Susan Greenhalgh. Soda Science: Making the World Safe for Coca-Cola. University of Chicago Press, 2024. 352 pages.
Christy Spackman (Arizona State University)
I recently returned from a trip to Mexico City. One grocery store visit in, and my husband remarked that the black “stop sign” labels on foods made it excessively clear how many offerings in a grocery store deserved a second think. A desire for popcorn had taken us there. The black stop signs on the various options shaped our choice—we went for the one that although it had less popcorn didn’t warn us of an excess of sodium or fat.
The front-of-the-house menu of health promises and warnings on offer in the contemporary grocery store (be it in Mexico, the E.U., or U.S.) isn’t the only side of the story. Labels and what they are allowed to communicate are deeply political objects shaped by a less-visible back-of-the-house set of players. As Susan Greenhalgh’s recent book, Soda Science: Making the World Safe for Coca-Cola (University of Chicago Press, 2024) demonstrates, the often invisible, back-of-the-house work goes well beyond what the general consumer might imagine. Specifically, Greenhalgh focuses on how the food industry (more generally), and Coca-Cola (specifically) worked from the 1990s through 2015 to reshape scientific and public discourse in the U.S. and China around obesity research to a form that was more friendly to producers of highly processed foods and beverages. They did so through the creation of the International Life Sciences Institute (ILSI), a corporate-funded, nonprofit think tanked tasked with “creat[ing] science to protect the interests of the food industry” (21).
Food-oriented scholarly readers who know the writings of Barry Popkin, Marion Nestle, and Michele Simon will find Greenhalgh’s critique of the profit-oriented science produced through corporate influence familiar. Similarly, readers working with the small but growing body of literature examining the creation of ignorance (agnotology) will recognize in these pages similarities between how the food industry mobilized science to defend its products and the work of pharmaceutical and tobacco companies to defend their own products. Soda Science adds to these accounts increased attention to how the non-corporate scientists themselves understood the science they were making, how they enacted ethics in the process, and how they helped industrial food players like Coca-Cola bring soda science into public policy all within a cross-cultural comparison between science conducted under democratic and authoritarian regimes. Greenhalgh does this by drawing on tax documents, publicly available records from ILSI including annual reports and conference proceedings, interviews, and participant observation. She demonstrates that the soda-defense science produced through these efforts differs in small but significant ways from mainstream public health science around the causes of obesity: 1. Its over-attention to energy expenditure (vs intake); 2. Its efforts to obfuscate corporate influence into the creation of that science; and 3. Its efforts to seed the insights from soda science into public policy in countries around the world.
Ostensibly written for a general audience, at 265 pages of core text (and 354 total pages) Soda Science felt long for its aims. In the effort to make the book more accessible, Greenhalgh moves much of the academic conversation to the endnotes and employs an “unmarked citations” approach to minimize reader encounters with endnote markings in the main text. This left me wishing for additional details and evidence in place of the careful signposting, framing paragraphs, and conclusions found in each section and subsection; the margins of my copy include multiple “show me, don’t tell me!” notes. As a teacher, I craved more theorization and theoretical engagement. For example, I wished for incorporation of foundational anthropological theories about gift economies into Greenhalgh’s discussion about the way that Coca-Cola subtly enrolled scientists as quasi-corporate scientists through access to research funds, conference and networking opportunities, and travel (e.g. pages 92-100). Despite my personal preferences, I suspect such authorial choices may render the book more accessible to interested undergraduate-level readers. This would prove especially true if an instructor included specific chapters or sections from Soda Science as discussion pieces to invite students into applying already-learned relevant foundational theories to contemporary cases. Given the ubiquity of soda in our daily lives, I anticipate such an exercise would prove extremely fruitful.
Those minor quibbles aside, any graduate student considering (or aiming for) a job at an R1- or R2-type institution would do well to spend some serious time with Soda Science as part of their own preparation for navigating the funding pressures imposed by the contemporary university system. Greenhalgh’s account only briefly touches on how reductions in U.S. federal and state funding for higher education and research have pushed individual researchers and institutions to court corporate funding sources. Yet the impact of such changes weave throughout Part One (Making Soda Science in the U.S.): undoubtedly the researchers’ institutions were as interested as the researchers in the $4 million of funding brought in by partnering with ILSI. My own experience entering as tenure-track professor at Arizona State University quickly revealed that the institution conceptualized each of us as a start-up tasked with producing a notable return on investment to support the institution via grants from federal, private, and corporate sources. For example, ASU currently imposes a 67.7% overhead on industry-funded projects. The industry-funded projects I have personally worked on have funded multiple undergraduate and graduate students, filling a gap created through years of state divestment. At the same time, potential publications from those projects have had to go through university-level review streams to ensure no violation of the corporate-university agreements I played no part in crafting. Universities’ needs for funding impose their own kind of institutional pressure, and shape the types of science researchers can produce when engaged in industry-funded projects. Greenlagh’s book thus opens a much-needed door for within-department/school/college conversations about how to ethically do research in times of funding scarcity. Perhaps I am jaded, but I suspect that whether such department, school, or college findings can successfully cross to the University administration’s offices undoubtedly depends on how egregiously current projects cross such ethical lines, as well as on federal and state funding levels.
