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    RFK Jr railed against ultra-processed foods. Trump’s policies encourage their production

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    As health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr has repeatedly blamed industrially manufactured food products for the country’s chronic illness and obesity crises, and urged Americans to limit their consumption of foods with added sugar, salt, fat, dyes and preservatives.Amid a slew of controversial and unbacked public health claims, his stance on ultra-processed foods is one of his least polarizing. More than 65% of Americans say they are in favor of reforming processed foods to remove added sugars and added dyes, according to a January Associated Press and National Opinion Research Center poll.Yet while RFK Jr touts the importance of eliminating ultra-processed foods from the US diet, nutrition experts say several of the Trump administration policies, including massive subsidies to corn and soy farms, undermine that goal.“Maha leadership is really failing on their promise to fight chronic disease, and they’re betraying the members of the public who put their trust in them to address this very real problem that Americans are really concerned about,” said Aviva Musicus, an assistant professor of nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health.In September, Kennedy’s health and human services department released the “Make America Healthy Again” strategy report, billing it as a roadmap to improve children’s health. The report named highly processed foods as a leading driver behind the rising rates of chronic disease in children and outlined more than 120 recommendations, including educational campaigns to promote new, forthcoming dietary guidelines; advancing policies to restrict food dye additives; and potential revisions to nutrition information rule-making.The report has been criticized by nutrition and public health experts, however, for its focus on voluntary action over meaningful regulation of food and chemical companies. It suggests tracking Americans’ exposure to chemicals and pesticides, but does not impose any limitations on pesticide use, for example. Despite poor diet being named as a harm to children’s health, it does not suggest regulating the majority of additives in ultra-processed foods (UPFs).It instead proposes developing a government-wide definition to “support potential future research and policy activity”. The plan also recommends the exploration of “potential industry guidelines”, to limit the marketing of unhealthy food to children. Some advocates say that the report’s goals clash with the Trump administration’s cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Snap), Medicaid and scientific funding, all of which are essential to public health.“When it comes to food, Maha doesn’t seem particularly interested in regulation, despite talking about the need to protect consumers from industry influence and the harms the industry is creating,” Musicus said.A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services, wrote in a statement to the Guardian: “The MAHA Strategy is a comprehensive plan with more than 120 initiatives designed to reverse the failed policies that have fueled America’s childhood chronic disease epidemic. It represents the most ambitious reform agenda in modern history – realigning our food and health systems, transforming education, and unleashing science to safeguard America’s children and families.”She added: “HHS is committed to serving the American people, not special interests, by delivering radical transparency and upholding gold-standard science.”Ultra-processed foods are industrially altered food products that include processed additives to improve taste, convenience and shelf life. Making up as much as 73% of the US food supply, UPFs have been linked to a number of health risks including cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, cancer, digestive and microbiome issues, and adverse mental health.Many of the additives in UPFs, such as high-fructose corn syrup, corn starch, dextrose, soy lecithin and maltodextrin, are derivatives of corn and soy, two commodity crops that receive millions in agricultural subsidies. Trump’s reconciliation bill, signed into law in July, increases spending on these subsidies by $52bn over the next 10 years, according to an analysis by the Environmental Working Group. (Subsidy payments increased even as programs like Snap, which in 2024 provided food and nutrition assistance to 41 million Americans, faced significant cuts.)Subsidies for corn and soy “have definitely contributed”, to the proliferation of UPFs, said Ben Lilliston, the director of rural strategies and climate change at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy. The consumption of high-fructose corn syrup, for example, increased 1,000% between 1970 and 1990.“Our farm policy is designed for farmers to overproduce corn and soy, and encourage them to do that,” Lilliston said. Decades of huge subsidies for commodity crops led to an excess amount of corn and soy, which eventually were used to produce the additives in ultra-processed foods like corn syrup and soy lecithin, he added.“It’s hard to find a processed food, if you look at the ingredients, that doesn’t have corn and soy in there. It’s incredibly cheap – below the cost of production – there’s so much of it, and there’s access to so much of it,” Lilliston said. Today, ultra-processed foods make up more than half of the calories in the American diet, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.Soy and corn – most of which is converted to animal feed, ethanol fuel, and byproducts used in UPFs – make up more than half of the country’s cropland. The farms that grow fruits and vegetables (known as specialty crops), are typically smaller and are not eligible for the majority of subsidies. But, these “are the types of farms that will be providing healthy foods, fruits, and vegetables on plates across the US”, said Jared Hayes, a senior policy analyst at the Environmental Working Group.Before joining Trump’s cabinet, RFK Jr himself blamed agricultural subsidies for America’s addiction to ultra-processed foods. In a 2024 interview, RFK Jr said the US obesity epidemic was being driven by food “poisoned” by “heavily subsidized” commodity crop derivatives. In a 2024 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, Kennedy listed several steps Trump could take to “Make America Healthy Again,” and among them was reforming crop subsidies.“They make corn, soybeans and wheat artificially cheap, so those crops end up in many processed forms,” he wrote, adding: “Our subsidy program is so backward that less than 2% of farm subsidies go to fruits and vegetables.”The first Maha assessment report, released in May, blamed the food manufacturing industry for rising rates of chronic illness. After its publication, more than 250 food and agriculture groups, including the American Soybean Association and the National Corn Growers Association signed a letter claiming it included “erroneous representations” about food and agriculture and called for “formal inclusion of food and agriculture representatives in the commission’s processes moving forward”.But in the follow-up report, there was little mention of the food industry’s role in children’s health, nor were there suggested pathways to regulate what ingredients companies put in their products. While ultra-processed foods were mentioned 40 times in the initial report, the second, strategy report mentioned the term just twice.“Kennedy has framed himself as an anti-corporate hero, while at the same time utilized the age-old tactic of becoming buddies with the very industries that he purports he wants to change or regulate,” said Rebecca Wolf, the food policy lead at Food and Water Watch.“There’s anti-corporate rhetoric, but at the same time an inability and an unwillingness to actually take on corporate power,” Wolf said. “We’ve just [been] keeping a really close eye on the difference between narrative and policy, and what I’ve seen right now are policies that will not protect people, but in fact, further threaten their health.”To truly build a healthier US diet, Musicus says the Trump administration, in addition to regulating UPFs, should not be cutting the very programs that make nutritious food and healthcare more accessible to low-income families and individuals.“We’ve seen the federal government cut Snap benefits, write off millions of Americans from their health insurance coverage, slashed programs to help farmers bring local foods into schools, eviscerate government funding for research on nutrition and health and threaten access to life-saving vaccines,” Musicus said, adding that RFK Jr had simultaneously failed to impose meaningful regulation on the food industry.“As a result, the net public health impact of this administration has been negative, despite the fact that they’re constantly talking about improving Americans’ health,” she said. 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      Mocktails for Maga: why the US right is turning sober

