Grocery Update Volume 2, #4: MAHA Or Misdirection.

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

1. MAHA Or Misdirection.

By Errol Schweizer.

The Trump Administration released a much-anticipated white paper from the MAHA commission on May 22, 2025.

The report analyzes four major drivers of chronic disease, including poor diet, overmedicalization, aggregation of environmental toxins, chronic stress and lack of physical activity. The commission zeros in on ultraprocessed foods (UPFs), food dyes and environmental toxins such as PFAS, microplastics, herbicides and pesticides, and calls out revolving door relationships between lobbyists, researchers, policy makers and corporate interests. The report also contains a lot of nationalistic rhetoric that aligns with Trumpism, bordering on jingoistic, that “American farmers feed the world, American companies lead the world, and American energy powers the world”, etc., and purports to create a transparent and big tent movement to transform the food supply.

With many state governments united on MAHA principles and policies, health focused retailers showing strong growth, many food companies either reformulating products or expanding distribution of “better for you” products aligned with this philosophy, and a movement of well-funded entrepreneurs, activists and “MAHA Moms” that have propelled RFK to public office, America seems to be having it’s MAHA moment.

For a report of this scale and visibility to be issued under a Republican Administration is unprecedented. For the Democrats, who are either pretending to play dead or actually dying in office, to leave this policy opening to the Trump team is bizarre, and frankly, unforgivable. Republicans have absorbed the burgeoning MAHA coalition and the report appears to be a first step to operationalize the momentum.

The report ambitiously states, “Real transformation requires more than vision – it requires clarity... Before we act, we must fully understand the scope of the crisis, the conditions that created it, and the mechanisms through which it continues to grow. Without this foundation, interventions risk being reactive, fragmented, or ineffective…The purpose of this report is radical transparency about our current state to spur a conversation about how we can build a world – together..”

And incredibly, also states, “The greatest step the United States can take to reverse childhood chronic disease is to put whole foods produced by American farmers and ranchers at the center of healthcare”.

The report emphasizes a lot of what the core MAHA movement has rallying around, including the best selling book by MAHA leaders, former federal lobbyist Callie Means and his sister, Surgeon General nominee Dr. Casey Means.

But it also presents a somewhat watered down and cherry-picked analysis of the processed food industry previously articulated in greater depth by the likes of Robyn O’Brien, Ken Cook and Environmental Working Group, and Marion Nestle, among others, and ignores the structural critiques of the industry articulated by Raj Patel, Phil Howard, Austin Frerick and Jennifer Clapp, as well as yours truly.

The MAHA commission’s concluding recommendations, though, are a let down. They fall far short of a systemic game plan to overhaul the food supply, other than reforming the GRAS regulatory review process for new food ingredients, and vague mentions of “lifestyle interventions” and nutrition research trials. Their plans will be further articulated in a follow up report due out in August 2025.

Most concerningly, there are only a handful of mentions of the core problems of the industrial food system, namely monopoly power and concentration of wealth, ownership and governance, and the resulting inequalities. As the report states, a “small number of corporations control a large share of food production, processing, distribution, and retail” and goes into no further detail, a massive non-sequitur.

»This centralized control of wealth, infrastructure, decision making and labor power dwarfs that of any other country in world history, and the coordinated relationships between production, inputs, grain trading, processing, manufacturing, wholesale, retail and food donation sectors lock in ultra processed foods as the de facto caloric and nutrient options for the vast majority of Americans. At the end of the day, it’s all about the supply chain.«

The MAHA report misses this forest for the trees, with a critique that leaves out its biggest and most vital targets. And the overall impact feels like misdirection, making big statements one way, while the administration’s day to day actions are 180 degrees opposed, as if simply being close to power, being invited to sit at the big table, is enough to make significant changes to the food supply.

The MAHA report is, for now, at best, just high profile virtue signaling, without policy actions and funding committed to actually doing things about the problems it articulates, with even Bloomberg noting this, that “the report doesn’t lay the groundwork for the type of aggressive policies that had most concerned them” and thought leaders such as Marion Nestle and Carey Gilliam echoing this criticism.

