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The justices of the U.S. Supreme Court tussled over the meaning of the 1978 Pregnancy Discrimination Act Wednesday. The issue is whether the law allows companies to suspend pregnant workers, while allowing other workers with temporary disabilities to remain on the job.

In 1976, the Supreme Court ruled that a company that didn't include pregnancy in its disability plan was not discriminating based on gender. The Court said that such a plan was simply omitting coverage for one disability. Congress promptly overruled the Court by passing a law banning discrimination based on pregnancy.

Since then, however, lower courts have disagreed about what the law means.

Enter Peggy Young, a driver who sued the United Parcel Service for suspending both her job and health insurance during her pregnancy. She contends that UPS violated the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, the PDA, by treating pregnant workers differently from other workers with temporary disabilities. Young says she was ready and willing to work, and that her route required her to pick up and deliver mainly envelopes and small packages. But because her doctor recommended she not lift more than 20 pounds, she was laid off for the duration of her pregnancy.

"Peggy Young was seven years old when the Pregnancy Discrimination Act became law," said Young's lawyer Sharon Fast Gustafson on the steps of the Supreme Court. "And here we are 36 years later asking the Court to hold simply that the Pregnancy Discrimination Act means what is says." Namely, that pregnant workers must be treated "the same" as other workers with temporary disabilities. It's an argument that both pro-life and pro-choice groups backed before the Court.

But inside the Supreme Court chamber, conservative justices were not particularly receptive.

"You make it sound as if the only condition that was not accommodated was a lifting restriction because of pregnancy," said Justice Anthony Kennedy, and that's "really giving a misimpression."

Arguing on Young's behalf, University of Michigan law professor Samuel Bagenstos replied that UPS accommodates not just those injured on the job, but large classes of workers with other disabilities, including workers who lose their driving certificates because of injuries and illnesses that take place off the job.

Law

Did UPS Discriminate Against A Pregnant Worker By Letting Her Go?

You're calling for "most favored nation treatment," for pregnant employees, Justice Antonin Scalia retorted, meaning if you give a benefit "to any other class of employees" you have to give it to the pregnant worker too.

That prompted Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, later on, to remark that the UPS's policy amounted instead to "least favored" status for pregnant workers.

Solicitor General Donald Verrilli, representing the federal government and supporting Young's argument, contended that the law is actually quite narrow. "There's only one thing that an employer can't do," under the PDA, he said, and that is to "treat pregnancy-related medical conditions worse than other conditions" that similarly limit a non-pregnant employee's ability to work.

Verrilli noted that in deciding to protect some classes of people, Congress makes choices, and here the choice was to protect pregnant women. Congress didn't protect everyone who is injured off the job, he said. It chose to protect those with pregnancy-related medical conditions.

UPS has in fact changed its policy on accommodating pregnant workers; the new policy is to begin in January. But the company still defends the old policy. Making that argument was lawyer Caitlin Halligan. She urged the Supreme Court to leave any further refinement of the law to "the democratic process," and she noted that nine states have added protections for pregnant employees.

"For the democratic process to work as it should," shot back Justice Elena Kagan, the Supreme Court has to properly interpret the law. "And what we know about the statute," Kagan said, is that it was "supposed to be ensuring that [pregnant workers] wouldn't be unfairly excluded from the workplace."

Halligan, however, contended that the UPS policy was well within the law. She argued that the company had a "facially neutral policy" that accommodated workers disabled on the job, but did not accommodate "anyone with an injury or condition" sustained off the job.

"The employer will always have a facially neutral policy," countered Justice Stephen Breyer, it just "happens to hit the pregnant women and four other people," and "that's the kind of thing" Congress was "trying to stop in this statute."

Halligan disputed the facts as represented by Young's lawyers. She said it was not true that non-pregnant workers routinely got dispensations for light work when they sustained off-the-job injuries.

"Is there really a dispute," asked Justice Samuel Alito, "that if a UPS driver fell off his all-terrain vehicle" at home on the weekend, he would not get a light-duty accommodation?

Halligan replied that there is no dispute, that the worker would have to take leave.