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      Butterworth’s, an eclectically decorated restaurant in Washington DC, is an unofficial lounge of the Maga elite. A nameplate on one table declares it the official “nook” of Raheem Kassam, the former adviser to the rightwing British politician Nigel Farage and a co-owner of the restaurant. Steve Bannon is also frequently sighted holding court over Carolina gold rice – though the signature dish is bone-marrow escargot, which some young Maga politicos swear is good for your collagen.When he opened the farm-to-table brasserie in 2024, Bart Hutchins, Butterworth’s chef and one of its partners, was determined to resist what he sees as “the new puritanism” of wellness and sobriety culture. Hutchins finds non-alcoholic “mocktails” annoying on principle. “I did this edict, where I was like, ‘I’m not stocking that stuff,’” he said. “If you want to drink a glass of juice, just ask for a glass of juice; I’m not gonna pretend it’s a cocktail.”Hutchins has never felt teetotalism’s temptation, he told me, and his memory of drinks marketed as alcohol alternatives, like the near-beer O’Doul’s, was that they were “terrible”. But lately, as more Republican staffers, pundits and politicians patronize Butterworth’s antler-bedecked environs, a fifth column of non-drinkers has quietly undermined his anti-mocktail edict.It’s not just at Butterworth’s where rightwingers are drinking less. A Gallup poll in August found that the share of Americans of any political stripe who say they consume alcohol is at its lowest in nearly 90 years – though by only one percentage point. More strikingly, Republicans are the group, of the many demographic cohorts measured, that has turned most aggressively to sobriety.Gallup, which has asked Americans about their alcohol use since the 1930s, found in 2023 that 65% of Republicans said they drink alcohol – about the same as Democrats and independents. Just two years later, in 2025, that number has plunged a staggering 19 points to 46%. Democrats and independents also report drinking less, but each only by single digits. (All the results are self-reported; Gallup took participants at their word.)The decline is surprising and “statistically significant”, Lydia Saad, the director of US social research at Gallup, told me – though she has “no real hypothesis” for the sudden rise of Republican teetotalism.View image in fullscreenLaurence Whyatt, an analyst at Barclays who covers the beverage industry, “can’t explain it” either. He suspects the broader US decline in drinking may have to do with pandemic-era inflation and belt-tightening and may not last. “But there’s no obvious reason why Republicans would be drinking less,” he said. “Of course, I’m aware that some prominent Republicans don’t drink. Could that be the reason?”Yet theories abound. Perhaps this is another manifestation of the cult of personality around Donald Trump, a Diet Coke enthusiast. Maybe the rising tide of Christian nationalism has revived an old-fashioned Protestant temperance. Or perhaps red-blooded rightwingers, eager to “Make America healthy again”, are eschewing beer, barbecues and bourbon to become the sort of smoothie-drinking health nuts they might once have mocked.Prominent rightwing or right-adjacent abstainers include Trump himself, whose older brother died of alcoholism-related heart attack; Robert F Kennedy Jr (who has spoken about his own substance problems); Tucker Carlson (a recovering alcoholic); and the activist Charlie Kirk (for health reasons). JD Vance drinks, but his predecessor Mike Pence, a devout born-again Christian, did not. Joe Rogan, the podcaster and gym-bro whisperer who endorsed Trump in 2024, quit drinking this year for health reasons.“None of my core team [of colleagues] under 30 drinks,” Bannon, who hosts the podcast War Room, said in a text message.The War Room’s 24-year-old White House correspondent, Natalie Winters, does not drink for health reasons – nor wear perfume, consume seed oils or drink fluoridated tap water. Earlier this year a friend of hers told the Times of London that elective sobriety had become common and accepted in rightwing political circles. “Here you don’t second-guess,” the friend said. “In London if someone isn’t drinking, you think they have an alcohol problem. Here it’s either that, or they’re Mormon, or because they’re focused on health.”Carlson, speaking to me by phone as he returned from grouse hunting with his dogs, said he had noticed that young conservatives, particularly men, were far more health-conscious than they once were. When he came up as a journalist, he said, the milieu was awash in booze and cigarette smoke. “I’m just from a different world. When I was 25, the health question was ‘filter or non-filter?’” he said. “And I always went with non-filter.”Carlson quit drinking in 2002, after a spiral whose nadir saw him having two double screwdrivers for breakfast. He said he was surprised – but happy – to see people today, even those who are not problem drinkers, quitting or moderating their consumption. The Athletic Brewing Company’s alcohol-free beers are popular, he has noticed, and not just among “sad rehab cases like me. I think it’s normal young people.”Carlson – who has recently offered a range of unorthodox health advice including using nicotine to improve focus and testicle tanning to improve testosterone levels – says political professionals and journalists today also inhabit a 24/7 news cycle in which “there’s just, substantively, a lot more going on; the world is reshaping in front of our eyes,” he said. “I think there’s an incentive to pay attention in a way that there wasn’t before. It’s just kind of hard to imagine spending three hours away from your phone – or three hours, like, getting loaded midday.”View image in fullscreenHutchins, Butterworth’s chef, noticed when diners, including those he considered “reasonable people, and not insufferable”, kept asking for non-alcoholic options. The restaurant was gradually “brought over to the dark side”, he said, ruefully. He tested a few zero-proof drinks that he deemed respectable enough to serve beside marrow without shame.Many patrons still drink enthusiastically, and by 10pm most nights the atmosphere is “pretty bacchanalian”, he said. But Butterworth’s now offers a pre-packaged alcohol-free Negroni, verjus (a wine alternative made from unripe grapes) and non-alcoholic Guinness (“super popular”, Hutchins said).Changing health attitudes are probably a factor in the broader decline in US alcohol consumption. Recent research has cast doubt on the idea that even moderate drinking is an acceptable health risk. In January, the US surgeon general suggested that alcohol bottles should carry warnings that drinking can contribute to cancer.Malcolm Purinton, a beer historian at Northeastern University, noted that many young people learned adult socialization during Covid lockdowns, meaning their relationship with alcohol may differ from that of their parents or older siblings. People turning 21, the legal drinking age, do not necessarily see drinking as cool.“There’s always some form of rebellion between generations,” he said. Thanks to the cruel march of time, for instance, craft beer – which millennials once embraced as a sophisticated alternative to their fathers’ Miller Lites – is now itself a “dad drink”.Yet none of this explains the dramatic shift among Republicans. Nor does it explain another odd anomaly: the same Gallup poll found that Republicans, despite reporting drinking less than other groups, were less likely than Democrats or independents to say they viewed moderate drinking as dangerous.Some observers suggest the shift may have more to do with who now identifies as Republican. “Republicans made a big push in toss-up states such as Arizona and Pennsylvania in 2024 to register more Republicans, especially among far-right Christians, Mormons and Amish,” Mark Will-Weber, the author of a book on US presidents’ drinking habits, told the Financial Times in August. “These religious groups abstain from alcohol.”Saad is not sure. Republican respondents report drinking less regardless of other factors such as religiosity, she noted. “We’re not seeing anything that would tell us, you know, ‘It’s religious Republicans,’ ‘It’s pro-Trump Republicans,’ ‘It’s Republicans paying attention to the news.’ It’s really across the board.”It’s also difficult to determine the ideological correlation with sobriety. Although rightwing parties have gained ground in many other countries in recent years, Whyatt said, those places have not typically seen the same “aggressive decline in consumption”. The phenomenon seems specific to conservative Americans.The best guess may be that Republicans have turned against alcohol for the same economic and health reasons that Americans in general have – but amplified by “Make America healthy again” politics (with its hostility to vaccines and chemicals, and its faint granola paranoia) and a self-help podcast culture popular on the right that extols wellness, discipline, and treating your body like a temple.Months before his death, Charlie Kirk spoke on his podcast about the reasons he had quit drinking. He said he had done so “four or five” years earlier to improve his sleep and general health. Sobriety was “becoming trendier”, he argued, listing Trump, Carlson, Elon Musk and the Christian pundit Dennis Prager among prominent conservatives who don’t drink – or, in Musk’s case, don’t often.“The top-performing people I’ve ever been around,” Kirk said, “are very against alcohol, against substances. They’ll tell you they perform better, think clearer, have better memory, better recall, more energy, more pace. And I [also] find that some of the people who drink the most, they’re hiding something, they’re masking something.”Most experts acknowledged that it is too soon to tell whether this new sobriety will stick. “You can tie yourself in knots trying to solve those puzzles,” said Saad, the Gallup pollster. “We’re going to just have to wait and see if this holds up next year … maybe by then we’ll see other groups catch up.”Hutchins said Butterworth’s will continue to cater to drinkers and non-drinkers, just as it caters to diners of all political persuasions. But one group of patrons, he added, seems particularly unsettled by the sight of conservatives – or anyone – succumbing to the vice of sobriety.“We have a lot of British clientele, for some reason,” he said. “As soon as some new [British] journalist or diplomat type moves to DC, they come here. And they all say: ‘Nobody drinks here. Nobody even has martinis at lunch. What is happening in this country?’” More

