Theodore Ross: Welcome to Forked: Food Politics in the MAHA Age. I’m Theodore Ross, editor-in-chief of the Food & Environment Reporting Network, and I’m joined by my co-host, Helena Bottemiller Evich from Food Fix. This episode we’re doing something a little different, a collaboration with another show. We’re joined by veteran food policy journalist Tom Philpott, one of the hosts of the Unconfined Podcast, from the Center for a Livable Future at Johns Hopkins University.
Unconfined is a monthly interview podcast focusing on the public health implications of industrial meat production. So we’re going to dive deep into why RFK Jr. rejected the UN declaration on noncommunicable diseases, how MAHA has and hasn’t transformed our food system, and finally, what we’re all reading. Tom, Helena, how are you?
Helena Bottemiller Evich: Doing great. How are you?
Theodore: I’m good. I’m good. This is a special day on Forked. We have our first guest and collaborator, Tom Philpott. Say hello to everybody, Tom.
Tom Philpott: I’m so happy to be here, guys. Long time coming. I’ve been a listener since you first started, so it’s great to be here.
Theodore: Terrific. Before we get down to it, I do want to do a little bit of promotion.
Buzzkill, which is FERN’s podcast on the pollinator crisis, is up for a Signal Award for the best podcast in the sustainability and environment category, which is a great thing. The Signal Awards are a big honor, and we hope we can win. Now, the thing about the Signal Awards is it’s sort of like the Webbys, if you’re familiar with that, where you vote.
So if you listen to the podcast, I would love it if you go out there and vote for us. It’s very easy to do. You just go to www.vote.signalaward.com. Now you will need to register and you have to verify your email, but I voted and so far, no spam. So help support Buzzkill. Oh, voting is open until October 9, which means there are now two days left.
All right, so there’s the bit of business to keep the lights on. Why don’t we jump in? As you know, Helena, and maybe you know, Tom, we like to start every episode of Forked with what we call the double take, which is something in the food news that is so, you know, it makes you do a double take because it’s, usually bad. But it could just be surprising.
Now, for this time, I think we should talk about the fact of RKF Jr. rejecting the UN declaration on noncommunicable diseases. This happened a little while ago. The coverage on it was to me — and I’ll get to both, let you both talk about this — but to me, the interesting thing about it was that it didn’t really provide all that much information about why RFK Jr. rejected it. It did cover the fact that he said that it was promoting radical gender ideology and abortion. That’s about as far as the news went. But if you actually listened to RFK Jr.’s videotaped comments on it — it was about four minutes long — it did say a bit more that he got to the “biological reality of sex, women-only spaces” and, and this is the one that I thought was most interesting, the “constitutional or international right to abortion,” none of which is in the UN declaration.
But I do have a couple of theories about what maybe RFK Jr. was objecting to. There’s certain words that I found within the document itself that I think are interesting. There is, of course, “equity,” “evidence-based.” He might not have liked that. The word “pandemic” comes up, “Covid-19,” “disproportionately impacted” — I assume that’s code word for DEI, and they didn’t like that.
“Universal healthcare coverage,” that’s in there. The “World Health Organization,” they do not like that. “United Nations,” that comes up. “Vaccination.” And then the last one that I thought was interesting, the phrase “public funding” appearing in the same sentence as “research and development.” These are not MAHA things. So, Helena and/or Tom, tell me what’s going on here? Why did they reject this? What does it mean?
Helena: I think maybe we should start by zooming out just a little bit ...
Theodore: All right.
Helena: … into why it’s notable that the UN is putting more focus on noncommunicable diseases. So for the uninitiated, noncommunicable is kind of like all the things we worry about that are not infectious, right? So, cardiovascular disease, obesity, diabetes, cancer, and for a long, long time, the international community has not put as much focus on these even though the UN estimates like 43 million people die every year from noncommunicable diseases. Eighteen million of those deaths are considered premature. So this is a huge global impact and hasn’t gotten a lot of focus and attention, and of course ...
Theodore: That sounds good to me. That’s a good thing, right?
Helena: Of course, Kennedy often talks about how he feels it’s wrong that the U.S. doesn’t focus enough on chronic disease in kind of a similar vein. So watching the UN say, you know, we’re really trying to marshal the international community to focus on tackling noncommunicable diseases, and then have Kennedy come and say the U.S. rejects this and give all these reasons was sort of just a shocking moment for people. But I think if you take the Trump administration’s overall view of multilateral action and the UN generally — and, you know, we are leaving the World Health Organization — it makes a lot more sense when you look at the bigger picture and sort of the just adversarial tone to this stuff. And yeah, HHS would not explain further what they actually had issue with in this.
Tom: Yeah, and I think it really just gets to the core contradiction of MAHA, where it talks this huge game about shifting all these resources to these kinds of chronic diseases that are very, very often diet-related. And this is something that Kennedy has just been hammering home for years now. He hammered it home during his presidential campaign. He hammered it home while he was a surrogate for Trump. At his confirmation. I mean, it’s just consistently talking this game up. But when it comes time to putting policy behind it, it always ends up getting the short shrift.
And, you know, what he really sort of marshals any kind of force behind policy has been the vaccine stuff. So he just sort of — and I think it’s kind of amazing because the really popular part of his message when he was running and when he was pushing MAHA for Trump during the campaign was the food-related stuff.
I think it’s a lot more mainstream than anti-vaxxers. Now, he’s helped grow anti-vaxxer-ism, but it was, you know, a pretty fringe part of the thing. But there’s this sort of dawning realization that the food that we eat is a problem, and it’s consistently not taken action when he could, and this is just the latest glaring example of that.
Helena: Well, and one of the reasons they actually did — that Kennedy did give during his, I think it was during the speech he gave at the UN meeting — you know, he mentioned that taxes were an issue. Like that we had some issue with that in the declaration. But in the political declaration itself, it had been so watered down by industry lobbying, it no longer recommended taxes on sugary drinks or other “unhealthy products.” It, I think, just stuck to alcohol and tobacco taxes, which I think every country, most countries are already taxing. And so, you know, to your point, Tom, of just talking this big game, I mean, I personally have heard Secretary Kennedy say that sugar is poisoning us.
In no uncertain terms. He says that literally, and he said that many times. And so then to take issue with a document that doesn’t even go as far as taxing sugary drinks, which in theory should be very in line with MAHA, is just sort of puzzling.
Theodore: I don’t think it’s that puzzling. I mean, I think it is in keeping with what we’ve seen. So you and I, Helena, we talk about this a lot, whether the MAHA movement is anti-regulatory or why they’re doing certain things in certain ways. But what you really see, the really consistent theme, is a desire to tear down institutions, right? So if your goal is to tear down the WHO and potentially to tear down the UN itself, you are not going to go along with this relatively benign, pretty watered-down declaration on the very things that you want. Because your goal is not necessarily those health and food priorities that you talk about. They are, in fact, to tear down the institutions, right? That would seem to be a simpler explanation than, oh, they don’t know how to enact policy.
Helena: I think the folks within the movement would take issue with tearing down. They want these institutions remade in their image, they want them to be remade to be MAHA, right? Maybe not the UN, but like FDA, USDA. It’s interesting, we don’t really see calls to abolish USDA or abolish FDA, like on the food stuff. You know, people are fine signing away the Department of Education — conservatives are fine with getting rid of the Department of Education – or, you know, even USAID. It is interesting that I think there is a little bit more broad recognition across political lines that, you know, inspecting meat is a good thing. I don’t know, I think we still have some semblance of agreement on that.
