Everyone should read Eric Schlosser’s op-ed, Why Did Trump Order Up 660 Million Pounds of Mystery Meat?  We have country-of-origin labeling for fresh produce.  But because of Big Meat lobbying,

Beef and pork are notable exceptions to these laws. And that may help to explain why President Trump signed a proclamation last month that will allow the duty-free importation of about 660 million pounds of inexpensive beef.

If American consumers knew where that beef was coming from, they might not want to eat it.

As he explains, this beef is  trimmings, possibly stored frozen for years, intended to be added to ground beef to adjust the fat content.

He lists the food safety scandals around such trimmings.

• China rejected two shipping containers of beef from Uruguay after finding residue of an anti-parasitic drug in the meat.
• China rejected beef from Argentina reportedly because it tested positive for a banned antibiotic that can cause serious blood disorders.
• Brazilian federal police raided nearly 200 meatpacking plants after allegations that government inspectors and politicians were being bribed to allow the sale of contaminated beef.

As for why President Trump allowed this, against the wishes of the US beef industry:

“Regime Change,” the recent book by the Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, contains an interesting clue: a White House meeting last November between President Trump and Joesley Batista, whose family controls JBS…Mr. Batista gained the White House meeting last November, Ms. Haberman and Mr. Swan wrote, because of his friendship with Melania Trump. In addition, a JBS subsidiary had donated $5 million to Mr. Trump’s second inauguration, the largest gift from any individual or corporation.

Eric Schlosser discusses this and other such matters on Democracy Now.

Comment

We need country of origin labeling for beef, for sure.  We have it for produce.  Congress made beef exempt.  Bring it back.

Food safety lawyer Bill Marler wants more USDA inspection and more transparency, as he says in 660 Million Pounds of Trimmings — The Part of Eric Schlosser’s Op-Ed I Would Underline.  His advice to hamburger eaters:

The one thing that makes a hamburger safe is 160°F, measured with a thermometer. Buy from your butcher if you want to know where your beef came from. Then cook it to 160 anyway.

And then, of course, there’s what’s happening to beef prices.  You might feel better about this if you knew the beef was raised here and was safe.

A bunch of items got me thinking about the gap between what MAHA promised and what it is actually doing: mostly talk, but not much action.

I.  This post from Senator Elizabeth Warren on X.

II.  The New York Times: How Kennedy did on children’s health reforms

Everything seems to be a mixed bag:

• Dietary guidelines advising eat real food and restrict highly processed foods, but also advising more meat, fat, and saturated fat.
• State restrictions of sodas and other sugary foods on SNAP, but other requirements that have dropped enrollments.
• An FDA proposal to close the GRAS loophole, but cuts to personnel will make oversight impossible.
• Removal of artificial dyes from food products, but this is voluntary.
• Defining ultra-processed foods, but this is held up and its fate is uncertain.
• Promises to put real food in schools, but no rules have as yet been issued nor is more money being appropriated.

III.  “MAHA Moms Built a Movement. MAGA Bros Have Taken It Over,”

With the midterm elections approaching and MAHA voters increasingly dissatisfied with Trump, it’s worth asking: How exactly did a cause powered by women turn into one run by men? And will the women who built the MAHA movement ever revolt?

IV.  KFF  Health News:  Trump and Kennedy’s Health Industry Deals Haven’t Been Enforced and Are at Risk of Vanishing

Like the focus on artificial dyes, however, many of the administration’s highest-profile health initiatives rely on voluntary agreements. The goals, such as lower drug prices and nutrition classes for doctors, have widespread appeal, cutting across party lines and economic divisions.  But the administration-industry deals lack the enforcement teeth of more traditional federal regulation. Their details are vague, and minimal oversight makes it hard to monitor progress. In some cases, the administration has claimed victories that have yet to materialize.

Comment

I had some cautious hope that this particular piece of this administration’s plans might actually get somewhere.  At the beginning, RFK Jr sounded like he really did want to improve American diets and Make America Healthy Again.  Apparently, he was unable to stand up to food industry pressures, as is most evident by his failure to get glyphosate out of the food supply.

His one resounding success?  Destroying confidence in the safety and efficacy of vaccinations, despite tons of evidence that their benefits hugely outweigh risks.

In a word, disappointing.

It’s Climate Week, so this seems ironically appropriate.  Never mind global warming, ruminant greenhouse gas emissions, or food safety.

You have to love the double-speak rhetoric:

This action aligns research and promotion activities with the Department’s priorities and the original mission of the checkoffs. USDA remains committed to ensuring that every dollar collected from American producers serves American agriculture for the better.

“Serving American agriculture for the better” is a red flag.  It usually translates as serving the interests of agribusiness or the peculiar politics of the current USDA.