The bright spot of the MAHA report is that some of the most awful agricultural vested interests, such as soy and corn grower associations, agrochemical interests and the GMO foods lobby, are pissed off by its findings. Their golden geese, such as the herbicides glyphosate and atrazine that are used across millions of acres of GMO corn and soy production, are justifiably in the MAHA crosshairs. These vested interests warn that concerns about “production practices” such as pesticide use, would “put American food production at risk.” (Yes, even criticizing the agrochemical complex will drive down yields, that is how sensitive that GMO corn is. Cornflakes or… snowflakes?) Lobbyists will doubtlessly be working overtime to thwart any positive outcomes from the report.

The broader context is that the Trump junta continues to implement policies that are at odds with even the mildest MAHA recommendations. As my colleague Steven Hoffman articulates in depth in his newsletter, “Overall, it is difficult to square Kennedy’s rhetoric with the on-the-ground actions of the administration he serves.”

Here are some brief and timely examples of how the Trump Administration is actively undermining the purported goals of the MAHA Commission.

In recent months, the Trump USDA killed over a billion dollars in local foods infrastructure funding and also hiked up subsidies for large scale growers adversely impacted by bird flu culls and Trump’s ill-advised trade war chaos. At USDA, it’s business as usual, propping up industrial ag and sidelining alternatives.

Just this past week, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) decided to not pursue their case against an unnamed big box store, likely Walmart, and PepsiCo for coordinating unfair price advantages and exclusive discounts at the expense of competing retailers.

How does the administration claim that ultraprocessed foods are very bad and are at the heart of America’s chronic disease epidemic, and then not go after the country’s two largest purveyors of junk foods? You can’t find one corner of any given big box store without a Pepsi, Fritos, Doritos, Cheetos, Tostitos, or Lay’s display. Chester Cheetah, monopolist, making off like a bandit. The post Lina Khan-FTC, back to being asleep at the wheel. Funny, now I’m craving some chips.

Stacy Mitchell, co-executive director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR) condemned the decision. "The FTC’s decision to dismiss the case against PepsiCo represents a fundamental abandonment of the commission’s responsibility to ensure a level playing field for small businesses… The dismissal fits a troubling pattern of weakened antitrust enforcement that has allowed unprecedented corporate concentration across the American economy.”

And then there is the problem of how the MAHA report squares up against the Republican attack on food access.

The United States already has a systemic problem of food insecurity and food apartheid, or two food systems of haves and have-nots divided by race, class and geography, of radically different product assortments and access to fresh and healthy foods, of Dollar Generals and Whole Foods, of Walmarts and Erewhons, HEBs on the East Side of Austin versus HEBs on Austin’s West Side.

Over 47 million Americans are food insecure, a number that skyrocketed during the Biden Administration’s brilliant combination of cognitive decline, apparent cancer, the underwriting of an unpopular and horrifying war against the civilian population in Gaza, the elimination of pandemic era-benefits, massive government subsidies to private industry, plus high interest rates, slow anti-trust efforts, and lack of price stabilization policies for essential food categories that enabled food monopolies continued to grow market share while raking in record profits from price hikes, while real wages declined against inflationary pressures. It was a case study in ineffective, contradictory industrial policy, where the macroeconomics grew adversely to household economics. Bidenomics 101.

Yet while Democrats and their talking heads were happy to gaslight Americans into thinking everything was just fine until November 6th, 2024, there is now a distinct whiff of paternalism with the MAHA commission that unintentionally or not, reflects the elite white nationalism at the heart of Trump politics. That is what Trump means when he says MAHA leaders have “impeccable credentials”: 1. no analysis of how race, income and wealth, or geography plays into chronic disease statistics, 2. no structural analysis of profit, ownership and governance, and 3. no stakeholders at the table from communities and social strata most impacted by its findings and recommendations, namely the working class and working poor. While RFK has set a good precedent by bringing his coalition to Washington to keep him honest, especially his “MAHA Moms” and longtime food producers and activists, their focus appears to be narrow and he is working within these priorities.

