Grocery Update Volume 2, #23: Making Sense Of MAHA.

Also: Grocery Nerd Meets Ken Cook.

Discontents: 1. Grocery Nerd Meets Ken Cook/EWG. 2. Making Sense Of MAHA: A Comprehensive Analysis.

1. Grocery Nerd Meets Ken Cook/EWG:

The episode is live HERE.

2. Making Sense Of MAHA.

After months of anticipation, the MAHA Strategy Report is out.

But before you dive into our comprehensive analysis below, you may want to catch up on our thought process.

Here is all of our coverage of this whole Trump/MAHA thing going back almost a year:

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

Grocery Update #30: Notes On A Trump Food Economy.

Grocery Update #31: The Circus Comes To Town. Let Them Eat Interest Rates.

Grocery Update #32: Government Interference, Eternal Vigilance.

Grocery Update # 57: The DOGE Days of #MAHA.

Grocery Update #59: The Trump USDA, Still Not Making America Healthier.

Grocery Update #61: The Tariff Shell Game.

Grocery Update #56: Why The Trump USDA Will Make Avian Flu Even Worse.

Grocery Update Volume 2, #6: How To Make Farmwork Great.

And Grocery Update Volume 2, #4: The MAHA Misdirect and How To Actually Make Everyone Healthier (These are not MAHA strategies, but they should be):

1. Living Wages and Expanded Union Protections.

2. Universal SNAP + Free Produce for All.

3. UPF labeling.

4. Stop subsidizing 200 million acres of corn syrup, animal feed and ethanol.

5. Break up Big Food.

6. Create a Public Grocery Sector, and Operationalize the Right To Good Food.

7. Subsidize Fresh Food Processing Infrastructure.

8. A Just Transition for the Grocery Industry.

9. Defund The Pentagon and Divert Funding.

10. Universal Healthcare.

Phew. That’s a lot. We need a new hobby.

And as for the new MAHA Strategy “Making Our Children Healthy Again”… well, it’s a bit of a dud. Underwhelming. A non-sequitur. A non-event. Around 128 non-binding recommendations, seemingly lost in the huge gap between consumer health and wellness trends and Trump administration policy actions, while quite obviously accommodating status quo industry concerns. A far cry from their ambitious agenda- environmental preservation, anti-corruption, addressing chronic disease and promoting regenerative agriculture. MAHA, now milquetoast. MAHA? Meh.

The May MAHA report was at the very least inspired, energized and interesting, and raised questions about the health effects of glyphosate and atrazine, citing poor diet, exposure to chemicals, lack of physical activity, stress and an overprescription of medication as potential factors driving a rise in chronic disease among children. It scrutinized ultra processed foods for fifteen pages, and mentioned seed oils and high-fructose corn syrup as potentially harmful. Fueled by pandemic-era trauma and extensive chronic health issues, social media disinformation and the heavy handedness of the Biden administration towards alternative health practices and the distrust towards the mainstream medical and pharmaceutical industry, many swing voters found the welcome arms of RFK and then Trump. MAHA seemed to be picking up on this widespread gap between food policy and consumer trends on health and wellness.

The MAHA Strategy report, to its credit, has some new and compelling ideas that never would have passed muster in a Biden-era FDA – such as a much needed review of the GRAS (generally regarded as safe) process that allows new ingredients into the food supply, some mild encouragement of food companies to take out artificial food dyes, an openness to hearing from new food industry voices that would never have gotten in the door in previous USDA/FDA administrations, and a so-called streamlining of organic certification.

But the report is mostly cognitive dissonance, seemingly oblivious to administration funding cuts to local food purchasing, regional food business centers and local meat processing, along with the reversal of the Biden Order on food system consolidation, plus big cuts to food safety testing and occupational safety, and the wholesale elimination of food insecurity surveys, because cutting $186 billion in food aid surely won’t cause millions more Americans to go to bed hungry or increase their susceptibility to chronic disease-but we will never know because the feds will no longer measure such trifles. #MAHA.

The report is also a huge gift to GMO corn and soybean growers, as well as the agrochemical industry, who lobbied furiously. And RFK’s rejection of an international effort to combat chronic disease, his overt support of ICE accessing personal information of immigrants, as well as the dog whistle rejection of DEI and parroting of MAGA talking points on “able-bodied” SNAP users, along with massive staffing cuts to vital HHS services, casts vast shadows over the MAHA agenda, placing it in a very reactionary, backwards light.