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      Americans and US food banks brace for Trump cuts: ‘Battling hunger is no longer a priority’

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      Americans are bracing for the impact of the largest cuts to the government’s food assistance program for low-income people in US history that have begun to take effect as a result of Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act.Effective 1 October, the beginning of fiscal year 2026, funding for Snap-Ed, part of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Snap) that provided funding for food banks across the US, is being eliminated. The cuts are part of the sweeping spending bill Trump signed in July.A report this month by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities noted “some low-income families will see their food assistance terminated or cut substantially (or will be denied benefits) this fall, though most current participants will face cuts when their SNAP eligibility is next recertified,” with estimates that 4 million Americans in a typical month will lose some or all of their Snap benefits when the cuts are fully implemented.A Snap recipient in Camden county, New Jersey, who works as a cake decorator at a small business and requested to remain anonymous, said their Snap benefits were cut off in September without receiving a notice.“Snap was my way to finally not pay half to three-quarters of my paycheck on groceries. Now, I have nothing in my house regularly and it just feels like no one wants to help people any more,” they said. “I only got a little over $110 a month, but it helped tremendously.”They said it’s made it more difficult to work at a job they love, but that doesn’t pay enough.Jessica Griffin of Fort Smith, Arkansas, a mother of three, said she lost her job about five months ago and has struggled to find another, with her family relying on her husband’s income.After rent and utility bills, there isn’t much left over to buy groceries and she doesn’t have reliable transportation to get to food banks, she said.“I used to be able to buy $100 worth of groceries a week to feed a family of five, now even with one child out of the house $100 will only go a couple days,” she said. “The rent rates are so high now as well as groceries that families can barely afford to feed their kids and keep a roof over their heads at the same time. So it almost feels like we have two options, to either live in a house or live on the street and not starve.”View image in fullscreenFunding cuts to states, which will be expected to share costs of Snap for the first time as well as cover more administrative costs, are phased for fiscal years 2027 and 2028, but several provisions and changes to Snap are being implemented as states have to grapple with drastic costs shifted on to them from the federal government.“States don’t have enough administrative staff or capacity to handle this,” said Gina Plata-Nino, interim Snap director at the Food Research and Action Center. “I think we’re on a downward path. Polling and data is showing that one of the biggest obstacles that people are having in being able to eat is just how expensive food is at the moment. This is a direct result of tariffs and other policy choices that the administration has made. It’s something that everyone, regardless of income, can understand.”The looming Snap cuts come as food prices are still rising under the Trump administration and are expected to continue rising due to tariffs and labor shortages in the food industry due to Trump’s immigration policies.From January 2022 to August 2025, overall food cost in the US increased by about 17.8%, according the consumer price index, and has increased 2.0% since January 2025, when Trump took office. Trump’s tariffs are expected to drive further increases, with food prices set to rise 3.4% in the short term and stay 2.5% higher in the long run, according to the Yale Budget Lab.Food banks have been struggling across the US to keep up with demand and manage rising food prices, while bracing for further cuts, higher prices, and a surge in demand once Snap cuts begin taking effect.At a food bank in Charlottesville, Virginia, Jane Colony Mills, executive director of Loaves & Fishes, said the food bank has “experienced a 20% increase in the numbers of people coming for food assistance in 2025, likely driven not only by the cost of groceries in our community, but by the overall cost of living in Charlottesville and Albemarle area.”She noted their food supply has decreased as well, since they rely on food that stores cannot sell, and have also been affected by cuts at the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) to programs that support food banks. Colony Mills noted Snap cuts haven’t taken effect yet in Virginia, but local social service departments are bracing for those reductions or cancellations starting 1 October.“People who rely on these incremental supports will be struggling even more to provide food for their households each month,” she added.In Washington, the Thurston County Food Bank said they are bracing for significant cuts to Snap that will increase demand and make it more difficult to meet the current demand, let alone handle increases. They have already had to lay off staff positions funded by the Snap-Ed program that was cut by the Trump administration.“We have been told to brace for cuts that could be as much as 20% to 25% of the food we received in prior years. For us, 25% is $1m worth of food in 2024 prices, so with rising food costs, we can assume that is a gap of well over a million dollars,” said executive director of the Thurston County Food Bank.Ahead of the cuts to Snap and rising food prices, the Trump administration announced the cancellation of the annual hunger survey that measures food insecurity in the US and food researchers at the USDA were put on leave.USDA deferred comment to a press release, where they claimed “these redundant, costly, politicized, and extraneous studies do nothing more than fear monger.”The decision is viewed by anti-hunger advocates as an effort by the Trump administration to obfuscate the impacts of their cuts to Snap and other policies affecting food insecurity for Americans.“By cancelling the survey, USDA is sending a signal that tracking and battling hunger is no longer a priority,” Eric Mitchell, president of the Alliance to End Hunger, said in a statement. “It is further troubling that the decision comes amid predictions that hunger may increase in the coming months and years. Hunger will not disappear simply because it is no longer tracked.” More