Tom: But I think to Ted’s larger point, I think there’s a tension between sort of earnest MAHA — we want a USDA that promotes healthier food, we want an FDA that sort of keeps out chemicals from the food system — and the broader project of Trumpism.
Helena: Yeah.
Tom: And I think there’s no question that there is this, going back to Steve Bannon and the first campaign but also just lots of people in the administration now, where they do seem, when you step back from it, what are they trying to do here?
They are shredding institutions, and you see it even in the USDA and FDA. Maybe they’re not saying abolish them, but within the Trump administration there’s this big push to, you know, gut their funding, fire a bunch of employees. And I think that, you know, the takeaway that I get from that is that there was this idea out there that maybe Kennedy would hold the line and push the sort of earnest MAHA idea.
And he has got no intention of it. He is overseeing the sort of gutting of research at FDA. He is overseeing, you know, just all these cuts within USDA, and any chance that he’s had to increase regulation of the food supply — you know, he could have used his bully pulpit, for example, in the Big Beautiful Bill — he’s just pumping all these subsidies, these increased subsidies, into the industrial ag system. Not a peep out of him.
So, you know, I think you guys are both right, that sort of the real earnest people within the MAHA movement want to sort of improve and reshape those agencies. But what we’re seeing is the broader Trump project trying to, you know, put the jackboot down on them.
Theodore: Yeah. So I think that should be the last word on that. We have made many takes on the double take as regards this one UN declaration. That leads us to our second part of this Forked episode, which is going to be a departure from what we normally do.
Normally, our second section is called Forks and Knives. And we just sort of talk through the biggest thing that’s happening structurally in food politics. But this episode, we’re going to turn the reins of Forked over to Tom and let him do his Unconfined things, and he’s going to lead us through it. So, Tom, tell me. What are we going to talk about?
Tom: I’m going to unconfine us from the usual constraints of your podcast, and I am just really fascinated to talk to you guys about the broader project of MAHA.
And I’ve got to say, I’m a major reader of Helena. I don’t miss a newsletter. I’m also a big FERN reader and occasional contributor to FERN. So, you know, just really excited to have both of you guys on. And so, Helena, early on, you know, in your coverage, you covered the Kennedy confirmation hearings back in January. And you wrote a post that really resonated with me, because I had watched, I had sort of dipped into the hearings, saw some of them, and was kind of stunned by what I was hearing.
And what you observed was that basically every senator who got a chance to talk — Republican, Democrat, right-wing, centrist, liberal — you know, basically said the same thing, which was: I completely agree with your take on food. I think our food system is making us sick, you know, sick and unhealthy. I have a reservation about your — eyou know, just a mild reservation or a serious reservation — about your take on vaccines.
And that was universal. And for folks like us who’ve been covering this stuff for years, our jaws were dropping.
Helena: Yes.
Tom: And you know what you say is, it’s hard to overstate how big of a change this is. Even a year ago, it would’ve been unthinkable to have a hearing like this with a fierce critic of the food industry and not hear lawmakers bring up pro-industry talking points. So I want you to maybe take us back to that place and just talk about how weird it was, and then let’s use that as a context to talk about what’s happened since.
Helena: Yeah, I remember that time well because I kind of looked around and thought, is everyone else hearing this, right? I think sometimes it can be helpful when you’re on a beat for a long time because you get to sort of understand how something — I mean, I think most reporters listening to that were, like, yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever. They agree on food and whatever.
But it was such a change from where we’ve been, and it told me, I think, how much the politics — or it suggested to me, I think, how much the politics may have shifted underneath our feet and we sort of didn’t realize it. And I still think that’s true to an extent. I think what we’ve seen since that moment is a big divergence between the political power of Big Agriculture and the political power of Big Food.
And we could talk about kind of the differences between those, but I think in the past we’ve always just seen, oh, the food industry or ag always gets its way and, you know, senators defend both of them, for the most part. A lot of Republicans would come and say, you know, we need the food industry, especially during fights about school meals during Michelle Obama.
These were just normal talking points that we would hear. And I think the politics have changed. I think the grassroots taking up this MAHA as part of MAGA has really shifted things on the right in ways that we’re still sort of trying to understand.
Tom: Yeah.
Helena: So, big change.
Tom: Yeah. So it’s amazing to see that sea change. I mean I think we could, you know, you would expect a fierce critic coming into any part of the Senate, you would hear people saying, we have the cheapest food system in the world. We’ve got the safest food system in the world where ...
Helena: I could literally write it. I could write the speech.
Tom: Yeah. And they would all make sure they said so that their lobbyists, you know, the lobbyists that talk to them on the stuff, would hear it. And they didn’t do that. Not one bit, not one of them. And what does that tell us about where we are? Because, I mean, we didn’t have a farm bill this year.
You know, it was a couple years overdue. What we got instead was a Big Beautiful Bill. Talk a little bit about what the Big Beautiful Bill did in the context of, you know, all of a sudden everyone in the Senate is a critic of the food system. What did the Big Beautiful Bill do in sharp contrast to that, with very little debate?
Helena: Yeah, I mean, I think what we’re seeing is generally Washington is not shifting, in any way, ag policy. We’ve increased subsidies, we’ve increased supports. There’s probably going to be more aid coming down the pike, because commodity prices are so low compared to high input costs.
And so we’re seeing Washington, we’re seeing the rhetoric change a lot, that there’s not a lot of lawmakers standing up for and saying, you know, maybe defending some of the practices or willing to go toe to toe with the MAHA advocates. But the actual policy, where the money’s going, USDA’s policy is not changing in any meaningful way.
I went back and I actually watched — this morning when we were talking about doing this — I went back and I watched Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s video that he filmed in front of USDA from, it was about a year ago now. So everyone should go back and watch this. He literally says that our current ag policy is destroying America’s health on every level. He says the health of farmers are in jeopardy, get big or get out. He says we’re destroying the health of soil and water. He cites monocrops, chemicals, herbicides, feedlots. I mean, he goes down the laundry list, chemicals polluting our bodies.
We’re going to give farmers an off-ramp from the current system. That’s what he says. And I think these are politically potent in a way that, you know, Tom and I, we’ve been watching this probably slowly build over time. But those talking points are now resonating, and yet we’ve seen, I mean, I don’t think any movement in that direction in terms of ag policy. Now the food policy’s a little more complicated, like I think food companies aren’t necessarily getting their way in that way. Like they are pushing food dyes out, they are going to be doing GRAS reform, which clamps down somewhat on food chemicals. So there’s a little bit of a divergence there, but the rhetoric does not in any way illustrate where policy is now. That’s just a fact.
Tom: I want to get a take from both of you guys on this next question. And that is, since Kennedy sort of, you know, proved that this is a resonant kind of talking point. And the kind of speech he gave outside of the USDA a year ago — you just mentioned it’s a resonant talking point — has gotten all these, you know, senators to sort of subtly, without comment, change — not so subtly — but acting like it’s no big deal to completely change the way they talk about food and ag. Do you think the Democrats, who have traditionally in the, you know, the past 20 or so years, really kind of played along with this sort of Big Ag-Big Food line? I mean, there are exceptions, like Cory Booker, but in general, I think it’s fair to say Democratic ag policy has been embodied in the person of Tom Vilsack, former Iowa governor — very, very sort of status quo, pro ethanol, you know, don’t take on the meat industry. Do you think there’s an opening for Democrats in sort of, you know, generally speaking nationally, but also in the sort of red upper Midwest states, to take some of that MAHA magic and actually apply it to food and ag in a way that someone like Cory Booker has been doing, but to make it more broad and more part of the national conversation?
