For almost a year now, I’ve been keeping TLT readers updated on a developing scandal at the Cornell Food and Brand Lab, headed by Dr. Brian Wansink.
This week, BuzzFeed reporter Stephanie M. Lee, who has been doggedly pursuing this story, published a blockbuster piece entitled “Sliced and Diced: The Inside Story Of How An Ivy League Food Scientist Turned Shoddy Data Into Viral Studies.” In the story, Lee shares a series of internal Cornell Food & Brand Lab emails that clearly document how Wansink and his colleagues endlessly massaged low-quality data out of a express desire create grabby “findings” likely to garner media attention. They also at times purposely sought out less prestigious journals to publish their studies, seemingly in an attempt to evade scrutiny of their questionable data analysis.
In a separate BuzzFeed story, Lee also reveals that one of Wansink’s former colleagues has been dismissed* left his academic post at New Mexico State, possibly because of his work for Wansink.
In light of Lee’s excellent reporting and all of the previous red flags raised by others last year about Wansink and his work, it’s astonishing to me that Cornell University has yet to take any meaningful action on this issue.
And going back to my own post published almost exactly a year ago — “BREAKING: Can We Trust the Data Behind Smarter Lunchrooms?”, there’s still the troubling fact that the U.S. Department of Agriculture bought into Wansink’s ideas so wholeheartedly, it invested $20 million in taxpayer dollars to fund and implement Wansink’s “Smarter Lunchrooms” in school cafeterias nationwide. As previously reported here, some of the key studies behind that program are among those that have now been thoroughly discredited.
Stay tuned.
[*EDITORIAL UPDATE – 3/1/18 10:30am CST: It was correctly pointed out to me that we don’t yet know if Wansink’s colleague was dismissed from his post at New Mexico State or if he left of his own accord. Apologies for the inaccuracy, which has now been corrected.]
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Lindsey Parsons says
Thanks for continuing to report on this. It’s frustrating to continue to see people in my district pushing this stuff as a main focus instead of focusing on improving the food served in the cafeteria despite the evidence that the work was shoddy.