Food has become one of the biggest stories of the 2024 Presidential Campaign. Vice President Kamala Harris has promised to ban corporate price gouging, while the Trump campaign has aligned with longtime environmental activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to make health, wellness and food issues core campaign promises. But not everyone is convinced.
The Context.
The externalized costs of food-related, noncommunicable diseases for Americans is over $1.3 trillion a year, greater than the value of all groceries sold annually. The food industry is highly consolidated, has leveraged inflation to reap record profits, has a revolving door with regulators and sells many products and ingredients in ultra-processed foods that are banned in other countries.
According to Robyn O’Brien, Chief Operating Officer at Montcalm and author of Seeding Innovation and The Unhealthy Truth, “one in two American men are expected to get cancer in their lifetimes, and one in three American women. One in three American children has what are known as the four As: allergies, autism, ADHD and asthma, and cancer is the leading cause of death by disease in American children. Most families are one disease away from financial ruin.”
Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) wants “to dismantle the corporate stranglehold on our government agencies that has led to widespread chronic disease, environmental degradation, and rampant public distrust… MAHA seeks to drive a transformative agenda. This includes prioritizing regenerative agriculture, preserving natural habitats, and eliminating toxins from our food, water, and air… to combat the chronic disease epidemic, which includes addressing the root causes such as poor diet, environmental toxins, and inadequate healthcare… and dismantling the corporate takeover of government agencies that are supposed to protect public health and the environment.”
Vani Hari, a wellness industry entreprenuer and influencer, testified in front of the U.S. Senate, stating that “American food companies are making a fool out of us. They are knowingly poisoning us. It’s time for this to stop.” Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., recently posted a video of the health and nutrition roundtable he held with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as well as Professor Jordan Peterson, Dr. Casey Means, billionaire hedge funder and confections entrepreneur Jason Karp and influencer Jillian Michaels.
At a recent event, former President Trump gave Kennedy a warm shout out. “I want to also congratulate somebody who’s going to make us all healthy: RFK Jr. … He wants healthy people. He wants healthy food. And he’s going to do it. He’s going to have a big chance to do it, because we do need that.”
Some industry observers are cautiously optimistic.
In her popular Food Politics newsletter, NYU Professor Marion Nestle noted, “They (MAHA) are calling for fixing the food system, doing something to coordinate and address diet-related chronic diseases, stopping corporate power, eliminating conflicts of interest between industry and government, getting toxic chemicals out of the food supply, and doing everything possible to refocus the food environment and dietary advice on health.”
And in her newsletter Food Fix, former Politico correspondent Helena Bottemiller Evich, noted that there seems to be a political realignment. “We’re seeing former President Donald Trump really trying to tap into what I think is a very real grassroots interest in health issues writ large: things like diet-related diseases and concerns about pesticides and other chemicals.”
Ingredient deck of an ultra-processed frozen food.
Trump’s policy history tells a very different story.
The Trump EPA approved over 100 new pesticides, many of which have been banned in other countries. The Trump Administration gutted chemical safety rules and killed a rule to protect kids from dangerous PCBs in schools. Trump appointed a pesticide lobbyist to oversee toxic chemical regulation and denied a petition to ban perchlorate, a harmful water contaminant. Trump reversed limits on bee-killing neonicotinoid (or “neonic”) pesticides and scaled back regulations on GMOs, making it easier for GMOs to enter the food supply. Trump supported school food rules to allow more junk foods.
Trump’s EPA also rolled back over 100 environmental protections. Not surprisingly, in the prototypical Republican-Democrat administration power struggle do-see-do, the Biden-Harris Administration renewed many of the protections.
Trump’s USDA abolished stronger organic animal welfare rules. The Biden-Harris Administration restored them.
Trump’s EPA failed to act on PFAS, known as “forever chemicals” that are ubiquitous in food, air, water, and even breast milk, and linked to cancer, birth defects, thyroid disease, weakened immunity, and reproductive harm. The Biden-Harris team issued a drinking water standard for PFAS and funded it to the tune of $1 billion.
President Trump reversed a pending ban on the insecticide chlorpyrifos, a brain-damaging chemical linked to ADHD and autism after meeting with the CEO of Dow Chemical, chlorpyrifos’s biggest manufacturer, and after the company donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration. The Biden-Harris Administration restored the ban once in office.
According to Kari Hamerschlag, deputy director of food and agriculture for Friends of the Earth Action, “Kennedy’s MAHA bid is completely contradicted by Trump’s track record and the interests of his biggest corporate backers, including Big Agriculture and the chemical industry.”
