Skepticism and Shifting Food Paradigms

Today's guest is Elizabeth Nolan Brown, whose recent Reason cover story looks into the politics of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement spearheaded by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Just a decade or so ago, it was Democrats, liberals, and progressives who were pushing healthy eating initiatives and it was common to see Republicans and conservatives like Sarah Palin brandish Big Gulps like AR-15s and Fox News anchors like Sean Hannity declare their loyalty to Kentucky Fried Chicken.

But now the Trumpian right is embracing wellness and food purity like nobody's business—and is using the state to enforce its preferences.

Nick Gillespie talks with Brown about how we got here, where it's headed—and whether you've eaten your last red M&M.

This episode was recorded live in front of an audience in New York City. Go here to get information about upcoming events, including The Reason Roundtable live in New York on July 15!

 

0:00—Intro

1:17—What is MAHA?

4:51—The right used to scoff at wellness

11:31—Processed foods were once desirable

13:13—Liberals were first to embrace "farm to table"

15:21—What led to the right's embrace of healthy living?

23:52—Where libertarians and MAHA align

27:43—How RFK Jr. won over the right

30:44—Research quality of dietary recommendations

35:53—Concerns about the MAHA movement

37:17—School lunches and food stamps

40:14—Tradwives

43:00—Gender roles and MAHA

 

Upcoming Reason Events

The Reason Roundtable Live in NYC, July 15

The Soho Forum Debate: Jacob Hacker vs. David Goldhill, July 16

 

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Transcript

This is an AI-generated, AI-edited transcript. Check all quotes against the audio for accuracy.

Nick Gillespie: Let's start by defining MAHA. How does it define itself, and what are its constituent parts?

Elizabeth Nolan Brown: I think MAHA is a state of mind because it means so many things. When I was researching this article, I just searched the MAHA hashtag on various social media to see what was defined as MAHA. I think of it as being about using tallow to cook your fries instead of seed oils. Or maybe skepticism about vaccines, on the other hand. But when you look at what people are describing as MAHA, it's everything from banning food dyes, to getting people to exercise more, to functional medicine, to regenerative farming, to testing your air in your home for mold and toxins. Any sort of wellness fad of the past 40 years is kind of being lumped in as MAHA, right now.

What is regenerative farming?

Regenerative… Don't let the future surgeon general Casey Means—or Callie Means, I forget which one is which. 

It's one of the Wonder Twins of alternative medicine.

It's farming so that the soil, so that while you're planting crops, it's done in a way that the soil gives back and will be more healthy after you've planted in it than before.

Okay, that sounds… 

Unobjectable…

I suspect people are doing that, yeah. So who gets to define MAHA? Because Robert F. Kennedy Jr., former Democratic presidential candidate—an independent presidential candidate— now secretary of Health and Human Services, is a big key figure in this. If Trump gets to say what "America First" means, does RFK Jr. get to define what MAHA is?

I think he's the one who coined the term or started popularizing the term. But it was really him capitalizing on this already existing trend within conservative circles, which was that suddenly conservatives were starting to sound like old-school hippies — or like my friends that lived in Brooklyn in 2009 about this stuff. Suddenly, they were talking about cleansing your aura and eating without additives, and just all of the stuff that you think of as not belonging to the right at all. Especially since COVID, that ramped up. RFK just sort of capitalized on that and brought it all under this MAHA umbrella.

What is the connective tissue between, "okay, we're going to eat healthy, we're not going to eat corporate cereals that have petroleum-based food dyes in them, and we're also going to be anti-vax?" Is there a controlling idea that motivates all of this?

Yeah. I think if there's a loose thread underlying all of this, it's skepticism of conventional health wisdom and health establishment authorities. So, skepticism of government health advice, skepticism of the big governing health bodies. And that's why, at its core, it's sort of refreshing from a libertarian standpoint. I'm not anti-vaccine. I am skeptical about some mainstream nutrition advice.

Like what? Can you give us an example?

Well, I guess now it's not necessarily mainstream anymore, but the whole "eat carbs to lose weight and don't eat saturated fat"—that kind of stuff.

So let's talk a little bit about—you were saying what's weird, or what's notable about this, among other things, is that you have people who identify on the right, they're conservatives, or they're MAGA Republicans, who are talking like they belong to the Park Slope Co-op in 2009, right? And you, in the story—which is just kind of a great run-through of all this in an analysis—you bring up forgotten episodes where Sarah Palin, of all people, is slurping from a Big Gulp and saying, "From my cold, dead hands. Would you ever take this"?