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      When even Ben & Jerry’s can’t speak out, it’s clear: the era of corporate responsibility is over | Austin Sarat

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      When the history of this era is written, there will be much to say about the behavior of large corporations. And none of it will be good.As the Trump administration has ramped up its assault on American democracy, many corporations have chosen to look the other way or to curry favor with the president. They have fired employees who were too outspoken in their criticism of Donald Trump – ABC’s suspension of Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night talkshow, after Kimmel’s remarks about Maga’s reaction to the killing of Charlie Kirk, is the latest example.Or corporations have muted their brand’s identification with progressive causes.One casualty is Jerry Greenfield, co-founder and namesake of Ben & Jerry’s ice-cream. This week, he resigned from the company.He did so because, he said in a statement, the politically outspoken company had been “silenced”.The consumer goods company Unilever acquired Ben & Jerry’s in 2000, for a reported $326m. At the time, it agreed to respect the company’s independence.No more, according to Greenfield.“Standing up for the values of justice, equity, and our shared humanity has never been more important,” Greenfield noted in explaining his resignation. But, he said: “Ben & Jerry’s has been silenced, sidelined for fear of upsetting those in power.”Ben & Jerry’s crossed swords with Unilever last year when it sued the company for allegedly fighting its calls for a Gaza ceasefire and an end to US military support for Israel.The 2024 suit claimed that Unilever had threatened to dismantle the ice-cream company’s independent board and punish members if Ben & Jerry’s issued a call for a ceasefire. (Unilever said it rejected “the claims made by B&J’s social mission board”. Its motion to dismiss the lawsuit is pending.)Another flare-up occurred in March of this year, when, according to Ben & Jerry’s, Unilever fired its chief executive, David Stever, over his work to advance the company’s “social mission”.If those allegations are true, Unilever would not be alone in trying to avoid offending the Trump administration or its supporters. This is just the latest sign that the era of corporate social and political responsibility is over.Ice-cream lovers will now have to choose between their taste buds and their consciences.Corporate social responsibility (CSR) requires that business leaders recognize, as Harvard Business School explains, that they “have a responsibility to do more than simply maximize profits for shareholders and executives. Rather, they have a social responsibility to do what’s best – not just for their companies, but for people, the planet, and society at large.”The CSR movement really took off about 40 to 50 years ago when businesses realized that they could carve out a niche and attract investment from people who wanted to make money and stay true to their values. Ben & Jerry’s was founded in 1978 during the heyday of CSR, by Greenfield and Ben Cohen.It was upfront about the issues it cared about and the values it sought to promote. The list was long, but it included racial justice, refugee rights, climate, LGBTQ+ rights and democracy.The Association of Corporate-Citizenship Professionals traces the roots of CSR back to the 18th century. At that time, religious groups would not invest, and would urge their members not to invest, in businesses that did not advance their values. Those included the slave trade and businesses that supplied the instruments of war.Fast forward to the start of the 20th century, when in 1928, the Pioneer Fund became one of the first mutual funds to promote socially responsible investing, which meant avoiding companies producing alcohol or tobacco, or promoting gambling. Almost a century later, the Business Roundtable included in its statement on the purpose of a corporation the following: “We commit to … supporting the communities in which we work. We respect the people in our communities and protect the environment by embracing sustainable practices across our businesses.”Some progressives have criticized CSR, describing it as a charade and a public relations tactic that left the profit motive intact and did not require substantial changes in the way companies did business. But Ben & Jerry’s did more than brand itself as interested in social justice and political equality.As its 2024 lawsuit made clear, Ben & Jerry’s has wanted to take political stands even if it meant that it would lose some customers. A year earlier, in March 2023, as Newsweek reports, Cohen “shocked many” by speaking out against the US providing military aid to Ukraine.” (An ally said he opposed Russia’s invasion but wanted a diplomatic solution.)While from time to time, the company has been accused of not living up to its values, not surprisingly, conservatives have targeted Ben & Jerry’s for being “woke”. Some have tried to organize a boycott to protest what they see as its radical left politics.That’s perhaps why Unilever apparently wanted to pull back Ben & Jerry’s activism.What we are witnessing now in the way of corporate acquiescence to the rise of authoritarianism is a familiar story. There are plenty of examples.Take Viktor Orbán’s Hungary. There, as the political economist Gábor Scheiring argues: “Since 2010 Orbán has been using the momentum created by popular anger at the failures of liberal policies to build up his own system: authoritarian capitalism. A system that is deeply illiberal but capitalist: private property and the profit logic still dominate, but the state bureaucracy and its institutions are subdued to the enrichment of the preferred national economic elite.”There is ample evidence that Trump is succeeding in that same endeavor. That’s why the era of corporate social responsibility is over. Greenfield’s departure is just the latest evidence.

