Is America’s Food System Safe Under Trump?

Written By Leeja Miller

Sources:


Transcript:

Despite Trump and Health and Human Services secretary RFK jr’s promises to make America healthy again, some key agencies tasked with ensuring just that have been swept up in the DOGE-led effort to slash and burn federal jobs and budgets. These include the Centers for Disease Control, the Food and Drug Administration, and the US Department of Agriculture. These are the three main entities tasked with overseeing the safety and regulation of the massive United States food system, from inspecting poultry to communicating with the public about e.coli outbreaks, for a population of over 330 million people spread across 3.5 million square miles. That is a huge responsibility that necessitates a large, sometimes unwieldy apparatus to monitor. And while it is true that, despite the large number of people typically working on monitoring the food system in the US at any given moment, there are still outbreaks and things still slip through the cracks, it is not necessarily the size and the cost of that food safety apparatus that is causing the mistakes. And reducing the work force and attempting to cut costs across the Department of Health and Human Services (parent agency to the CDC and the FDA) and within the USDA has done very little, other than sow chaos, since Trump took office a few months ago.

For example, the physical locations of FDA testing sites have been downsized, requiring the transport of food samples, confusion, moving scientists around, firing scientists, and hampering the FDA’s efforts to monitor the food supply for foodborne illnesses. The CDC has faced major cuts, including to divisions that aggregate data related to food safety. Two USDA food safety advisory committees have been dismantled. The unit within the Department of Justice that is tasked with overseeing enforcement, investigations, and prosecutions related to consumer safety and negligent handling of food safety, among many other things, was completely disbanded. At every level of our food system, from the scientists testing poultry for salmonella to the consumer protection enforcement mechanisms that keep food producers in check, and everything in between, the Trump administration has been chipping away at regulations, data, expertise, science, and consumer protections that have been decades in the making and that ensure our food system is safe for consumers. Again, mistakes are still made every year, according to KFF Health News, “each year, about 48 million people in the U.S. get sick with foodborne illnesses, 128,000 are hospitalized, and 3,000 die. … The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates the deaths, chronic illness, medical treatment, and lost productivity from food-related illnesses amounted to $75 billion in 2023.” $75 BILLION in a single year, lost because of foodborne illness. And, of course, 3,000 lives lost, but I’m trying to focus on the economic figures that seem to matter most to MAGA. There is nothing being cut from these agencies that will make up for the billions and billions of dollars lost every year due to foodborne illness. And there is no way that the regime’s slash and burn approach will result in a safer food system for everyone.

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The “Make America Healthy Again” movement is rife with disinformation, and how the media interprets this information can vary greatly depending on the bias of the publication. This headline from Salon caught my eye: “Source? I made it up: RFK Jr.'s MAHA report cites fabricated studies” It’s helpful to see in the Ground News browser extension that this publication leans left, so to get a fuller picture of the story I can click on Full Coverage. On the Ground News website I can see that 186 sources are covering this topic, with interpretations varying wildly depending on the bias of the publication.

For example, left leaning Daily Kos uses the headline “New RFK Jr Scandal: MAHA Report is a Steaming Pile” while right-leaning The Washington Examiner uses the headline “MAHA report will be revised following citation errors” downplaying the issue by calling fully made up information “citation errors.” Depending on where you get your news, you’re going to get very different takes on the same story. And if you only pay attention to one side or the other you might miss the full picture of the national conversation happening around the issue on all sides of spectrum.

This is where Ground News comes in - and why I've been using them for over a year. Today’s partner Ground News is an app and website that offers tools to help you critically analyze the news you read, providing context to understand the full picture.

By using the Ground News Vantage Subscription, I can also see the blindspot feed where I can see stories disproportionately covered by one side of the political spectrum. For example, almost no right-leaning sources are covering the story “Elon Musk Was on Ketamine, Ecstasy and Adderall as He Cozied up to Trump” Interesting. I feel better equipped to make sense of what’s happening in the world without being influenced by just one perspective. And listen I’m not the only one who loves Ground News, the Nobel Peace Center even called it "an excellent way to stay informed, avoid echo chambers, and expand your worldview.”