She literally did that. I discovered so many great old stories when I was going back through news archives. This is why it seemed so weird to me, though. This is what interested me in the first place. When I started noticing this trend—and a lot of people have written about it over the past year or so— but I remembered so vividly how pro-unhealthiness Republicans were in the late aughts and early 2010s. It was all, "Yeah, you can have my Big Gulp when you pry it from my cold, dead hands."

And that was because they were responding, partly, to a lot of things. But at that point, they were pushing back against people like Michelle Obama and trying to make school lunches healthy.

Yeah. I think some of that, yeah—and the soda taxes here in New York, bans on big sodas, and stuff. Definitely there was some of it that was pushing back on government stuff. But I also think that in the aughts, there was this sort of idea—or maybe going back even further—that healthy eating was "gay." Healthy eating made you like a sissy. It was more like liberal…

Like a soy boy—

Right, exactly. Real men and real Americans ate triple cheeseburgers and had heart attacks by the time they were 45, because that's what you did.

That's patriotism. 

Yeah. Yeah. 

I guess it was in the '80s, there was a book called Real Men Don't Eat Quiche. So this is like an older heritage. That was partly a response to the idea that anything that was European, like quiche—it's a French food so we know that they're our greatest gastronomical enemy, as well as geopolitical adversary.

But talk a bit about how did eating well become feminized in the conservative mind before we enter this new phase where they're the granola eaters?

That's an interesting question. Obviously, dieting and caring about food has long been associated with women, so I think there's some of that there too. But when I talked to Nina Teicholz—she wrote The Big Fat Surprise. And she was talking about how since the '60s and '70s and up through the '90s and even sort of today, the mainstream dietary advice was very much about cutting down on meat, cutting down on butter, and cheese, and eating more…

And fat… and protein, even, was cutting down…

Right. Cutting down on protein and eating more soy and eating vegetables and stuff like that. So I think these things that were associated with male diets, especially — even though everybody ate them — were really demonized for a long time. So the idea of eating healthy was very much like, "Well, you have to eat lettuce and you know…"

Then you're reduced to eating rabbit food. People would say, "Oh, vegetarians are weak." They're feminized in the public imagination and whatnot. Meat, and potatoes, and eggs, and dairy are somehow the real America. Conservatives glommed onto that. Did they glom onto that because it seemed like that's what liberals hated? Or is it that they're from states that are farm producers?

Probably both, I think, yeah. But definitely, a lot of it was like, "Oh, liberals are doing this, so we hate it."

Yeah. So then how can you—I mean, Sarah Palin, I haven't seen or heard from her in years it seems. Is she still on Big Gulps? Or has she become— I could see her becoming very healthy.

Yeah, well, that's what I thought. Sean Hannity was the funniest one that I read. In my article, I open with him, he had this extended rant: "I love my Big Mac. I love my Arby's," whatever. And then a couple of years after that, he went on a big diet. Now he's interviewing RFK about how fast food is poison. He's a really good avatar…

I don't know if he still does it—he used to throw a football into his audience at the end of his show. This was a staple, which seems related somehow, where conservatives would go on rants about how soccer is inherently gay, right? Even though it's the most popular sport in the world and in most countries it is associated with working-class or lower-class people. But in America, if you chose soccer over football, we need to send you to pray-away-the-gay camp or something, right?

I mean, we think now about how everything is—both the left and the right—seem to always be defining themselves in opposition to each other. But that always sort of has existed, and I think we see a lot of that too. I love that I found all these articles about when Michelle Obama was like, "Hey, maybe people should breastfeed," which now has become this huge conservative talking point—that women all need to breastfeed and not use formula. But Michelle Obama said that and they freaked out. There was this whole news cycle where they were all like, "Big Mother is out to get you and make you breastfeed." 

Wow, I totally forgot about that one. 

She wants to subsidize your breast pumps and stuff.

Yeah, and that is true, right? Breast pumps are subsidized. 

Well, they're tax-deductible. 