      Austin Sarat, William Nelson Cromwell professor of jurisprudence and political science at Amherst College, is the author or editor of more than 100 books, including Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America’s Death Penalty More

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      Trump’s tariffs have hurt tea exports to the US, says Fortnum & Mason boss

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      The boss of upmarket retailer Fortnum & Mason has said Donald Trump’s trade war has hit sales of its luxury tea exports to the US and forced up prices.Tom Athron, the London-based retailer’s chief executive, said Trump’s stricter country of origin rules and the end of the “de minimis” cost exemption for parcels worth less than $800 (£587) had hit customers across the Atlantic.“The American authorities have told us – this is the tea industry in its entirety – that if you’ve got tea from China and India in your tea, then its country of origin [is] China or India, and therefore those enormous tariffs apply,” he told the Financial Times.Trump, who landed in the UK on Tuesday for an unprecedented second state visit for a US president, last month imposed a 50% tariff on imports from India as a punishment for buying Russian oil.And earlier this year, the US administration raised tariffs as high as 145% on Chinese goods as the trade war intensified, before dropping them to 30% in May to facilitate talks between the two trading giants. The world’s two largest economies held talks in Madrid this week to try to reach a potential deal.For a 250g canister of loose leaf Royal Blend tea, which retails to US consumers at $27.85, Fortnum’s has now been forced to charge delivery fees starting at $25.41 owing to the changes to US taxes and duties.The 318-year-old retailer, which holds two royal warrants, was not previously liable for any tariffs on the majority of its deliveries to US customers.US custom agents assess whether a “substantive transformation” has been made to a product to decide whether its country of origin is different from where the product has been sourced.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThis process can be unclear to retailers, while the scrapping of “de miminis” rules has led to customers being wary of buying Fortnum & Mason’s products, which are popular with expats and international buyers.“A lot of our things are sent as gifts [so] if you’re living in New York and I’m sending a present to you, I want to be sure that you’re not going to be landed with a $200 bill on receipt of your parcel,” said Athron. “It’s all in hand, logistically we’re immaculate, it just means prices will go up for US consumers.”Overseas sales of Fortnum & Mason’s goods, including its famous hampers, were £12.5m in the year to July 2024, accounting for about 5.5% of total revenues.Wider inflationary pressure has led the retailer to raise the UK price of a 250g canister of loose leaf Breakfast Blend tea by almost 40% over the last five years. More

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      ‘It seemed like a ghost town’: LA food vendors on how Trump’s Ice raids affected business

