Search results: the corporation not me

I know I’ve been posting this graph multiple times, but to me it sums up everything that’s wrong with the U.S. agricultural system.  Close to half the biofuels grown in the U.S. is used to make biofuels.

Here’s what happens to corn.

But that’s not all.  Roughly 40% of U.S. soybeans are converted to diesel fuel, according to a report from the World Resources Institute: Increased Biofuel Production in the US Midwest May Harm Farmers and the Climate.  

As the report explains,

• Corn and soybeans are grown on 178 million acres of farmland.
• They grown mainly in Midwest states — Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota and Wisconsin.
• 30 million acres of corn are used to produce ethanol, but ethanol from corn only supplied 4% of U.S. transportation fuel in 2022.
• More than 40% of U.S. soybean oil supply has been used for biofuels since 2022; biodiesel made from soybeans supplied less than 1% of U.S. transportation fuel.

The rest is mainly used for animal feed.

All this means that the current subsidy system:

• Encourages large agricultural producers to grow corn in places where it should not be grown (areas of low water, for example).
• Takes up farmland that could be used to produce food for people.
• Pollutes the environment with pesticides and herbicides, making local water sources undrinkable.
• Promotes meat in the diet (it reduces the price of feed)

This is a really bad system that does nothing to help Make America Healthy Again.

Is the system likely to change?  Not a chance.

And now we have the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

It is applauded by the trade association for ethanol and diesel producers.

The American Prospect, however, calls it “climate-wrecking.”

the Renewable Fuels Standard, created by the Energy Policy Act of 2005….was to cut down on greenhouse gas emissions by requiring the use of various biofuels for transportation and heating (and, not coincidentally, hand out gobs of cash to farm states like Iowa, a place which is kind of critical in presidential elections). Since these are created from plants that pull carbon out of the atmosphere, rather than digging up oil from the ground, it was thought this would cut emissions. [But] mainly it led to an explosion of farming corn and soybeans to be rendered into ethanol, which increased by about 500 percent between 2005 and today.

Take a look at who is made happy by this bill.

• American Soybean Association
• National Association of Wheat Growers (they want in)
• National Cattlemens Beef Association

Big Ag wants to sell crops; it doesn’t care how they are used.

Add this to everything else that’s wrong with this bill.

Fortunately, there is at least one dissenting voice:

Meanwhile, House Agriculture Committee Ranking Member Angie Craig (MN-02) shared her negative sentiment towards the bill saying in a statement that “Today marks a grave turning point for our country, one which leaves rural communities and farmers behind, and places us on the road toward increased hunger, less prosperity and fewer opportunities for working families. This bill takes food away from millions of children, seniors, veterans and people with disabilities. Congressional Republicans have sold out ordinary Americans to pay for tax breaks for the ultra-rich and large corporations. The Republican budget is a disgrace, and every single person who voted for it should be ashamed.”

The big news in my world last week was the leaking of drafts of the forthcoming MAHA strategy report.

At least four reporters sent me copies for comments.

• Leaked version dated August 6 (highlighted to indicate food issues)
• Leaked version dated August 11 (no highlights)

I did not do a careful comparison.  The main difference seems to be that the earlier version had this useful graphic about MAHA’s strategic intentions.

All of this may change when the final report is released, but here are my initial thoughts on its food sections.

First, the background: The first report, despite the hallucinated references, was a strong indictment of this country’s neglect of the health of our children. It stated the problems eloquently. It promised that the second report would state policies to address those problems.

As for this report: No such luck.

It states intentions, but when it comes to policy, it has one strong, overall message: more research needed.

Regulate?  Not a chance, except for the long overdue closure of the GRAS loophole (which lets corporations decide for themselves whether chemical additives are safe).

Everything else is waffle words: explore, coordinate, partner, prioritize, develop, or work toward.”