Yeah, right. I mean, I guess in any particular issue, these things come and go in cycles too. Where breastfeeding is perceived—and we can talk about whatever we know about the science or medicine or stuff in a second—but there are cycles where it's like, "Obviously better for the kid, and everybody should do it." Then it's, "No, actually, formula is good," and we should be embracing science and technology to reduce the biological burden on women to be mothers." Where are we in that? Is anybody saying, "Yeah, you know what, actually, formula is good?"

No. I was actually really surprised to learn that in my mom's generation, none of them got the breastfeeding talk.

I guess in postwar America, there are those moments where, if something is manufactured—if something comes out of a factory—it is inherently better. So white bread, Wonder Bread, was great. It was kind of an aspiration, as opposed to peasant bread, which was dark and grainy and imperfect. What you wanted was something…

Better living through science.

That's right. And it's like, we want food that is untouched by human hands. We want formula because that's got to be better. If it comes out of a lab, it's good. Now that's totally reversed.

Yeah. I think that's great, to a degree. I lived in Brooklyn in 2009 through '13, and this was the peak of people farming on rooftops, making their own kombucha, and drinking it out of mason jars, and butchering their own hogs in some weird butcher shops. My boyfriend was a big butcher trend person.

Was this underground as well?

Like figuratively or literally? 

Was it licensed butchering?

Yes, yes. No, all of a sudden in Greenpoint and Williamsburg, there were these "do your own butchering" classes and stuff. I'm very pro that trend—I definitely got taken in by it—but it's just really funny to me how that was very left-coded. There's no reason it was left-coded. There's nothing inherently leftist. In fact, you could say a lot of this stuff—the sort of "back-to-the-land," "back to traditional ways"—is actually sort of conservative. But because of the people who were doing it which was young, liberal-leaning people in urban areas, it became left-coded. And now you see the exact same aesthetic, except now it's all Mormons doing it, so it's very right-coded. It's tradwives. It's become…

Can we talk a little bit—assuming that Brooklyn is kind of the font of this, and that's overstating it a bit—but why did hipster lefties, or people who coded left, why did they get into smoking American Spirit cigarettes or rolling their own, and butchering their own meat? Where did that imperative come from?

I definitely had a lot of theories about this back in the day because it suddenly seemed it happened overnight. If you went to the sort of liberal-leaning health food stores, it was all tofu and lentils and all this shit. And then all of a sudden, it was grass-fed beef and lamb and all this stuff. Part of it was this whole slow food movement that was happening and Michael Pollan and all of that, of the era.

I also think the recession had a lot to do with it. 

How so?

Like the music changed—the music all became very folky—and everything became about getting away from the offices, getting away from this capitalist system, and making your own food, having local currencies. Everything was about being localized. I think it was very much a big mood in response to global events that people felt they couldn't control.

Were you in Brooklyn during the Occupy Movement?

No, I was in D.C. then. Because that was like 2007–08, right?

Yeah, and a little bit later, I guess, like 2010, maybe…

Maybe I was here for some of it.

Does the ideology of Occupy give rise to a kind of slow food movement—or vice versa? Are they all of a piece with one another?

I think it's the same impulse. This impulse to sort of be like,"we're going to unplug from this big, elitist system that we don't really trust and can't control."

"But we're going to use our MacBooks in order to figure out how to do everything."

Yeah, because that was back when tech was still supposed to be good.

Was still okay… 

Apple, and Twitter, and Facebook and all that, they were the good guys back then.

So let's talk about how did things started shifting rightward. Because you're totally right that this stuff which was considered— this was a sign that you were a leftist in good standing. Now it's like you're a MAGA/MAHA power user or something like that. What are the steps that it ends up turning right?

That's what I wanted to answer with this article. That's why I talked to a whole bunch of people to try and solicit theories about it. Because I don't know. I was just fascinated by the question of how we got here. Some of the more plausible theories that people talked about… a big one is COVID, but I think it starts before COVID. We can come back to that. 

Partly, the left started ceding—c-e-d-i-n-g—ceding this territory to nobody at the time. 

Suddenly we had the rise of the body positivity movement, and the rise of various concerns about cultural appropriation and various concerns about privilege, and these more, I guess you'd call them social justice-y—maybe now we'd call them "woke", or you whatever you want to call them. But these concerns started taking over what was appropriate in left-leaning spheres.

So is that like if you go to Whole Foods, which is already kind of corporate and capitalist, but if you go to your local co-op and they have a certain type of Latin American or South American crop, on the left you're like, "Maybe I shouldn't be eating this"? 

