Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s name has been mentioned as a possible secretary of Health and Human Services or even secretary of agriculture in a second Trump administration. Kennedy, who’s campaigning for Donald Trump under the banner of MAHA, or Make America Healthy Again, is arguing for major changes in the way our food is produced.
Kennedy brings a certain amount of political baggage, including, at least once, a dead bear in his trunk, but politics often makes for strange bedfellows. Farmers like me, and everyone who eats have to hope that this political alliance will last for as long as most of President Trump’s relationships.
Kennedy is no stranger to scaring people about diet and the environment, but some of his criticisms are valid: the increase in obesity and the diseases caused by obesity are a challenge to our health.
However, trading obesity for whooping cough and measles is a bad exchange. Kennedy’s opposition to childhood vaccination is well known and, in any rational universe, would be disqualifying for a position of public trust.
But there is more, so much more. Kennedy has led litigation against modern agriculture practices that benefit both the food supply and environmental health. His distrust of genetically modified seeds is longstanding and in opposition to thousands of scientific studies that have demonstrated the safety of modern seed breeding. He’s promised to get fluoride out of water and the “….the chemicals out of the chemtrails” on day one of the Trump administration.
For the uninitiated, conspiracy theorists are convinced that the vapor trails visible behind airliners are actually chemicals sprayed as a part of a massive conspiracy.
According to Kennedy, 1000 food additives are used in the U.S. but have been banned in Europe. He’d get rid of them all. Some additives legal in the U.S. may be risky, some may not be strictly necessary, but many of those additives increase the shelf life of foods and reduce food waste. We’ll have to add weevils and mold to childhood diseases as we examine the costs of this alliance between RFK Jr. and former President Trump.
Kennedy is convinced that governmental agencies are unduly influenced by “Big Ag” and “Big Pharma” as they examine the safety of products that have improved the lives of millions. His concern about conflicts of interest doesn’t extend to those who criticize our present food system while helpfully marketing a long list of dietary supplements that are unregulated by any government agency for safety or efficacy. The contradictions here are flagrant but ignored by Mr. Kennedy.
Kennedy and many of his allies recently testified at a Senate hearing sponsored by Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., and the amount of nutritional nonsense on display was amazing. No expert who testified was a nutritionist, biochemist, toxicologist, agronomist, or even farmer, but almost everyone who appeared has a financial interest in scaring people away from their present diet.
Kennedy would replace our present agricultural system with one that emphasizes “organic, regenerative agriculture.” For 10,000 years, agriculture WAS organic, and people were hungry. For the past couple of generations, hunger has declined precipitously as we’ve applied science to the production of food. According to the UN Food and Agricultural Organization, one in three people in developing countries in 1970 experienced hunger but by 2015, only 12% of citizens in developing nations suffered from hunger.
If past famines don’t convince, the recent experience with organic farming in Sri Lanka might. The Sri Lankan government in 2020 adopted organic farming and banned the importation and use of exactly the same fertilizers that Kennedy would ban. Within a single crop year, production of rice dropped by 20%, and the country went from an exporter to importer of the staple crop. Inflation in Siri Lanka increased, as did poverty, and the experiment was reversed.
Part of Trump’s appeal to many voters is his willingness to think outside the box and challenge accepted wisdom. There is little doubt that his alliance with Kennedy brought new voters to his candidacy, at least some of them rightly concerned by the decline in U.S. life expectancy and the increase in chronic diseases caused by obesity.
The solutions offered by Kennedy will only succeed in making our health worse and our food more expensive. Thinking outside the box sometimes collides with reality, and we’d all better hope this unholy alliance lasts about as long as it takes to count the votes in Pennsylvania.
Blake Hurst is a farmer and greenhouse grower in northwest Missouri.