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      From early morning to late at night, food vendors are feeding the people of Los Angeles. They offer nearly anything – tamales, fried fish, crispy tacos, mole, pupusas, fresh fruit, esquites, bacon-wrapped hot dogs – to Angelenos as they start their commutes or head home after the bars have closed.Taco trucks and food vendors are a vital part of the city’s celebrated culinary scene, one that came under attack this summer as Donald Trump ordered mass immigration raids across the city.Shannon Camacho, a senior policy associate at Inclusive Action for the City, a non-profit in the Boyle Heights neighborhood that focuses on community economic development, says that many street vendors made the painful calculation between risking losing much-needed income or being detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice).“Vendors are in a particularly vulnerable situation, given that they have to work outdoors,” Camacho said. “They rely on foot traffic. They rely on busy neighborhoods and streets … This was something intentional that the Department of Homeland Security was doing – targeting vendors that were outside, understanding that many of them are immigrants and many of them are undocumented.”The LA Vendor Street Campaign, which includes Inclusive Action and three other organizations, has been advocating for the rights of vendors long before this summer. The LASVC led efforts to create a statewide policy decriminalizing street vending throughout the state. Recently, it raised around $100,000 of direct cash assistance for street vendors across Los Angeles county.Still, Camacho says more is needed.“There are thousands and thousands of street vendors, even just in the city of Los Angeles,” Camacho said. “And that’s not even including other parts of Southern California. We don’t have enough to support everybody.”The Guardian spoke to three food business owners in LA about the summer of Ice, and how it’s affected their families and businesses.Juan Carlos Guerra, Taqueria FronteraIt’s Los Angeles … you drive anywhere on the street, you’re going to see pop-ups. You’re going to see street vendors. But it just seemed like a ghost town during that time. No one was out on the street.I was going to open the new Silver Lake location of Taqueria Frontera at the beginning of June. And then the raids happened. It didn’t seem like we should have a celebration or a grand opening.I reached out to Javier Cabral from [the hyperlocal news site] LA Taco, and I said to him, “I want to try to help out. Whatever I can do. Do you know a good organization?” And he said: “Oh, yeah. CIELO is a great organization.”I talked to someone at CIELO, Comunidades Indígenas en Liderazgo (Indigenous Communities in Leadership). I was just like: “Taco Tuesday is usually a thing. Is it okay if I set up something saying that all proceeds of our trompo [taco] – which is what we sell the most – is going to be donated towards fundraising for CIELO so they can help immigrant families during this time?”We did Taco Tuesday with a purpose, and we ended up raising $4,000 from selling the trompo that day alone.Everyone was pretty supportive about it. And not just that day – a lot of people would come in just to check up on us, on my employees, see how they’re doing, how they’re feeling. There’s no way you could live in Los Angeles without being affected by this. And a lot of my clients were like: “I can’t believe this is going on.” Who doesn’t have a friend or family member or co-worker that isn’t undocumented here in Los Angeles?Street vendors are back out now and more people are outside eating. But I think that it’s still in the back of their minds. Could this happen at any time again? Right now it’s pretty calm, but what happens a month from now if they decide to do it again?Bulmaro, street vendorWhen we started the business, there weren’t many jobs out there. We knew how to make tamales, which is what we sell. Due to the lack of jobs and opportunities, we decided to do what we know how to do. From there, business grew and we started getting more clients, little by little. It’s our sole source of income.Because of the raids, everything stopped. We stopped selling for about a month, without working or anything. We just started working again a little more about two weeks ago. A lot of people don’t go out to buy things anymore because they’re scared. Sales have gone down a lot because of the raids. More than half of the clients we had haven’t come back to buy anything because of the fear that continues.We haven’t had phone orders, either. We just bring the day’s supply, and sometimes we come back home with tamales or with atol that didn’t sell. It’s never going to be the same as before the raids.View image in fullscreenIt’s me, my wife and another employee – three of us depend on the business. There’s nothing we can do, we have to keep working. We need to pay rent and bills, even though we’re going outside with fear. There’s no other way. The rent isn’t going to wait. The bills, and the food we need to buy, aren’t going to wait either.Alejandra Rodriguez, Alex Foods and Cemitas PoblanasA lot of our customers stopped coming. They were scared because a lot of them are Latino. Even at the local restaurants in the city of West Hollywood, [the workers] have their visas to be here, but they were still scared because of everything that was going on. They were saying that even if you had a visa, even if you had permission to be here, everybody was still getting kicked out. Our sales dropped more than 70%.Even on the street, there was nobody walking, nobody coming. It did take a very big toll on us … the local people that work at the restaurants, the chefs or the servers or the valet guys, they weren’t coming in to work.We closed down for about 10 days because it wasn’t worth coming out here. And luckily, we had a little bit of money saved up. Usually, when we leave on trips, customers will still call us to place orders. But no, the whole 10 days we were gone, we didn’t go to work. We didn’t get any calls or people asking us when we were going to come back.I had to let one of my two employees go. I couldn’t afford it anymore. And we’ve just slowly been climbing back. We have customers from the local car washes, and they told us that Ice actually got there at that car wash and took about four people. People are still aware. People are still scared. Any time they see a police officer pass by or a sheriff’s department or just somebody, they would flinch.People are just trying to get to work and come back. I know they were able to stay away, maybe for a couple of weeks, but everybody has to pay rent. More

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      Latte-swilling ‘performative males’: why milky drinks are shorthand for liberal