Robyn O’Brien does not believe that MAHA-Trumpism is viable.
“Trump has a toxic track record of putting our families at risk. Harris, throughout her career, has protected our families from the chemical industry, supported and protected farming families and expanded organic and regenerative farming, expanded access to nutrition and exercise programs, and invested in education campaigns to empower consumers with the knowledge to make healthier food choices.”
More soda.
The controversial Project 2025 also casts a long shadow over the MAHA-Trump marriage.
The 1,000 page blueprint for Trump’s second term is a complete revision of the roles and powers of the federal government, not the least in creating an imperial presidency above the rule of law. Project 2025 was authored by former Trump staffers and conservative think tanks that typically run interference for monopolies and polluting industries. It proposes policies that could kneecap much of the MAHA agenda, including removing GMO labeling, weakening federal inspection requirements for meat and poultry processing, critically weakening the Endangered Species Act, and reducing the influence of EPA science on pesticide approvals, among many others.
In a future Trump Administration, who would have more influence, world-spanning agrochemical, food and commodity monopolies, or well-healed wellness entrepreneurs and influencers? It would be an interesting showdown. But there would also be collateral damage.
Trump has also come out against regulating price gouging, saying such “price controls” would cause shortages and hoarding. But the Trump promise to deport a million or more “illegal” immigrants is a confession in the form of an accusation. Deporting thousands of taxpaying food workers who toil in the bowels of the supply chain by doing the planting, harvesting, growing, distribution, and manufacturing of everything in grocery stores, besides being truly traumatic for those communities, would cause unprecedented shortages, price increases and supply chain snafus that could make the Covid-19 hiccups look like the good old days.
It is not clear if mass deportations of food workers align with MAHA. But it is a Faustian bargain.
Healthy, fresh produce at a Knoxville-area grocery store.
Raj Patel, Research Professor at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at University of Texas at Austin, and author of Stuffed and Starved, is not impressed by the MAHA vision.
“People are legitimately concerned about how the food system is broken, and that Americans are spending quite as much as we are on healthcare as a result of our food system. But the one thing that really does drop out is class… the health outcomes that everyone seems to be decrying are disproportionately borne by working class people, by the poor, by people of color… You’ve got this deep concern about the food system, but actually, it appears the real concern is a very individualized, ‘my body is a temple, and no one shall defile my precious bodily fluids’ kind of approach to healthcare, which is of a piece with racial purity and discourses around keeping the blood of the nation pure.”
There is also little discussion of SNAP and federal food subsidies in the MAHA vision. But Project 2025 would radically cut funding of such programs that provide the majority of calories for millions of working poor Americans. Universalizing such policies could instead have a much bigger impact on the food choices of recipients.
MAHA does have ideas in common with public sector good food purchasing programs (GFPPs).
These frameworks have been championed by NGOs, labor unions and community groups to make good food much less expensive at point of sale. The standards and infrastructure to support such public sector supply chains have already been road tested by large scale retailers and manufacturers, such as Natural Grocers, Whole Foods Market and Organic Valley. GFPPs align animal welfare, nutrient density, fair wages, economic development, regenerative agriculture and supply chain transparency with institutional food purchases, at scale. Such initiatives have been successful in dozens of cities, were just adopted by New York State and have even been proposed for all food purchases at federal agencies as disparate as the USDA, the Department of Defense and the Department of Education.
GFPPs are the largest grassroots effort to change how America produces, consumes and buys food. Such procurement standards address the same concerns about the food supply that MAHA has articulated, and more, such as labor and fairness. Accelerating good food purchasing program adoption could truly make America healthy, again and again. It could be a much more effective alignment than a polarizing, and risky, Trump endorsement.
But politics in America is a Rorschach test.
Voters project their needs and aspirations onto the candidates that seem most likely to fulfill them. MAHA is born of sincere concerns about the food system, even if aligning with Trump is contradictory to its aspirations. But the MAHA dealignment is not the biggest problem for the Harris campaign. Harris has lost momentum with progressive and working class voters, downplaying plans to ban price gouging, breaking up monopolies and other economic populist messaging that gets to the heart of food system change.
According to one researcher, “If Harris loses, it’ll be because the campaign and the candidate represent a party that is now fundamentally alien to many working people – a party that has given up on mobilizing working people around shared class frustrations and aspirations.”
Health and wellness, therefore, are also economic justice issues. Good paying jobs with good healthcare. Freedom from fear of deportation. Lower grocery prices and subsidized healthy options cheaper or free at point of sale. Such bread and butter policies could truly make America healthy again.