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TechnoViews #19 ‘Soda Science. Making the World Safe for Coca-Cola’ | Susan Greenhalgh (Harvard University)
Episode 19
Monday, 24 March, 2025
Susan GREENHALGH, interviewed by Gonçalo SANTOS and Jun ZHANG on 28/February/2025ABOUT THIS EPISODEIn this episode, anthropologist and science studies specialist Susan Greenhalgh talks about her most recent book, Soda Science. Making the World Safe for Coca-Cola, taking TechnoViews listeners deep inside the secret world of corporate science, where powerful companies and allied academic scientists mold research to meet industry needs. The episode begins with a brief account of how industry leader Coca-Cola mobilized allies in academia to create a soda-defense science that would protect the industry’s profits by advocating physical exercise, not dietary restraint, as the priority solution to the problem of obesity. The goal of soda science was to use science to discourage the introduction of restrictive public policies like soda taxes that would threaten the revenues of giant soda companies like Coca-Cola. The author then explains why soda science should not be seen as fake science; it is real science, conducted by real and eminent scientists, but distorted to serve corporate benefits. This corruption of the science of obesity raises crucial questions about conflicts of interest in scientific research and the cunning ways giant corporations like Coca-Cola come to shape our diets, lifestyles, and health to their own needs. The author then establishes a contrast between the effects of soda science in China and in the US, and she then discusses some of the biggest challenges she faced during her research in these two countries on such a sensitive topic. Finally, the author discusses the importance of anthropology and the social sciences in the current era of misinformation and disinformation, sharing a few stories that were not included in the book.FEATURED AUTHORSusan GREENHALGH is the John King and Wilma Cannon Fairbank Professor of Chinese Society Emerita at Harvard University. An anthropologist, her interests lie in the entanglements of state, corporation, science, and society, and their consequences for human health and social justice writ large. She is author of Just One-Child: Science and Policy in Deng's China; and Cultivating Global Citizens: Population in the Rise of China; co-author of Governing China's Population: From Leninist to Neoliberal Biopolitics; and co-editor of Can Science and Technology Save China?, among other titles.BOOK WEBSITEGreenhalgh, Susan. 2024. Soda Science. Making the World Safe for Coca-Cola. University of Chicago Press, 352 pages | 18 halftones, 7 tables | 6 x 9https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/S/bo221451790.html