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      Another week, another somewhat fictional online buzzword to parse. This time it is the “performative male”, basically the idea that posturing straight men only read books to get laid, outlined in recent trend pieces including the New York Times, Vox, Teen Vogue, Hypebeast, GQ and millions of TikToks.According to the Times, this man “curates his aesthetic in a way that he thinks might render him more likable to progressive women. He is, in short, the antithesis of the toxic man.” Apparently these heterosexual men who read Joan Didion, carry tote bags and listen to Clairo are not in fact human beings who enjoy things but performative jerk-offs who don’t really care about any of that girly stuff and are just trying to impress their feminine opposites. As Vox put it: “think Jacob Elordi when he was photographed with three different books on his person, or Paul Mescal publicly admiring Mitski”. Reading! Enjoying music by women! Perish the thought.Each piece differed slightly in what it defined as the key characteristics of the performative male, but they all shared one detail: he drinks matcha lattes.This was unsurprising. For three decades the latte has been the favored blog-whistle of the trend piece writer. It signals liberalism, femininity, gayness, pretension, gentrification – ideally all of the above – so reflexively that its origins as an insult are rarely revisited.It began in earnest in 1997, when journalist David Brooks writing in the Weekly Standard coined the term “latte liberal”. He was trying, disparagingly, to give name to the crunchy consumerist leftism of the time, in which organic vegetables and world music had become part of the social justice hamper: “You know you’re in a Latte Town when you can hop right off a bike path, browse in a used bookstore with shelves and shelves of tomes on Marxism the owner can no longer get rid of, and then drink coffee at a place with a punnish name that must have the word ‘Grounds’ in it, before sauntering through an African drum store or a feminist lingerie shop.”Brooks wanted to hint that leftism is a luxury only the bourgeois can afford – an idea encapsulated by the earlier formation of champagne socialist. But the latte proved a stickier, more evocative symbol, painting liberals as soft and effete.In 2004, lattes really entered politics, when a Republican Pac ran an ad accusing presidential candidate Howard Dean of being a “latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading, body-piercing, Hollywood-loving left-wing freak show”.Lattes also became a byword for gentrification. In 2000, when the Brooklyn neighborhood Williamsburg was, the Times bemoaned at the time, reaching “the point of hipster saturation”, the final straw was “a local Italian specialty store and a working-class institution … advertising the arrival of the Chai latte”. In New York Magazine’s 2005 feature L-ification, the publication mapped out how gentrification was spreading further east into Brooklyn along the route of the L train with little latte icons, a milky glyph of whiteness by that point understood by everyone.Noticeably, the latte form remains permanent, even as the type of latte shifts. Newt Gingrich accused New York mayor Bill De Blasio of “small soy latte liberalism” in 2014 – emphasising that the only thing more girlish than drinking a big dairy milky coffee was drinking a small vegan milky coffee. On Drake’s 2010 song Thank Me Now, when he’s asking the woman he’s left behind if she still thinks of him, he croons: “But do I ever come up in discussion / Over double-pump lattes and low-fat muffins?”Now the performative male has once again given rise to the idea that there is something inherently disingenuous about a milky beverage. Interestingly as the latte has changed colour, from white to green, the stereotype has expanded beyond the white liberal: matcha hails a diverse new generation of milky boys.The idea of the performative male started out mostly as a joke on TikTok, where knowing posters would show a man reading at the gym, for example, and joke that he was pretending. Contests in which men meet in parks to compete to be the most performative have been funny, postmodern, heterosexual versions of drag.But with each passing write-up, the knowing humorous element has been rinsed away, until Vox earnestly announced in its piece that the “MeToo movement showed us that even supposed ‘nice guy’ could be capable of alleged manipulation and abuse – that in fact, they could use their enlightenment as a kind of shield”. If you see a man with a matcha latte, you need to run!None of the pieces particularly wanted to reckon with the fact that, as Judith Butler put it, “gender identity is a performative accomplishment” to begin with, or that Arthur Schopenhauer was complaining in the mid-19th century that a performative reader “usually confuses the purchase of books with the acquisition of their contents”. Do we read in order to get laid? Only since forever.View image in fullscreenIronically much of this ribbing comes from the same people who decry a crisis of masculinity, and worry for future generations of boys who feel like they lack purpose and companionship. Yet in the world of the performative male, even having female friends and drinking milky coffee is a divergence from true masculinity.Why is the latte such an enduring emblem for this distrust – a way to call men you do not like effeminate?Partly it is the allegory of milk, the pursed mouth of a graphic designer on a coffee cup as a surrogate for the Madonna del Latte, the thousands of medieval depictions of Jesus nursing at Mary’s breast. Grown men drinking milk has always been laden in symbolism, the blend of nurture and eroticism evocative of a sexual infantalization. It is why so many films from A Clockwork Orange to Babygirl centre milk as a poison beyond a place of regular intoxication. When Kelis sings that her milkshake brings her boys to the yard, the lyric is so heavy in implication that the exact innuendo she is reaching for is irrelevant.Even the ancient Greeks used to have their own version of the latte joke, belittling the Persians who drank milk: Aristotle said Empedocles described it as “whitish pus”.But the milk in the context of the latte also turns coffee, a drink which was sold as fuel, bitter black stuff for TV detectives and the working man, into a sweet little treat. A latte fundamentally dilutes the taste of coffee and so it is easy to present those who drink it as watering down their wine. Even though the iconography of the latte liberal is now so strong it has stretched to drinks that do not contain any coffee to begin with. According to the performative male trend pieces, drinking a matcha latte indicates to women that you are soft, feminist-leaning and worldly (after all, it’s from Japan).Even though the latte is supposed to be this bastion of girlishness, women are not exempt from being chastised for drinking them, although the latte trope for them is more often a reflection of being superficial than performatively feminine. The logic of this makes little sense: latte liberal men are supposedly too European to be masculine, yet iced latte girlies are gormless Americans sucking on the straw of consumerism. No matter, the two sit side by side, one clutching a hot cup of simp soup, the other a pumpkin-spiced lobotomy. They are a pair one can project all their prejudices towards, without having to interrogate any of it too much.The irony is that hipsters and gentrifiers in coastal towns are rarely drinking lattes these days. They are much more likely to be sipping on a single origin V60 that’s been carefully weighed out on a digital scale. Indeed the stereotype could easily be flipped around – that it’s red states where complicated online Starbucks orders and Stanley cups filled with 32oz of latte abound. In the best survey of the coffee Americans actually drink and how it aligns with their politics by Diana C Mutz and Jahnavi S Rao, the differences were negligible. Although it is true that liberals do prefer lattes over conservatives (16% v 9%), the same research found liberals also prefer the more masculine-coded espressos over conservatives by a much bigger margin, and the vast majority of Americans prefer brewed coffee.But the milky latte stereotype persists because it is creamy and white (or green) and vaguely Italian. When GQ is asking “Are Matcha Men the New Soy Boys” you have got to wonder if gendering beverages has become the most performative act of all. More

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      Talking politics has bartenders on edge in Trump’s Washington DC

