Apple Cider Vinegar, 'Healing' Juices and Porkie Pies
A wellness scammer and her cookbook of lies are on the menu tonight
What to watch tonight: Apple Cider Vinegar (Netflix)
In this age of the scammer, you think you’ve heard it all, but they really broke the mould with Belle Gibson.
Perhaps you’ve already heard of Gibson, or @healing-belle as she was then known, the Australian Instagram influencer who faked having a brain tumour, a stroke, heart surgery and more cancer, which she then claimed to have cured herself of by eating healthy organic foods. After launching an app and a cookbook based around her health “journey” — and claiming she had turned away from chemotherapy and radiotherapy for her terminal cancer — she was outed in 2014 as having made the whole thing up. And, she might have gotten away with it for longer, were it not for her whistleblower mate and the investigative work of two journalists (Beau Donelly and Nick Toscano) who discovered that she had also lied about donating $300,000 to charity.
A tell-all TV interview followed in which she admitted she had never had cancer, but then she muddied the waters further by claiming she was the real victim (watch this incredible clip where she can’t even answer the simple question of how old she is), and she’s apparently still paid nothing of the $400,000 fine handed to her in 2017 by Melbourne’s federal court. In shades of the Rachel Dolezal story, she was bizarrely last seen in 2020 in a video of Melbourne’s Ethiopian community, claiming now to be called “Sabontu”, and referring to Ethiopia as “back home.”
Gibson’s story has now been turned into a bright and gripping dramatisation on Netflix called Apple Cider Vinegar. And while we’re clearly in the era of these online scammers having a choke hold on the streamers – see Anna Delvey’s similar origin story, Inventing Anna, or the Elizabeth Holmes/Theranos scandal, The Dropout, The Tinder Swindler, right back to Catfish and its subsequent reality spinoffs – it’s a symptom of the times that so many grifters have got away with these cons, and hence why these stories are so prevalent on screen right now.
If you want to get into it deeper, I’ve written a bigger piece for BBC Culture on the whole, unbelievable story, and why there’s actually the need for all these fictionalised versions of true scam stories, to hammer home just how incredibly sceptical we still all need to be of what’s presented as fact online. But in the meantime, you should definitely watch the engaging and fast-paced six-part series – Kaitlyn Dever (soon to be seen in The Last Of Us series 2) is brilliant at portraying this narcissistic and duplicitous woman, while the stories of Milla Blake (played by Alycia Debnam-Carey, and based on another real life wellness blogger, Jessica Ainscough, who actually did have cancer) and Lucy (Tilda Cobham-Hervey) are heartbreaking and highlight the tragic and dangerous consequences of being duped by fake wellness gurus.
Although we never get to the bottom of why Gibson carried out this cruel hoax, it’s perhaps best summed up by the apt outro tune of episode five, Flagpole Sitta: “I’m not sick / But I’m not well”.
What do they eat and drink on Apple Cider Vinegar?
A lot of attention is shone on the shonky “science” of the Hirsch Institute in the series, a fictional health and wellness centre that’s said to be based on the Gerson Institute in Mexico, which claims hourly fresh juices and coffee enemas can “heal” the body of diseases “naturally”.
So, there’s an awful lot of juicing going on in the series – Milla even creates and hawks her own “healing” juice line at one point – alongside Gibson’s own cooking, for her cookbook, The Whole Pantry, which was published in Australia in 2013. In the dramatisation, Gibson bullies her way into cooking for the publisher, Julia Gibbs, at home, making her a miniature vegan peach tarts. “I chose it because I used to pick the peaches at my grandma’s house,” she says. “She used to have an orchard, just outside Brisbane”. “Was that bullshit about your grandma?” Gibbs asks later, adding: “Peaches don’t grow well in Brisbane. Stone fruit, they like a cold winter.” This could have been the moment of Gibson’s downfall, but she styles it out, covering up her lie with yet another stinker.
This scene highlights how easy it could have been to expose Gibson, if only people promoting her had done their due diligence and full research. In another bit of shocking real-life footage, her publishers interviewed Gibson as a media training exercise, where anyone in the room could have realised that she was simply making things up on the spot, which you can peep here.
Sure, all the food Gibson cooks up does indeed look lovely – especially the meal where she basically seduces her LA crisis management PR, Hek, into working for her – but take away the glossy, professional food styling of her dishes and it’s all rotten to the core.
What should I eat or drink while watching Apple Cider Vinegar?
Like last month’s TV Dinners on Bryan Johnson and his Don’t Die documentary, I’m absolutely not against health foods, and they definitely have a big place in my kitchen. But, like, don’t be all uncool about it. And definitely don’t make some sort of sham medical/spiritual claims based on it. It’s just some nice snacks!
These are another TikTok inspired idea. While they might appear to be worthy, they’re actually pretty decadent and great if you have a sweet tooth, like moi:
Peanut butter-stuffed chocolate dates
Serves 2 people
Ingredients:
6-8 Medjool dates, I like these Zaytoun ones
Peanut butter – or almond butter, your choice, they both work
About 150g of as good quality as you can afford dark chocolate
Sprinkle of Maldon sea salt
Method
Carefully split the dates and remove the stone.
Fill each one with about half a teaspoon of nut butter
Meanwhile, break up the chocolate and melt in a glass bowl over some boiling water on a low heat.
Dip the date-and-nut bites into the warm melted chocolate so it coats them, and place on a plate
Sprinkle with a tiny bit of salt and leave to set. You can also dust them with a little cacao powder, too.
Enjoy!
To drink, well, let’s lean into that theme. You can actually make cocktails with apple cider vinegar – in the series, Gibson reckons she cured herself of tapeworm with it, probably another porkie pie – but I’m still on a low/no alcohol tip over here, and you can make a decent mocktail from it, and it’s got a bit of an enjoyably funky, kombucha-ry taste to it.
Add two teaspoons of apple cider vinegar to a glass of iced sparkling water, add a couple of dashes of angostura bitters, give it a mix, then pop in a maraschino cherry, and a little drizzle of the cherry juice on top. It won’t transform your life, but will be a tasty drink to enjoy.
Cheers!