Who exactly is this “America” they want to make healthier? Whose children are they referring to? The kids whose parents were deported or are working overnight double shifts in meat packing plants? The kids who parents were laid off by DOGE or are waking up at 3 AM to pick strawberries doused in fungicides or scraping the grease off of processing equipment in cereal factories? Or the kids whose families are losing SNAP dollars due to new “eligibility” requirements?

The report is crickets on sugar and seed oils, two of MAHA and RFK’s biggest pet peeves. And climate change? Crickets. The epidemic of gun violence and the prevalence of police violence? Crickets. Pesticides and herbicides? Crickets, just trust in the EPA, and don’t even think about suing the manufacturers. That pesticide liability shield is looming over this whole report, despite some MAHA leaders pushing back.

What about UPFs? Well… They are still working with the food industry on defining it, and various interest groups, both pro-UPF and more critical, are working hard to get their points of views across. Where it goes is anyone’s guess, likely follow the money. But crickets on former FDA chair David Kessler’s petition to ban UPFs and no longer classify them as GRAS (generally regarded as safe), which would seem to be right in line with MAHA rhetoric. Then again, Kessler could have just done this when he ran the FDA.

Deafening crickets on the enormous consolidation in the grocery industry, a handful of conglomerates dominating dozens of processed food categories across grocery shelves, or companies breaking up and recombining to further concentrate market share in their core categories, such as Kelloggs/Ferrara, Kraft-Heinz, JAB/Dr. Pepper, Mars-Kellanova, categories that are seeing astronomical increases in prices.

Or crickets on Kroger closing dozens of stores due to underinvestment, because capital was redistributed upwards to shareholders through dividends and buybacks. So now there are thousands of fewer grocery stores than in 1998, fueled by Walmart steamrolling market share in dozens of cities, and dollar stores and discounters opening everywhere as household incomes stagnate. Crickets on this actual existing grocery market structure, what choices people have in terms of stores and products that are being cited as major causes of chronic disease.

And crickets on the absolute lack of living wages for the vast majority of rank and file grocery workers, and crickets on the research-by investment bankers no less- that shows low income folks would eat healthier with higher wages or higher SNAP/WIC funds. And of course, so many crickets on the massive cuts to food security in the Big Beautiful Bill, because MAHA is happy to regulate what processed foods the working poor can buy, but god forbid they regulate the market and pricing power of Big Business. It’s so much easier to punch down.

And the MAHA strategy doesn’t address the roots of chronic disease, and why people are unhealthy from stress, long commutes, lack of exercise and poverty and inequality, poverty and inequality, poverty and inequality. Crickets.

Crickets on so many of the issues that actually matter to the food supply. At least more so than a token campaign to get companies to voluntarily commit to removing artificial colors.

And crickets on the mother of all health care crises. MAHA doesn’t bother confronting a predatory, parasitic health insurance complex that thrives on misery and disease by inserting bureaucratic middlemen and AIs into the relationships between doctors, caregivers and patients, profiteering off of the tsunami of care denials and delays, an industry of death panels, resulting in countless crimes against humanity that kill or maim hundreds of thousands of patients every year. And crickets on guaranteeing effective, on-demand, life-saving health care as a human right.

Yet even some decent ideas miss the forest for the trees, like the report’s strategy of fast tracking the opening of more grocery stores. The biggest barrier here is not addressed: banning restrictive lease covenants that big grocers use to keep new stores from opening in locations they have closed. These covenants last long, sometimes for decades. And new grocery stores alone won’t solve food deserts, as Whole Foods discovered in Chicago, or as research from Ken Kolb articulated, that incremental efforts to increase access to healthy foods won’t result in systemic changes, because food deserts are not actually about food. They are about poverty and inequality. Poverty and inequality, which MAHA and Trump will supercharge, and no longer accurately track.

Meanwhile, MAHA is building bridges between white nationalist think tanks and “regenerative” farmers and the John Oliver Show quoted MAHA spokesman Calley Means saying that “food deserts are driven by the incentives of SNAP”. Bro. Crickets would have been preferable.

And the report doesn’t address inequality because the Trump-Biden economy is thriving on inequality. Poverty has skyrocketed 40% since 2019. The Big Beautiful Bill, the largest upward redistribution of wealth in U.S. history, disentangled the historic social contract between food aid and subsidized agribusiness. Now, only the big farms get government money, or Milei’s “libertarians” getting a fat bailout in Argentina, or big banks when they go belly up. For the rest of us, bupkas.