Right. Before, with Michael Pollan and that whole thing, it was like, "Let's all just do home cooking. Let's all cook different flavors and different whole foods" and things like that. And then suddenly it was, "Wait a second. Those chickpeas, that's from this culture. You need to credit them." Maybe if you're a white person, you can't even cook them. There was this cookbook author, Alison Roman, who got excoriated for calling something a stew when actually it was a curry, and she should have credited that.

Yeah, that's a big problem.

Yeah. And then on the privilege side, I talked to this author, Phoebe Maltz Bovy—who's one of my favorite authors—and she was reminding me, and I remember seeing this too…

She is dangerously Canadian. Right?

She's from New York. She's dangerously Canadian now. 

She's a settler colonial of Canada?

Yes, exactly. But as she was reminding me—and I remember this—you'd see it in the comments of places like Jezebel and stuff. Someone would be like, "It doesn't take that much money…" People would be like, "It's privileged to eat healthy. People can't all eat healthy." Then someone else would come in and be like, "Well, you can get a can of beans or you can get some lentils. They're really cheap, actually, and anybody can cook them." Then some other people would come in and be like, "Well, maybe someone doesn't have a stove. Maybe they don't have time to cook them. Or, maybe they don't have arms." It just devolved into this whole thing where you couldn't win this argument because it was just like…

I guess if you don't have arms, the can is going to be a problem. 

Or the can opener… 

That's funny, because Ben Franklin, in his autobiography, famously talks about being a vegetarian because it was cheaper in the day. So with Michael Pollan—and I guess really The Omnivore's Dilemma and a couple of other books—he popularized the idea of food miles, but also this extended attack on people who merely eat "food-like substances." One critique…

You don't eat anything your grandmother or great-grandmother wouldn't eat.

Yeah, and I'm sure this was in the pages of Reason as well. One thing that people targeted about that was that it was really classist, in the end. Does that play into Brooklyn's embrace of slow food or of ridiculously ornate ways of preparing very niche foods?

Yeah, I think that it's part of it. And I should say—because Phoebe, who I just said, she also said this and I totally agree—that part of the critique was totally legitimate. There was a part of the slow food movement that was classist. You can only get your ingredients from these farmers markets, and they have to be these in-season things, and you need all these specialty foods.

If it wasn't sexist, it was at least not very considerate of the idea that a lot of times this would mean like, "ok, someone is expected to cook." Sure, some of the high-profile people like Michael Pollan were, but a lot of times if you're saying "you need to cook more," it's the woman who that's going to fall to. There was not a lot of concerns about class and feminism and things like that. So I think some of the critique of it was valid. But then it pushed back too much.

But then you were saying, basically the left got—you know, in a way, you're supposed to eat healthy, but then you're not allowed to criticize people if they're out of shape.

Right. You're also not allowed to talk about wanting to eat healthy. That was a big part of it, too—with Pollan, with that whole slow food movement, with Michelle Obama and the early days of Let's Move. The whole thing was like, "We're really fat in this country. Let's be less fat." That was inherently a part of this healthy cooking thing. I mean, it was also about the pleasures of food and about other healthy…

But it's mostly like, "I don't want to have to walk down the street and see fat people and their Medicare scooters."

It was about trying to help people get fit, too. 

By shaming them…

And then, yes, it was about…

…and making them feel really bad about their guts. Right. Which is very American.

I think it was about a healthy concern with people's weight, and then that became a thing that was also sort of verboten.

So then the right—okay, so the left kind of evacuates this space a little bit or pulls back. How does the right move into it? Because that's kind of… 

I realize I have no idea what Sean Hannity's BMI is, but I always think of him as a fat shit, right? Am I alone in that? 

But he's not anymore, right?

No, he's not. It's also even people like Bill Clinton—if you remember him from his first two years of his presidency or so—he was Phil Hartman on Saturday Night Live, where he was stealing people's McDonald's while jogging. And it's like, no Bill Clinton hasn't been fat in like 30 years, almost. 

So how did the right move into the health space?

A couple of things. On one hand—and I'm sure you know this better than I — the right has always had weird strains of conspiracy theory, health skepticism, whatever. Going way back I think of the Kellogg's guy…

I don't know… Was Kellogg… was he right-wing or left-wing?

