What the F is MAHA

Plus make a bean-y grilled cheese to feel better ✨

Nov 17, 2024

Ever since the election, I feel the air has been sucked out of the room.

As much as I try to distance myself from the news, a headline will pop up that reminds me just how dangerous Trump’s presidency will be.

This newsletter is about food, so I will stay in my lane and talk about food, but first, I must call attention to the impact that Trump’s policies will have on trans people. For someone to be elected by promising to roll back the rights of trans people and erase their existence is terrifying and personal to my family.

Beyond the blatant hatred this campaign has promoted, the issue of food and our food system has emerged as a key issue led by RFK Jr.

A week after the election, a friend mentioned to me that she saw on Facebook that people in our community were influenced to vote for Trump because they believed that RFK Jr. could get the toxins out of our food system. This truly caught me by surprise and led me down a rabbit hole of learning about MAHA.

If you haven’t heard of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement, let me introduce you….

RFK has vowed to upend the nation’s food system while demonizing Big Food, one of the country’s most powerful industries whose traditional allies are Republicans. While being skeptical of vaccines and promoting other conspiracy theories, he has exposed some of the issues in our food system and the greed of corporations that have led to a food system that has resulted in some of the highest rates of chronic diseases and obesity in the world.

"This assault on our children's cells and hormones is unrelenting. They are swimming around in a toxic soup....We are mass poisoning all of our children and all of our adults."

What I want to call attention to is the strange overlap between my circle of people who are passionate about a more sustainable future of food and the rhetoric of RFK and this conservative MAHA movement.

Even though I am disturbed to agree with a handful of things RFK Jr. is saying about food, I don’t agree with the approach as his rhetoric is rooted in páranoia and a general mistrust in government. Yes, there are chemicals in our food, and we are too dependent on pesticides, and yes, we deserve better, but this doesn’t mean we can’t trust our food.

By instilling fear, he has distracted Americans from other important issues. Due to Trump’s historic allegiance to Big Food and Pharma, I would guess not much will actually be done to change our food system; instead, more and more people will lose all trust in the government and support more conspiracy theories.

For a deeper dive into the conservative wellness movement, check out this profile on Alex Clark from the Washington Post

For more detailed reporting on RFK’s views and the hypocrisy in his Kennedy’s Vow to Take On Big Food Could Alienate His New G.O.P. Allies or How RFK Jr.’s Pledge To Make America Eat Healthier Clashes With Trump

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Nature’s Candy—I got to see cookbook author Camilla Wynne at my favorite place in NYC, Archestratus. If you don’t know her, she is a badass musician, artist, and recipe developer who wrote this entire book about candied fruits!
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katie
’s recipes from the Sunday Stack and
Lukas Volger
as well as groceries from Farm to People and new bean recipes coming from Primary Beans.
Lunchables pulled from national school lunch programs in US - shocked that this is current news.