One good thing: the report mentions marketing to children, but only to “explore development of industry guidelines.”  Nothing about regulation.  This is too little too late.  We know what food marketing does to kids.  It’s way past time to stop it.

A few comments on specific issues mentioned.

• “USDA will prioritize precision nutrition research…”  USDA?  NIH is already doing that, and it is the antithesis of public health research, the kind that really will make Americans healthier.
• The report emphasizes color and other chemical additives (we knew it would), a definition (not regulation) of ultra-processed foods, and a potential front-of-pack label (unspecified).
• It says it will modernize infant formula (really? how?), and will work to increase breastfeeding (again, how?).

And then there are the contradictions:

• Improve hospital food, but the administration is taking money away from hospitals.
• Teach doctors about nutrition (how?)
• Prioritize “whole healthy foods” in nutrition assistance programs (but cut SNAP and WIC)
• Expand EFNEP (but eliminate SNAP-ED)
• Promote healthy meals in child care settings (also defunded)
• Encourage grocery stores in low-income areas (how?)

How are they going to do this?  It doesn’t say.

Are there any teeth behind it?  It doesn’t look like this is anything more than voluntary (and we know how voluntary works with the food industry; it doesn’t).  None of this says how or has any teeth behind it.

And oh no!  MAHA boxes.  I’m guessing these are like what got given out—badly—during the pandemic. 

Resources

• Politico: it published the first leak.  Its current headline: “quite industry friendly”
• Stat News (I’m quoted): This covers the entire report and emphasizes the reneging on trying to reduce pesticides in response to industry lobbying
• New York Times (I’m quoted): also a much longer story emphasizing the pesticide problem
• Washington Post: also emphasizing ag issues
• CNN (I’m quoted): lots on processed foods, as well
• Civil Eats: Should Regenerative Farmers Pin Hopes on RFK Jr.’s MAHA?
• Center for Science in the Public Interest: 

It is striking that the leaked Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Strategy Report, like its AI-assisted predecessor, embodies much of the idiosyncratic beliefs about food and drugs of one person: Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. He might be right about food dyes, but the report’s recommendations to alter our vaccine framework, restructure government agencies, and promote meat and whole milk are going to promote disease, not health…

The report…seems to twist itself into knots to make it clear that it will not be infringing upon food companies….But we also need to judge the administration by what it does, not what it says. And the administration’s attacks on SNAP, Medicaid, the health insurance exchanges, and the FDA and USDA workforces are poised to make America sicker, hungrier, and more at risk from unsafe food.

• John Oliver on the MAHA movement’s lack of genuine policy initiatives (I’m quoted!)  Do not miss this one.

I could hardly believe it when I saw this item: Taiwan state distillery taps food market with alcohol-based instant noodles.   Taiwan’s state distillery has diversified into the food industry with alcohol-based instant noodles, blending beverage expertise with ready-to-eat innovation… Read more

The Taiwan Tobacco and Liquor Corporation (TTL)’s

most well-known products are Taiwan Beer which is considered an icon in Taiwanese culture and also the most popular beer locally; as well as traditional Chinese Hua Tiao wine.

The latter has been used in TTL’s instant noodle innovation to create its viral TTL Hua Tiao Chicken Noodles, which incorporate not only significant Hua Tiao wine content but also Chinese herbs and meat chunks.

“These are not your average instant noodles – Hua Tiao wine elevates the noodles to another level, as it is traditionally known for its antioxidant content as well as benefits for digestion and blood circulation….”We already have the alcohol in production, and we are indeed well-known for our liquors, so it made a lot of sense to us.”

I’ll bet.

I suppose young people will have to be carded to be allowed to eat it.  Whatever.  You can’t make this stuff up!

Forthcoming November 11, 2025

For Information and Pre-Orders, click here

North Point Press/Farrar, Straus & Giroux (FSG)is publishing this book on November 11.  It’s hardbound and will have about 700 pages.

For events and publicity, contact Lottgen Shivers at FSG at lottchen.shivers@fsgbooks.com.