Well, I know he was very concerned about people masturbating. That's why he thought they should eat cereal?

That could have been a left-wing… I mean, that could be a progressive concern.

I mean that's true. That could've been a progressive concern. So again—with the Nazis. Take the Nazis…

Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

They were very concerned with health and bodily purity. There is a strain where, when you cross so far to the far right that people get really obsessed with naturalness. 

I remember a great story in the old magazine Lingua Franca, which was a magazine about higher education. They had a great article that was like, "Whatever else you say about the Nazis, you have to remember that they helped pioneer organic honey production." And it's like, yeah that's right up there thank you. The Holocaust, world domination, organic beekeeping. Yeah. But yeah, they were fixated….

A lot of this is about purity issues, right? How do you maintain your body against all of these outside shadowy forces? And the right, obviously, if you go back to the '60s, people who were anti-fluoridation or all sorts of things—that came from the right as well the left, probably more from the right. So do you see this as a continuation of that?

Kind of. Even before COVID too, you had the rise of all these different online subcultures. The gym bros got really into eating protein, talking about nootropics, and how to biohack themselves and all of that. And then on the female side of things, you have sort of, for lack of a better word, because I think this is overused now, but the trad wives and the back to the land conservative moms who are now concerned about you know like phthalates in their food and…

And that fits in with globalization or the corporatization of the food chain. Talk a little bit about how libertarians fit into this looming or this large floating set of concerns. People would talk a lot about how, "Oh, corn syrup is terrible. High-fructose corn syrup is terrible, and the only reason we have it is because we have a ban on Cuban sugar," and, "We have a corn lobby that makes us put corn in our gas tanks through ethanol—and in all of our food." That's kind of a libertarian… that's very vibrant in libertarian stuff. Is that part of this? That we have lost control over what goes into our bodies?

I mean, definitely. You have a lot of libertarians who got into the paleo diet and things like that. Who got into CrossFit a lot. I think a lot of these attract libertarians because of concerns that the powers that be are wrong about diets…

Right—and just being contrarian. So CrossFit, instead doing long repetition of specific discrete exercise, you do all these things in motion, short bursts of energy. It's contrary to what we're usually told.

For years the government was recommending like 12 teaspoons of sugar a day or something in the food pyramid. Recommending all these carbs, saying you shouldn't eat fat and you shouldn't do all of this stuff. And then it turns out that was all wrong. I cannot make sense of seed oils, guys. If somebody has the answer to seed oils if they're good or bad, please tell me, because I've read so much about seed oil.

They are the one thing, if we got rid of, we would not have a deficit. If we get rid of seed oils everything would be fine. 

Everybody be healthy. 

I think so, and then the federal budget would balance.

The reason we have seed oils in so many things is because the government suddenly was like: You shouldn't use lard. You shouldn't use butter. You shouldn't use tallow. You shouldn't use all these traditional fats to cook things. Then we got trans fats. Everybody started using trans fats instead. Then it turned out we had to ban all of those—well, that backfired. And then we went to vegetable oil. A lot of the stuff that we have now that people are now worried about is a direct response to the government—either indirectly or directly—saying you can't use these other substances.

So somebody like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. talks a lot. And he's a fascinating figure because he's a former heroin addict, he—by his own account—pumps himself full of testosterone. But he also eats a particular diet, he goes falconing, and he's always doing push-ups. I mean, he's a strange figure to be a health guru. He was also on the left—as an environmentalist lawyer and an anti-vaccine advocate going back to the beginning of this century, at the very latest. How did he capture so much mindshare on the conservative right?

COVID. Which is like the missing piece of all this.

Right, right. So all of this stuff is kind of floating around, and then COVID really helps focus on coming out of that. I think I read this in Reason, but in the early 2010s or so, Pew Research asked people of different political persuasions, "are you generally pro- or against vaccines?" 

And it was more common for people who defined themselves as liberal or on the left to be anti-vaccine. Conservatives were pro. 

That has clearly flipped because of COVID. 