The real action here is happening at the budgetary level, with the latest Republican budget reconciliation slashing $300 billion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and reallocating $130 billion for immigration enforcement and detention, including targeting undocumented farmworkers that harvest and grow the majority of food sold in the U.S., a crisis that MAHA has been silent on. Absolute crickets.

Alongside the latest tax cuts that would trim nearly $400k in annual taxes from the top .1% of income earners, on top of trade war/tariff stock windfalls that have shoveled over $300 billion into the portfolios of a handful of billionaires, the Trump administration is posturing as MAHA, all while waging class war from above.

Budget cuts to SNAP will be devastating to the purchasing power of the working poor, and may gut independent, regional and rural grocers whose revenue is dependent on SNAP redemptions, with 27,000 retailers in areas with the highest shares of SNAP participants most likely to bear the brunt of proposed drastic cuts to food assistance, meaning that SNAP cuts may further reinforce market concentration in a grocery industry that has lost thousands of independent grocers since the 1990s or create new food desert areas without full service stores, and supercharge the expansion of discounters whose shelves are rife with UPFs. Over 90% of SNAP recipients shop at Walmart, which harvested over 25% of SNAP redemptions. Regional and independent grocers are also hugely important in SNAP, and SNAP accounts for around 10% of all grocery industry sales.

The National Grocers Association, which represents thousands of independent grocers, is also “deeply concerned by the cuts and programmatic cost shift changes”.

“SNAP is not only essential to fighting food insecurity, but [is] also a proven economic engine for thousands of local communities across the country,” National Grocers Association President and CEO Greg Ferrara said.

Nearly sixty percent of people are opposed to cutting or reducing SNAP funding. SNAP generates over $4.5 billion in state and federal tax revenue and for every $1 invested in SNAP, $1.79 of economic activity is generated. SNAP funds rarely last for more than half a month for families and is inadequate to pay for a healthy, fresh-foods rich diet that minimizes convenient and ubiquitous UPFs, especially in families with working adults who are commuting, going to school, working multiple jobs, and caring for elders and children.

Yet, the food industry is also ground zero for the disparities that drive consumption of ultraprocessed foods and the resulting health and wellness issues that disproportionately impact the multiracial working poor, all driven by the low wages and lack of bargaining power that drives people to use programs such as SNAP.

This results in food workers being 93% more likely to be food insecure, nearly 1 in 5, and 60% are more likely to rely on SNAP, while earning a median income of just $28,000 per year. A recent survey documented that 75% of Kroger workers were food insecure. No amount of lifestyle intervention, nutrition education, GRAS oversight reform or removal of artificial food dyes will change that.

As Eric Schlosser stated to Deena Shanker over a decade ago, “What is the single most important change that's necessary to transform our food system? I would say, a big increase in the minimum wage.”

One in 10 workers live in a household that receives SNAP due to low wages, inconsistent work schedules, and no paid sick leave, while 70% worked full-time every week. In many states, under 60% of eligible workers use SNAP and less than 15% of farmworkers use it. SNAP already requires adults to job train or work at least 30 hours a week. But many recipients are not expected to work because they’re children, are living with a disability, or are older adults. The best RFK can do here is to claim that there are too-many “able-bodied recipients” not working because they are on SNAP, a popular and woefully inaccurate talking point that is willfully blind to the systemic food insecurity driven by low wages and geographic concerns, i.e., there a dozen zip codes in East Austin without full service grocery stores, neighborhoods that are majority Black, Hispanic and immigrant. There are thousands of such low income zip codes and census tracts across the U.S., across all racial demographics.

