How Vani Hari, the Blogging ‘Food Babe,’ Became a Trump-Era Megastar

Vani Hari, who branded herself the Food Babe back in 2011 when she started blogging about green smoothies and buttocks-firming exercises, stood at a podium in the great hall of the Department of Health and Human Services last month in a sequined white tweed suit.

The stage behind her was filled with mothers like herself who have become the face of the “Make America Healthy Again” movement. In front of her were reporters assembled to hear the government’s strategy to eradicate petroleum-based food dyes.

And there, gazing up at her from the front row, was the nation’s health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who helped transform Ms. Hari, once voted one of the sexiest Democrats in Charlotte, N.C., into the Taylor Swift of the MAHA moms.

Ms. Hari took a deep and very audible breath.

“For over a decade I said the F.D.A. is asleep at the wheel,” she said. “Now I can stop saying that.”

Ms. Hari, a 46-year-old former business consultant with a computer science degree, can barely believe that after 14 years of food activism in which she chewed a yoga mat to make a point about the chemicals in Subway sandwich bread, she has surfed the wellness wave all the way to the center of the Trump administration’s food agenda.