Grocery Update # 57: The DOGE Days of #MAHA.
Also: The Scars of Covid-19.
Discontents: 1. The Grocery Scars of Covid-19. 2. The DOGE Days of #MAHA. 3. Tunes.
(Publisher’s note: Friends, apologies that we did not publish last week, the flu sucks. But we will make it up to you. Lots in the hopper. Dust off your reading spectacles. Peace.)
Grocery Workers Still Bear The Scars of Covid-19.
A new survey examines the experiences of frontline grocery store and drug retail workers during the COVID-19 pandemic and the lasting effects five years later. As farmworkers start to fall ill with a rapidly evolving avian flu, and the Trump USDA doubles down on production practices that will supercharge infectious diseases, the lessons of the last pandemic loom large for the food industry. What have we learned?
Around 100,000 grocery workers fell ill and hundreds died from the Covid-19 pandemic. These deaths climbed into the thousands when families and community members of food workers were included in statistics. For many food workers still in the day to day retail grind, this is not a trauma they can easily move past.
On the fifth anniversary of COVID-19 being declared a global pandemic and a national health emergency, the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 770 union and the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy (LAANE) released the results of a survey that illustrates the lasting impact of the pandemic on essential workers.
“Every single one of us was exposed to COVID-19. So many of my coworkers got sick—one almost died, and another lost five family members in a month, including her father. I got COVID twice. The second time, in 2024, it landed me in the ER and led to knee surgery,” said Paszion Horner-Smith, a Front End Supervisor at Vons in Granada Hills. “The trauma we went through has given so many of us PTSD. COVID-19 didn’t just change our lives, it destroyed them. We’re still struggling with that depression, anxiety, and anger, all while asking ourselves, ‘How sick am I going to get next?”
Survey results show that in the five years since the pandemic began, over half the respondents felt that their lives had changed dramatically. Over 51% said their mental health suffered, and nearly 44% said they are worse off financially, while 31% felt their physical health had suffered.
“It was scary. I felt a lot of anxiety. I was scared and angry. At the onset of the pandemic three of my co-workers and I walked out of our store. We felt unsafe when management let large crowds of people into our store despite the Health Department mandates on safety protocols. I refused to work under these conditions. I felt unsafe and walked off in protest. Then, I got into my car and broke down in a full-blown panic attack,” said Mary Mueller, a cashier at a Los Angeles-area Ralphs. “There were many days where I just couldn’t avoid crying and had to take several weeks off because I felt so overwhelmed and unsafe. I got infected with Covid three times and my mental health was severely affected. I didn’t fully recover. I don’t feel like I am the same person I was before COVID.”
Throughout the pandemic, frontline grocery store workers, just like first responders, were deemed essential employees and were not able to shelter in place. The surge in customer volumes while the economy shut down meant that market leading companies reaped enormous profits, much of which was redistributed to executives and shareholders. Instead of reaping the profits, grocery employees bore the brunt of COVID-19’s devastating impacts. The survey also showed that employers failed to provide emotional support for dealing with difficult customers and that many stores exposed workers to infection through a lack of timely and effective protective measures.
Key Survey Findings:
Mental Health Impact on Workers: Contracting COVID-19 brought significant physical challenges, but the mental and emotional toll of the pandemic was even harder to endure. The mental anguish often outweighed the physical strain of the illness itself.
COVID-19 Infections: A high number of workers were infected at work, many contracting COVID more than once.
Financial Strain: Many workers reported being worse off financially now than before the pandemic.
Customer Treatment of Workers: Nearly 50% of workers felt customers treated them worse during and after COVID-19.
Safety Concerns: Employers failed to inspire confidence that worker safety was a priority.
“At the beginning of the pandemic, me and my coworkers had to work while there was a cluster COVID infection in my store, with nearly 20 employees sick with the virus. It was terrifying and took a huge toll on my mental health. I was terrified of bringing the virus home to my grandparents and three little siblings. The company expected us to keep going, even as so many of my coworkers were getting sick. Without us, the stores wouldn’t have run," said Gabriela Morales, an employee at Ralphs in Hollywood, California.
An anonymous employee stated that “I am now, and have been, homeless since the pandemic. It caused me to have a mental breakdown several times due to stress not knowing how I was going to pay rent and then I lost my place to live due to all the stress. I lost my car as well so it really left me homeless and on the streets. I’m still dealing with homelessness and I’ve been using all the resources I know of in my area.”
Another employee also offered that “Our employer loved to say to the public that we employees were ‘heroes’ for working during the pandemic, however, they have not shown any appreciation for the risks we took, in our pay or quality of life standards at work.”
Five years on, as inflation rages on and a wave of new crises faces the food industry, from wildfires to avian flu and Trump-imposed import tariff chaos, grocery workers still bear the scars of the Covid-19 pandemic. Mental health, financial strains and safety concerns remain top of mind for the folks stocking shelves and feeding the country.