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We are already seeing the very real consequences that come from downsizing the food safety measures in this country. An e.coli outbreak last fall sickened 90 people across 15 states. It put a 9 year old in the hospital with kidney failure. The inspection and testing period to confirm the type and source of the outbreak concluded in February, but the Trump administration made the decision not to publish their findings, because none of the infected products were still on shelves. But alerting the public to an outbreak is not just about immediate safety and recalls. According to KFF Health News, “the information is still important because it can prevent more cases, pressure growers to improve sanitation, and identify repeat offenders. It also gives victims an explanation for their illnesses and helps them determine whom they might take legal action against.” The government’s ability to communicate foodborne illness outbreaks to the public has been hampered by major cutbacks at the FDA and CDC. In fact, earlier this month it was reported that the FDA failed to publish over a dozen letters they had sent flagging certain hazards at food companies, including potential BOTULISM contamination. This failure happened as a direct result of firings at the FDA. According to NBC, “the federal workers responsible for reviewing the food safety letters before they’re posted online were fired.” These letters are essential for the FDA to exercise its enforcement powers to hold companies accountable to federal food safety regulations. In fact, since the day after Trump’s inauguration, not a single warning letter sent to U.S. food manufacturers has been posted publicly. Without public notice about possible food safety violations, it’s impossible for food retailers and the public at large to know whether the food they're selling or consuming has been flagged by the FDA for potential issues.

USDA inspectors were also among the tens of thousands of federal employees who were offered a buyout or early retirement in exchange for walking away from their jobs. In a piece published this week, NPR spoke with one of them, a meat and poultry plant inspector in Wisconsin who worked in the role for 38 years. Now, she told NPR, because of these cutbacks, inspectors that once had to inspect 4 plants per day are expected to inspect 8. A feat which, according to the inspector, is impossible to do. Which means that meat and poultry inspections are either being done hastily or not at all. But in a statement emailed to NPR, the USDA claimed that front-line inspectors and veterinarians from the agency were exempt from the offer of early retirement. They claimed inspectors were not given the opportunity to walk away from the job, because of the essential nature of their work. Interesting, considering NPR literally spoke to someone who did. In fact, NPR revealed it had “reviewed emails sent from USDA officials urging inspectors to take the early retirement deal and confirming their eligibility for it, as well as a document listing eligible job categories, including consumer safety inspector and slaughterhouses inspectors.” A boldfaced lie coming from the department tasked with making sure there isn’t literal shit in my food does not bode well. This, on top of chaos at the FDA, where scientists are supposed to test foods for contaminations, and staffing cuts at the CDC, tasked with communicating important foodborne illness outbreaks and recalls with the public, means that every level of our food system, from the fields to the factories to the grocery stores, is less monitored and at greater risk of making all of us sick.

In the face of these roll backs, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins, who used to serve as ethics advisor to Texas governor Rick Perry, to give you a sense of her legal acumen, announced gleefully that the USDA has graciously extended funding to the states to manage their own food inspections–a whopping sum of $14.5 million. I reread the announcement a couple of times, and I’m quite certain that sum is the total of all money given to states in this new wave of funding. If my math is correct, which it rarely is, that’s less than $300,000 per state. To take over the monumental task that the federal government is abandoning, one that necessarily requires federal oversight because food travels across state lines so frequently it is impossible for each individual state to adequately oversee the food coming into and going out of its territory. The announcement from the USDA, which assures Americans that this much-needed funding will protect the safety of the meat and poultry that lands on their tables, is nothing short of state-sponsored propaganda. A drop in the bucket, fluffed up to look like something more than it is. Meanwhile, outbreaks are happening and the Trump administration is purposefully not reporting them to the public.

And it is outright dangerous to leave food safety in the hands of individual states. It silos the states, restricting their access to information and their ability to coordinate efforts to contain new outbreaks. That single e.coli outbreak I mentioned spread across 15 states, each of which may not have known about the other infections had they been solely managing the food safety within their borders. And when you have states enacting their own food safety measures, that also means food will move through states with varying levels of safety. So you may live in a state with strict food safety standards, but that beef you’re eating was produced five states away and had to pass through a whole host of varying levels of safety measures to get to your plate. Without a federal apparatus to normalize these standards, the patchwork of regulations it would create would also be unwieldy and bad for health outcomes.