But in rebuttal, Young's lawyer said that the record shows UPS did in fact make accommodations for employees who sustained sports and other off-the-job accidental injuries, as well as illnesses.

In an age when consumers have become increasingly suspicious of processed food, the Internet has become a powerful platform for activists who want to hold Big Food accountable.

One of the highest-profile of these new food crusaders is Vani Hari, better known by her online moniker, Food Babe. Among her victories: a petition that nudged Kraft to drop the artificial orange color from its mac and cheese, and another one that helped get Subway to do away with the common bread additive azodicarbonamide — which Hari noted was also used in making yoga mats.

To followers on her website and on social media, who are known as the Food Babe Army, Hari is a hero. And with a book and TV development deal in the works, her platform is about to get a lot bigger.

But as her profile grows, so too do the criticisms of her approach. Detractors, many of them academics, say she stokes unfounded fears about what's in our food to garner publicity. Steve Novella, a Yale neuroscientist and prominent pseudoscience warrior, among others, has dubbed Hari the "Jenny McCarthy of food" after the celebrity known for championing thoroughly debunked claims that vaccines cause autism.

The Salt

Subway Phasing Out Bread Additive After Blogger Flags Health Concerns

Hari is a self-styled consumer advocate and adviser on healthful eating. Her website, FoodBabe.com, offers recipes, tips for nutritious dining while traveling, and, for $17.99 a month, "eating guides" that include recipes, meal calendars and shopping lists. But she's best-known for her food investigations, frequently shared on social media — posts in which she flags what she deems to be questionable ingredients.

Take, for example, Hari's campaign urging beer-makers to reveal the ingredients in their brews. Among the ingredients that concerned Hari was propylene glycol, a chemical used in antifreeze. But, as cancer surgeon and blogger David Gorski writes, the product used in some beers to stabilize foam is actually propylene glycol alginate — which is derived from kelp. "It is not the same chemical as propylene glycol, not even close. It is not antifreeze," he wrote.

Another beer ingredient that got Hari up in arms? Isinglass, or dried fish swim bladders, which may sound, well, fishy, but has been used to clarify beers for well over a century. Such mix-ups prompted historian Maureen Ogle, the author of Ambitious Brew: The Story of American Beer, to dissect Hari's claims, point by point, in a post on her site titled "What's In YOUR Beer? Or, The Dangers of Dumbassery."

The Salt

Just What Is In Pumpkin Spice Flavor? (Hint: Not Pumpkin)

Hari's approach capitalizes on growing consumer distrust of both Big Food companies and their unfamiliar, industrial-sounding ingredients, and of regulators' ability to oversee them effectively. Some of these chemicals and additives may indeed be questionable, but food scientists would argue that nearly all are safe. So why do food companies respond to her demands, if they have nothing to hide?

Because, Gorski writes, "companies live and die by public perception. It's far easier to give a blackmailer like Hari what she wants than to try to resist or to counter her propaganda by educating the public."

Critics note that Hari lacks credentials in nutrition or food science; she's a former consultant who studied computer science. Hari declined to be interviewed for this story; through her publicist, she told NPR she isn't speaking to media until her new book is released in February. But when the Charlotte Observer asked her about such criticisms, Hari answered, "I've never claimed to be a nutritionist. I'm an investigator."

But that lack of training often leads her to misinterpret peer-reviewed research and technical details about food chemistry, nutrition and health, says Kevin Folta, a professor of horticultural sciences at the University of Florida and vocal online critic of Hari. "She really conflates the science," he tells The Salt.

"If anything, she's created more confusion about food, more confusion about the role of chemicals and additives," Folta says.

More recently, as we've reported, Hari's attacks on the lack of pumpkin in Starbucks' Pumpkin Spice lattes prompted the Institute of Food Technologists to release a video explaining the chemicals that replicate that squash flavor in a cup of Joe.

"What she does is exploit the scientific ignorance and fear of her followers," says Kavin Senapathy, an anti-pseudoscience blogger who frequently challenges the assertions in Hari's posts. "And most of us are in agreement that we simply can't accept that."

Senapathy and other online critics, using parody names like Science Babe, Chow Babe and Food Hunk, have taken to Twitter and Facebook in an organized effort to engage with Hari's followers and counter her scientific claims.

