MAHA: One Step Forward, Two Steps Back
Plus other need-to-know food news (and great reads) from March
Hi readers! March has been spring break month for me and for Liz. Liz took her family to Costa Rica, where they kayaked and hiked and coffee-tasted, and her bird-obsessed nine-year-old fulfilled his dream of seeing green herons in the wild. I’m fresh off a restorative trip to Palm Springs, where we hiked in Joshua Tree National Park and visited an organic date farm.
And just like that…it’s April! We’ve got great stuff in store for you this month, including a canned tuna buying guide and an explainer about why electrolyte drinks are everywhere, and who can benefit from them — plus details on where to buy those amazing dates.
Before all that, though, here’s your monthly food news update: the need-to-knows, great reads, and thoughts on the flood of food proclamations from the Trump administration’s Make America Healthy Again campaign.
Here we go….
Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) is on the move. In the weeks since Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was confirmed as Secretary of Health and Human Services, he has instructed the Food and Drug Administration to explore ways to close the so-called GRAS loophole, which, essentially, allows food manufacturers to put whatever they want into food products with no oversight. He gave food company CEOs an ultimatum to eliminate artificial dyes from their products by the end of his tenure. He’s even touted beef tallow over seed oils, inspiring home cooks and restaurants to make the switch. (One of my first “sights” outside of Palm Springs was a Steak and Shake advertising its tallow-fried French fries.)
MAHA’s energy is inspiring action. West Virginia, the punchline for many of public-health joke, last week banned seven artificial dyes from foods sold in the state; 20 more states have similar legislation underway. In the private sector, spice giant McCormick announced that, due to a “tick up” of activity from the MAHA movement, it would reformulate products to remove artificial dyes.
On the one hand, this is exciting! Issues that have long languished are getting attention, and RFK Jr., for all his faults, has landed on a message that is firing people up. He’s (IMO, fairly) compared the food industry to Big Tobacco and has cast healthy eating as a patriotic act: “If you love this country,” Kennedy said to cheers in West Virginia, “you need to start taking care of yourself.”
BUT there are real questions about whether these actions will do much of anything to make Americans healthier.
Why? It is true that some food dyes are linked to cancer. But it is obesity, which tops 40 percent in the U.S., and the chronic diseases associated with it, that are harming Americans’ health. As Kennedy presses his case to make America healthy again, the rest of the Trump administration, and its GOP allies in Congress, are pulling in the other direction, with policies and proposals that would limit research on chronic diseases and increase poverty and food insecurity, both of which are inextricably linked to obesity and chronic disease.
Here are a few examples:
HHS yanked funding for the landmark Diabetes Prevention Program, a 30-year longitudinal study aimed at preventing diabetes, which affects nearly 12 percent of the U.S. population.
The administration has promised 25 percent tariffs on Mexico that are likely to spike the already-high prices of fruits and vegetables. The Budget Lab at Yale projects that over the next year produce prices will rise 2.9 percent – the equivalent of “two years’ worth of fresh-food inflation in one fell swoop.”
The USDA canceled $1 billion in payments to food banks and local schools to buy local food. Nine days later, it halted an additional $500 million in payments to food banks. The cuts would hurt at any time but are particularly difficult when food prices are up 20 percent over five years ago.
GOP reps in Congress have proposed a range of deep cuts to SNAP (formerly known as food stamps) that would slash low-income Americans — as many as 9 million according to one analysis — from the rolls, making it even more difficult to put food, let alone healthy food, on the table.
Republicans also are pushing to undermine school lunch by altering a program called the Community Eligibility Provision. As written, it would deny 24,000 schools and 12 million children one of the healthiest and most reliable meals of their day.
Banning dyes is a quick win that looks and feels good, but these, sadly, are not policies that will move the needle on Americans’ health. We’ll be watching to see if MAHA squanders its rare opportunity.
Great Reads … pulled from our March text threads
Poppi just sold for $1.6 billion // CNN
Pepsi has scooped up breakout probiotic soda brand Poppi in a $1.65 billion deal. I covered the rise of Poppi and drinks like it in a recent post, mostly splashing cold water on the notion that a bougie soda can really help your gut. This is why I am not sought out for investment advice! But I’m sticking to my guns on this one – only time will tell whether this investment works out for Pepsi. Like meal kits and plant-based meats – two other hyped food innovations that I never bought into – my bet is still that probiotic sodas fizzle.