The USDA’s target here is its Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy.  This, according to the announcement, was

established through the checkoff, has pursued extensive ESG initiatives, including greenhouse-gas and net-zero targets. USDA’s action ends checkoff support for those ESG-related projects…This action also directs the Agricultural Marketing Service to ensure no research and promotion funds in other commodity checkoffs advance ESG mandates…USDA is taking swift action to bar the Dairy Checkoff from spending farmer paid dollars on the radical ESG ideology [my emphasis].

I took a look at the Innovation Center website.  Its focus areas may explain why the USDA wants its funding stopped.  Radical ideology?  You decide.

• Animal care: Align the industry on best practices for animal well-being and care.
• Environmental Stewardship: Advance solutions that protect natural resources and nourish the planet for future generations.
• Food Safety: Drive adoption of world-class food safety practices while exploring next generation technologies that progress safety and traceability.
• Health & Well-being: Deliver dairy nutrition that meets emerging and personalized health while improving nutrition security in the U.S. and around the world.
• People & Community: Support efforts to alleviate hunger, promote community vitality, and empower the dairy workforce.

The Center is funded by the checkoff program.  With no checkoff funding, it will no longer exist.

Chalk this up as another tragic casualty of the Trump administration’s radical ideology.

I subscribe to Jerry Hagstrom’s “The Hagstrom Report” for his tracking of food events in Washington DC I would not know about otherwise.  He occasionally hosts sponsored posts and I was especially interested to read this one on September 15: “Candy: An American Manufacturing Success Story 250 Years in the Making” by John Downs, the president and CEO of the National Confectioners Association.

I don’t write about candy much.  Yes it’s sugar, but most people don’t eat all that much of it.

The CDC lists these main sources of sugar in US diets:

• 24% from sugary drinks, such as soft drinks, fruit drinks, sports drinks, and energy drinks.
• 19% from desserts and sweet snacks.
• 11% from coffee and tea that is sweetened before sale or added later.
• 9% from candy and sugars.
• 7% from breakfast cereals and bars.

According to Google’s AI, for candy:

Wish Fast Food Nation a happy 25th anniversary.

It’s hard for me to believe it’s been 25 years since this book first appeared, but 25th anniversary editions of my Food Politics and Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma are also in the works.

The book is about the beef industry and what it does to the animals, packing house workers, the environment, and human health.

Eric Schlosser wrote a new Afterword for this edition.

Here are two excerpts.

As of this writing…highly pathogenic avian influenza (H5N1) has not yet caused a deadly epidemic among human beings.  Pasteurization kills H5N1 in milk, and the virus hasn’t yet mutated to become for contagious or more lethal.  But H5N1 has become endemic among wild birds, chickens, turkeys, and dairy cattle in the United States, allowing a continual mixture of its genes.  A bird flu epidemic that kills millions of people may never emerge from America’s factory farms—or it may next week, next month, next year.  The industrialization of livestock, the transformation of sentient creatures into commodities, and the absence of government oversight have created an efficient system for creating dangerous new pathogens.  As this book argued twenty-five years ago, that’s the price we pay for cheap meat.  That price doesn’t appear on the menu. (p. 312)

Economists often use the four-firm concentration ratio as a measure of the competition in a market for goods and services.  When four companies gain a combined market share of 40 percent or higher, an oligopoly has formed.  The prices offered to suppliers, the prices charged to consumers, and the wages paid to workers are no longer determined mainly by market forces.  A handful of companies have gained control of the market.  Effective government regulation becomes more difficult, as state and federal agencies readily become “captive” to the corporations they’re supposed to oversee.  Today, four companies control about 60 percent of the worldwide market for seeds and 61 percent of the market for pesticides.  Four companies control about 70 to 90 percent of the worldwide trade in grain.  Four companies are responsible for processing about 70 percent of America’s hogs and 85 percent of its cattle.

This book kicked off the food movement 25 years ago.  If you haven’t read it, now is the time.  We need it more than ever.

More and more Americans are taking GLP-1 drugs; the current estimate is 11%.

This causes a big problem for the food industry.  Eating less is bad for business.

Here are some of the ways the food industry is responding.

Analyzing the GLP-1 consumer

• Overturning 7 industry assumptions about the GLP-1 consumer: The newest evidence challenges some of the food industry’s most comfortable conclusions about GLP-1 consumers… Read more
• New GLP-1 Consumer Data Challenges Food Industry Forecasts:  New data from IFF, PwC, BCG, and The Harris Poll UK challenges assumptions about GLP-1 consumers, bakery demand, grocery spending, and product development.

