Who is Food Babe?
What this video covers
This seven-minute reel, posted in September 2013, is Hari’s own highlight compilation — in the channel’s description, “a compilation of the most newsworthy & exciting moments” of her early career as the Food Babe. It functions as an origin-story video from her breakout year.
The arc it traces: in her early 20s, Hari was hospitalized with appendicitis and, she has said, found herself relying on multiple medications; she overhauled her diet and began investigating food ingredients. She started the Food Babe blog in 2011 — the name, she has said, was suggested by her husband Finley Clarke — while working as a management consultant at Accenture, and left the firm in 2012 to blog and advocate full-time.
The reel stitches together the clips that made her: an interview on the Kraft dye campaign (she says the petition had over 235,000 signatures, and that Yellow 5 and 6 are made from petroleum-derived chemicals like gasoline, asphalt, and tar — her claim); a local-news segment on her march to Kraft headquarters alongside food blogger Lisa Leake; a baby-carrots clip in which she tells viewers not to trade baby carrots for chips (noting processors spray them with a small amount of chlorine, about the same concentration as tap water, then rinse them); a GMO-labeling segment (she says 50+ countries require GMO labeling, including China and Russia, while the US does not); a convention-floor clip of her buttonholing policymakers including Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack; her appendix-and-prescription-drugs origin story; and a Charlotte cooking demo featuring her “Hari Shake” smoothie, homemade almond milk (one cup of almonds soaked overnight, four cups of water, blended and strained), baking powder without aluminum, and quinoa sushi made with coconut sugar.
Her first campaign victory, which she recounts in interviews: a local organic frozen yogurt chain whose “organic” marketing she investigated; after her post went viral, the company’s CEO wrote to her and removed the signage. By summer 2013 she was a national figure, with the Kraft dye petition launched that spring and the Chick-fil-A campaign behind her.
Key points
- Self-produced summer-2013 reel of her career highlights to that point.
- Traces her start: a health crisis in her early 20s, a diet overhaul, and the blog’s 2011 launch while she worked at Accenture.
- The reel’s contents, per the transcript: the Kraft dye petition drive (she cites 235,000+ signatures), the Chicago march to Kraft HQ with Lisa Leake, GMO labeling advocacy, her origin story, and a cooking demo with the “Hari Shake” and homemade almond milk.
- First win: an “organic” yogurt chain removed signage after her viral exposé post.
- Captures her momentum in 2013 — the year of the Kraft petition and the Chick-fil-A campaign.
- Useful as a primary-source snapshot of how Hari framed her own story at the moment she broke through.