Grocery Update #166: When MAHA Came For Marion.

How To Combat Misdirection, Misinformation and Genuine Stupidity.

A Few Words On Solidarity.

By Errol Schweizer

There are a few folks outside of the grocery industry to whom my career in buying, formulating, and selling billions of dollars of “better for you” groceries owes a huge debt. Professor Marion Nestle is one of those people.

When I was a young gun at Whole Foods (prior to Amazon), responsible for the profit and loss of what eventually grew into a $5 billion division, my supervisor suggested I read some of Marion Nestle’s work. Nestle had spoken at a Whole Foods gathering of some sort, something above my pay grade that I was not privy to. They had extra copies of her books, so I managed to snag a couple during a weekly check in with the boss. The two books were Food Politics and What To Eat.

Of course I read them both right away. Food Politics was a romp, a surgical take down of the role that lobbying and corruption play in our food supply. What To Eat was right up my alley as a biology and political economy nerd, along the lines of Margaret Wittenberg’s texts on ingredients, quality standards, how and where food is produced and why that all matters. I found Nestle’s work to be better cited, less polemic, more precise and less precious than some of the popular food industry work of the time (Pollan, Schlosser, Salatin, etc.). There was also something familiar about Professor Nestle’s tone and tact, very New York, very Jewish, very much no bullshit, that I really appreciated and felt comfortable with. She was like my food studies grandma.

I read those books, internalized them and it took me years to realize how much they had influenced me and my work in the food supply, in developing thousands of organic and non-GMO and fair labor and plant-based and nutrient dense and regenerative grocery products consumed by millions of people daily. I couldn’t have done much of that without the knowledge and analytical basis that Professor Nestle provided. I owe her a great debt, as does much of the food industry who is trying to make processed and manufactured foods that much better, for consumers, for workers, for the planet.

But the other really important thing here is Professor Nestle isn’t just an Ivory Tower critic of the food industry, as much as that is her public persona. She willingly and frequently engages with the industry she criticizes, like that Whole Foods leadership gathering. This is the contradiction, the dialectic that makes Nestle so compelling.

I have met her twice at industry events. Once, backstage at a Natural Products Expo, where I got to geek out with her for a few minutes. And then a year later at a Specialty Food Show, where we walked the show for a few minutes sampling stuff and shooting the shit about all the crazy products at that show. She was almost 90 years old, razor sharp, energetic and running circles around me. I was privileged to have spent the time.

That’s why, when I heard that MAHA came after Marion, I wasn’t having it.

Why? When we are the subjects of conspiratorial misinformation, we have two immediate options.

Debunk the BS.

And stand in solidarity with the accused.

Or before you know it, they’ll come for you too.

We hope sharing these texts below from our friends Robyn O’Brien and Raj Patel helps everyone understand why this situation was so dangerous and how to combat it moving forward. The “better for you” food sector has been politicized, corrupted and manipulated in a really ugly direction. It doesn’t need to be this way.

And for a brief guide to what The Checkout Grocery Update thinks of the “MAHA” phenomenon, please click on this picture link below for a pile of articles we wrote last year. Unfortunately, we got bored and lost interest in covering this topic.

Until now, that is.

1. MAHA’s Fascist Turn

By RAJ PATEL

I was in the weeds of editing and revisions a couple of weeks back, so I missed when Calley Means, Senior advisor at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and a leader within Make America Healthy Again, played the world’s most inept character assassin, first at the Aspen Ideas Festival, and then at the Great American State Fair, trying to blame Marion Nestle for the ills of the food system.

