Grocery Update Volume 2, #24: A Ten Point Program To Make America Healthier Than Ever.

Reprinted From Volume 2, #4 ICYMI. Revised and Expanded.

The Grocery Nerd Ten Point Program To Make America Healthier Than Ever.

What is MAHA Missing? Let’s start here.

Reprinted From Volume 2, #4. Revised and Expanded.

1. Living Wages and Expanded Union Protections:

The first step to a healthier life is a living wage. If wages had kept up with productivity, that would be $26 an hour. If wages had kept up with corporate profits, that would be $44 an hour. If wages were tacked to the buying power that baby boomers had in previous decades, that looks more like $60+ an hour. This adds up to $79 trillion in wealth that has been siphoned from the bottom 90% of income earners in the last four decades. So let’s recalibrate the economy to ensure living wages. Research by investment bankers at Whipstitch Capital shows that people would eat healthier if they could actually afford to. Good food is not cheap. So let’s start there.

And why unions? They built the middle class and are the surest vehicle to achieving better wages and working conditions for the majority. Unions are the best anti-poverty program and by default, the best way to achieve the healthiest outcomes for the most people. They are democratic vehicles by and for their members and are incorporated as their own legal entity. They are more popular than ever and most non-union workers would join one if their employers weren’t so opposed. So start there, start with living wages and labor protections in order to MAHA.

2. Universal SNAP + Free Produce for All:

SNAP barely makes ends meet for users and is a weak substitute for living wages and actual purchasing power. SNAP is also stigmatized despite being used by over 40 million Americans and generating nearly 10% of the grocery industry’s annual revenue. First step, universalize SNAP. Anyone can use it to buy food. Want to protect and improve a public program? Let rich kids use it too. The most successful social programs in the world have ditched means testing, see the Nordics.

And we can make all produce free at point of sale, fully subsidized by public funds. That will incentivize healthy eating. The worst that can happen may be some creative souls reselling produce as arbitrage to folks who don’t believe they can get it for free. Because produce can be free, if we want it to be. It would cost far less than the vast increase in military spending under Biden and Trump. And a lot less than $130 billion for ICE and the deportation industrial complex.

3. UPF labeling.

Ultraprocessed foods should have a warning label. At this point, the best rubric is the Colombian labeling system, which would mean that around 60% of grocery items would have a warning label. That would also create a strong market incentive for “better for you” products to gain consumer visibility. The Non GMO Project is also developing a Non-UPF label for consumer products (Disclosure: I am a longtime board member).

The exception to this labeling should be plant-based food analogues, until there is clear research connecting them to the same health impacts as actual junk foods like soda, candy, chips and hot dogs. Let’s not throw the Beyond Meat out with the UPF bathwater.

4. Stop subsidizing corn syrup, animal feed and ethanol.

Over 200 million acres of genetically modified, chemical dependent monocultures dominate the heartland. It’s not food. It’s for fuel, animal feed, processed crap.

Instead, only subsidize nutrient dense, whole food production that is using regenerative, climate friendly and organic production methods. This is very simple but really huge. The Big Farm and Biotech lobby will freak out. The consolidated meat sector will scream. Politicians will lose their jobs.

This will need to be phased in carefully, along with massive farmer training and outreach, just transitions for affected workers and retail price controls as supplies of finished goods are impacted. But commodity farmers need to get off the dole. They need to start growing food. And if they want price or production supports, they need to be more responsible not only with what they grow and but how they grow it. Period.

5. Break up Big Food. Support Co-ops, ESOPs, “BFY” and Specialty Producers.

Enforce Robinson Patman, an antitrust law that polices unfair price advantages by the largest players. The grocery industry is highly consolidated at all levels and is responsible for the $600 billion or so in annual sales of ultra processed foods. Start with seed and agrochemical companies, then retailers like Walmart, Albertsons and Kroger that dominate dozens of metro markets, and then move on to consumer packaged goods behemoths like Pepsico and Nestle, Mondelez and Kraft Heinz that dominate dozens of food categories. Stop allowing them to negotiate exclusive discounts. Disallow slotting fees and other pay-to-play activities.