Theodore: I think if the goal of that would be to change their political fortunes in those red areas — I think there is no opportunity for that. And I think, one of the ways I look at it, we just recently at FERN, we published this story by Stephen Robert Miller in The Guardian about how red state solar and wind projects are being taken down by red state governments, you know, through a mixture of sort of misinformation and disinformation about what those projects are about. And most of those projects, many of those projects, were brought to those places in those states by the Biden administration with this sort of explicit idea that if we put these kinds of projects — green projects that are benevolent and benefit everyone — in those places, that we will be rewarded by red state voters, because they’ve seen what we can do for them.
And not only did they not, you know, put Biden back in the White House, but these projects now themselves are targeted. The Trump administration and the people in those red states are now pushing back against them. I don’t know that a Cory Booker-like, a true message, a good message — I don’t think it’s going to change things in those places.
The Democrats are not, at this particular moment, in a position to turn that around. We are in the unfortunate position of ground game, getting your side of the aisle more fired up than the other’s. And the only way you’re doing that, and the only way the Democrats seem to have any chance of doing it, is by seeing the Republicans fail. So when you look at those Republicans who changed their minds about food policy, I think that’s pure political calculation on their part. They’re saying, well, this is where the consensus is for now. I have to say those things. I will, unlike Democrats, not be punished by failing to do it.
And that’s what I believe is happening.
Helena: I mean, I think it’s true that tailoring national ag policy to try to win over Republican voters has not been a successful exercise. I think that’s true. But I think it might kind of be the wrong question.
I think the question is: Could Democrats peel off some of the MAHA voters, and I think these are swing voters, maybe lower-information voters, independents, you know, suburban moms and dads. I think it’s kind of a different chunk of voters than the farmer vote or the rural vote — which are not the same, by the way. But you know, I think that’s what we often think about. Like, oh, okay, in rural counties, there’s really strong support for Republicans. I think the MAHA stuff is actually a suburban issue. I think this is a set of suburban, kind of kitchen table issues.
You have a lot of parents who are just, like, I don’t like the crap my kids are being fed at school or marketed to, and, you know, these are starting to resonate in a political way. And I think if Democrats wanted to experiment with some of those messages, because we haven’t seen it really nationally at all from Democrats — even when Michelle Obama was doing the school meal stuff — we never saw food as an election issue. I mean, it wasn’t something you’d get asked about in a town hall or a presidential debate. I think that’s probably about to change. But I think that’s the question. Is the swing voter the kind of the suburban independent, like the mom that maybe leans right or, you know, maybe doesn’t love Trump but likes the MAHA stuff. I think that’s the gettable voter, and you see a lot of the MAHA folks talking about the midterms. They know that they have to hang on to these MAHA voters.
Theodore: I think you’re dead right.
Helena: And they’re, I think, worried that, you know, some of this coverage about the lack of alignment could put some of that in jeopardy. I don’t know. We’ll see.
Theodore: I think that’s a very good point because, I mean, you see some of the research on the MAHA movement itself, and the connection to farming is very nebulous, right? The closer someone is connected to a farm, the less likely they are to support MAHA, according to ...
Helena: But they support MAGA.
Theodore: But they do. But they’re still Republicans. Still a partisan ideological divide. But I do think that one of the things that we’re seeing overall is that the political understanding of where MAHA lives within the national scene, it is not resolved. Right? We don’t know yet what these things are all going to add up to.
And those suburban folks that you’re talking about, that potential farmers market person, but who also likes wellness products, but who voted for Trump and really likes RFK Jr., they are still up for grabs. That I think is very, very clear.
Tom: Yeah. And one thing I would say also to go back to Helena’s point about, you know, the rural vote, the farm vote, even in a place like Iowa — I just did a big piece for the New Republic that’s coming out soon about Iowa.
Even in a place like that, the percentage of the population that is a farmer or works on the farm is vanishingly tiny, because the remnant farms there are so giant. There’s just a recent report out that looked at Iowa’s economy. And does anyone want to give — I’m going to give you an over or under of 25 — what percentage of Iowa’s economy comes from agriculture, over or under 25?
Theodore: I'll bite. I’m going to say under.
Helena: Yeah, I want to say under, because that’s the counterintuitive thing, but I would’ve thought it’d be like half or something.
Tom: See, I let you guys off too easy. It’s 7 percent of GDP in Iowa comes from agriculture, and it’s, you know, finance and real estate and insurance, just normal stuff just dwarfs agriculture. So I think that there is a bit of a paper tiger issue with the sort of ag lobby, even in its strongest point. And I do think that, you know, people in a place like that are tired of drinking toxic water. Most of them are not benefiting directly from farms. Now, there’s huge cultural issues in Iowa, and it’s gone right in a way that is kind of stunning, you know, with sort of cultural right-wing issues. But one thing I’ll say is that Obama won Iowa in 2008.
He won in the caucus, and then in the general election on an explicit campaign of regulating CAFOs, regulating these giant animal feedlot operations. And if you look at the 2020 caucus, Bernie Sanders and Liz Warren went in there with this huge reform agenda of cracking down on CAFOs, break up Big Ag. You know, it’s a Democratic side, but you would think they would get trounced in Iowa because this stuff is so popular.
But the two of them got, combined, about 45 percent of the delegates compared to about 13 percent for Biden. So I think there is traction to be had on these issues. And I think that Kennedy kind of provided a proof of concept, and I think you’re right, Helena, that it is mostly a suburban phenomenon of kind of well-off parents who want to make sure their kids are getting healthy food. But I do think the Democrats, I think the right Democrat, the right message maybe could go from the food in front of us, the food at the grocery store, the food in the school lunch to the farm. I think you could make those connections.
Helena: I’m starting to see the seeds of that through the regen ag stuff. There’s starting to be more conversation about — and this is among mostly advocates and folks in the grassroots, right? No pun intended. But this is not things I’m seeing coming out of USDA, to be clear.
But talking about regenerative ag or soil health, or whatever you want to call it, and making that connection to consumers on maybe nutrient density or just overall health, like talking about the microbiome. There’s a lot of thread lines there that I think are starting to be talked about and are not partisan. Like you definitely do see an actual grassroots movement among farmers. I think it’s a slim minority, but there is a grassroots movement there on the regen ag stuff. A lot of those folks are libertarian or right or, you know, they might even just consider themselves kind of strong Republican, but they absolutely want to opt out of the current system.
And that is there. That’s real. And so how that might be threaded together with some interesting coalition is — it’s an interesting thought experiment. But I think it’s very early days for that.
Theodore: I think so, too. I think, and I have to say I’m a little skeptical. I agree that what you’re describing exists and that that means that is meaningful. I’m skeptical that it will turn many votes by the time the midterms come around.
Helena: It’s a long ways off, I think.
Theodore: Yeah.
Helena: But just look at the cover crop numbers. I don’t know what they are for Iowa now, but I mean just overall, it’s just such a — and cover crops are not the be-all, end-all of regen ag. But they’re sort of a marker, right, of where things are.
And I mean, it’s, I don’t know what the latest numbers are. What is it, like 5 or 7 percent nationally using cover crops. And that would be regen ag lite, right? That would be your first step. So just sometimes you think about, oh, regenerative, it’s so buzzy. There’s been all these documentaries. I think consumers kind of know what it is now. But if you really take a look and compare that to where we are, we’re just very far away from that.
Theodore: So Tom, I’m going to grab my ball and take it back and pull us away from Unconfined and put us back into Forked territory. Is that okay?
Tom: Okay. Go for it.