So why not simply ignore Hari? Because her reach is growing: Last month her op-ed was featured in The New York Times' Room for Debate section. In October, Experience Life magazine, a health and fitness publication, featured her on its cover. That decision prompted critics to bombard the magazine's Amazon page with single-star reviews for putting "an uneducated fearmonger" on its cover.

And this fall, Hari addressed the University of Florida as part of a lecture series for freshmen on "The Good Food Revolution." That talk prompted Folta to write a scathing blog post about her visit in which he accused her of being "afraid of science and intellectual engagement."

He was angry that her talk didn't include a question and answer period in which he could challenge her on some of her scientific assertions. "When you bring in a self-appointed expert, a celebrity more than a scientific figure, it does have the effect of undoing the science we are trying to instill in our students," Folta told me.

Ultimately, Folta says, he thinks Hari's heart is in the right place. "She does seem to come from an honest intention of wanting people to think about good food choices and health." But, he says, "it's a question of science."

Other critics are less generous in their assessment, noting that Hari isn't just raising the alarm about food additives. Through affiliated marketing partnerships, she is also making money by referring her website readers to organic and non-GMO food brands, as Ad Age has reported. Indeed, the Food Babe brand, a registered LLC, has become a full-time job for Hari, who also earns fees from speaking appearances.

"Unfortunately, the Web is cluttered with people who really have no idea what they are talking about giving advice as if it were authoritative, and often that advice is colored by either an ideological agenda or a commercial interest," Yale's Novella writes on his blog. "The Food Babe is now the poster child for this phenomenon."

Hari has brushed off such questions about her motivations and scientific proficiency. "I know that I'm doing the right thing," she told the Observer. "I'm trying to help people understand things that no one else has spoken out about."

But the message of Hari's campaigns boils down to "this toxic secret thing they are putting in my food is making me [sick]," says John Coupland, a food scientist at Penn State, in an email to The Salt.

"I personally think this is largely a distraction from more real concerns" about the food system, says Coupland. Problems, he says, like advertising aimed at kids, the environmental impacts of food production, food waste and hunger.

food chemistry

food babe

big food

food additives

Yukiko Koyama kicked around Tokyo for a few years looking for the right job. For a while, she designed costumes for classical ballet dancers. But she longed to work in the great outdoors, and to find a job she could really sink her teeth into.

Two years ago, she found just the right thing for her: sinking a chainsaw's teeth into the pine forests of Matsumoto City in landlocked Nagano prefecture. Forests there on the central island of Honshu have been growing since the end of World War II, and many are in need of weeding.

On a recent windy day, Koyama deftly sliced through big pine logs like a sushi chef cutting up a tuna roll.

i i

During her lunch break, Koyama says she is treated equally and fairly at her job, and wishes to stay in this line of work, even after she has children. Yo Nagaya/NPR hide caption

itoggle caption Yo Nagaya/NPR

During her lunch break, Koyama says she is treated equally and fairly at her job, and wishes to stay in this line of work, even after she has children.

Yo Nagaya/NPR

Koyama, 35, is one of about 3,000 women in the government's Women's Forestry Program. It trains and certifies women to work in the logging industry and pays timber companies half the cost of employing women for up to three years.

"We had never even considered hiring women for this kind of work before," says Ryoichi Ogasawara, boss of the timber mill where Koyama works. The mill makes plywood, flooring and paper pulp.

"But after we started hiring women, our workplace environment has become more lively and friendly," Ogasawara adds.

The program is part of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's wider effort — dubbed Abenomics — designed to yank Japan's economy out of two decades of stagnation. This month, Japanese voters will head to the polls in snap elections portrayed by Abe as a referendum on his economic policies.

Japan's workforce is shrinking and aging, and immigration is strictly limited. Slightly less than half of Japanese women participate in the workforce, the lowest rate of any developed economy. Only 11 percent of the country's lawmakers are women.

" 'Creating a society in which women shine' has consistently been one of my highest-priority issues since the launch of my administration in December 2012," Abe said in a speech in September. "Japan has set a target of having women occupy 30 percent of leadership positions by 2020."