Here’s a short summary of what happened. Means claimed, at the Great American State Fair — as reported by the Washington Post — that in the 1980s a body called the Sugar Research Council paid Marion to conduct research. There’s no such thing as the Sugar Research Council either in the Sugar Association’s own history nor in the IRS nonprofit records. The sugar industry funding that he seems to be thinking about went to three researchers at Harvard in 1965 and 1967. That’s roughly when she was a graduate student in molecular biology at Berkeley. Her only connection to that episode is a commentary she was invited to write condemning the sugar industry. Means said that this money induced Marion to promote carbohydrates and grains and to warn against fat and against natural foods. But the 1988 Surgeon General’s Report she edited recommended vegetables, fruits, whole grain foods, fish, poultry and lean meats, and she has maintained a stated policy of taking no payments from food companies. Means said she claims credit for being the architect of the 1992 food pyramid. This can’t be right because, in addition to there being no evidence for it, the pyramid was released in April 1992 and she joined the 1995 dietary guidelines advisory committee in 1993. She was involved in the 1992 pyramid, but only to the extent that she exposed the meat industry’s 1991 role in suppressing it. You can find the full anatomy of disinformation on Marion’s site.

There’d better be a good reason for me to add to the volume of ink spilled on this and, reader, there is.

I’ve been reading some nauseating right-wing food literature, in part so that I can write something on its imaginaries for a forthcoming Journal of Peasant Studies forum on Degrowth and Agrarian Change, and in part so I can peer review Limn’s upcoming issue on the far right. So I’m feeling pretty sordid, and looking for as large a dividend as possible of having to suffer this toxic swill.

Here’s the payoff: there’s a nasty similarity between Means’ accusations and the structure of one of the far right’s most influential food system texts, The Eggs Benedict Option. I’m not going to link to it but let me save you the trouble of searching for what it says, as Eamon Whalen did here for Mother Jones.

The argument, quoting approvingly from Michael Pollan and citing Tom Philpott, starts from many of the premises that animate lots of us to think about food. There’s a rise of chronic disease, glyphosate is everywhere, climate change is changing the horizon of possibility.

And then we part ways.

The argument presents the Neolithic Revolution as a disaster, because it was the way that settler agriculture parasitised free people. It was the first Great Reset, in which states made people farm and deprived them of nutrients. Its modern version is the Planetary Health Diet, the result of a study that does the arithmetic about the food required to support everyone living on the same planet with a healthy diet, which therefore urges moderation in meat consumption and which therefore, apparently, has the power to turn its consumers into cucks.

The foreword, by Noor Bin Ladin (an outspoken Trump supporter, niece of Osama ) explains why. We suffer today under “an almost total stranglehold over the media, entertainment, tech sector and academia,” “underpinned by the financial structure headed by the central banks that ensure and perpetuate the citizens’ enslavement via debt and usury.” It amounts to a programme of “population-manipulation techniques” and “the rewriting of history” that has succeeded “the herding of the masses blindly towards the slaughterhouse.” In other words, “the people at the very top of the pyramid have gone to great lengths to deliberately poison us.” The injury she catalogues is not only metabolic but genetic, “the downgrading of our DNA,” “the marring of our physiognomy.”

Guess who’s at the top of the pyramid? At the World Economic Forum, there are “supposed ties to the Rothschild family”. The book’s author, Charles Cornish-Dale, doesn’t use the word ‘Jew’ in the text, but you don’t have to scratch terribly deeply to find anti-semitism either in the text or, indeed, in his opinions.

A late chapter argues that what made Americans great was the frontier, the thesis Frederick Jackson Turner set out in 1893 in his Significance of the Frontier in American History and which has been under sustained attack since the 1950s for treating conquered land as empty. Cornish-Dale knows the objection. He notes a few lines earlier that “the racial overtones and the emphasis on sacred soil of course began to rankle with academics, especially after World War II.” Then he affirms it anyway:

Because the fact remains, however much the academic ‘deboonkers’ might kvetch and wail about blood and soil, that the Turner Thesis is very definitely true.

This is the only use of Yiddish in a book published by Antelope Hill, whose other works include Hitler’s speeches among other far-right texts. Cornish-Dale himself has quoted Hitler on his twitter account, among whose two-hundred-thousand followers is the US Vice President, J. D. Vance. After Mother Jones profiled him in under the headline “Blood, Soil, and Grass-Fed Beef,” Cornish-Dale leaned in, had the slogan printed on t-shirts and sold them from his website. He was still boasting about it this May. The same account carried a quotation from Mein Kampf set against a swastika flag, a reference to “zog,” and the shorthand HH.