You can pre-order it—ISBN 9780374608699—from:  Amazon   Barnes & Noble   Books-a-Million   Bookshop   Powells   Target

Here’s what the publisher says about it.

A thoroughly revised classic, What to Eat Now is a field guide to food shopping in America, and a treatise on how to eat well and deliciously.

What to Eat Now is a clear-eyed, no-nonsense guide to the most important food questions on our plate today. How do we make informed dietary choices for ourselves, our families, and our communities?

In the twenty years since Marion Nestle’s groundbreaking What to Eat first came out, food has undergone a radical change. The emergence of techno foods, the growth of corporate organics, and a surge of interest in food-delivery services reignited by the pandemic are just a few of the things that have altered how we think about how we eat.

The typical American supermarket carries more than thirty thousand products. How do you choose? Misinformation, disinformation, and corporate misdirection play a crucial and hard-to-see role in how the average shopper thinks about and chooses food.

In an aisle-by-aisle guide, Nestle, America’s preeminent nutritionist and a founding figure in American food studies, takes us through the American supermarket. With persistence, wit, and common sense, she establishes the basics of good nutrition, food safety, and ethical and sustainable eating, and gives readers a close-up look at the web of interests—from supermarket slotting policies to multinational food corporations to lobbying groups—that food has to navigate before it gets to your shopping basket.

Above all else, What to Eat Now is a defense of real food and of the value of eating deliciously, mindfully, and responsibly.

From: Jen Sherman, Shitty Housewife, <jensherman@substack.com> April 27, 2025

A book recommendation

I’ve been thinking about these things because recently I read a book. (Yeah, I know, I read books all the time). Marion Nestle is a food policy expert, nutritionist, writer, and one of the nation’s preeminent advocates of eating well. She’s written many books about food politics and the food industry in the US, and one of her books I really liked was What to Eat, a guide to every section and aisle of the supermarket, and what the best choices you could make are in terms of health and ethics. 

That book is almost twenty years old, and a lot of things in the food world have changed in the past two decades, so some of the things in the book are a little out of date. But happily, there is going to be an updated version published later this year: What to Eat Now.** I was lucky enough to be able to proofread the magnificent beast of a book, and it is glorious. Like the original, it covers every aisle and section of the supermarket, and is both a broad and detailed overview of the food choices you could make. There are a lot of books that go into detail about the things I alluded to in this post (farmworkers, food policy and politics, the meatpacking industry, truck drivers, supply chains, grocery stores), and if you fancy a deep dive into these issues, there are many great books out there. But if you just want a comprehensive overview of every category of food and how to make the best choice in terms of health, environment, human and animal welfare, this is the book you should read. It’s out in November and you can pre-order it now. 

Review in Science Magazine: 18 Sep 2025, Vol 389, Issue 6766, pp. 1180-1186.  DOI: 10.1126/science.aeb4192.  https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aeb4192.

Marion Nestle offers expert advice on this topic, presented in such an engaging, lively voice that readers will quickly get past any initial trepidation that might have arisen as a result of the book’s considerable heft….Expect a generous dose of food policy discussion sprinkled throughout the book, which is presented in the context of how seriously it affects the information and messaging made available to consumers. Ultimately, readers will leave better equipped not only to interpret the food messaging of today but to look out for the forces that will shape it over time.

It’s not easy to figure out what’s happening on the food front in DC these days, but a lot of it does not sound good.  Here are a bunch from last week.

I.  Food Bank Support. USDA stops $500 million worth of shipments of food to food banks.

Food banks across the country are scrambling to make up a $500 million budget shortfall after the Trump administration froze funds for hundreds of shipments of produce, poultry and other items that states had planned to distribute to needy residents.

The Biden administration had slated the aid for distribution to food banks during the 2025 fiscal year through the Emergency Food Assistance Program, which is run by the Agriculture Department and backed by a federal fund known as the Commodity Credit Corporation. But in recent weeks, many food banks learned that the shipments they had expected to receive this spring had been suspended.