I think the reason why the Trump administration simultaneously claims to want to Make America Healthy Again while cutting back on the very agencies tasked with doing just that, is two-fold. One, as Adam Serwer pointed out in his recent article in The Atlantic, the very point of it all is to have less information. To conduct fewer studies, to collect fewer samples, to find fewer outbreaks. The absence of information doesn’t confirm that something doesn’t exist, but the Trump regime has made a habit over the last decade of pointing to a lack of evidence as positive proof that something is true. The less information they collect on foodborne illnesses, the more opportunity they have to say “under the Trump administration, foodborne illnesses have dramatically decreased.” As Trump extracts experts and scientists from all areas of the federal government, the data the government presents is going to be, and probably already is, less and less reliable.

The second reason for scaling back tracking and announcing foodborne illnesses, is that part of that process involves identifying the source of the outbreak and publicizing the name of the company. That, of course, becomes thorny when a small handful of companies own the vast market share of any given food in the country. The billionaires running Cargill or Tyson or Kraft Heinz are not going to be too happy with their friend The Donald if his USDA is constantly up their butt about such inconveniences as “sanitation” and “making sure their food isn’t covered with literal feces.” The point of the government is to look out for the people. The neoliberal, free market, lassez-faire believers who argue that everything should be privatized to run more efficiently, appear unconcerned with the fact that monitoring for food safety is actually not often the most economically viable option for a company. It is the fear of regulation, of naming and shaming, of facing genuine consequences, that inspires companies to invest the time and money into making sure their food doesn’t make people sick. Because when you already have a monopoly on the market, consumers have no choices, they can’t simply say “hmm that meat made me sick last month, I’m going to buy from somewhere else” because there is nowhere else. At least not meaningfully in a way that is affordable for the average consumer.

Instead of attempting to improve the very real threat of foodborne illnesses in this country, the ones that literally kill thousands of people, especially children and the elderly, RFK Jr is obsessed with things like reducing access to vaccines, fluoride in the water, and removing artificial dyes from our food. And listen, I’m all for banning artificial dyes, studies have linked them to negative health outcomes, they’re banned in a lot of countries, I think that’s a perfectly reasonable thing to want to do. But when you are focused on dyes that might cause migraines and fluoride that prevents literal millions of cavities per year especially in lower income children, while also defunding important agencies tasked with preventing people from ingesting literal shit and DYING, clearly the plot has been entirely lost.

And this phenomenon represents a larger trend in public health in this country, one that MAGA and MAHA have picked up and run with, wherein the very basic public services necessary for preventing death and misery for millions–things like Medicare and Medicaid which provide for basic healthcare for the country’s poorest people, regulating the cost of insulin to ensure people have access to, you know, the things that they require for just basic survival, things like that–those are being cut in the interest of downsizing government, avoiding tax hikes, privatizing healthcare so big pharma can make even more money, and ensuring this country never slides into the communist hellscape that universal healthcare would bring about. Meanwhile, those in charge of ensuring positive health outcomes for millions, are more interested in providing services and protecting people who are already healthy, who have the money to pay for it. Someone barely scraping by on food stamps is not necessarily sitting around thinking about red dye 40 in their kid’s breakfast cereal. They’re worried about paying for basic healthcare. But the wealthy Gwenyth Paltrow Goop acolytes who already have the basics of their physical health covered through expensive private health insurance, and the luxury of time to think about things like food additives or vaginal facials or whatever else latest thing Gwenyth is hawking this month, who have the time and money to shop local at the farmers market and their organic food co-op, they are the only ones that benefit from a government intent on slashing basic consumer protections and food safety guidelines while promoting “wellness” trends and regulations around things poor people don’t have the time, energy, or money to give a shit about.