The MAHA strategy is just soft eugenics. It punches down, on regulating what and how much the working poor can eat, without touching wages, while rolling back food safety and cutting the largest chunk of food aid in history, all the while asking for voluntary commitments from big business and promising subsidies to big growers. Tough on the working poor, soft on oligarchs.

MAHA, as the official food policy of the Trump era, will turbo charge food apartheid, the separate and unequal food options divided by class, race and zip code.

Chef Adrian Lipscombe said it best in her Substack: “MAHA claims to “make America healthy again,” but its policies strip away school meals, cut community food programs, and ignore the realities of families living in areas lacking the basic needs to survive, aka nutritional food. It demands “personal responsibility” while denying structural responsibility. It tells parents to buy cleaner food while cutting the very support that makes food affordable, SNAP. It blames individuals while dismantling the safety nets that underprivileged communities rely on to survive.”

MAHA is $30 smoothies at Erewhon, while millions fall into Buy Now/Pay Later debt purgatory for their weekly groceries. MAHA is 47 million Americans skipping meals and going to bed hungry, inherited from the high inflation/high interest rate/record Wall Street profits of Bidenomics.

For folks working in the food industry, MAHA doesn’t matter. It is not fit for purpose. Working people say they want higher wages, better childcare and benefits and better schedules, not sanctimony and condescension on their food choices.

For emerging brand entrepreneurs, MAHA also doesn’t really matter much. The folks formulating and marketing “better for you” products in the face of sky high wholesale and retail fees, tariffs and cost inflation, climate change, labor shortages from deportations, and pressure from private label brands, these folks likely have much bigger problems to consider than the details of a milquetoast MAHA Strategy. They are already building the future food system. They are way ahead of MAHA.

And for consumers that can still afford food, MAHA is not keeping up. Consumers have been pointing the way to better food policy with the trends they are creating, from organic and regenerative, to humanely raised and plant based, to allergen friendly special diets, to recognizing the need to address the climate change impacts of supply chains to values based purchasing guidelines in public procurement. They are the guiding lights, and while big business tries to oppose, delay, deny and greenwash progress, in the biggest non sequitur and missed opportunity, MAHA food policy is just not giving the people what they want and will likely ensure the opposite of its purported goals. MAHA indeed.

What folks we like are saying:

“It looks like pesticide industry lobbyists steamrolled the MAHA Commission’s agenda,” said EWG co-founder and President Ken Cook.

According to EWG, 37 states have introduced a total of 94 bills banning or restricting certain chemicals or categories of food, with more than a dozen adopted. States are acting because the federal government has for years dragged its heels on food safety, allowing most new chemicals into the marketplace without meaningful review. So don’t count on RFK, follow the state level energy.

Adrienne DeLuca of NOSH, a leading CPG publication: “This second edition, which Kennedy repeatedly noted contains 128 recommendations, lacks actionable recommendations. The majority of the language in the 20-page document is forward looking and makes a short, vague statement about addressing the problem of that given section before moving on to the next. For example, the only mention of ultra processed foods (which was called out 38 times in the first document) was this: “USDA, HHS, and FDA will continue efforts to develop a U.S. government-wide definition for “Ultra-processed Food” to support potential future research and policy activity.”

“If the Administration is serious about its recommendations on food and agriculture, it should start by restoring funding and investing even more in healthy, scratch-cooked school meals and regional infrastructure and markets for local farmers and ranchers. USDA also needs to fully fund and expand conservation agriculture programs that reduce use of toxic pesticides and reform its own food purchasing programs by sourcing from organic and regenerative farmers and phasing out processed meat and ultra processed food.” Kari Hamerschlag, Deputy Director of the Food and Agriculture Program at Friends of the Earth.

According to Carey Gilliam of The New Lede, the report “provides a few “crumbs” for public and environmental health advocates, but big wins for powerful food and chemical industries seeking to skirt limits on their products and practices… MAHA’s final report has erased any mention of the controversial weed killer glyphosate, the world’s most widely used herbicide, which scientific studies have linked to cancer and other health problems. The May MAHA report specifically cited the risks of glyphosate as well as another commonly used weed killer called atrazine, which has been linked to birth defects. The final report makes no mention of pesticide exposure routes or risks.”

“The report has a lot of ideas for actions that really could improve health, but is short on specifics and weak on regulatory action,” said Marion Nestle, professor of Food, Nutrition, and Public Health, Emerita, at New York University (NYU). “What’s still missing is regulation. So much of this is voluntary, work with, promote, partner,” she said. “MAHA has so much bipartisan support. This is such an opportunity. I sure wish they had taken it.”