In this book, he lets readers fill in the blanks, inviting them to substitute their pet cultural pollutant into thoughts like:

This is why the Biden administration is doing its best to criminalize America First and its supporters, in addition to ramping up the policy of demographic replacement and other forms of social and cultural disintegration.

To be clear, I’m not saying that Calley Means has read The Eggs Benedict Option.

I am saying that Calley Means is participating in a fascist trope, a storytelling device that propels a wider narrative. It explains not only why Means should continue with these lies, but the broader effort to which they contribute.

It’s a strategy that has a direct parallel with National Socialism in Germany, and it works like this:

1. Find a real grievance, such as worries behind industrial food and its health effects, a concern as widespread in the 1930s as today.

2. Pivot, so that the force behind the grievance is a cabal out to pervert national purity (whether the plot to undermine the German race, or the World Economic Forum out to degrade DNA, or a nutritionist in hock to Big Sugar poisoning America’s children)

3. Impugn scientific critique as urban/impure (by indicting specific scientists as treasonous members of that cabal, like Julius Moses or the EAT Lancet report, or Marion Nestle).

4. Once you have your dirty monsters, offer a doctrine of Blood and Soil as the sole and purifying means to address the grievance.

This is why Means’ behaviour is so poisonous, and needs to be condemned. The only way to do this — and here’s where Marion and I differ — is by rejecting MAHA in toto, as many people of colour, who can see MAHA’s racism a mile away, already have.

Some premises of the Make America Healthy Again movement are the same as any genuinely democratic one, but many aren’t, including concerns with individual bodily purity that are ripped from Dr Strangelove. In that concern with individual bodily purity lie the seeds thinking about a master race.

If you can recast Marion Nestle, one of the world’s most relentless critics of food industry influence, as a paid shill for Big Sugar, you can collapse the distinction between legitimate public health research and corporate capture. Once you do that, you’ve cleared the stage for reactionaries to posture as the only true defenders of the food supply, swapping peer-reviewed science for blood-and-soil populism and for the opportunity to buy bidets from Means’ company using your tax-free health savings account to keep your colon sparkling clean.

As I explained in the Boston Review last year, this is why “MAHA’s stock in trade is biomonitoring devices, blood tests, and mail-in stool samples—all services available from MAHA proponents for a fee—so that vigilant individuals can avoid the worst. “You are the primary person responsible for understanding your body,” says the website of Casey Means,” Calley’s sister. The responsibility for vigilance for bodily and national purity is one that falls on every MAHA supporter.

There are proper alternatives on offer. If you want the opposite of MAHA, the Boston Review piece argues that Mamdani’s programme in NYC offers the possibility of radical public health, grounded in multi-racial working class politics. These are the struggles worth fighting for. And, in the meantime, it’s critics like Marion Nestle who deserve the most vigorous defence against the pathetic and sickening lies that Means peddles.

2. The Tobacco Playbook Is Being Run Against the Woman Who Wrote the Book on It

By ROBYN O’BRIEN

There is a pattern that anyone who questions MAHA quickly learns to recognize: challenge the movement, and within hours you will be accused of being funded by Big Food, Big Pharma, Big Tobacco, or some combination of all three.

The accusation doesn’t need to be true. It just needs to land fast enough to change the subject.

I have known Marion Nestle for nearly twenty years. Her book Food Politics was instrumental in shaping my first book, The Unhealthy Truth, published by Crown/Random House in 2009. Long before the food movement became divided and politicized by the current administration, Marion’s work was foundational to all of it. She has spent fifty years following the money, documenting with meticulous, peer-reviewed precision how corporate interests corrupt the science, capture the regulators, and rewrite the guidelines that are supposed to protect us. She has done this work without taking a dollar from the food industry. She has a public policy on her website saying exactly that.