Whether their concerns are heeded during the next pandemic may just be a matter of how essential these workers really are.
Feature: The DOGE Days of #MAHA.
Part 1: Food Politics Dumpster Fire.
Like a limited edition Pringles sku, the Second Trump Administration has brought a special flavor of crazy to politics, the economy and everyday life. Unlike the hapless Democrats, Trump Republicans are a revolutionary party. But they are a socially conservative, white nationalist and billionaire-led revolution, with a blood and soil vibe, a shared affinity for throwing Sieg Heils to their audiences (i.e., “Roman salutes”) and a disproportionate amount of leaders charged with and/or accused of rape. While the tariff chaos and foreign policy belligerence are justifiably getting the biggest headlines, the Trump junta is not a cohesive whole. Trump is a transactional creature and different elements have purchased their seats at the table.
There is the white nationalism and isolationism of the Bannon wing that founded the MAGA movement, pushing for “America First” foreign policies, the increased deportations and stricter immigration policies, as well as a re-shoring of manufacturing jobs and implantation of import tariffs. There are the Heritage Foundation, thinktanks and Christian conservatives who co-authored Project 2025, which at this point seems like table stakes for much of how they will run the federal government into the ground, or “drown it in the bathtub” like Grover Norquist used to say. There is the adderall-juiced “Tech Support”, the techno-utopian, private equity-style cost cutting and anti-organized labor policies of the Thiel/Musk crowd running the DOGE apparatus. And there are the RFK #MAHA folks, who hitched their sails to Trump, who has since signed an executive order endorsing their vision.
These #MAHA leaders are pushing for incremental reforms to the industrial food system in an attempt to address the chronic disease epidemic, including closing the GRAS food ingredient approval loophole and banning synthetic food dyes and other additives. Next up, they are targeting thickeners, flavor enhancers, emulsifiers and preservatives, the type of stuff that forward thinking retailers like Thrive Market, Natural Grocers and Whole Foods have long since banned, the somewhat functional ingredients with long, funky names that contribute to the chronic ailments RFK and his allies are targeting. You don’t actually need them to produce food, but Big Food has convinced us otherwise, and built lucrative business models around that delusion.
These are admirable moves and are in line with consumer trends and much of what the “BFY” emerging brands sector has been doing for years. It didn’t come out of nowhere. They may be making Big Food companies nervous, which is great, although the seed oil-free fetishizing of tallow-fried processed foods is surely making the meat cartels happy to have another income stream. Deep frying crap in tallow doesn’t sound too healthy, but getting rid of unnecessary additives and ingredients is low hanging fruit for food system reform.
But while #MAHA pushes its agenda, they will have to square it up against the realities of DOGE cost cutting and the corporate lobbying driving much of the Trump agenda, much of which is a far cry from making anyone healthier, except for special interests. Like at the EPA, seemingly rolling back every environmental, water and chemical safety regulation they can. Or agencies cutting cancer research funding, workplace safety regulations or laying off air traffic controllers. You can’t be healthy on a crashing plane. How will RFK’s FDA enforce food safety and ingredient regulations while cutting staff and programs?
The Trump junta is also considering massive cuts to SNAP. Yet there are zero conversations about mandating living wages, basic incomes, or a jobs guarantee as a way to ensure people can afford good food. Influencers are coming out of the woodwork to opine about what the working poor can spend their limited SNAP dollars on. No soda for poor people! But nada-nothing-about subsidizing fresh produce for all, or developing middle market processing infrastructure to ensure the availability of healthy meals and snacks in stores, hospitals and schools, or subsidizing food delivery to get good food to anyone, anytime. Instead, the USDA is already cutting vital post-pandemic infrastructure spending that should be a basic requirement for #MAHA, as our guest writers discuss below.
The USDA is being run by a Trump appointee with zero relevant food and agriculture experience. While the USDA is the lynchpin for any real #MAHA reforms, the agency will be under enormous pressure to please the competing interests. The avian flu response discussed in Grocery Update #56, thank you Rob Wallace, is a case in point. Infectious disease spreading from concentrated animal feedlots is definitely not #MAHA.
(Note: The good news here is that if these characters can get appointed to run federal agencies, even just to slice and dice them into itty little bits, then really most anyone can. Like me or you, dear readers. Grocery Nerds for Secretaries of Everything Still Left After DOGE Cuts ‘2028. But I digress.)
A silver lining, for the moment at least, is that the Ferguson FTC has maintained its mergers and acquisitions direction that it developed during the Lina Khan era, meaning the courts may no longer be using the Bork Doctrine and consumer welfare ideology that let Big Food get so damn big. And the Justice Department is probing high egg prices and possible price gouging by large suppliers.
