Grocery Update #28: Make America Healthy Again's Faustian Bargain.

Also: Boo! Union Made Halloween Treats.

Discontents: 1. #MAHA: A Faustian Bargain With Trump. 2. Union Made Halloween Treats. 3. Tunes.

1. #MAHA’s Faustian Bargain With Trump.

An abridged version of this article just appeared in Forbes. This one is saltier.

Food has become one of the biggest stories of the 2024 Presidential Campaign. Vice President Kamala Harris has promised to address antitrust and ban corporate price gouging, while the Trump campaign has aligned with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to make health, wellness and food issues core campaign promises.

The Problem Is Real. Our Food Supply Is Very Unhealthy.

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. It’s a hot mess.

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… and dismantling the corporate takeover of government agencies.”

MAHA’s grievances and solutions are very real, until the punchline: “The PAC’s purpose is to create a broad coalition of voters who are committed to reclaiming America’s health, liberty, and environmental integrity— as we work to re-elect Donald Trump.”

Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., recently posted a video of a health and nutrition roundtable he held with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as well as Jordan Peterson, Dr. Casey Means, billionaire hedge funder and confections entrepreneur Jason Karp and influencer Jillian Michaels. 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.”

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.”

But. Trump’s policy history is the opposite of #MAHA.

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 typical Republican-Democrat administration power struggle do-see-do, the Biden-Harris team renewed many of the protections. Trump’s USDA abolished stronger organic animal welfare rules. Biden-Harris 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.

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 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, of 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.” Robyn O’Brien believes that “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.”

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. Project 2025 was authored by over 100 former Trump staffers alongside 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 processing, weakening the Endangered Species Act, and reducing the influence of EPA science on pesticide approvals.

Trump also wants to lower wages for working people. He wants to arrest striking workers and send high paying jobs to lower paying states. He thinks it is easy to assemble an automobile. 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 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 catastrophic supply chain snafus. The food supply depends on immigrants. The dairy industry will be crippled. Not just gallons of milk, Yoo-hoo and Kraft Singles, but processed cheese for pizzerias, delis, and sandwich shops. And Texas’ economic miracle will be crushed.

Mass deportations are a Faustian bargain for MAHA.

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’, 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.

MAHA does have ideas in common with public sector good food purchasing programs (GFPPs). These frameworks have been championed by grassroots groups to make good food much less expensive at point of sale. GFPPs align animal welfare, nutrient density, fair wages, economic development, regenerative agriculture and supply chain transparency with institutional food purchases. The standards and infrastructure have already been road tested by large scale retailers and manufacturers. 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.

GFPPs are the largest grassroots effort to change how America produces, consumes and buys food, addressing the same concerns as MAHA. Accelerating GFPP adoption could truly make America healthy, again and again. So will MAHA also endorse GFPPs?

But politics is a Rorschach test. What do you see?

Voters project their needs and aspirations onto candidates. MAHA is born of sincere concerns about the food system, just as RFK’s vaccine skepticism leveraged real experiences of vaccine side effects with the depredations of a cruel, profit driven healthcare industry. But, a truly bipartisan movement would seek to build the broadest coalition and wield power to pressure whomever gets elected to do their bidding, instead of aligning with America’s most polarizing politician, a protege of Roy Cohn and Vince McMahon, the son of a slumlord, a con man, a failed businessman, racist and misogynist, a failed Coup-ist with cognitive decline who has never done an honest day’s work. This is who MAHA thinks will disrupt the status quo?

But the MAHA dealignment is not the biggest problem for the Harris campaign. According to one researcher, “If Harris loses, it’ll be because the campaign and the candidate represent a party that has given up on mobilizing working people around shared class frustrations and aspirations.”

Harris has lost momentum with progressive and working class voters, her own Faustian bargain with Liz Cheney, downplaying plans to ban price gouging, break up monopolies and other economic populist ideas that get to the heart of food system change. It is not about individual choices, personal health coaches and GLP-1 drugs. It requires structural economic changes to supply chains.

Henry Wallace, the head of the USDA during the New Deal, once observed, "Democracy to crush fascism internally must demonstrate its capacity to "make the trains run on time." … It must put human beings first and dollars second. It must appeal to reason and decency and not to violence and deceit. We must not tolerate oppressive government or industrial oligarchy in the form of monopolies and cartels." This is very much applicable to the food supply.

The Democrats have failed to heed that. And Republicans undermine it. At the end of the day, health and wellness are economic justice issues. Good paying jobs. Freedom from fear. Lower prices and subsidized healthy options at point of sale. Such bread and butter policies could truly make America healthy again.

Epilogue. I Love Grocery. I Hate Politics.

I am not much of Harris or Biden Administration fan, his terrible, bloody foreign policy, his high interest rates and his inability to tamp down on price gouging. V.P. Harris started out as a corrections officer and prosecutor. Her record as a Senator was mixed; pro-Labor, but also tight with Silicon Valley. She has really come around on some policies, like drug legalization, anti-trust and child tax credits. I do not think she will break with Biden’s foreign policy though, which may cost her the election.

When I see some of the most vulnerable communities supporting Harris, it makes me pause. They don’t do it because they love her. They know if they don’t they get her elected and hold her accountable, they may may lose their rights, their homes, their livelihoods. Politics is not like rooting for you favorite team. It is a doorway you hold open. Democrats must deliver for their constituents. Young people, working and middle class families, small businesses. Lina Khan gets that. Does Harris?

I do not like Harris. But I think there are many issues she can be held to account on, including much of what MAHA supports, as her record indicates. There is no rational proof that Trump will do likewise. It is probably a shell game, considering how his last administration worked. But we can be certain that the tradeoffs for endorsing Trump will be dire, for women, immigrants and working people, for anyone not feigning fealty or bankrolling his latest con.

Special Thanks to Robyn O’Brien. And a big hug to Matt Rink for letting me vent.

2. Boo! A Union-Made Halloween.

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3. Tunes.

Rest In Peace, Paul DiAnno, founding vocalist of Iron Maiden.

peace.