Scrutinize wholesaler cost-plus relationships and revenue models that disadvantage small producers and diversify the consolidated middle market of wholesalers, aggregators and re-sellers. Create a level playing field for ambitious, emerging brands making “better for you” products. Sell shares of retailers back to employees and democratize ownership, like HyVee, Woodman’s, Redner’s, Winco or Publix do, or sell shares to community members and supercharge the consumer cooperative sector along the lines of Scandinavia, the U.K., Switzerland or Japan, where cooperatives dominate many metro markets. It will be a big, beautiful, diverse, vibrant and innovative grocery industry, always reinventing itself and creating wealth and prosperity for everyone, not just a handful of ultra-wealthy executives, investors and owners.

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

Over two thirds of surveyed New Yorkers would shop at a publicly owned grocery store, especially if it was operated well and priced lower than competitors, while selling culturally appropriate and values-based products. The military already has a robust public grocery sector that service members know and love, so it can be done.

This can also include public cafes, like Brazil implemented in Belo Horizonte to reduce food insecurity, as well as public wholesale markets, so that smaller farmers and emerging brands have more options for gaining distribution at retail and aren’t reliant on a handful of wholesale monopolies. And finally, this should also mean free delivery for all, like “Access-A-Rides” but for groceries, so that you never have to worry about skipping meals if you are working late or can’t get to a store. Everyone has the right to good food.

7. Subsidize Fresh Food Processing Infrastructure.

The biggest challenge to a public grocery sector is the a bottleneck in aggregation, processing, production and distribution of healthier foods between farm gate and retail. While the Trump USDA killed over a billion dollars in local food procurement subsidies, MAHA could push for an aggressive public investment in small and medium scale food processing- if it weren’t locked into DOGE cost cutting. This would create millions of jobs but also enable consumers to have better food options that are made closer to home. Organizations such as Marcellus Foods were already working on this despite fundraising challenges, because the VC sector just doesn’t get this. So it is just a matter of allocating public funds to ramp this up. Fund it and they will come. The demand is there, and it will spur more localized production and less dependence on imports and commodities once upstream processing and aggregation is de-risked for growers.

8. A Just Transition for the Grocery Industry.

It will take time to phase in a healthier and regenerative food supply, especially at the farm and retail levels. The best framework for where this needs to go would be the values-based procurement that has been embraced by dozens of cities for their public schools and hospitals, that require foods to be produced using fair wages and labor standards, sustainable growing methods, humane animal care, and a focus on whole foods and healthy diets and economics that keeps wealth in communities. Ten years is an ambitious timeline to phase in values-based procurement for thousands of grocery stores and hundreds of millions of acres of farmland. But there is no better time to start than now.

9. Defund The Pentagon.

The Trump budget calls for over a trillion dollars in spending on war, death and destruction and increased annual military spending is a bipartisan obsession. The grocery industry is just over a trillion dollars in annual sales, as a relative measure. The Pentagon has never passed an audit. No one really knows where all that money goes (to arms contractors, most likely making armaments to sell to Israel and Saudi Arabia and other rogue states, and maybe also covering up alien sightings). No one really knows how many offshore military bases the U.S. really has, or why we need them. To protect trade routes of stuff that Trump is tariffing or to make sure the oil and natural gas keeps flowing from Qatar and Riyadh? To justify building more battleships and fighter jets?

The Pentagon is the largest employer in the U.S., and much of the preceding could be staffed by former military personnel transitioning to productive civilian lives. Arms manufacturers can be decommissioned, the employees furloughed and retrained, and the infrastructure transitioned and repurposed to permanent peacetime uses. And how much “defense” spending do we really need? The E.U., with over 100 million more people than the U.S., and with Russia to its east, spends around $300 billion and growing. Or Brazil, with a hundred million fewer people than the U.S., and sharing a border with less stable neighbors like Venezuela, Paraguay, Guyana and Argentina, spends around $25 billion a year on defense, around 2% of what we currently do. Sounds about right.

10. Universal Healthcare.

Free at point of service, for both conventional and alternative modalities, no questions asked. No one really likes their employer-provided private insurance, we are all just scared shitless of losing that job, having a health crisis and facing medical bankruptcy. And we’re all pissed as hell at the merry go round of denials, delays, mis-billings, having to pay premiums and co-pays and deductibles and out-of-pockets, and underwrite the extreme profiteering by the Medical Industrial Complex and Big Pharma. We need Nuremberg Trials for big insurers and their crimes against humanity, the millions of people hurt and killed by their bureaucratic meddling, their death panels. But damn, all that holistic wellness stuff is expensive too, and people should have the right to choose what modalities work best for them. Universal should mean universal. Healthcare is a fundamental human right. There is no MAHA without universal healthcare.

peace.

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