“In short, despite the very-online agitations of Kennedy’s Make America Healthy movement, the Trump administration successfully rammed through a bill that will likely make the least-healthy food even cheaper… And the bill’s massive increase in immigration-enforcement spending will likely target the undocumented people who harvest the bulk of US fruits and vegetables, making healthier choices even more expensive.” Tom Philpott, in a recent Mother Jones analysis of the Big Beautiful Bill.

And some MAHA leaders are not happy either:

“This report is a major missed opportunity for the Trump administration and a clear sign that Big Ag, Bayer, and the pesticide industry are firmly embedded in the White House and intentionally short-circuiting Trump’s campaign promise to the millions of MAHA voters who helped him return to power. In the past four months alone, three major independent peer-reviewed studies have found definitive links between pesticides like glyphosate, paraquat, and chlorpyrifos to six of the top ten common cancers found in the U.S., Parkinson’s disease, and brain damage in children.” David Murphy is the founder of United We Eat and a former Finance Director for RFK Jr.’s Presidential campaign.

“The pesticide section of the report, which directs EPA to partner with industry on PR campaigns to convince Americans the system is ‘robust,’ reads like it was written by Bayer and Monsanto.” Elizabeth Kucinich, former Director of Policy for the Center for Food Safety.

Zen Honeycutt, founder of the Moms Across America movement and a vocal MAHA supporter, said her group is “deeply disappointed that the committee allowed the chemical companies to influence the report.”

But “Food Babe” Vani Hari and founder of Truvani (actually a decent product), still quite undeterred by material reality, thinks RFK is declaring war on UPF’s.

For reference, from Friends of the Earth:

Under the Trump Administration, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has eliminated or gutted numerous programs that would advance the MAHA Commission’s purported objectives around healthier food and farming systems:

• In March, the USDA axed the Local Food for Schools program and the Local Food Purchase Assistance Program, slashing more than $1 billion in funding for fresh whole foods from local farmers.

• USDA Secretary Rollins cut thousands of conservation staff that provide critical technical assistance to farmers for regenerative agriculture practices.

• The agency cancelled over a billion dollars in conservation projects.

• USDA has significantly reduced funding or cancelled programs that provide infrastructure and marketing support for small farmers and ranchers

• USDA eliminated almost all Farm to School funding for FY 25, making it harder for schools to put healthy, local food on kids’ plates.

• in July, Secretary Rollins eliminated the Regional Food Business Centers, a critical support system for local food infrastructure, small-scale meat producers, and regenerative farmers resources.

• Secretary Rollins is withholding $50 million from farmers for sustainable agriculture research and demonstration projects that advance regenerative and organic farming practices.

Under the Trump Administration, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has entrenched industry influence and rolled back or eliminated numerous environmental rules that protect people from toxic exposures. Here are a few examples:

• Appointed chemical industry executives and Big Ag lobbyists to key posts overseeing chemical regulation at the EPA

• Lynn Ann Dekleva, who previously spent over thirty years at chemical giant DuPont and lobbied for the American Chemistry Council, appointed to oversee new chemicals

• Kyle Kunkler, who was previously a pro-pesticide lobbyist for the American Soybean Association, appointed to oversee pesticide regulation

• Rolled back protections from PFAS and terminated funding for research into forever chemicals like PFAS.

• Pushed to re-register additional uses of the dangerous pesticide dicamba, despite the fact that they have been banned twice by federal courts. Dicamba is linked to serious health impacts like cancer.

• Eliminated the Office of Research and Development, laying off hundreds of scientists that provided critical expertise and guidance on protecting human health and the environment from toxic chemicals

• In March 2025, EPA Administrator Zeldin announced plans to rescind or weaken 31 significant environmental regulations targeting clean air, clean water, climate change, vehicle emissions, and more.

Special Bonus For Readers who made it this far!

Ten years ago, in Spring 2015, my boss at Whole Foods, the esteemed Walter Robb, sent me to a USDA conference to give a presentation on food trends and subsequently argue with a bunch of Monsanto/agribusiness flacks. It was epic (and probably the only time I have been caught on video wearing a sports jacket). “Organic is the gold standard. Organic is the future of American agriculture.” Enjoy.

peace.

(Perspectives are 100% our own and do not reflect our sponsors’.)