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Hello, readers of The Breakdown!
I am on vacation this week, but I’ve got a treat for you: A guest newsletter by Michael Grunwald, whom I’ve known for more than thirty years. He is one of the very best writers on policy out there.
That’s my opinion, but I’m not the only one who holds it. Mike has won multiple awards during a career that includes stops at the Boston Globe, the Washington Post, Time, and Politico. He’s also a New York Times bestselling author whose past titles include The Swamp and The New New Deal.
The future of our planet was a theme of both those books, as it is for his latest, We Are Eating the Earth. As the title suggests, it’s about connections between agriculture, food policy, and the environment. A few months back, I interviewed him about it—you can watch that here—but we didn’t get a chance to talk about Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his agenda.
He has thoughts. I’m glad to have him share them with you below.
–Jonathan
P.S. – If you like reading this newsletter and checking out the rest of what we do at The Bulwark, please consider signing up for Bulwark+ today. You’ll get access to all our members-only content, plus you’ll be supporting our independent journalism. We’d love to have you aboard:
RFK Jr.’s Junk Science Diet
His MAHA ideas about food are built on some of the same lies as his antivax campaign.
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THE STANDARD NON-MAGA TAKE take on Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is that it’s too bad he’s such a brain-wormed lunatic about vaccines, because he’s a surprisingly thoughtful visionary about food and farming. After Donald Trump chose him to be health secretary, an Atlantic essay headlined “RFK Jr. Is in the Wrong Agency” captured this conventional wisdom, with a memorable subhed emphasizing the problem was the job, not the man: “He could be a great agriculture secretary.”
But it was always strange to assume that a brain worm would pick and choose which judgments to infect. While Kennedy’s progressive-sounding ideas about unhealthy food and industrial agriculture are more popular than his retrograde theories about lifesaving vaccines, many of them are just as pseudoscientific, conspiratorial, and wrong. In fact, they’re grounded in the same strain of sloppy and simplistic thinking popular with biohackers and yogis on the right and left, the naturalistic fallacy that anything “unnatural”—including genetically modified crops, pasteurized milk, fake meat, and chemical pesticides as well as mRNA jabs—must be bad for our health and our planet.
It’s woo-woo nonsense—the kind that results in the nation’s top health official urging Americans to binge on fries (as long as they’re made with beef tallow rather than seed oils) and Coke (as long as it’s made with cane sugar rather than high-fructose corn syrup). The inconvenient truth is that you shouldn’t worry about seed oils or GMOs; that “natural” cane sugar is just as unhealthy as processed corn syrup; that plant-based meat isn’t health food but is already healthier than cow-based meat; and that while some agrichemicals are genuinely dangerous, the weed killer glyphosate, Public Enemy Number One for Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again movement, is unusually benign.
Like the proverbial broken clock that’s right twice a day, Kennedy has a few non-bonkers food beliefs. Yes, ultraprocessed junk like Twinkies is bad for you. No, we don’t need artificial food dyes in our cereal. Yes, “real food” like fruits, vegetables, and whole grains is as nutritious as it was when Michelle Obama was pushing it. But Twinkies aren’t unhealthy because of their processing or even their long ingredient list full of GMO crops grown in monoculture fields; they’re unhealthy because they’re sugary, high-calorie, low-nutrient junk that everyone knows is junk. They’d still be junk if their corn syrup and starch came from organic non-GMO corn grown in diverse rotations.
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It’s telling that Kennedy is also an outspoken advocate for red meat, which is associated with increased risk of cancer and heart disease. The steaks atop the Trump administration’s new food pyramid come from industrially bred cattle stuffed with GMO grain in unnaturally crowded feedlots and then “processed” in assembly-line slaughterhouses, but they’re vibes-aligned with caveman-diet meatfluencers like Joe Rogan, as well as Republican livestock-industry donors. Red meat also happens to be an environmental disaster; in the United States, we use more than half our agricultural land to produce beef, which provides only 3 percent of our calories.
In other words, Kennedy’s food fights have as little to do with science as his antivax fights. There’s no better example than the recent Trump world brawl over glyphosate, the active ingredient in the herbicide Roundup. Jonathan Cohn recently wrote about this chemical warfare here in The Breakdown, explaining how MAHA moms who consider glyphosate a toxic menace are furious about Trump’s new executive order in support of glyphosate production. They’re particularly mad that Kennedy, who has condemned Roundup as a poison fueling a national disease epidemic, was forced to defend the order on ludicrous national security grounds, when Trump was obviously just pandering to the agricultural and chemical lobbies.
It’s an important political story, and it was fun to watch Kennedy—who, as an environmental lawyer, often sued Mo