Theodore: So our final segment, again, we’re doing some new stuff here today. Normally what we do is we try to talk about a good vibe, something that’s happening in food politics that’s not so terrible. But we’re going to do something else. And I think it’s fun. I think we should talk about what things we are reading right now, and I know what I’m reading right now, which is David Copperfield.
I try to get novels in there when I can, but I want to know what you two are up to and what you think is interesting.
Tom: Go for it, Helena.
Helena: It’s next on my list, but I’m going to read Food Intelligence, the new book by Kevin Hall and Julia Belluz. And I think it’s very needed right now, because it’s very focused on the science of what we know and what we don’t know about nutrition, metabolic health. And I think it’s kind of the perfect time for this book to come out because there is so much noise about all of this, and these are really important issues. But it’s also important that we try to stick to, as much as possible, the science of what we know, what we don’t, and the kind of incredible gaps in our understanding still. So, very excited about that book. Quick plug for them. I think it just came out last week or recently. But I should be reading something fun, too. I need to get a novel back on my list.
Tom: And Kevin Hall is the guy who’s done this incredible research on ultraprocessed foods. And one might’ve thought that he would’ve been a popular guy in the Kennedy HHS. Do you want to say a few words about what happened to him?
Helena: Yeah. He left NIH, citing censorship. He didn’t feel that he was able to talk about his research if it broke from the administration line. And so he left NIH. And yeah, he’s basically done the only highly controlled clinical research we have on ultraprocessed foods in the U.S. That’s how limited our knowledge base is. That was a big deal when it happened, and the book, I think, is going to force a lot more conversation about ultraprocessed foods and what we do and don’t know about their effect on our health.
Tom: And one of the things about that research is that it’s very expensive and it’s, you know, only happened with government funding, and that’s not going to happen anymore. Everyone should Google Kevin Hall.
Helena: Yes. Yeah, you should go read about his research, Kevin Hall. And Julia Belluz is also a fantastic science journalist. I think the lack of nutrition research at NIH is one of the big untold stories. I did a lot of reporting on that when I was at Politico. But just really a shameful lack of investment considering the disproportionate impact that diet plays in our chronic diseases. So, yeah, I await more investment. We have not seen it yet.
Theodore: All right, so that’s no David Copperfield. What about you, Tom? What are you reading?
Tom: I have been reading and grappling with a book called We Are Eating the Earth by an author named Michael Grunwald. Unconfined listeners might remember that I had Michael on the show a few months ago to talk about the book. I read it for that interview, and I dove back into it for a long review in the Boston Review. And basically what he does in the book is that he makes a case that because of climate change, because of population growth, the U.S. model for growing food in big industrial farms and for growing meat on these giant livestock facilities where we can find, you know, 10,000 pigs or, you know, 5,000 pigs and huge amounts of chickens and cows into these facilities and concentrate their waste. We may not like it. We may think it’s not very appetizing, but it is the only way forward, and that is because this way of growing food and growing, you know, lots of corn and soybeans and monocrops and, you know, the giant lettuce fields of California, growing stuff that way. The reason why we have to keep doing it is because yields are higher, and yield is everything.
And if we don’t continually increase yield, we’re going to all starve to death. That’s the basic premise of the book. And he acknowledges that there are sort of, you know, excesses of industrial agriculture or certain bad effects of it, and he hyper-focuses on tech fixes for those.
And, you know, where I came after grappling with the book is that if you look at the research on the relationship between yield increases and saving land, taking land out of production for farming. What he says is that we have to take land out of production for farming and not put any more into production at the very least, because when land is rewilded, it can actually sequester carbon and help with climate change.
And that’s the whole premise of his book. And when you look at the actual research on the relationship between yield increases and land savings, it doesn’t work that way. You know, increasing yields does not translate to less land under cultivation. In fact, it can have the opposite effect, because if you’re down in Brazil and you’re cutting into the savanna, the Brazilian savanna, to plant soybeans and you’re getting these incredible yields, then someone else who can get land down there is going to want to do the same thing.
And so you get this sort of deforestation effect from yield increases. And then, you know, what I’ll say about the search for tech fixes is he devotes about two-thirds of the book to this topic. And basically he goes through each and every one with great optimism going in, and it’s got all this promise, it’s going to save all this land. And then he’s inevitably disappointed. And the mother of all disappointments for him is the effort to create lab-based meat. He has this vision of …
Helena: It’s called cell cultivating, actually.
Tom: … all this land, the corn and soybeans. We can put it back into prairie because we’re going to, you know, grow meat in these big vats.
And after doing all the reporting — while he was reporting it, the bubble, the financing for these companies burst. And he is left with acknowledging, something that a FERN reporter named Joe Fassler, who’s written for FERN multiple times, has just basically documented that the technology just is not there. And maybe it will be in some decades, but it’s not any kind of solution.
Theodore: No, not for low-cost, you know, mass food products. It’s not going to happen.
Helena: Have you guys had it? I’ve had it.
Theodore: I have had it, too.
Tom: I have not had it.
Helena: So I had it at José Andrés’, like, he had a little reporter’s dinner. There was, like, a couple of us. And then they launched a tasting that was supposed to happen at China Chilcano, one of his restaurants, ,every week or something. You’re supposed to be able to sign up. There was all this press around it, and they just stopped doing it, I don’t know, not very long into it.
And they couldn’t get the product. I mean, that’s how much it doesn’t work. They couldn’t do a single tasting every week, I assume, without losing a lot of money. And so, my goodness, I mean, the texture was very close. The texture was close. The flavor was, you know, it was pretty much there. But the technology just doesn’t work right now.
Theodore: So I think we should leave it there. And I want to say, if we’re going to focus on one takeaway from our little book reports that we’re doing is that mother of disappointment is kind of where we land on a lot of these things.
Helena: But also pro research, right? Like fun research.
Theodore: Absolutely. Research is good.
Tom: Fun research.
Helena: And maybe some of this public, maybe the cell cultivated thing could benefit. I don’t know the whole mechanisms of it, but maybe it could benefit from some time in academia, where they kind of plug away on these super-boring technical challenges.
I don’t know, but maybe that’s what it needs, right? Is some more tinkering. But, yeah, the tech solutions are just not there. I think that’s fair to say.
Theodore: So Helena…
Tom: So Ted, you have to say, up or down, David Copperfield. Is it something we should all be diving into?
Theodore: We should all be reading David Copperfield. It is sad and funny and beautifully written, and the whole thing is in there. Whatever you think, whatever your thing is, it’s in there. I love Dickens. So we should all be reading Dickens.
Helena: Love it. Love it.
Theodore: So Helena, I want to do what we always do when we end one of these episodes. I want to hear about your newsletter, which is pretty fantastic.
Helena: If you like food policy, you should be reading it every Friday. Go sign up: foodfix.co. You can get your email on the list. So much going on right now. So much going on. So I think, I like to say it’s a food policy newsletter that’s also fun to read. It’s meaty, it’s wonky, but it’s also fun to read.
Theodore: Tom ...
Tom: I can testify that that is true.
Theodore: So can I, and I’m a subscriber. Tom, thank you very much for coming on and being our first guinea pig in the collaboration world. We were really, really happy to have you here.
Helena: Yeah, and we’re glad to be on your feed, too. It’s really great. So thanks.
Tom: I’m very happy to introduce my feed to you guys.
Theodore: All right. Now our feeds know each other. With that as the last word, thank you very much.
Helena: Thanks, guys.
Tom: Thanks for having me.
Theodore: Forked is a production of the Food & Environment Reporting Network. Our executive producers are me, Theodore Ross, and Tom Laskawy. Our sound engineer is Lauryn Newson. Our producer and video producer is Katie Gardner. Our hosts are Helena Bottemiller Evich and me, Theodore Ross. Special thanks to Tom Philpott and the team at the Center for a Livable Future at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.
