This piece on food misinformation is part of the weekly series “Growing Forward: Insights for Building Better Food and Agriculture Systems,” presented by the Global Food Institute at the George Washington University and the nonprofit organization Food Tank. Each installment highlights forward-thinking strategies to address today’s food and agriculture related challenges with innovative solutions. To view more pieces in the series, click here.

For my doctoral research, I studied how graphic cigarette warning labels effectively convey health risks. The premise behind these warnings is deeply rooted in cognitive psychology and behavioral marketing—an understanding that humans are fundamentally poor at conceptualizing abstract dangers or anticipating the long-term impacts of their actions without concrete visual cues. This cognitive limitation applies just as strongly to our food system today.

Close your eyes and imagine grocery stores where produce costs triple, with a sparse selection and visible insect damage. This isn’t dystopian fiction—it’s a likely future if we turn away from the technologies that misinformation campaigns routinely demonize. While people readily fear ingredients in conventional foods after seeing alarming social media posts, they rarely visualize what abandoning modern agricultural practices would actually mean. The consequences would hit lower-income populations hardest, forcing even more difficult choices between malnutrition and unaffordable food.

The current wave of food anxiety stems, in large part, from food misinformation, resulting in a misunderstanding of hazard versus risk. A substance can be hazardous at high doses but pose minimal risk at typical exposure levels. Yet social media influencers often highlight studies where ingredients caused harm in animals—at doses hundreds or thousands of times higher than any human would consume. You’ve seen the social media posts? A person frantically running around a grocery store, reading the ingredient lists, and throwing around words like “toxic,” “artificial,” “cancer-causing,” etc.—the reality is, unless you are a rat being exposed to a football field worth of aspartame, you probably needn’t worry about artificial sweetener causing cancer in adults. In that same vein, a 2019 IFIC survey found that 20 percent of U.S. consumers avoid certain produce due to pesticide concerns, even though residues are far below safety thresholds—pushing people to pricier organic alternatives, despite the fact that organic produce is grown with pesticides, too!

Read the full article about food misinformation by Jessica Steier at Food Tank.