Last month, Calley Means stood at a podium at the Great American State Fair and told the crowd that the Sugar Research Council paid Marion to promote carbohydrates in the 1980s, and that she claimed credit for architecting the 1992 food pyramid.

A Washington Post reporter asked her: any of this true?

“Good grief no,” she said. “Not only are these statements false; they are spectacularly false.”

She went through them line by line, setting the record straight.

These accusations, spectacularly false, as Marion puts it, are not new, and they are not unique to her. They have been directed at many of us who have spent years working on food safety and chemical accountability. They are a tactic, not an argument. When you cannot answer the evidence, you manufacture a history for the person presenting it.

What Calley Means did to Marion Nestle’s history has a name. Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway named it in their book, and later film, Merchants of Doubt: the deliberate manufacture of scientific uncertainty to protect industry profits. The tobacco industry called it their own product.

A 1969 internal Brown & Williamson document stated it plainly:

“Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the body of fact that exists in the mind of the general public.”

Attack the scientist. Manufacture doubt about their funding. Change the subject before the evidence can land. Marion has spent fifty years teaching all of us to recognize it. We owe her the honesty of naming it.

Marion has spent her career documenting exactly how that strategy migrated from tobacco into food, how the same PR firms, the same tactics, and in some cases the same people moved from defending cigarettes to defending sugar to defending pesticides. She didn’t just study the playbook. She mapped it. And now it is being run against her.

What is worth naming clearly is what Marion has been doing lately that makes her a target: she has been documenting Bayer’s lobbying operation in real time, $9.19 million spent on Congress and the executive branch in 2025 alone, 45 registered lobbyists, 13 outside lobbying firms, and writing about the revolving door between the agrichemical industry and the regulators who are supposed to oversee it.

She published a piece specifically titled “How to explain glyphosate hypocrisy? Bayer’s lobbying and revolving door.” She has been writing about the conflicts of interest embedded in the MAHA dietary guidelines advisory process.

She has been calling out, clearly and publicly, that MAHA followers “could also examine the conflicts of interests of their own wellness-industry aligned leaders.”

She has been doing, in other words, exactly what she has always done: following the money. And the money, in this case, leads somewhere the movement does not want examined.

The courage it takes to do this work, to speak publicly against an administration that has demonstrated a clear willingness to bully, discredit, and fabricate, should not be taken for granted.

Marion is 90 years old, and she is still at her desk, still reading the documents, still publishing. I am grateful she is speaking out. I am appalled that she has to. But I am not surprised.

This is what happens when the money gets uncomfortable. And as more people start to shine a light on this, the money is clearly getting very uncomfortable.

3. Marion Nestle Sets The Record Straight.

“In the 1980s, a group called the Sugar Research Council paid her to do a lot of research. And they really funded her to say that basically the base of our diet should be carbs, and the base our diet to be grains, and we should fear fat. And really, we should fear a lot of natural foods in favor of grains. And her research, she claims credit for being the architect of the 1992 food pyramid. And I told her, when we talked last week, I think it’s actually demonstrable that the dietary guidance from the 1990s has been the most destructive public health document in modern history, because they put grains and carbs at the base of the pyramid. And they didn’t differentiate whole grains or refined grains. Why did they do that? That was directly prompted by the food industry, which at the time was the cigarette industry.”

Marion Nestle’s Line By Line Rebuttal:

Means: In the 1980s, a group called the Sugar Research Council paid her to do a lot of research.

False. In the 1980s, I was teaching nutrition to medical students at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) school of medicine and running a nutrition education program funded by NIH and, later, by the John Tung Foundation. To avoid conflicts of interest, I have a long-standing policy of not taking payments from food companies. The policy is posted on this site here.

Means: And they really funded her to say that basically the base of our diet should be carbs, and the base our diet to be grains, and we should fear fat.

