Dan Piller was a business reporter for more than four decades, working for the Des Moines Register and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. He covered the oil and gas industry while in Texas and was the Register’s agriculture reporter before his retirement in 2013. He lives in Ankeny.
In an era when sex and religion are politicized, it was inevitable that food would follow.
Two bookend events in 2025 may catapult our eating habits off the Food Network and onto mainstream cable and broadcast news. First will be the confirmation hearing for Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for Secretary of Health and Human Services. Then an ad hoc committee of experts must release the legally-required rewriting of the federal government’s food and nutrition dietary guidelines, which are due by the end of 2025.
AN AGENDA AT ODDS WITH TRADITIONAL GOP ALLIES
Trump’s nomination of Bobby the Younger will no doubt focus primarily on Kennedy’s oddball views about vaccinations. But food and farming interest groups will want to know more about his vow to “Make America Healthy Again” by reforming farming and food processing practices. Many of Bobby Junior’s advocacy positions seem to put him more on the side of his family’s longstanding Democratic Party affiliation, rather than the hard-right Republican doctrine espoused by MAGA.
Bobby’s advocacy of “non-chemical agriculture” and his slander of fast and processed food as “poison” contradicts the orthodox Republican chumminess with large-scale industrial agriculture and fast-food processing and consumption. That could reorder some political alignments. Republicans traditionally have been the Red Meat party. Democrats eat plants. Republicans love big corn-fed livestock feedlots and barns that dot their GOP-dominated rural American base. Democrats grow their own and favor grass-fed meat or the seafood easily available off their politically-friendly east and west coasts.
Maybe Bobby will change those alignments. After all, the Trump era has redefined the word “conservative” to mean less an economic viewpoint and more of a cultural and religious attitude. At the moment, it’s hard to envision angry ranchers, cheeseburger and barbeque-lovers suddenly finding common ground with the Green New Deal, but stranger things have happened.
The implications for Iowa and its agriculture could be enormous. The state is the largest producer of corn and soybeans used in animal feeds. Bobby has bashed vegetable oils and corn sweeteners as well. Iowa is also the biggest producer of hogs and eggs and seventh largest cattle producer, all products that draw upturned noses from the low-cholesterol crowd.
A BATTLE BREWING OVER WEIGHT LOSS DRUGS
Obesity and weight loss, subjects long shunned by politicians and the media because of American’s longstanding touchiness about their weight, are emerging from the shadows. Next year’s big vaccination story may not be about infectious diseases and children. Rather, it may be about the heavily-advertised new weight loss drugs, which surely will appeal to the 90 million or so Americans afflicted by obesity.
Some 230 million Americans are overweight, and the U.S. now has the world’s highest obesity rates. The chicken came home to roost during the COVID-19 pandemic. It became apparent that a solid majority of U.S. patients who needed expensive intensive care and intubation procedures were obese.
Ozempic and Wegovy have been approved for use by Medicare and Medicaid. The government’s green light covers medical conditions but not weight loss, and didn’t come with instructions on who would pick up the $1,000 per month tab for the drugs, which must be taken indefinitely to forestall re-gains of lost weight.
Trump himself may be using the weight loss drugs, although he has attributed his dramatically-slimmer appearance to “better eating habits.” (His weight loss has freed him to resume his longstanding practice of fat-shaming others.)
As for Bobby Junior, he has disclaimed any need for weight loss drugs for the general public. Rather, he says, we should “feed people good food and the obesity problem will disappear overnight.”
It’s unclear how Bobby would get farmers and processors to produce this “good food,” or how he would induce pizza-loving Americans to eat it. A nation where one-third of adults scorned masks and vaccinations during COVID isn’t likely to take kindly to mandatory vegetable feedings (or exercise). Maybe Bobby will be pressed to explain at his confirmation hearings. It goes without saying that the Farm Bureau and various livestock and grain-growing advocacy organization will pay close attention to his answers.
Regardless of one’s views on weight, nutrition, and politics, the increases in health care costs caused by treating obesity and related heart disease, diabetes, kidney and G.I. disorders and certain types of cancers are catching the attention of cost-cutters looking for ways to reduce America’s heath care bill. The recent shooting of United Healthcare executive Brian Thompson—possibly inspired by an anti-health insurance motive—is being described as a “turning point” in America’s impatience with its health care system and by association, its food and nutrition.
THE LAST PRESIDENT TO FOCUS ON PHYSICAL FITNESS
The emergence of Bobby Kennedy junior as a fighter against obesity and for better health is rife with irony. More than six decades ago, his uncle, President John F. Kennedy, led what turned out to be the last effort by a president to improve the health and fitness of his fellow Americans.
In a December, 1960 issue of Sports Illustrated magazine (which had the same status as ESPN in those pre-cable TV days), President-elect Kennedy decried what he called “the soft American,” and called for a greater commitment to the physical fitness of America’s youth. JFK’s words appeared three weeks before his inauguration and cast the challenge in Cold War terms: fitter kids would make better defenders of the country. He added, presciently, that compounded poor health would lead to higher health care expenses for future generations.
