The video has the aggressive title of “Shocking secrets of the food industry,” and it opens with a depiction of Snow White biting into an apple and falling into a coma. Unfortunately, it’s gone viral, netting 80 million views in the first two weeks after being published by the Facebook page 5-Minute Crafts.
The problem is: The video is wrong. And not just a little, change-in-perspective wrong, but really wrong wrong. In an article published Tuesday, Snopes details every twist and turn in the video to show just how misleading it was meant to be. As Snopes says, “None of the items described in the video could accurately be described as either shocking or secret.”
The Snopes piece does a great job of putting the video’s claims into real context, from the waxy coatings on apples, to the use of regulated and safe food colorings, to the “genetic memory” of honey. And, of course, Snopes cries foul about 5-Minute Crafts’ video quite often.
“This video is so misleading that it appears almost proud of its own abject ignorance and total lack of intellectual curiosity,” Snopes says in its analysis.
This is the second time this summer that Snopes has gone to bat for the food-production industries. The fact-checking site set the record straight on a trending image where Facebookers talked about a “cow crusher” literally being used to crush cows, to the point of saying that that’s how ground beef gets made. The reality, of course, is that the device is used to keep an animal steady so that medical, hoof-trimming, and other services can be administered safely.