False. Here, I think he must be referring to the Sugar Research Foundation (SRF) which funded researchers at Harvard who wrote a skewed review of diet and heart disease in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1967; the review downplayed sugar, and emphasized fat. The SRF’s role in this research was exposed in 2016 in JAMA Internal Medicine by Cristin Kearns, Laura Schmidt and Stanton Glantz: Sugar Industry and Coronary Heart Disease Research: A Historical Analysis of Internal Industry Documents. I wrote the commentary on this study: “Food industry funding of nutrition research: The relevance of history for current debates.” I also wrote about both pieces on this site.

Means: And really, we should fear a lot of natural foods in favor of grains.

False. Here, I think, he must be talking about my role as managing editor of the 1988 Surgeon General’s Report on Nutrition and Health. The report summarized the research consensus of that time.

“Fats and cholesterol. Reduce consumption of fat (especially saturated fat) and cholesterol. Choose foods relatively low in these substances, such as vegetables, fruits, whole grain foods, fish, poultry, lean meats, and low-fat dairy products.”

“Complex carbohydrates and fiber: Increase consumption of whole grain foods and cereal products, vegetables (including dried beans and peas), and fruits.”

The National Academies’ even more comprehensive report, Diet and Health: Implications for Reducing Chronic Disease Risk, made similar recommendations in 1989.

Means: And her research, she claims credit for being the architect of the 1992 food pyramid.

False. I have never claimed such responsibility; I had none. My only role in the 1992 pyramid was to work closely with a reporter for the New York Times, Marian Burros, to expose how the meat industry induced the USDA to suppress the pyramid when it was about to be released in 1991. I devoted an entire chapter of my book, Food Politics, to providing the evidence for this.

Means: And I told her, when we talked last week, I think it’s actually demonstrable that the dietary guidance from the 1990s has been the most destructive public health document in modern history,

True. This is what he said and, I assume, is what he thinks.

Means: because they put grains and carbs at the base of the pyramid. And they didn’t differentiate whole grains or refined grains.

False. The USDA’s pyramid brochure said: “Choose a diet with plenty of grain products, vegetables, and fruits which provide needed vitamins, minerals, fiber, and complex carbohydrates, and can help you lower your intake of fat.”

It also says, “Here are some selection tips: ☛ To get the fiber you need, choose several servings a day of foods made from whole grains, such as whole-wheat bread and whole-grain cereals. ☛ Choose most often foods that are made with little fat or sugars. These include bread, english muffins, rice, and pasta… ☛ Baked goods made from flour, such as cakes, cookies, croissants, and pastries, count as part of this food group, but they are high in fat and sugars.”

Means: Why did they do that? That was directly prompted by the food industry, which at the time was the cigarette industry.

Misleading. Yes, the cigarette industry owned Kraft Foods and other food companies at that time, and taught those companies how to use the tobacco playbook to promote unhealthy products (as we only recently learned). But the major food industry influences on dietary guidelines and food guides in the 1980s and 1990s were the meat and dairy industries, as I describe in Food Politics. As far as I can tell, they still are, as witnessed by the 2025-2030 guidelines and inverted pyramid.

But that’s not all. Calley Means said on Instagram: “At @aspenideas, I spoke with @marionnestle – an architect of the 1990s U.S. Dietary Guidelines that led to an explosion of refined carbohydrates and ultraprocessed food in the American diet.”

Misleading again. I was indeed a member (although hardly the architect) of the 1995 Dietary Guidelines Scientific Advisory Committee. Here is what the 1995 guidelines said about grains.

“Most of the calories in your diet should come from grain products, vegetables, and fruits These include grain products high in complex carbohydrates—breads, cereals, pasta, rice—found at the base of the Food Guide Pyramid, as well as vegetables such as potatoes and corn. Dry beans (like pinto, navy, kidney, and black beans) are included in the meat and beans group of the Pyramid, but they can count as servings of vegetables instead of meat alternatives.”

(all perspectives are 100% our own and do not reflect sponsors).