“It’s Part of Who I Am:” Heston Blumenthal // The Guardian
Heston Blumenthal is one of the world’s most famous and eccentric chefs. At his restaurant, The Fat Duck, in Bray, England, he has served “edible soil,” bacon-and-egg ice cream, and snail porridge. A story this month in the Guardian reveals how his family’s history with mental illness and his own struggles shaped his life and his food. Blumenthal is radically honest about his past drug use, his own diagnosis with bipolar disorder and time spent in a psychiatric ward.
How Baby Led Weaning Almost Ruined My Life // The Atlantic
It’s always fun to watch a writer you love (in this case Olga Khazan) become a parent and run head on into the parenting industrial complex – in this case, the cult of Baby Led Weaning, which instructs parents to allow babies, who have only just developed enough muscle strength to sit up, to determine what and how much they should eat. We took on the phenomenon in an early episode of our podcast Pressure Cooker called Feed This, Not That and discovered that, like many parenting philosophies, it has much more to do with jittery new moms craving strict rules (and a tribe) than it does actual nutrition. Khazan discovers much the same thing, concluding that her son should not be leading his own weaning because he is, well, a baby: “He thinks the trash can is awesome. He doesn’t realize that I don’t die when I go to the bathroom. He believes the Roomba is sentient. He does not, unfortunately, instinctively understand how to eat a diet rich in varied macronutrients, in order to perfectly complement his formula feeds in an age-appropriate way. That’s my job, and I’m going to lead him through it.”
America Is Done Pretending About Meat // Yasmin Tang
Doubling up from the Atlantic, Yasmin Tang writes about how plant-based eating, once viewed as the future of the American diet, is losing momentum as people discover they simply don’t have to pretend to feel bad about eating meat any more. There are nutritional motivations at play here – people increasingly rejecting ultra-processed foods, a label which applies to the bulk of plant-based meat substitutes, as well as seeking more animal protein for perceived health reasons – but the Tang points out that meat’s rising is also part of the larger wave of right-wing influence on American culture.
Can We Talk About Joy In Wine? // Everyday Drinking
“We’ve been hearing a lot of negativity in the world of wine lately,” writes Jason Wilson. “The wine industry is in crisis! Neo-prohibitionists want to outlaw drinking! More people are smoking weed than drinking wine! But perhaps the biggest whine in wine right now is that young people hate wine and aren’t drinking it—with everyone pointing fingers over why. Waaah, wine is too exclusive and gatekeepy! Waaah, wine education is too boring and uncool! Waaah, wine media is boomerish and out of touch! Waaah, wine is too snobby and complicated!” Wilson is my favorite spirits writer, and his case for the romance and joy of wine is well-timed for our tempestuous era.
More from Jane and Liz
Take the Pain out of Weekly Meal Planning – With AI // The Wall Street Journal (Gift Link)
In the summer of 2023, I went down the AI rabbit hole for our podcast Pressure Cooker in an episode called: Can A Bot Please Feed the Kids? The answer back then was yes, with some caveats. Eighteen months later, about 1,000 years in AI time, the answer is: Absolutely. If you haven’t yet noodled with ChatGPT or Claude to suggest recipes and create shopping lists, check this out for a step-by-step how to.
I seem to have developed a niche testing convenience foods to determine if they pass the snob test. This time, I took on instant coffee and was gobsmacked by the results.
Liz contributed two profiles to National Geographic’s big NG33 package, a roundup of innovative leaders using their talents to tackle the planet’s most pressing issues. Sana Javeri Kadri is using a highly transparent direct-trade supply chain to source for her upstart spice company, Diaspora; shoppers get fresher spices, and Indian and Sri Lanken farmers earn a living wage. Lucie Basch has helped to divert millions of pounds of food waste from landfills with her app Too Good to Go, which is enabling over 100 million users in 19 countries to buy leftover food from grocery stores, bakeries, and restaurants at deeply discounted prices.