This also follows a trend I’ve personally noticed in “wellness influencers” on social media. One that is a microcosm of a larger wellness industry intent on inventing ever more fringe and ludicrous procedures and products to sell to a public that is growing statistically sicker and desperate to feel better. But instead of the basics, things that aren’t flashy or profit generating, things like ensuring people are eating enough fiber, something that can easily be done through increasing fruit and vegetable intake and something that the vast majority of Americans dramatically underconsume–most Americans are eating about half of the recommended daily dose of 14 grams per 1000 calories. This can have far ranging impacts, with studies showing a 10% reduction in ALL-CAUSE mortality risk for each 10 gram per day increase in fiber intake. Statistically speaking, if every American increased their fiber intake by 10 grams per day, which is the equivalent of adding two cups of broccoli or 1 and a quarter cup of raspberries or three quarter cup of black beans, to their daily food intake, all cause mortality risk would drop significantly. But that’s not sexy or easy to package and then sell at a premium. “Big Broccoli” isn’t out there scheming up ways to make broccoli sexier so they can mark up the price. Instead, major marketing companies and the fitness influencers who peddle their shit are convincing everyday Americans that all their ills can be fixed if they just take supergreens powders or other supplements that are based on shaky at best science, have hardly any quality control, and take food that would provide your needed daily fiber intake and grind it down to low fiber powder. Pay no attention to the fact that this tub of supergreens is 30 dollars while a literal pound of broccoli is less than 3. And that’s just one example of the myriad ways quote unquote “health” has been repackaged so companies can make a quick buck while the actual programs that can significantly impact health outcomes–SNAP benefits, free meals for children, increasing access to fresh produce in low income neighborhoods–are being slashed by the government to avoid having to charge taxes on the obscenely high incomes of the very people making their fortunes off peddling this fake health shit to all of us.

And this is of course all premised on the very MAGA belief that everything is based on individual decisions. If you’re fat, that’s because you’re a moral failure, you’re lazy, you haven’t tried, you want to take advantage of the system. Have you tried just taking a supergreen supplement, daily ice cold showers for cold exposure, and getting in a half hour run before work everyday? Have you not just tried that??? Fuck your childhood trauma, fuck your poverty, fuck your disability, those are all just excuses for not living up to your full health potential. MAGA and the MAHA movement seem allergic to the idea that systems have a greater impact on overall health outcomes than individual decisions do. If people could just choose to be healthy, do you not think they would? MAGA is living in a fantasyland where there’s a huge group of lazy, morally inferior people who are perfectly capable of living “productive” healthy lives and are just choosing not to because of their own moral failings. And so cutting SNAP and rolling back food safety bureaucracy is righteous payback for those mooches who’ll have to just suck it up and get a job and stop spending their SNAP dollars on sodie pops.

And so it’s no wonder, given this shift away from programs and systems meant to help provide people with basic health improvements and towards a new MAHA future wherein alternative medicine and supplements and wellness practices take priority, that we have Dr. Oz leading Medicare and Medicaid and wellness influencer Casey Means newly nominated for surgeon general, literal celebrities and influencers peddling bullshit, but make it the federal government.

In the face of all this food safety chaos, I have been wondering the best ways to keep myself and my family safe from foodborne illnesses. Getting a meat thermometer a couple years ago was a gamechanger for my peace of mind, allowing me to ensure that I had thoroughly cooked my meat. I do love a medium-rare steak, but I will likely be foregoing the undercooked meats for the foreseeable future. I am definitely going to take thoroughly washing my produce a lot more seriously, as dangerous outbreaks from e.coli and salmonella are often MORE prevalent from produce than from meat. I have also been growing my own little garden lately and have started harvesting kale, herbs, and radishes, with beans, tomatoes, and cucumbers on the way. The less transport time and processing, the better, as it provides fewer opportunities for bacteria to grow and less cross contamination. This old but handy guide to washing produce confirms that commercial fruit and vegetable cleaning solutions are not necessarily safe, and the best method for cleaning anything is to wait to wash until you’re ready to eat (introducing moisture could create more bacteria), give everything a good scrub with your hands or, if the produce skin can take it, a brush, dry everything thoroughly, and if you want to take the extra step, soak leafy greens in distilled vinegar, though it could affect the taste.

Once again, as I’ve said about so many things with this administration, it is so stupid that this is the timeline we’re living in, that we as individuals, on top of existing in our daily lives, are also now tasked with taking extra precautions to ensure the food safety that our government is supposed to provide. And, as with most of these cuts, it is certainly the most vulnerable populations in the US that will be hurt the most. The ones that don’t have the time or money or capacity to go to a farmer’s market and then come home and soak their greens in vinegar. But taking these extra sanitizing steps is what is going to help give me the peace of mind to exist in the US, given these new cuts to our country’s extensive and essential food safety apparatus.

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And if you liked this episode, you’ll like the one from last week about the Big Beautiful Medicaid cuts.

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