II.  Line speeds in meat processing plants.  USDA announces “streamlined” meat processing.  This is USDA-speak for increasing line speeds in processing plants, something terrifying to anyone who cares about worker safety and food safety.  As Food Safety News puts it, this is unsafe at any speed—again.

Once more, policymakers are making the same catastrophic mistake. Once more, industries are downplaying risk while lives hang in the balance. Once more, we are choosing efficiency over responsibility…It’s a reckless increase in processing speeds that threatens to overwhelm the very safeguards meant to protect both workers and consumers.

III.  Food safety rules.  FDA puts food safety rule on hold

In an announcement on March 20, the Food and Drug Administration said it intends to publish a proposed rule “at a later time.” The rule has already been published and approved and was set to go into effect Jan. 1, 2026. The rule was mandated by the Food Safety Modernization Act, which Congress approved in 2010.

The food industry has been pushing back against the rule since before it was written, citing expenses. Industry groups applauded the FDA’s postponement of enforcement of the rule.

IV.  Seed Banks.  DOGE is trying to fire staff of the USDA’s National Plant Germplasm System, which stores 62,000 seed samples.

Comment

I’m not seeing much about Making America Healthy Again, beyond encouraging the elimination of artificial colors and trying to do something about the GRAS loophole, which lets companies essentially self-determine whether additives are safe.  Those are both worth doing, and have been a long time coming.  I still want to see this administration take strong action on:

• Ultra-processed food
• Food Safety
• School meals
• Support for small and medium farms

The cancelling of funding for the Diabetes Prevention Program, a 30-year longitudinal study, seems at odds with MAHA.  I hope the funding gets restored quicky.

As a long-time proponent of food advocacy, I’ve been collecting suggestions for what you and I can do to stop or counter presidential decrees that we think damaging to Americans and American democracy.

A lot of this is easy.  Do it!

• State your opinion to Washington: Call the Capitol switchboard: (202) 224-3121.
• State your opinion to your representatives. To find your representative, click here.  To find your Senator, click here.
• Protect the vulnerable in your community; Urge your state’s attorney general to file complaints, injunctions, and restraining orders. To find your state attorney general, click here.
• Join with others in your community to protest what needs to be protested. To find local organizations working on such issues, click Indivisible here.
• Boycott companies enabling the illegal government takeover. Click here to find out a corporation’s politics.
• Support groups doing the litigating. Track federal cases here.
• Speak truth to power. Get news from reliable sources; spread it.
• Take care of yourself; stay strong.

Much of this has been inspired by Robert Reich’s daily comments on current events, and his summary of needed actions. 

He says,

We will get through this, and we will prevail.”

But it will require confidence, courage, and tenacity. We need to stay healthy for this fight. We need to be fortified by those we care about. And we need to be there for those we love.

His final piece of advice: “keep the faith.”

Do not give up on America. Do not fall into the traps of cynicism and defeatism. Remember, Trump won the popular vote by only 1.5 points. By any historical measure, this was a squeaker…America has deep problems, to be sure. Which is why we can’t give up on it — or give up the fights for social justice, equal political rights, equal opportunity, democracy, and the rule of law.

I spent a lot of time last week responding to reporters’ questions about Trump’s appointing Robert F. Kennedy, Jr to head the Department of Health and Human Services.

Here’s what the president-elect said about the appointment on Twitter (X):

For too long, Americans have been crushed by the industrial food complex and drug companies who have engaged in deception, misinformation, and disinformation when it comes to Public Health…HHS will play a big role in helping ensure that everybody will be protected from harmful chemicals, pollutants, pesticides, pharmaceutical products, and food additives that have contributed to the overwhelming Health Crisis in this Country. Mr. Kennedy will restore these Agencies to the traditions of Gold Standard Scientific Research, and beacons of Transparency, to end the Chronic Disease epidemic, and to Make America Great and Healthy Again!