In his article JFK noted that time and labor-saving devices undermined physical fitness, saying,
A single look at the packed parking lot of the average high school will tell us what has happened to the traditional hike to school that helped to build young bodies. The television set, the movies and the myriad conveniences and distractions of modern life all lure our young people away from the strenuous physical activity that is the basis of fitness in youth and in later life.
One can only imagine how he would react to today’s computer screen-obsessed youths.
But the realist in JFK also admitted, “we do not live in a regimented society where men are forced to live their lives in the interest of the state.”
Kennedy’s Thousand Day administration put its emphasis on exercise and fitness, particularly physical education classes and higher standards in American schools. The president said nothing about poor diet, in an era that preceded the explosion of fast-foot franchises as well as the hyper-aggressive marketing of sugared soft drinks to American kids.
JFK launched his effort at a time when about 25 percent of Americans were overweight, and 5 percent were obese. Today, about 70 percent of Americans are overweight and 40 percent obese, despite the profusion of more than 41,000 fitness centers that seem to sit on every corner of America.
In any case, personal efforts from the White House died with Kennedy on November 22, 1963. Subsequent presidents contented themselves with an occasional run or trip to the golf course, and appointments of political supporters among prominent athletes and coaches to a “President’s Council on Physical Fitness.” But no president has hectored Americans about their weight and fitness as did JFK.
(Historians have also observed that JFK was a less-than-perfect example of health and fitness. While he affected the appearance of good health with a slender build and tailored Brooks Brothers suits, the “vigor” he espoused was generated partially by steroids and amphetamines to overcome various health issues carefully hidden from the public.)
OBSTACLES FACING BOBBY JUNIOR
Now comes nephew Bobby, whose appointment probably was a payoff for bringing a fringe element of voters to Trump’s side, as opposed to a sincere desire to improve Americans’ personal health. Trump thinks Big Macs and KFC are food groups and disdains exercise beyond climbing in and out of golf carts. Nevertheless, he said he would turn Bobby loose to “go wild on health.” As it turns out, the bureaucratic and political landscape in which he will work to bring about this good food and better health is wild enough by itself.
For starters, while the HHS department Kennedy might lead has responsibility for the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institute of Health, agencies beyond Bobby’s reach will share responsibility for food and health. The Environmental Protection Agency, which regulates agricultural chemicals, is an independent cabinet-level agency. Low-income food assistance and school lunches are regulated by the U.S Department of Agriculture, whose 162-year legacy going back to Abraham Lincoln makes it resistant to whippersnappers like Bobby Junior.
Bobby will have to do a lot of persuasive talking at cabinet meetings, backed up by Trump, to guide healthy food from field to table.
Then there is Congress, whose jam-up on agricultural issues has caused it to miss two annual deadlines to renew the 2018 Farm Bill. Bobby Junior’s efforts to coax Iowa farmers to produce more chemical-free “good food” will swim in a political current crowded with budget sharks, who aren’t sure they want to continue America’s nine-decade legacy of subsidizing farmers.
From outside the Federal Triangle, critics of modern agriculture policy have noted that almost all farm subsidies go to grain farmers who produce feed for livestock. Almost no subsidies go to those growing fruits and vegetables, which medical-nutrition experts now recommend for a more prominent place on American plates. That debate certainly will renew when the next round of U.S. Dietary Guidelines is laid before steak-loving Trump in 2025.
Farm chemicals are used by 95 percent of Iowa farmers, who voted for Trump by a 3-to-1 margin in November. Somewhere between those numbers and Bobby’s dream of “chemical-free agriculture” lies a compromise. Incoming Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins, who grew up on a Texas farm and studied agronomy at Texas A&M, will have plenty to say, along with the Trump-supporting Farm Bureau. Farm chemical sales people likely won’t need to snap shut their sales cases.
Bobby would do well to ponder the experience of former First Lady Michelle Obama. Her initiatives to make kids healthier by putting less chocolate milk and more vegetables in school lunches was greeted by tons of thrown-away food and squawks from parents and school administrators about how the healthier food becomes, the more expensive it gets. Trump gleefully reversed most of Michelle’s school lunch initiatives, and the Biden administration decided it had bigger fish to fry (or more healthily, bake) than to go back for seconds on school lunches.
Right-wingers, noting that obesity rates are higher among people of color, have blamed unhealthy food consumption by low-income people for the obesity problem. (They ignore the legacy of previous efforts to promote “Black Capitalism” by showering inner city ghettos with fast-food franchises.) Liberals have so far resisted efforts to require low-income assistance to be used for “healthy” foods instead of candy and soda. They remember the taunts of “nanny state” when big-city mayors (mostly Democrats) tried to ban out-sized “Big Gulp” soft drink containers.
So, the politics of food and nutrition may turn out to be as complicated and nasty as the politics of masks and vaccinations. Bobby Junior has succeeded in getting an appointment to high office. What he can do with it remains open to question.
He’ll have to go a lot further than Uncle Jack.
Top image: Mosaic depicting Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s endorsement of Donald Trump, first published on RFK Jr’s campaign Facebook page in October 2024.