To find out more about FERN and donate to support our independent nonprofit reporting, go to www.thefern.org.
Unconfined is a monthly interview podcast focusing on the public health implications of industrial meat production. So we’re going to dive deep into why RFK Jr. rejected the UN declaration on noncommunicable diseases, how MAHA has and hasn’t transformed our food system, and finally, what we’re all reading. Tom, Helena, how are you?
Helena Bottemiller Evich: Doing great. How are you?
Theodore: I’m good. I’m good. This is a special day on Forked. We have our first guest and collaborator, Tom Philpott. Say hello to everybody, Tom.
Tom Philpott: I’m so happy to be here, guys. Long time coming. I’ve been a listener since you first started, so it’s great to be here.
Theodore: Terrific. Before we get down to it, I do want to do a little bit of promotion.
Buzzkill, which is FERN’s podcast on the pollinator crisis, is up for a Signal Award for the best podcast in the sustainability and environment category, which is a great thing. The Signal Awards are a big honor, and we hope we can win. Now, the thing about the Signal Awards is it’s sort of like the Webbys, if you’re familiar with that, where you vote.
So if you listen to the podcast, I would love it if you go out there and vote for us. It’s very easy to do. You just go to www.vote.signalaward.com. Now you will need to register and you have to verify your email, but I voted and so far, no spam. So help support Buzzkill. Oh, voting is open until October 9, which means there are now two days left.
All right, so there’s the bit of business to keep the lights on. Why don’t we jump in? As you know, Helena, and maybe you know, Tom, we like to start every episode of Forked with what we call the double take, which is something in the food news that is so, you know, it makes you do a double take because it’s, usually bad. But it could just be surprising.
Now, for this time, I think we should talk about the fact of RKF Jr. rejecting the UN declaration on noncommunicable diseases. This happened a little while ago. The coverage on it was to me — and I’ll get to both, let you both talk about this — but to me, the interesting thing about it was that it didn’t really provide all that much information about why RFK Jr. rejected it. It did cover the fact that he said that it was promoting radical gender ideology and abortion. That’s about as far as the news went. But if you actually listened to RFK Jr.’s videotaped comments on it — it was about four minutes long — it did say a bit more that he got to the “biological reality of sex, women-only spaces” and, and this is the one that I thought was most interesting, the “constitutional or international right to abortion,” none of which is in the UN declaration.
But I do have a couple of theories about what maybe RFK Jr. was objecting to. There’s certain words that I found within the document itself that I think are interesting. There is, of course, “equity,” “evidence-based.” He might not have liked that. The word “pandemic” comes up, “Covid-19,” “disproportionately impacted” — I assume that’s code word for DEI, and they didn’t like that.
“Universal healthcare coverage,” that’s in there. The “World Health Organization,” they do not like that. “United Nations,” that comes up. “Vaccination.” And then the last one that I thought was interesting, the phrase “public funding” appearing in the same sentence as “research and development.” These are not MAHA things. So, Helena and/or Tom, tell me what’s going on here? Why did they reject this? What does it mean?
Helena: I think maybe we should start by zooming out just a little bit ...
Theodore: All right.
Helena: … into why it’s notable that the UN is putting more focus on noncommunicable diseases. So for the uninitiated, noncommunicable is kind of like all the things we worry about that are not infectious, right? So, cardiovascular disease, obesity, diabetes, cancer, and for a long, long time, the international community has not put as much focus on these even though the UN estimates like 43 million people die every year from noncommunicable diseases. Eighteen million of those deaths are considered premature. So this is a huge global impact and hasn’t gotten a lot of focus and attention, and of course ...
Theodore: That sounds good to me. That’s a good thing, right?
Helena: Of course, Kennedy often talks about how he feels it’s wrong that the U.S. doesn’t focus enough on chronic disease in kind of a similar vein. So watching the UN say, you know, we’re really trying to marshal the international community to focus on tackling noncommunicable diseases, and then have Kennedy come and say the U.S. rejects this and give all these reasons was sort of just a shocking moment for people. But I think if you take the Trump administration’s overall view of multilateral action and the UN generally — and, you know, we are leaving the World Health Organization — it makes a lot more sense when you look at the bigger picture and sort of the just adversarial tone to this stuff. And yeah, HHS would not explain further what they actually had issue with in this.
Tom: Yeah, and I think it really just gets to the core contradiction of MAHA, where it talks this huge game about shifting all these resources to these kinds of chronic diseases that are very, very often diet-related. And this is something that Kennedy has just been hammering home for years now. He hammered it home during his presidential campaign. He hammered it home while he was a surrogate for Trump. At his confirmation. I mean, it’s just consistently talking this game up. But when it comes time to putting policy behind it, it always ends up getting the short shrift.
And, you know, what he really sort of marshals any kind of force behind policy has been the vaccine stuff. So he just sort of — and I think it’s kind of amazing because the really popular part of his message when he was running and when he was pushing MAHA for Trump during the campaign was the food-related stuff.
I think it’s a lot more mainstream than anti-vaxxers. Now, he’s helped grow anti-vaxxer-ism, but it was, you know, a pretty fringe part of the thing. But there’s this sort of dawning realization that the food that we eat is a problem, and it’s consistently not taken action when he could, and this is just the latest glaring example of that.
Helena: Well, and one of the reasons they actually did — that Kennedy did give during his, I think it was during the speech he gave at the UN meeting — you know, he mentioned that taxes were an issue. Like that we had some issue with that in the declaration. But in the political declaration itself, it had been so watered down by industry lobbying, it no longer recommended taxes on sugary drinks or other “unhealthy products.” It, I think, just stuck to alcohol and tobacco taxes, which I think every country, most countries are already taxing. And so, you know, to your point, Tom, of just talking this big game, I mean, I personally have heard Secretary Kennedy say that sugar is poisoning us.
In no uncertain terms. He says that literally, and he said that many times. And so then to take issue with a document that doesn’t even go as far as taxing sugary drinks, which in theory should be very in line with MAHA, is just sort of puzzling.
Theodore: I don’t think it’s that puzzling. I mean, I think it is in keeping with what we’ve seen. So you and I, Helena, we talk about this a lot, whether the MAHA movement is anti-regulatory or why they’re doing certain things in certain ways. But what you really see, the really consistent theme, is a desire to tear down institutions, right? So if your goal is to tear down the WHO and potentially to tear down the UN itself, you are not going to go along with this relatively benign, pretty watered-down declaration on the very things that you want. Because your goal is not necessarily those health and food priorities that you talk about. They are, in fact, to tear down the institutions, right? That would seem to be a simpler explanation than, oh, they don’t know how to enact policy.
Helena: I think the folks within the movement would take issue with tearing down. They want these institutions remade in their image, they want them to be remade to be MAHA, right? Maybe not the UN, but like FDA, USDA. It’s interesting, we don’t really see calls to abolish USDA or abolish FDA, like on the food stuff. You know, people are fine signing away the Department of Education — conservatives are fine with getting rid of the Department of Education – or, you know, even USAID. It is interesting that I think there is a little bit more broad recognition across political lines that, you know, inspecting meat is a good thing. I don’t know, I think we still have some semblance of agreement on that.
Tom: But I think to Ted’s larger point, I think there’s a tension between sort of earnest MAHA — we want a USDA that promotes healthier food, we want an FDA that sort of keeps out chemicals from the food system — and the broader project of Trumpism.
Helena: Yeah.