“ Abenomics has done nothing for women, children and low-income people. Perhaps the top 1 percent has benefited, but the majority of working women are temporary or contract workers, and for ordinary people, there's been no benefit.

- Editor Tokiko Kashiwara

But Tokiko Kashiwara, editor of the Tokyo-based Women's Democratic Journal, doubts Abe can achieve these goals.

"Abenomics has done nothing for women, children and low-income people," she says. "Perhaps the top 1 percent has benefited, but the majority of working women are temporary or contract workers, and for ordinary people, there's been no benefit."

Kashiwara says Japanese women are paid half of what men get for the same work. Many are mired in poverty. Finding child care and returning to their jobs after maternity leave remains difficult for many Japanese women. Japan has an equal opportunity employment law that bans discrimination against women, but Kashiwara says it has failed to solve the problem.

Abe appointed a record-tying five female ministers to his Cabinet. Two of them have resigned after scandals.

Kashiwara says that despite the rhetoric, Abe and the female ministers still hold very traditional views about women in the workplace. She says he wants women to serve GDP growth, and not vice versa.

The Changing Lives Of Women

IMF's Lagarde: Women In Workforce Key To Healthy Economies

"I think what Abe wants to do is to use women as part of the country's economic forces, by having us give birth and raise children, according to Japanese women's traditional role," she says.

Back in Matsumoto, lumberjack Yukiko Koyama takes off her hardhat and chaps, lets down her hair and breaks for lunch.

Abe's "womenomics" program may be facing big challenges. But Koyama says she is treated fairly and equally. She says she intends to stay in this line of work, although perhaps in a different capacity later.

"After I have children, I will want to stay in the forestry business, but it doesn't have to be wielding a chainsaw," she says. "It may be creating forests, planting trees or maintaining trees."

Correction Dec. 3, 2014

A previous Web version of this story incorrectly referred to the Women's Democratic Journal as the Women's Economic Journal.

Shinzo Abe

Japan elections

Japan

In an age when consumers have become increasingly suspicious of processed food, the Internet has become a powerful platform for activists who want to hold Big Food accountable.

One of the highest-profile of these new food crusaders is Vani Hari, better known by her online moniker, Food Babe. Among her victories: a petition that nudged Kraft to drop the artificial orange color from its mac and cheese, and another one that helped get Subway to do away with the common bread additive azodicarbonamide — which Hari noted was also used in making yoga mats.

To followers on her website and on social media, who are known as the Food Babe Army, Hari is a hero. And with a book and TV development deal in the works, her platform is about to get a lot bigger.

But as her profile grows, so too do the criticisms of her approach. Detractors, many of them academics, say she stokes unfounded fears about what's in our food to garner publicity. Steve Novella, a Yale neuroscientist and prominent pseudoscience warrior, among others, has dubbed Hari the "Jenny McCarthy of food" after the celebrity known for championing thoroughly debunked claims that vaccines cause autism.

The Salt

Subway Phasing Out Bread Additive After Blogger Flags Health Concerns

Hari is a self-styled consumer advocate and adviser on healthful eating. Her website, FoodBabe.com, offers recipes, tips for nutritious dining while traveling, and, for $17.99 a month, "eating guides" that include recipes, meal calendars and shopping lists. But she's best-known for her food investigations, frequently shared on social media — posts in which she flags what she deems to be questionable ingredients.

Take, for example, Hari's campaign urging beer-makers to reveal the ingredients in their brews. Among the ingredients that concerned Hari was propylene glycol, a chemical used in antifreeze. But, as cancer surgeon and blogger David Gorski writes, the product used in some beers to stabilize foam is actually propylene glycol alginate — which is derived from kelp. "It is not the same chemical as propylene glycol, not even close. It is not antifreeze," he wrote.

Another beer ingredient that got Hari up in arms? Isinglass, or dried fish swim bladders, which may sound, well, fishy, but has been used to clarify beers for well over a century. Such mix-ups prompted historian Maureen Ogle, the author of Ambitious Brew: The Story of American Beer, to dissect Hari's claims, point by point, in a post on her site titled "What's In YOUR Beer? Or, The Dangers of Dumbassery."