Although Greenhalgh largely overlooks the institutional pressures that help make what she terms “corporate defense science” possible, she trenchantly highlights how other factors can quickly muddy researchers’ ethical commitments to producing science free from corporate influence. Her account of how the opportunity to travel, plan conferences that brought together emerging research networks, and emerging interpersonal relationships shaped how friendly a scientist is to corporate aims deeply resonated with my own experience: the circulation of ideas is central to academic success, and one is often more friendly to industrial food production once you’ve had to grapple with navigating between corporate profit motives and a desire to create a successful, tasty, and (hopefully healthy) product. In a world where academic institutions and their researchers are potentially even more dependent on industry then it was when ILSI was first founded, Soda Science offers fruitful ground for exploring how emerging and current researchers might better protect their science from “serving two masters”, to riff on Matthew 6:24’s warning.
Indeed, Greenhalgh’s account of the doing of ethics in both the U.S. and China highlights for current and future researchers the significant stakes at play in the making of science. As Steven Shapin notes, science has never been pure—rather it is created by “people with bodies, situated in time, space, culture, and society, and struggling for credibility and authority.” Soda Science reiterates Shapin’s claim through a contemporary lens. For example, Greenhalgh points out how researcher Steven Blair’s enthusiasm for the idea that exercise is medicine, as well as a lack of interest in Blair’s approach from national funding bodies, facilitated collaboration between Blair, ILSI, and ILSI’s primary internal Coca-Cola corporation lead. Similarly, she highlights the ways that the defunding of public health research in China made Chen Chunming, ILSI China’s founder, amenable to working with ILSI global, while pointing out how Chunming’s personal connections and ability to work within an authoritarian system enabled her to successfully insert ILSI-China’s priorities into Chinese health policy making.
Greenhalgh’s claims about the success of ILSI’s efforts and those of its associated academic colleagues to make soda science mainstream viscerally resounded with me. I remember my mother telling me that she had read that if you cut out 100 calories a day you could over time address unwanted weight gain (she thinks it was Parade magazine). For months she had been eating either a smaller potato (or, she noted, ¾ of a regular-sized one), half a piece of toast rather than a full one, etc., and was pleased to report that she’d finally shed her peri-menopausal weight. “The focus [of the new science of energy gaps] on individuals calculating their personal gaps and fine-tuning their daily routines” Greenhalgh notes, “quietly reinforced the notion that obesity was a problem for us as individuals to solve” (60). While my parents are of the cook-from-scratch/ grow-your-own-food generation who are largely immune to industrial food fads, the ideas Greenhalgh traces back to ILSI and its colleagues had clearly been successful: pgs. 60-67 included health insights that felt entirely intuitive and natural to me, despite the evidence before my eyes that they had clearly grown out of a multi-pronged, multi-decade effort to help protect corporate profits through changing public health discourse. Greenhalgh recaps this idea succinctly in her final pages: “as individuals made responsible for our own health, we need to constantly remind ourselves that our ideas about exercise and weight are partly if not largely corporate constructs” (258). Indeed.
Soda Science simultaneously suffers from and addresses one weakness I see in many conversations about (food) science, industry, and ethics. Specifically, how to navigate the thorny question of pragmatics in the conduct of science within specific political and cultural value systems. For example, many in the U.S. prefer the government take a largely hands-off approach to managing dietary supplements, despite the often tenuous dietary claims, and subsequent public understandings that have emerged as a result of corresponding regulatory loopholes. Yet Greenhalgh takes as an accepted good the idea that regulatory bodies limit, e.g. through sin taxes such as soda taxes, the ability of corporations to market their foods without restriction. Libertarians certainly disagree, as do those who claim that there is no way to account for taste. Yet history demonstrates that unfettered corporate pursuit of profits comes at the expense of consumer health—indeed, this is what led to the creation of the F.D.A. Despite past federal efforts to protect consumers, economic growth nonetheless seems to remain the guiding principle: on February 4, 2025 David Leonhardt and Ashley Wu noted in a NY Times article how U.S. economic policy “prioritizes economic growth” over pretty much all other factors (drawing on a recent State of the Nation report). Within that framing, one cannot help but wonder what, exactly, it makes sense for researchers to call for when it comes to industrial food corporations. Does it make sense for U.S.-based researchers ask for the complete dismantlement of industrial food given that U.S. federal priorities focus on GDP over all other things (as well as the fact that few of us wish to return to subsistence-farming lifestyles)? A change in mission from one that is profit-driven and responsible to shareholders to one that is outcome-driven and responsible to its clients? Or do researchers simply make do in the system that is? While Greenhalgh leaves the former questions largely unanswered for the U.S. in Part One, she offers a potential pathway forward in Part Two through her examination of ILSI’s ability to succeed in China, and more importantly, in her core concepts section in Appendix 1. Perhaps, given the increasingly authoritarian bent emerging in the first months of the second Trump administration, Greenhalgh’s omission was acutely prescient: We would do well to look at how scientists in China navigated knowledge-making under the authoritarian state, and work together as research associations to build on the core concepts Greenhalgh introduces to develop guidelines and precautions capable of catching and preventing the subtle enshrinement of corporate science into government policy and everyday life through our own research and that of others.