Tom: And I think there’s no question that there is this, going back to Steve Bannon and the first campaign but also just lots of people in the administration now, where they do seem, when you step back from it, what are they trying to do here?
They are shredding institutions, and you see it even in the USDA and FDA. Maybe they’re not saying abolish them, but within the Trump administration there’s this big push to, you know, gut their funding, fire a bunch of employees. And I think that, you know, the takeaway that I get from that is that there was this idea out there that maybe Kennedy would hold the line and push the sort of earnest MAHA idea.
And he has got no intention of it. He is overseeing the sort of gutting of research at FDA. He is overseeing, you know, just all these cuts within USDA, and any chance that he’s had to increase regulation of the food supply — you know, he could have used his bully pulpit, for example, in the Big Beautiful Bill — he’s just pumping all these subsidies, these increased subsidies, into the industrial ag system. Not a peep out of him.
So, you know, I think you guys are both right, that sort of the real earnest people within the MAHA movement want to sort of improve and reshape those agencies. But what we’re seeing is the broader Trump project trying to, you know, put the jackboot down on them.
Theodore: Yeah. So I think that should be the last word on that. We have made many takes on the double take as regards this one UN declaration. That leads us to our second part of this Forked episode, which is going to be a departure from what we normally do.
Normally, our second section is called Forks and Knives. And we just sort of talk through the biggest thing that’s happening structurally in food politics. But this episode, we’re going to turn the reins of Forked over to Tom and let him do his Unconfined things, and he’s going to lead us through it. So, Tom, tell me. What are we going to talk about?
Tom: I’m going to unconfine us from the usual constraints of your podcast, and I am just really fascinated to talk to you guys about the broader project of MAHA.
And I’ve got to say, I’m a major reader of Helena. I don’t miss a newsletter. I’m also a big FERN reader and occasional contributor to FERN. So, you know, just really excited to have both of you guys on. And so, Helena, early on, you know, in your coverage, you covered the Kennedy confirmation hearings back in January. And you wrote a post that really resonated with me, because I had watched, I had sort of dipped into the hearings, saw some of them, and was kind of stunned by what I was hearing.
And what you observed was that basically every senator who got a chance to talk — Republican, Democrat, right-wing, centrist, liberal — you know, basically said the same thing, which was: I completely agree with your take on food. I think our food system is making us sick, you know, sick and unhealthy. I have a reservation about your — eyou know, just a mild reservation or a serious reservation — about your take on vaccines.
And that was universal. And for folks like us who’ve been covering this stuff for years, our jaws were dropping.
Helena: Yes.
Tom: And you know what you say is, it’s hard to overstate how big of a change this is. Even a year ago, it would’ve been unthinkable to have a hearing like this with a fierce critic of the food industry and not hear lawmakers bring up pro-industry talking points. So I want you to maybe take us back to that place and just talk about how weird it was, and then let’s use that as a context to talk about what’s happened since.
Helena: Yeah, I remember that time well because I kind of looked around and thought, is everyone else hearing this, right? I think sometimes it can be helpful when you’re on a beat for a long time because you get to sort of understand how something — I mean, I think most reporters listening to that were, like, yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever. They agree on food and whatever.
But it was such a change from where we’ve been, and it told me, I think, how much the politics — or it suggested to me, I think, how much the politics may have shifted underneath our feet and we sort of didn’t realize it. And I still think that’s true to an extent. I think what we’ve seen since that moment is a big divergence between the political power of Big Agriculture and the political power of Big Food.
And we could talk about kind of the differences between those, but I think in the past we’ve always just seen, oh, the food industry or ag always gets its way and, you know, senators defend both of them, for the most part. A lot of Republicans would come and say, you know, we need the food industry, especially during fights about school meals during Michelle Obama.
These were just normal talking points that we would hear. And I think the politics have changed. I think the grassroots taking up this MAHA as part of MAGA has really shifted things on the right in ways that we’re still sort of trying to understand.
Tom: Yeah.
Helena: So, big change.
Tom: Yeah. So it’s amazing to see that sea change. I mean I think we could, you know, you would expect a fierce critic coming into any part of the Senate, you would hear people saying, we have the cheapest food system in the world. We’ve got the safest food system in the world where ...
Helena: I could literally write it. I could write the speech.
Tom: Yeah. And they would all make sure they said so that their lobbyists, you know, the lobbyists that talk to them on the stuff, would hear it. And they didn’t do that. Not one bit, not one of them. And what does that tell us about where we are? Because, I mean, we didn’t have a farm bill this year.
You know, it was a couple years overdue. What we got instead was a Big Beautiful Bill. Talk a little bit about what the Big Beautiful Bill did in the context of, you know, all of a sudden everyone in the Senate is a critic of the food system. What did the Big Beautiful Bill do in sharp contrast to that, with very little debate?
Helena: Yeah, I mean, I think what we’re seeing is generally Washington is not shifting, in any way, ag policy. We’ve increased subsidies, we’ve increased supports. There’s probably going to be more aid coming down the pike, because commodity prices are so low compared to high input costs.
And so we’re seeing Washington, we’re seeing the rhetoric change a lot, that there’s not a lot of lawmakers standing up for and saying, you know, maybe defending some of the practices or willing to go toe to toe with the MAHA advocates. But the actual policy, where the money’s going, USDA’s policy is not changing in any meaningful way.
I went back and I actually watched — this morning when we were talking about doing this — I went back and I watched Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s video that he filmed in front of USDA from, it was about a year ago now. So everyone should go back and watch this. He literally says that our current ag policy is destroying America’s health on every level. He says the health of farmers are in jeopardy, get big or get out. He says we’re destroying the health of soil and water. He cites monocrops, chemicals, herbicides, feedlots. I mean, he goes down the laundry list, chemicals polluting our bodies.
We’re going to give farmers an off-ramp from the current system. That’s what he says. And I think these are politically potent in a way that, you know, Tom and I, we’ve been watching this probably slowly build over time. But those talking points are now resonating, and yet we’ve seen, I mean, I don’t think any movement in that direction in terms of ag policy. Now the food policy’s a little more complicated, like I think food companies aren’t necessarily getting their way in that way. Like they are pushing food dyes out, they are going to be doing GRAS reform, which clamps down somewhat on food chemicals. So there’s a little bit of a divergence there, but the rhetoric does not in any way illustrate where policy is now. That’s just a fact.
Tom: I want to get a take from both of you guys on this next question. And that is, since Kennedy sort of, you know, proved that this is a resonant kind of talking point. And the kind of speech he gave outside of the USDA a year ago — you just mentioned it’s a resonant talking point — has gotten all these, you know, senators to sort of subtly, without comment, change — not so subtly — but acting like it’s no big deal to completely change the way they talk about food and ag. Do you think the Democrats, who have traditionally in the, you know, the past 20 or so years, really kind of played along with this sort of Big Ag-Big Food line? I mean, there are exceptions, like Cory Booker, but in general, I think it’s fair to say Democratic ag policy has been embodied in the person of Tom Vilsack, former Iowa governor — very, very sort of status quo, pro ethanol, you know, don’t take on the meat industry. Do you think there’s an opening for Democrats in sort of, you know, generally speaking nationally, but also in the sort of red upper Midwest states, to take some of that MAHA magic and actually apply it to food and ag in a way that someone like Cory Booker has been doing, but to make it more broad and more part of the national conversation?