But the trade-offs of enabling the Trump junta, whether through #MAHA or otherwise, will continue to be freedom of speech, womens’ bodily autonomy, veterans’ benefits, LGBQT rights and freedoms, any progress on racial, social or economic justice, particularly the savage inequalities in wealth and income that will get worse and worse, workers’ collective bargaining rights, immigrants’ and undocumented workers’ residency, civil rights and peace of mind, and the economic and civic well-being of anyone who depends on the public sector services and entitlements that are on the daily chopping block, whether it be social security, medicare, subsidized healthcare, public schooling or the mail.
How does sacrificing our liberties make us healthier? Will your deported neighbors be relieved RFK closed the GRAS loophole while doing hard labor in Nayib Bukele’s sweltering prison labor camps? Will gulag food be additive free? When UnitedAetnaBlueCross denies your claims for stage 4 chemo treatment, will that make you healthy again?
And if it feels like the whole clown show is trying to crash the economy so they can privatize it and sell it off for spare parts, well, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent more or less said so.
Trump, beholden to Afrikaner car salesman and exploding rocket ship aficionado Elon Musk, is a lifelong grifter, a conman, a convicted felon, who owned and even bankrupted a casino, likely faked getting shot in the ear, which healed miraculously fast, a man thriving off of a pump and dump casino economy. Art of The Deal, still a fun read. Privatize everything, winners take all.
The role of a citizen is to keep their mouth open. The only effective attitude towards the elected or appointed leaders: we are here to kick their asses, not kiss them, to hold them accountable, not hold their hands, to push back on the worst of their agenda while standing in solidarity with the millions that will be taking it on the chin day after day. Otherwise, we are all just marks.
In the meantime, bursting with crazy, the Pringles economy chugs along. #MAHA.
Part 2: How the USDA Is Undermining The MAHA Agenda.
By Erin Martin
Erin Martin is the Founder of FreshRx Oklahoma and Co-Lead, Oklahoma Food is Medicine Policy Coalition. Erin is a Gerontologist and a Regenerative Ag and Local Food Advocate.
The recent termination of the Local Food Purchase Assistance (LFPA) 2025 Cooperative Agreement and continued delays in awarding USDA Produce Prescription Grants undermine key provisions of President Trump’s Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Executive Order issued on February 2025. These actions directly contradict federal mandates aimed at strengthening local food systems, enhancing nutrition security, and addressing diet-related chronic diseases through evidence-based food-as-medicine strategies.
Key Violations of the MAHA Executive Order.
The MAHA Executive Order mandates federal agencies to:
Expand access to fresh, healthy foods for vulnerable populations to combat chronic diseases.
Strengthen local and regional food systems to support economic resilience and public health.
Enhance federal support for food-as-medicine programs as a recognized component of preventive healthcare.
The LFPA Termination Contradicts MAHA’s Local Food System Strengthening Mandate:
LFPA has successfully increased market access for local farmers and directed millions of pounds of fresh, regionally produced food to underserved communities. The abrupt cancellation of LFPA 2025 funding disregards the MAHA directive to bolster federal-local partnerships for nutrition and economic security. Farmers lose stable income streams, and communities relying on LFPA-supported food programs face increased nutrition insecurity and chronic disease.
The LFPA program has provided critical revenue stability for small and mid-sized farmers, allowing them to invest in equipment, infrastructure, and workforce expansion. Many farmers have made long-term planting and operational decisions based on LFPA contracts, and the sudden termination leaves them with unsold produce, financial strain, and the risk of farm closures. Local food supply chains suffer, as farmers who once sold directly to food hubs, schools, and healthcare programs lose key markets, creating a ripple effect in rural economies.
The termination of LFPA directly contradicts MAHA’s priority of strengthening American food producers and decreasing reliance on foreign agricultural imports.
Delays in USDA Produce Prescription Grants Violate MAHA’s Food is Medicine (FIM) Intentions:
USDA's Produce Prescription Program is a proven, cost-saving intervention that improves health outcomes, particularly for low-income individuals with diabetes, hypertension, and cardiovascular diseases. Allocated funds remain unawarded, halting the expansion of FIM programs that MAHA explicitly endorses. Healthcare providers cannot prescribe produce to patients as planned, worsening chronic disease.
Economic & Public Health Consequences:
Cost to Taxpayers: LFPA and Produce Prescription programs have demonstrated significant healthcare cost savings by reducing emergency room visits, hospitalizations, and medication dependency for chronic diseases.
Farm & Local Economy Losses: The sudden LFPA cut jeopardizes contracts for thousands of small and mid-sized farmers who supply schools, hospitals, and food assistance programs.
Rural & Tribal Health Disparities: Indigenous and rural populations who benefit disproportionately from these programs face the greatest risk due to policy reversals.
Urgent Actions Needed.
Congress & Senate Leaders Must:
Immediately reinstate LFPA 2025 funds to uphold federal commitments to local food security and American agriculture.