Yeah. They asked if they had trust in medical institutions. It was more common on the left to say no. Now, it's way more common on the right. I think people on the right got very radicalized by COVID and distrustful of the government advice around masks or vaccines. Some of the stuff they got radicalized about was valid; some, not. But anyways they got radicalized on that…

I talked to Alex Clark, who's this sort of conservative influencer, podcaster, young woman and she was saying, they already distrusted the government about a lot of things, but they were really trusting of food and pharma. And then this made them be like, "Well, wait a second, why are we trusting them about this?" On the one hand that radicalized a lot of conservatives against institutions like food and pharma that they traditionally trusted. Then on the other hand, you had a lot of leftists who were like, "I support all of these institutions." 

I talked to a woman who was a yoga teacher and she was saying how so many people she knew in the gym and yoga space, anyone who made their living doing things involving bodies—there were the shutdowns and they felt like that was unfair. They felt like defining them as not essential was unfair. They felt like there was just like all of this stuff around COVID that radicalized them and they started sort of protesting against it. And then that put them in touch either in person, at protests, or online with right wingers and people kept being like, "Well, if you don't buy everything that the government is doing about COVID, that means you're a right-winger." And a certain amount of them were just like, "Okay, well then fine, I guess I'm a right winger now." 

It sort of led to this space where people left and right who were maybe both dissatisfied with their party's establishment found each other over these health concerns. 

How do you parse the latter? In the article, you talk about this a bit, but is there a way to know with, say claims about particular foods, whether it's good or bad, or a diet is good or a bad, or a medicine is good or bad? Do we have good information or is it really still kind of up for grabs? If you only eat, you know, Atkins bars, which I did for a number of years, yeah, and will continue to, I'm sure. But you know, is that bad for you? Stuff that is made in a lab, that is supposed to help you lose weight or you know keep your blood levels where they should be? 

Do we know definitively that that's really bad for you, or nutrition seems to be one of these sciences that is constantly rediscovering things from 50 years ago. As no, this time it's real, etc. Do we have more knowledge that's actually reliable now? 

I think part of the problem is like what you said, people want to have really easy dichotomies: processed food is bad, whole foods are good. But it depends on the processed food, right?

If we're talking processed foods like potato chips and Twinkies and all the things we have on the one side of the table out there like yeah, probably eating that diet is bad. But there are many foods that are technically processed foods that are made in ways with whole foods ingredients that are maybe made in such a way that they're not actually bad for you. So you can't just say like…

I feel like that's part of the problem now. RFK, and various people in the Trump administration, and various people on the right, they were all like, "We want freedom to follow our own medical advice, not listen to experts, do our own thing, take our health into our own hands." Great. But now they're like, "Wait a second, we've got power now. So we could actually force everybody to do it, because we know what's best."

Right. And it would be criminal not to.

Right. "We have to. We know the way now. Now that we have enlightened nutrition, it's so much better than it is." And it's like, no. Because we still don't know. We might have some better answers, but there's still so much we don't know. People who think that we're like…

"We've finally cleared the thicket of ignorance and we're civilized now. We won't revisit any of this because we now have the truth." What are some of the political agenda items of the MAHA movement? Regardless of whether they're correct or not. I suppose we can and should debate each individual thing, but what are some of the political agenda items that they have that worry you?

 That worry me?

Or concern you.

I guess just any of the things that they're mandating. It's sort of hard to know because with the food additives thing, RFK was like, " Well, I came to an understanding with the food companies that they're going to phase out all these food dyes." Does that mean they're willingly doing it—this is a free market thing—or does it mean he basically pressured them? Like, "Nice company you have; it'd be a shame if I have to do some regulations on you."

It'd be interesting—I don't know the answer to this—but how many of you remember SnackWells? There was a period where your grocer aisle had a massive SnackWells item. Or Healthy Choice was another one that made terrible ice cream that you could eat by the quart. It didn't taste well, but it had no fat or flavor in it or something.

Were they jawboned into that? Or were they trying to build a market niche. Or were they responding to a market niche? In the same way now, is RFK, or is the government, forcing manufacturers to change what they do? Or are companies suddenly realizing there's a market just for this type of product? Like grass-fed beef, I don't think people probably wouldn't have been willing to pay for that in the '70s or most of the '80s.

I don't know. I think some states are starting to do more direct bans on different things.

West Virginia banned certain yellow and red food dyes. It just seems weird that that bubbles to the top of West Virginia's dietary concerns. I'm not saying anything—it's just that West Virginia is an incredibly poor state and an unhealthy state. It doesn't seem like that's going to move the needle.

I don't think anybody needs to eat Yellow Dye No. 17, or whatever it is, but I worry…

But they should be able to.