Theodore: I think if the goal of that would be to change their political fortunes in those red areas — I think there is no opportunity for that. And I think, one of the ways I look at it, we just recently at FERN, we published this story by Stephen Robert Miller in The Guardian about how red state solar and wind projects are being taken down by red state governments, you know, through a mixture of sort of misinformation and disinformation about what those projects are about. And most of those projects, many of those projects, were brought to those places in those states by the Biden administration with this sort of explicit idea that if we put these kinds of projects — green projects that are benevolent and benefit everyone — in those places, that we will be rewarded by red state voters, because they’ve seen what we can do for them.
And not only did they not, you know, put Biden back in the White House, but these projects now themselves are targeted. The Trump administration and the people in those red states are now pushing back against them. I don’t know that a Cory Booker-like, a true message, a good message — I don’t think it’s going to change things in those places.
The Democrats are not, at this particular moment, in a position to turn that around. We are in the unfortunate position of ground game, getting your side of the aisle more fired up than the other’s. And the only way you’re doing that, and the only way the Democrats seem to have any chance of doing it, is by seeing the Republicans fail. So when you look at those Republicans who changed their minds about food policy, I think that’s pure political calculation on their part. They’re saying, well, this is where the consensus is for now. I have to say those things. I will, unlike Democrats, not be punished by failing to do it.
And that’s what I believe is happening.
Helena: I mean, I think it’s true that tailoring national ag policy to try to win over Republican voters has not been a successful exercise. I think that’s true. But I think it might kind of be the wrong question.
I think the question is: Could Democrats peel off some of the MAHA voters, and I think these are swing voters, maybe lower-information voters, independents, you know, suburban moms and dads. I think it’s kind of a different chunk of voters than the farmer vote or the rural vote — which are not the same, by the way. But you know, I think that’s what we often think about. Like, oh, okay, in rural counties, there’s really strong support for Republicans. I think the MAHA stuff is actually a suburban issue. I think this is a set of suburban, kind of kitchen table issues.
You have a lot of parents who are just, like, I don’t like the crap my kids are being fed at school or marketed to, and, you know, these are starting to resonate in a political way. And I think if Democrats wanted to experiment with some of those messages, because we haven’t seen it really nationally at all from Democrats — even when Michelle Obama was doing the school meal stuff — we never saw food as an election issue. I mean, it wasn’t something you’d get asked about in a town hall or a presidential debate. I think that’s probably about to change. But I think that’s the question. Is the swing voter the kind of the suburban independent, like the mom that maybe leans right or, you know, maybe doesn’t love Trump but likes the MAHA stuff. I think that’s the gettable voter, and you see a lot of the MAHA folks talking about the midterms. They know that they have to hang on to these MAHA voters.
Theodore: I think you’re dead right.
Helena: And they’re, I think, worried that, you know, some of this coverage about the lack of alignment could put some of that in jeopardy. I don’t know. We’ll see.
Theodore: I think that’s a very good point because, I mean, you see some of the research on the MAHA movement itself, and the connection to farming is very nebulous, right? The closer someone is connected to a farm, the less likely they are to support MAHA, according to ...
Helena: But they support MAGA.
Theodore: But they do. But they’re still Republicans. Still a partisan ideological divide. But I do think that one of the things that we’re seeing overall is that the political understanding of where MAHA lives within the national scene, it is not resolved. Right? We don’t know yet what these things are all going to add up to.
And those suburban folks that you’re talking about, that potential farmers market person, but who also likes wellness products, but who voted for Trump and really likes RFK Jr., they are still up for grabs. That I think is very, very clear.
Tom: Yeah. And one thing I would say also to go back to Helena’s point about, you know, the rural vote, the farm vote, even in a place like Iowa — I just did a big piece for the New Republic that’s coming out soon about Iowa.
Even in a place like that, the percentage of the population that is a farmer or works on the farm is vanishingly tiny, because the remnant farms there are so giant. There’s just a recent report out that looked at Iowa’s economy. And does anyone want to give — I’m going to give you an over or under of 25 — what percentage of Iowa’s economy comes from agriculture, over or under 25?
Theodore: I'll bite. I’m going to say under.
Helena: Yeah, I want to say under, because that’s the counterintuitive thing, but I would’ve thought it’d be like half or something.
Tom: See, I let you guys off too easy. It’s 7 percent of GDP in Iowa comes from agriculture, and it’s, you know, finance and real estate and insurance, just normal stuff just dwarfs agriculture. So I think that there is a bit of a paper tiger issue with the sort of ag lobby, even in its strongest point. And I do think that, you know, people in a place like that are tired of drinking toxic water. Most of them are not benefiting directly from farms. Now, there’s huge cultural issues in Iowa, and it’s gone right in a way that is kind of stunning, you know, with sort of cultural right-wing issues. But one thing I’ll say is that Obama won Iowa in 2008.
He won in the caucus, and then in the general election on an explicit campaign of regulating CAFOs, regulating these giant animal feedlot operations. And if you look at the 2020 caucus, Bernie Sanders and Liz Warren went in there with this huge reform agenda of cracking down on CAFOs, break up Big Ag. You know, it’s a Democratic side, but you would think they would get trounced in Iowa because this stuff is so popular.
But the two of them got, combined, about 45 percent of the delegates compared to about 13 percent for Biden. So I think there is traction to be had on these issues. And I think that Kennedy kind of provided a proof of concept, and I think you’re right, Helena, that it is mostly a suburban phenomenon of kind of well-off parents who want to make sure their kids are getting healthy food. But I do think the Democrats, I think the right Democrat, the right message maybe could go from the food in front of us, the food at the grocery store, the food in the school lunch to the farm. I think you could make those connections.
Helena: I’m starting to see the seeds of that through the regen ag stuff. There’s starting to be more conversation about — and this is among mostly advocates and folks in the grassroots, right? No pun intended. But this is not things I’m seeing coming out of USDA, to be clear.
But talking about regenerative ag or soil health, or whatever you want to call it, and making that connection to consumers on maybe nutrient density or just overall health, like talking about the microbiome. There’s a lot of thread lines there that I think are starting to be talked about and are not partisan. Like you definitely do see an actual grassroots movement among farmers. I think it’s a slim minority, but there is a grassroots movement there on the regen ag stuff. A lot of those folks are libertarian or right or, you know, they might even just consider themselves kind of strong Republican, but they absolutely want to opt out of the current system.
And that is there. That’s real. And so how that might be threaded together with some interesting coalition is — it’s an interesting thought experiment. But I think it’s very early days for that.
Theodore: I think so, too. I think, and I have to say I’m a little skeptical. I agree that what you’re describing exists and that that means that is meaningful. I’m skeptical that it will turn many votes by the time the midterms come around.
Helena: It’s a long ways off, I think.
Theodore: Yeah.
Helena: But just look at the cover crop numbers. I don’t know what they are for Iowa now, but I mean just overall, it’s just such a — and cover crops are not the be-all, end-all of regen ag. But they’re sort of a marker, right, of where things are.
And I mean, it’s, I don’t know what the latest numbers are. What is it, like 5 or 7 percent nationally using cover crops. And that would be regen ag lite, right? That would be your first step. So just sometimes you think about, oh, regenerative, it’s so buzzy. There’s been all these documentaries. I think consumers kind of know what it is now. But if you really take a look and compare that to where we are, we’re just very far away from that.
Theodore: So Tom, I’m going to grab my ball and take it back and pull us away from Unconfined and put us back into Forked territory. Is that okay?
Tom: Okay. Go for it.
Theodore: So our final segment, again, we’re doing some new stuff here today. Normally what we do is we try to talk about a good vibe, something that’s happening in food politics that’s not so terrible. But we’re going to do something else. And I think it’s fun. I think we should talk about what things we are reading right now, and I know what I’m reading right now, which is David Copperfield.
I try to get novels in there when I can, but I want to know what you two are up to and what you think is interesting.