Trump has instructed Mr. Kennedy to end chronic disease and “Go wild on food.”

In various statements, Mr. Kennedy has said he wants to get rid of “poisons”

• Ultra-processed foods in schools
• Artificial colors in cereals
• Chemicals, pollutants, pesticides
• Mercury in fish
• Fast food

He also wants to

• Restrict sodas on SNAP
• Promote sustainable, regenerative farming by small farmers
• End conflicts of interest between government agencies and corporations: Corporate capture is the biggest threat to democracy.

These are the kinds of things I’ve been saying and writing about for decades!

[He also is pushing for some things that are much less well grounded in science: getting rid of grains for kids, seed oils, and fluoride in drinking water; deregulating raw milk; and firing all nutrition scientists on day 1].

If he really does do what he’s promising here, it means taking on the food industry, in a way that no government has ever done, and Trump showed no signs of doing in his first term.

What can we expect?  I have no idea, but thist sure will be interesting to watch.

Mother Jones calls Kennedy’s appointment “a genuine catastrophe.”

For charges of hypocrisy, click here.

Civil Eats asked a bunch of people to predict “The Path Forward for Food and Ag.”  Here’s what I said.

I wish I had a crystal ball to say how food and agriculture issues would play out over the next four years, but all I have to go on is what Trump and his followers say. If we take them at their word, then we must expect them to implement their Project 2025 plan, which replaces one deep state with another that favors conservative business interests and ideology. This calls for replacing staff in federal agencies with Trump loyalists and dismantling them, stopping the USDA from doing anything to prevent climate change, reforming farm subsidies (unclear how), splitting the farm bill to deal separately with agricultural supports and SNAP, reducing SNAP participation by reinstating work requirements and reducing the Thrifty Food Plan, and making it more difficult for kids to participate in school meals.

On the other hand, some of the plans make sense: eliminating checkoff programs and repealing the sugar program, for example. So do some of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s goals: Make America Healthy Again by focusing on chronic disease prevention, getting harmful chemicals out of kids’ foods, and getting rid of conflicts of interest among researchers and agency staff. It’s too early to know how much of this is just talk, but I’m planning to do what I can to oppose measures I view as harmful, but to strongly support the ones I think will be good for public health.

The Global Health Advocacy Incubator (GHAI) has issued this new report.  It’s well worth a look.

By now, soda taxes are well established to decrease consumption and raise revenues that can be used for social purposes.  As you might imagine, the soda industry does not like such taxes.  As the report explains,

Recently, Big Soda has adapted their [the cigarette industry’s] playbook and shifted their approach from outrightly opposing SB [sugary beverage] taxes to favoring weaker SB tax standards. This report highlights different actions and narratives employed by the industry and demonstrates how these strategies follow a global playbook, including:

1. Proposing weaker taxes tailored to favor industry interests at the risk of public health.

2. Threatening and challenging governments that have passed an SB tax.

3.  Delegitimizing evidence to distort perceptions about SB taxes.

4.  Stigmatizing SB taxes through economic arguments.

5.  Taking advantage of and using vulnerable populations and environmental concerns to avoid the SB tax.

Under Strategy #5, for example, the report provides this information:

The report offers advice about how to counter industry measures by “(1) protecting the tax design to ensure it will have an optimal public health outcome, (2) safeguarding the policy decision-making process from undue influence and (3) leveraging opportunities for civil society to defend SB taxes.

For example, to safeguard policy decisions, it advises:

Avoid participating in public-private partnerships, especially those claiming to mitigate the “economic damages” of the SB tax through false solutions. This is the entry point for corporations to take a seat at the policy-making table and meddle with the design and implementation of the tax.

Soda taxes are up for renewal in Berkeley and are under consideration in Santa Cruz.  Stay tuned.