Dealing with labeling issues

• What do consumers call GLP-1s? Manufacturers must understand how consumers talk about the drugs to improve marketing effectiveness, product discoverability and consumer engagement… Read more
• What does the ‘GLP-1 friendly’ label really mean?  Food companies are increasingly adopting the label on packaging, but failing to explain how it could help consumers on weight loss drugs, one industry expert writes.
• Beyond ‘GLP-1 friendly’: The nutrition opportunity food brands are missing: Health experts point to muscle, bone and cardiovascular health as key priorities for consumers taking GLP-1 medications and navigating midlife, creating opportunities for food and beverage brands to connect functional nutrition with consumer education… Read more

Developing new products

• Can foods make consumers feel full like GLP-1s?  Many hope to replicate the impact of GLP-1s on satiety through food… Read more
• Nestlé bets big on GLP-1s with AI-powered nutrition push: The world’s biggest CPG is using AI and nutritional science to develop products tailored to GLP-1 users… Read more
• Europeans finally care about GLP-1s: Europe’s GLP-1 conversation is taking off. While uptake still trails the US, interest is surging across the continent… Read more

_________________________

Arriving Sept 8. For a 30% discount, pre-order here using code UCPSAVE30.

I was struck by this announcement: 

Campbell’s is not the only one.  Also see:

• Food Dive: The biggest food and beverage layoffs in 2025 
• ProFoodWorld: Food Industry Layoffs Mount as Nestlé, Del Monte Cut Jobs
• Democracy Now: Over 3,000 Workers Laid Off as Tyson Foods Closes Meatpacking Plants

What’s going on?  I see four reasons for declining food sales.

• RFK Jr says the food industry is poisoning America
• Health advocacy to reduce intake of ultra-processed foods
• The effect of GLP-1 agonist drugs in reducing food intake
• Inflation in food prices

These trends may do wonders for health.

But to the food industry, they are a worry: eating less is bad for business.

If you want to know why school food is so controversial, and improving its nutrition quality is so difficult, follow the money.

A reader, Jennifer Windh, says she is a mom of a second grader in Texas (Tomball School District) and a member of “Make Texans Healthy Again.”  She tells me she asked ChatGPT to summarize information about food lobbying on the new school food rules:

I’ve been tracking USDA’s forthcoming proposed rule updating the Child Nutrition Programs to align with the 2025–2030 Dietary Guidelines for Americans (RIN 0584-AF17). USDA sent the proposed rule to the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) for review on July 20, and USDA’s regulatory agenda currently targets publication in September.

While the proposed rule itself is not yet public, OIRA’s public meeting records give us some clues about what may be under consideration. Outside groups can request meetings with OIRA while a significant regulation is under review, and OIRA publishes the identity of the groups, attendees, and materials they submit.

Much applause to Jennifer for digging into who is pushing OIRA about food and nutrition standards for school meals.

The table does not say what these participants were asking for, but let’s speculate.  The new dietary guidelines call for more real food, less highly processed food, and less sugar, but more protein, healthy fats, and whole milk dairy.

The trade associations want the USDA to require meals to have more of their products: rice, bread (not too much whole wheat), frozen foods, grains (preferably not whole), and meat.

The National CACFP (Child and Adult Care Food Program) Association advocates for this desperately underfunded program and surely is asking for more funding to comply with new DGA standards.

The Plant Powered groups want more plant foods and less meat and dairy.

The Urban School Food Alliance works with school districts to provide healthy food to low-income kids.  I’ll bet it’s asking for more funding too.

Of special interest is the position of the School Nutrition Association, which supposedly represents school food service workers.

It is heavily sponsored by food companies.   Its position on forthcoming rules is that

Any new rules limiting UPFs in schools must ensure meal programs are permitted to serve nutrient-dense, pre-prepared foods. Schools are simply not equipped to scratch prepare all menu items – more than 93% cited the need for more staff, culinary training, equipment and infrastructure to reduce reliance on UPFs.

To see what attempts to improve the nutritional quality of school meals are up against, take a look at the SNA’s talking points defending highly processed snack foods as well as sugary foods.

As it happens, a new analysis shows that basically all snack foods sold in schools are ultra-processed.

And another analysis of 10,000 school lunches, Beyond the Nugget: The Hidden Health Risks of Industrially Produced Animal Proteins—and the Path Toward Better School Lunchesfrom Friends of the Earth and Chef Ann Foundation, finds that they are “dominated by industrially produced meat and cheese, raising concerns about children’s exposure to known carcinogens, ingredients of concern and potentially undisclosed contaminants, including veterinary drug, dioxin and pesticide residues.”

The big questions:

• Will the calls for less ultra-processed food and sugar survive this kind of lobbying opposition?
• Will school meals get enough funding to do what the guidelines call for?

I can’t wait to find out.