Well, yeah. And I also worry that—yes, they should be able to. From a… Yes, of course, Nick. Of course, I think they should…

They should be able to color their heroin that they sell in vending machines in private charter schools.

Yeah. They should be able to pay for their sex work in Red Dye No. 6.

I just swear, though, that with these things, we're going to have a trans fat situation too. Where everybody's going to be like, "Ok, we're all going to"—either because it's mandated or because we've been pressured into it—"we're going to all get rid of these substances, do these new things," and then we find out the new things are just as unhealthy, or actually worse for you, than before.

Does the MAHA movement concern you in terms of coercion? Are there big-ticket items—because obviously, from an economic or from a free-market point of view, we shouldn't have the embargo on Cuban sugar, right? But is MAHA going to start dictating food policy in a way that's worse or more coercive than whatever's in place now?

I think it's looking like that. And I think that's a shame, because I think that the promise of MAHA—what they were saying that they wanted to do—was just make it so people didn't have to do certain things. They talked about ending farm subsidies and getting rid of these obstacles to healthy eating that were created by the government. But now it seems like they're starting to be like, "Well, actually, since we have this power, why don't we use it?"

I want to bring it back to school lunches. How many of you ever ate a prepared lunch at school? How many of you enjoyed it? Ok, there were hands up, and there were very few hands after. Is there any way—to turn to maybe a brief conversation of state capacity libertarianism or something—is there any way that schools can be forced to, if they're going to offer lunch, offer food that is both edible and nutritious?

This is why I have mixed feelings about some of the things MAHA politicians or whatever have done. Often, do involve government things. They're like, "We're going to mess with what people can get on food stamps. We're going to change the makeup of school lunches." It's like, "Well, those are government programs. And if we are going to have those government programs, should we?" And I think there's arguments for and against the idea that like, if we are going to have them, well we should try to make them as healthy as possible. And then there's also the argument that, at least with the food stamps, that that's just paternalistic and it's actually just better to let people get what they want.

Yeah, what do you think? This is something where people on the left and right constantly are saying, "Well, soda is a definite no on food stamps and certain types of things." Do you feel that that's just being paternalistic?

What do you think?

Well, I was…

I don't have a good answer. I kind of agree with the idea and I know I'm not supposed to…

No, I don't know. I mean, in a way, having food stamps is paternalistic. Already.

Right, in general. So if we're going to do it, well, why not put some…

Yeah. "You're poor, we're going to give you money, but you can only use it on food." As opposed to—I'm much more in favor of unrestricted cash grants to low-income people, if that's what we're going to do to help them.

By extension, I know at various points in public housing projects there were attempts— this was going back I think under Obama—where smoking has been banned in most public housing projects that get federal money. But then it was like even on the grounds you couldn't smoke. And it just seems like,why are you punishing people? They can't even go outside. They've got to go outside and walk around the block in order to smoke or something. All of this stuff seems bad. 

The school lunch thing does seem clearer to me. The school lunch thing seems like we're doing these lunches, why not have them have some sort of minimum? But it is hard, because during Obama, they were like, "Ok, we're going to make school lunch, just healthier." So they have to do skim milk instead of like 2% or whole milk. And like, that's actually way less healthy. At least, a lot of people say it is, because they just added the nutrients back in. It doesn't have the fat. It's actually not as good for you, so it is kind of like, "Well, then who's the one saying what is healthy?"

Well, somebody gets to say, and they get to dictate it. You want to decentralize that or make it as individual a choice as possible. So I guess what we're saying is we need to get rid of compulsory education. That's the problem area.

Yeah, that's the only solution, obviously.

And maybe bring back work farms and child labor laws, right?

Talk a little bit about tradwives, because that's an interesting phenomenon and it's a big part of this. It seems to be a place that conservative women—whether or not they are actually stay-at-home wives—not necessarily mothers. 

How do they fit into this? Do they also embody the contradictions of the MAHA movement?

The tradwife phenomenon fascinates me because I feel like I see so many parallels with the liberals in Brooklyn that I was talking about, or the hipsters in Brooklyn— whatever you want to call them—during the recession. Because it was very much a response to that, it was this huge global thing's happening that we can't control, let's all just fantasize about if we're all prairie people and we're making all of our own living by our hands, and everything.

