being human. It’s also one of the most fragmented.

There is an entire economy that sells solutions to fears it invents. “Chemicals” and long ingredient lists get feared. Products with healthy-sounding marketing get a free pass.

Truths and lies get mixed together, and both get passed on. Some of the people passing them mean well. Some of them don’t.

The debate never ends because of what makes science worth trusting.

• It doesn’t speak in absolutes.
• It shows where its claims come from.
• It says how sure it is.
• It corrects itself.
• It holds a high bar.

The people selling fear don’t have to do any of that.

Everyone cites their own cherry-picked sources. Much of what’s online is not done in good faith. True discourse can only be resolved on an even surface.

So we’re building one.

• We absorb all of the discourse.
• We weigh every plausible side on its merits.
• We reconcile it into one stance, with the sources attached.

Ceeya is a food scanner. It analyzes the products you care about, at the sizes you actually eat them, based on cited, authoritative science.

We’ve been fear-mongered ourselves. So have people we love. We’ve seen dangerous advice spread online. And the food scanners that exist have mostly fed the cycle, for virality, for money, and by spreading a distrust of health institutions that does the most harm of all.

I want a future where the confidently wrong cannot exist.