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The first time it occurred to me that I might one day want to cover the food business as a journalist was sometime in the late '90s at a "health food" store in Northern California. I was looking at the snack chips, and there was one package bragging: "Contains Gingko Biloba."

Gingko was a hot nutritional supplement at the time. There was some flimsy evidence that it might improve human memory. It wasn't total snake oil, since there was some science behind it.