Direct USDA to accelerate the release of Produce Prescription Grant funds in alignment with the MAHA directive.
Conduct an oversight review of USDA program delays that contradict federal priorities and threaten rural economies.
The termination of LFPA and the delay in Produce Prescription funding represent a direct violation of President Trump’s Make America Healthy Again Executive Order and undermine critical efforts to combat chronic disease, support American farmers, and bolster nutrition security. Immediate action is necessary to uphold federal food policy commitments, support local economies, and protect public health.
For further information, please contact:
Erin Martin
Website: erinwmartin.com | freshrxok.org
Email: erin@freshrxok.org
Part 3: LFPA Funding And Local Food Infrastructure.
By Ellen Walsh-Rosmann
Ellen Walsh-Rosmann was born and raised in a driftless hollow in NE Iowa. She is a graduate of Iowa State University and farms with her husband, Daniel, and his family in Harlan. They farm 700 acres of certified organic corn, soybeans, small grains, popcorn, alfalfa and pasture. Previously Ellen also started, owned and operated a local food hub called FarmTable Procurement and Delivery. Ellen and Daniel also own Milk and Honey, a farm to table restaurant in Harlan, that serves meat and eggs from their farm as well as area producers' vegetables and dairy. Previously Ellen was the Director of Wellness, Food Service and Nutrition at Harlan Community Schools.
The LFPA was life changing not only for me but for our food system in Iowa. Sure, some federal programs have an expiration date, but an additional amount was promised last fall to the state- production plans, and locker dates followed. Distribution routes were built, menus planned and pre-orders were made. Now, seeds will be left unplanted, crops left unsold, and locker dates will be unfulfilled as the program was abruptly ended and the $11.3 million investment will no longer happen.
For over a decade, I along with others had been building upon a foundation for a program like this to exist, and in 2022 when it happened, the state gained an advantage. We had the networks, the food hubs, the farmers, the routes already running- but it allowed us to bend in new ways never imagined and what we dreamed about. We were suddenly able to donate local food to food banks and schools on already tight margins. Our routes were being supported to small rural communities in the far corners of our state that we would never have been able to afford to deliver to.
My food hub, the largest in the state, FarmTable Delivery, suddenly had 4 days of routes that covered almost 50 counties. The number of farmers we served tripled, and we hired more staff to support the growth. Our trucks were full, and infrastructure was pressed to new limits. The work was fulfilling. We were able to serve more schools and food banks, allowing them to purchase high quality fruits, meats, vegetables and dairy all grown by their neighbors. More farmers were able to join and felt financial security, and the necessity for food hubs was felt more than ever. We were able to reach farmers who faced decades of inequality and inopportunity in the marketplace because of procurement requirements.
I had dreamed of doing a program like this for years but never could make the investment as the margins were already tight, and my husband and I had invested a lot just to keep the truck on the road. But with these programs, which cost the federal government next to nothing, we were able to take $1 spent into the program and put $4 back into the farmers pockets.
We subsidize so much of our food system- billions of dollars' worth- that this seemed like a big impact for instrumental change. Schools were able to serve local yogurt, beef, pork, and more to children. Students were served local apples and beets all grown down the road. Food banks were able to supplement their community pantries with products coming directly from farmers.
Iowa had the best run program in the country because of the decade's worth of food systems work we had done, and I'm proud to have been part of the magic for 2 years. We did things we dreamed of and only imagined.
This work is never over.
Part 4: Where DOGE Is NOT Cutting Costs.
By Stephen Semler
Stephen Semler is the publisher of Polygraph and is the Senior Fellow, Center for International Policy (CIP) and the Cofounder, Security Policy Reform Institute (SPRI).
A few points on where DOGE isn’t cutting
Largest buyer of goods and services in the world: US government
Amount the US government spent on contracts for goods and services in 2024: $755 billion
Amount one government agency—the Pentagon—spent on contracts in 2024: $454 billion
Pentagon contracts as a share of total federal contracts: 60%
Amount DOGE claims to have saved by terminating federal contracts: $18 billion
Hypothetical DOGE cut to Pentagon contracts, if cuts were proportional: $11 billion
Actual DOGE cut to Pentagon contracts: $8.5 million
Cuts to Pentagon contracts as a share of all contract cuts: <0.05%
Cuts to Pentagon contracts as a share of annual Pentagon contracts: <0.002%
Top Pentagon contractor by market valuation: SpaceX
Pentagon contracts awarded to SpaceX: $5.6 billion
SpaceX CEO: Elon Musk
DOGE leader: Elon Musk
Tunes.
Happy St. Patty’s Day! I will raise a glass of ice cold lemon-lime seltzer for all of you and wear my Dropkick Murphys t-shirt. Cheers/L’Chaim/Slainte!
peace.
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