The tradwife thing or the online influencers that are very much like these women who are like, "I'm gonna milk my own cow and then drink the milk straight from its utter, because raw milk is best for you and I'm going to do my own sourdough from scratch." There's this one woman who makes her own Pop-Tarts from scratch—she does the butter and everything herself. That's the fantasy, it very much became popular during COVID. And I think the same thing is very much with during the recession. People felt like their lives were out of their control. There was some sort of elite controlling things. They didn't know if they could trust them or not. 

There was this very much fantasy about sort of, "What can we do? Well, we can control our bodies. We can control what we put in our bodies, we control what we put on our table." Whereas it was one crowd that captured that 10 years ago, during the pandemic it was this sort of online conservative influencer crowd that sort of managed to tap into that yearning that people had. And that's why I think they became so popular, not just with conservative women, but with all sorts of people that are apolitical or that were just across the spectrum. 

Do you think MAHA is activating large numbers of people into politics in a way that otherwise wouldn't have cared?

I think, yeah, I think a little bit. I did talk to some people when I was in this article that were just like, "I don't think that these issues should be politicized. I don't think about caring about, like food dyes or caring about getting certain toxins out of food or whatever, or getting them out of your toiletries and all that." I don't think it should be a political issue but it's become so politicized that suddenly they don't necessarily consider themselves right wingers, but they were like, "Now I'm getting slotted in with conservatives." And also if I want to vote for someone who's gonna do something about these issues, it's becoming totally polarized. The left is out there just like defending seed oils left and right, which again, I don't know about seed oils. I feel like it's weird that suddenly there's been all these like articles in like sort of left leaning publications that are like, "Actually seed oils are great." And it's just like, it's almost like the opposite of when Sarah Palin was doing the Big Gulps. Now suddenly they're like, "I'm going to bathe in seed oils and feed my infants them."

We've talked a little bit about tradwives and a kind of female version of this. There is the male version and it can be like gym bros or people who are pumping up. But also people like RFK Jr. have talked about how environmental chemicals are, "making the frogs gay." It's like straight out of Alex Jones and things like that. 

And that was a big thing about seed oil and eating soy products that it actually feminizes men on the molecular level. 

Is MAHA, on some profound level, is it partly a response to the fact that our traditional gender roles are kind of— there's a lot of free floating anxiety about them. Because, clearly, whatever we grew up with doesn't really make sense anymore, but what the new normal is hasn't quite emerged yet. 

Yeah. I mean, sometimes I think that everything that's happening right now is a response to anxiety about gender roles. At least it seems like that if you're on Twitter. 

I guess as a final question—and then we're going to have some Q&A—you have two young children. How do you feed them that is distinct from the way that your mother, or father, or grandmother fed the older generations or yourself?

Oh my God, my mom is horrified by the way I feed my children. Because I grew up on a diet of Twinkies, and Ho-Hos, Gushers, and Pop-Tarts, and canned vegetables, and McDonald's. 

And my son does not know—like when she says "McDonald's," he's like, "The farmer? Like Old McDonald?" He's never had it. She just thinks it's the worst—that I haven't given my three-and-a-half-year-old McDonald's yet in life.

Do you worry?

So it's a really weird food fight we have in my family. It legit upsets my mother.

Have you caught her trying to take them through the McDonald's drive-thru?

She hasn't done that, but she's sneaking in Goldfish crackers and stuff.

Isn't that fascinating? Food as a weapon of…

Yeah, I mean, she's pretty good about it. She actually is really respectful. But she just complains to me about it. Like, "I can't believe…"

Do you worry at all that your kids are going to become the sugar-free kids who go over to the one house in the neighborhood where…

Well, that was my neighbor across the street. Her mom—who I was like, "She's so weird. She does yoga, and she eats tofu and brown rice". And now I'm like, "Ok, I'm her mom now." But this was the '90s. She'd come over to our house and she would just binge on all the junk food that we had all the time.

So that is my lesson. I'm not super strict with my kids. Obviously, just because I've never taken them to McDonald's— they have some junk food. I'm trying to do it in moderation. It's hard. It's really hard to know where to draw lines, but I'm trying to—because I know that it can backfire like that.

It's very complicated that way. We're going to leave it there. 

I want to thank Elizabeth Nolan Brown for talking to The Reason Interview.

 

• Producer: Paul Alexander

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