The Salt

Just What Is In Pumpkin Spice Flavor? (Hint: Not Pumpkin)

Hari's approach capitalizes on growing consumer distrust of both Big Food companies and their unfamiliar, industrial-sounding ingredients, and of regulators' ability to oversee them effectively. Some of these chemicals and additives may indeed be questionable, but food scientists would argue that nearly all are safe. So why do food companies respond to her demands, if they have nothing to hide?

Because, Gorski writes, "companies live and die by public perception. It's far easier to give a blackmailer like Hari what she wants than to try to resist or to counter her propaganda by educating the public."

Critics note that Hari lacks credentials in nutrition or food science; she's a former consultant who studied computer science. Hari declined to be interviewed for this story; through her publicist, she told NPR she isn't speaking to media until her new book is released in February. But when the Charlotte Observer asked her about such criticisms, Hari answered, "I've never claimed to be a nutritionist. I'm an investigator."

But that lack of training often leads her to misinterpret peer-reviewed research and technical details about food chemistry, nutrition and health, says Kevin Folta, a professor of horticultural sciences at the University of Florida and vocal online critic of Hari. "She really conflates the science," he tells The Salt.

"If anything, she's created more confusion about food, more confusion about the role of chemicals and additives," Folta says.

More recently, as we've reported, Hari's attacks on the lack of pumpkin in Starbucks' Pumpkin Spice lattes prompted the Institute of Food Technologists to release a video explaining the chemicals that replicate that squash flavor in a cup of Joe.

"What she does is exploit the scientific ignorance and fear of her followers," says Kavin Senapathy, an anti-pseudoscience blogger who frequently challenges the assertions in Hari's posts. "And most of us are in agreement that we simply can't accept that."

Senapathy and other online critics, using parody names like Science Babe, Chow Babe and Food Hunk, have taken to Twitter and Facebook in an organized effort to engage with Hari's followers and counter her scientific claims.

So why not simply ignore Hari? Because her reach is growing: Last month her op-ed was featured in The New York Times' Room for Debate section. In October, Experience Life magazine, a health and fitness publication, featured her on its cover. That decision prompted critics to bombard the magazine's Amazon page with single-star reviews for putting "an uneducated fearmonger" on its cover.

And this fall, Hari addressed the University of Florida as part of a lecture series for freshmen on "The Good Food Revolution." That talk prompted Folta to write a scathing blog post about her visit in which he accused her of being "afraid of science and intellectual engagement."

He was angry that her talk didn't include a question and answer period in which he could challenge her on some of her scientific assertions. "When you bring in a self-appointed expert, a celebrity more than a scientific figure, it does have the effect of undoing the science we are trying to instill in our students," Folta told me.

Ultimately, Folta says, he thinks Hari's heart is in the right place. "She does seem to come from an honest intention of wanting people to think about good food choices and health." But, he says, "it's a question of science."

Other critics are less generous in their assessment, noting that Hari isn't just raising the alarm about food additives. Through affiliated marketing partnerships, she is also making money by referring her website readers to organic and non-GMO food brands, as Ad Age has reported. Indeed, the Food Babe brand, a registered LLC, has become a full-time job for Hari, who also earns fees from speaking appearances.

"Unfortunately, the Web is cluttered with people who really have no idea what they are talking about giving advice as if it were authoritative, and often that advice is colored by either an ideological agenda or a commercial interest," Yale's Novella writes on his blog. "The Food Babe is now the poster child for this phenomenon."

Hari has brushed off such questions about her motivations and scientific proficiency. "I know that I'm doing the right thing," she told the Observer. "I'm trying to help people understand things that no one else has spoken out about."

But the message of Hari's campaigns boils down to "this toxic secret thing they are putting in my food is making me [sick]," says John Coupland, a food scientist at Penn State, in an email to The Salt.

"I personally think this is largely a distraction from more real concerns" about the food system, says Coupland. Problems, he says, like advertising aimed at kids, the environmental impacts of food production, food waste and hunger.

food chemistry

food babe

big food

food additives