Yet over 25 states are considering restricting SNAP participants from buying UPFs like candy and soda, a policy that has been embraced by some of the MAHA leadership, but rejected by the grocery sector and food security advocates. There are MAHA believers who think that federal and state governments can tell people what to eat, but not ensure their employers pay living wages so they can afford enough food without public support.

“Programs like SNAP are a hand up—not a handout,” said Nichelle Harriott, Policy Director at the HEAL Food Alliance. “Republican leaders and their corporate allies are pushing the manufactured lie that there’s not enough to go around. They’re choosing to take food away from children, seniors, veterans, and people with disabilities so they can afford more tax breaks for billionaires. SNAP helps more than 41 million people afford groceries, and those dollars flow directly into local communities, supporting our farmers and rural economies.”

And a veritable who’s who of Factory Farm and Big Food special interests that are opposed to MAHA are also cheering on tax cuts and increased commodity subsidies in the Republican budget that represents the largest upward wealth transfer in American history. Chemical dependent commodity crop farmers would see their publicly funded incomes increase from “$125,000 to $155,000 per person, allow every member of a farm organized as a joint venture or limited liability company to collect up to $155,000 a year, and eviscerate an income limit designed to prohibit millionaires from receiving farm subsidies”, according to Scott Faber of EWG.

»This is a historic break from the New Deal social contract that merged subsidizing agricultural overproduction with broad scale access to cheap, abundant processed foods.«

The MAHA agenda is right in the middle of it all, advocating for one thing while Trump does the opposite.

And while it may sound heroic to disentangle the working poor’s food access from the excesses of federally underwritten industrial agriculture and ultraprocessed foods, the strategy also plays into a “Robin Hood in Reverse” that has taken hold of the food industry and society at large.

From the extreme profiteering that food industry monopolies engaged in throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, driving up grocery prices 40, 50 or even 60% in major packaged food categories, well before the Trump tariffs were ever imagined, price inflation tanking consumption volumes while juicing stock buybacks and net profits to their highest rates in nearly a century, even as market shares continued to increase and real wages flatlined. Or the enormous 2017 tax breaks on the wealthy that supercharged U.S. government deficits and debts, to the lack of job security and upward mobility that results in the real average U.S. income (minus the top 1,000 earners) hovering around a shameful, paltry $35,000 a year, an income that in no way can support a MAHA-approved diet and lifestyle in any zip code or census tract.

Poverty and inequality are at the heart of America’s chronic disease epidemic, and are the results of imbalances in wealth and power.

MAHA can’t solve for one without addressing the others.

Anything else is misdirection.

So while MAHA activists cheer the release of a report that makes some highly visible, accurate, timely but still limited critiques of the industrial food system, wrapping it with a vague and milquetoast set of policy recommendations, the Trump family plows forward with their ongoing objectives: to make themselves and their fellow billionaires richer, to increase poverty, inequality and food apartheid at the expense of health, sustainability and the common good, to increase centralized, corporate control over the food supply, to profit off of sending markets and supply chains into a tizzy with erratic threats of tariffs and trade wars, and to criminalize the folks actually growing our food.

How does all of that make America healthy again?

2. Grocery Nerd’s Ten Point Program To Make America Healthier Than Ever.

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. 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 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. The most successful social programs in the world have ditched means testing, see the Nordics. And make all produce free at point of sale. 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.

3. UPF labeling, with exceptions. 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 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 and 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, and 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 meat sector will collapse. 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. And if they want price supports, they need to be more responsible with what they grow and how they grow. Period.

5. Break up Big Food. 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. 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 the Trump folks want to sell off to the lowest bidders, of course), so we know 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. 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 are already working on this despite fundraising challenges, so it is just a matter of allocating public funds to ramp this up. The demand is there, and it will spur more localized production and less dependence on imports 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 billion dollars in spending on war, death and destruction and increased annual military spending is a bipartisan obsession. The grocery industry is just over a billion 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 planning 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 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. But damn, all that holistic wellness stuff is expensive too, universal should mean universal. Healthcare is a human right. There is no MAHA without universal healthcare.

peace.

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