Tom: Go for it, Helena.
Helena: It’s next on my list, but I’m going to read Food Intelligence, the new book by Kevin Hall and Julia Belluz. And I think it’s very needed right now, because it’s very focused on the science of what we know and what we don’t know about nutrition, metabolic health. And I think it’s kind of the perfect time for this book to come out because there is so much noise about all of this, and these are really important issues. But it’s also important that we try to stick to, as much as possible, the science of what we know, what we don’t, and the kind of incredible gaps in our understanding still. So, very excited about that book. Quick plug for them. I think it just came out last week or recently. But I should be reading something fun, too. I need to get a novel back on my list.
Tom: And Kevin Hall is the guy who’s done this incredible research on ultraprocessed foods. And one might’ve thought that he would’ve been a popular guy in the Kennedy HHS. Do you want to say a few words about what happened to him?
Helena: Yeah. He left NIH, citing censorship. He didn’t feel that he was able to talk about his research if it broke from the administration line. And so he left NIH. And yeah, he’s basically done the only highly controlled clinical research we have on ultraprocessed foods in the U.S. That’s how limited our knowledge base is. That was a big deal when it happened, and the book, I think, is going to force a lot more conversation about ultraprocessed foods and what we do and don’t know about their effect on our health.
Tom: And one of the things about that research is that it’s very expensive and it’s, you know, only happened with government funding, and that’s not going to happen anymore. Everyone should Google Kevin Hall.
Helena: Yes. Yeah, you should go read about his research, Kevin Hall. And Julia Belluz is also a fantastic science journalist. I think the lack of nutrition research at NIH is one of the big untold stories. I did a lot of reporting on that when I was at Politico. But just really a shameful lack of investment considering the disproportionate impact that diet plays in our chronic diseases. So, yeah, I await more investment. We have not seen it yet.
Theodore: All right, so that’s no David Copperfield. What about you, Tom? What are you reading?
Tom: I have been reading and grappling with a book called We Are Eating the Earth by an author named Michael Grunwald. Unconfined listeners might remember that I had Michael on the show a few months ago to talk about the book. I read it for that interview, and I dove back into it for a long review in the Boston Review. And basically what he does in the book is that he makes a case that because of climate change, because of population growth, the U.S. model for growing food in big industrial farms and for growing meat on these giant livestock facilities where we can find, you know, 10,000 pigs or, you know, 5,000 pigs and huge amounts of chickens and cows into these facilities and concentrate their waste. We may not like it. We may think it’s not very appetizing, but it is the only way forward, and that is because this way of growing food and growing, you know, lots of corn and soybeans and monocrops and, you know, the giant lettuce fields of California, growing stuff that way. The reason why we have to keep doing it is because yields are higher, and yield is everything.
And if we don’t continually increase yield, we’re going to all starve to death. That’s the basic premise of the book. And he acknowledges that there are sort of, you know, excesses of industrial agriculture or certain bad effects of it, and he hyper-focuses on tech fixes for those.
And, you know, where I came after grappling with the book is that if you look at the research on the relationship between yield increases and saving land, taking land out of production for farming. What he says is that we have to take land out of production for farming and not put any more into production at the very least, because when land is rewilded, it can actually sequester carbon and help with climate change.
And that’s the whole premise of his book. And when you look at the actual research on the relationship between yield increases and land savings, it doesn’t work that way. You know, increasing yields does not translate to less land under cultivation. In fact, it can have the opposite effect, because if you’re down in Brazil and you’re cutting into the savanna, the Brazilian savanna, to plant soybeans and you’re getting these incredible yields, then someone else who can get land down there is going to want to do the same thing.
And so you get this sort of deforestation effect from yield increases. And then, you know, what I’ll say about the search for tech fixes is he devotes about two-thirds of the book to this topic. And basically he goes through each and every one with great optimism going in, and it’s got all this promise, it’s going to save all this land. And then he’s inevitably disappointed. And the mother of all disappointments for him is the effort to create lab-based meat. He has this vision of …
Helena: It’s called cell cultivating, actually.
Tom: … all this land, the corn and soybeans. We can put it back into prairie because we’re going to, you know, grow meat in these big vats.
And after doing all the reporting — while he was reporting it, the bubble, the financing for these companies burst. And he is left with acknowledging, something that a FERN reporter named Joe Fassler, who’s written for FERN multiple times, has just basically documented that the technology just is not there. And maybe it will be in some decades, but it’s not any kind of solution.
Theodore: No, not for low-cost, you know, mass food products. It’s not going to happen.
Helena: Have you guys had it? I’ve had it.
Theodore: I have had it, too.
Tom: I have not had it.
Helena: So I had it at José Andrés’, like, he had a little reporter’s dinner. There was, like, a couple of us. And then they launched a tasting that was supposed to happen at China Chilcano, one of his restaurants, ,every week or something. You’re supposed to be able to sign up. There was all this press around it, and they just stopped doing it, I don’t know, not very long into it.
And they couldn’t get the product. I mean, that’s how much it doesn’t work. They couldn’t do a single tasting every week, I assume, without losing a lot of money. And so, my goodness, I mean, the texture was very close. The texture was close. The flavor was, you know, it was pretty much there. But the technology just doesn’t work right now.
Theodore: So I think we should leave it there. And I want to say, if we’re going to focus on one takeaway from our little book reports that we’re doing is that mother of disappointment is kind of where we land on a lot of these things.
Helena: But also pro research, right? Like fun research.
Theodore: Absolutely. Research is good.
Tom: Fun research.
Helena: And maybe some of this public, maybe the cell cultivated thing could benefit. I don’t know the whole mechanisms of it, but maybe it could benefit from some time in academia, where they kind of plug away on these super-boring technical challenges.
I don’t know, but maybe that’s what it needs, right? Is some more tinkering. But, yeah, the tech solutions are just not there. I think that’s fair to say.
Theodore: So Helena…
Tom: So Ted, you have to say, up or down, David Copperfield. Is it something we should all be diving into?
Theodore: We should all be reading David Copperfield. It is sad and funny and beautifully written, and the whole thing is in there. Whatever you think, whatever your thing is, it’s in there. I love Dickens. So we should all be reading Dickens.
Helena: Love it. Love it.
Theodore: So Helena, I want to do what we always do when we end one of these episodes. I want to hear about your newsletter, which is pretty fantastic.
Helena: If you like food policy, you should be reading it every Friday. Go sign up: foodfix.co. You can get your email on the list. So much going on right now. So much going on. So I think, I like to say it’s a food policy newsletter that’s also fun to read. It’s meaty, it’s wonky, but it’s also fun to read.
Theodore: Tom ...
Tom: I can testify that that is true.
Theodore: So can I, and I’m a subscriber. Tom, thank you very much for coming on and being our first guinea pig in the collaboration world. We were really, really happy to have you here.
Helena: Yeah, and we’re glad to be on your feed, too. It’s really great. So thanks.
Tom: I’m very happy to introduce my feed to you guys.
Theodore: All right. Now our feeds know each other. With that as the last word, thank you very much.
Helena: Thanks, guys.
Tom: Thanks for having me.
Theodore: Forked is a production of the Food & Environment Reporting Network. Our executive producers are me, Theodore Ross, and Tom Laskawy. Our sound engineer is Lauryn Newson. Our producer and video producer is Katie Gardner. Our hosts are Helena Bottemiller Evich and me, Theodore Ross. Special thanks to Tom Philpott and the team at the Center for a Livable Future at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.
To find out more about FERN and donate to support our independent nonprofit reporting, go to www.thefern.org.