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      Deke Dunne relocated to Washington DC from Wyoming in 2008 to pursue a career in politics. Though a progressive himself, he worked as a legislative aide for the Republican senator Mike Enzi and spent many nights at local watering holes, guzzling $10 pitchers and eating wings with fellow broke staffers from both sides of the aisle. Long before he began moonlighting as a bartender, he learned that talking politics in DC bars was always a recipe for disaster.“When I used to work in politics, I would spend a lot of time in bars near Capitol Hill,” said Dunne, “so I was exposed to more political professionals. In those spaces, you often find yourself witnessing knockdown, drag-out arguments about politics.”Today, Dunne is one of DC’s most influential mixologists, having abandoned politics almost a decade ago for a hospitality career. Serving drinks in a city that is more ideologically divided than ever, Dunne says he exercises more diplomacy behind the bar now than he ever did working in politics.There has always been an unspoken rule among Washington DC bartenders, according to Dunne, that political conversations across the bar should be avoided at all costs. It is generally understood that maintaining neutrality is critical to ensuring that guests of all political persuasions feel welcome. But the partisan rancor in Washington during the early stages of Donald Trump’s presidential encore has created palpable tension in hospitality spaces, placing undue strain on staff to manage the vibes.“It’s always been an accepted truth in DC that every four to eight years, you get a whole new swath of people in from a different political ideology and if you want to have a strong, viable business, you don’t talk politics,” said Dunne. “Trump broke that rule.”According to local bar professionals in the nation’s capital, the “tending” part of bartending has never been more challenging. “Politics in DC is not only something that a lot of people care about, but it’s also a lot of people’s livelihoods,” said Zac Hoffman, a bar industry veteran who until recently managed the restaurant inside the National Democratic Club near the Capitol. “When you’re talking about work, you’re talking about politics. That’s just the reality of where we live. It’s a company town.”At Allegory, where Dunne oversees the beverage program, the bar has always taken a progressive approach, which occasionally provokes more conservative-minded guests who stay in the Eaton, the boutique hotel and cultural hub in downtown where the bar opened seven years ago. Its aesthetic and cocktail menu reimagines Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, but featuring a young Ruby Bridges, the iconic civil rights activist who faced a jeering mob when she desegregated a Little Rock elementary school.“Our very presence as a mission-based bar has sparked many conversations surrounding our concept, but also gender-neutral bathrooms, provocative art and advocacy,” he said. “We’ve had people that are clearly uncomfortable with our concept leave and then post a negative review but frame it about something else.”The resurgent, and often strident, brand of conservatism that dominates the political sphere in Washington today has many of the city’s more progressive bar owners on edge. At The Green Zone, a Middle Eastern cocktail bar in Adams Morgan on the city’s north side, politics have always been integral to the bar’s identity since it opened in 2018. Bar owner Chris Hassaan Francke, whose mother is Iraqi, has earned a reputation for being outspoken about political conflicts, especially those in the Middle East.But since Trump’s return to office, he admits to having toned down some of the rhetoric. “We changed the name of one of our most infamous cocktails [which contained an incendiary reference to the current president],” said Francke. “It kills me that I can’t always say everything I want to say, but ultimately the safety and wellbeing of my staff [are] more important than that.”While the city may be under Republican rule at the moment, DC itself is still overwhelmingly liberal (Kamala Harris won over 90% of the vote in the 2024 election), which means that a majority of its hospitality workers are liberal, too. “I know some bartenders who will say the opposite of what they believe around customers they don’t agree with politically,” said Hoffman. “There are plenty of socialists who make great tips talking shit about liberals with Republicans.”It isn’t only the more progressive venues around town that have become targets. After recent articles in the New York Times and Washington Post championed the upscale Capitol Hill bistro Butterworth’s as a haven for Maga sympathizers, backlash ensued. According to chef and co-owner Bart Hutchins – who, like Dunne, also left a career in politics to work in hospitality – being perceived as pro-Trump has attracted crowds to his fledgling restaurant, which opened last fall. But it’s also created some unwanted operational challenges. For one, a serial provocateur with an air-horn routinely disrupts his weekly dinner service by sounding it through the front entrance, often multiple times a week.Despite Butterworth’s reputation for being a sanctuary for high-profile Trump supporters such as Steve Bannon, not every political conversation at the bar is peaceful. “I’ve broken up at least three political arguments since we opened,” said Hutchins. “It always starts with somebody who’s really, really insistent that everyone agrees with them, someone who’s watching way too much cable news who’s really determined to have their Sean Hannity or Rachel Maddow moment.”View image in fullscreenAnother unfortunate byproduct of being known as a right-leaning restaurant in a left-leaning town, Hutchins says, has been difficulty hiring and retaining staff. “There have been times where it’s been really hard to hire people,” he said. “Early on, we had some servers self-select out and say: ‘I don’t want to serve these people.’ But a lot of those people have moved on.”Over time, the staff has found ways to put their political convictions aside for the good of the restaurant. “Our No 1 rule that’s written on a door in the back is: ‘Everybody’s a VIP,” said Hutchins. “We’re not interested in using politics as a measuring device for whether or not someone deserves great service.”For DC bars, proximity to Capitol Hill has historically increased the likelihood that the conversations inside them will revolve around politics. And while some bars on the Hill may welcome these spirited conversations, many older, legacy bars prefer that patrons leave their partisanship at the door.View image in fullscreenTune Inn, a well-loved dive bar that originally opened a few blocks from the Capitol in 1947, outwardly discourages political conversations of any kind. “You can always tell the newbies because they want to come in and immediately start talking about politics,” said Stephanie Hulbert, who has worked as a bartender, server and now general manager at the bar for more than 17 years. “They get shut down very quickly.”To keep the peace and maintain non-partisan decorum inside the bar, she and her staff regularly intervene and admonish guests to keep their politics to themselves. These interventions occur at least two or three times every week, according to Hulbert, which is why the TVs inside the bar are deliberately set to sports channels rather than news outlets. “I’ll argue about sports all day long with you,” she said. “But I won’t argue about politics.”Despite the heightened anxiety in Washington, Dunne is optimistic that healthy dialogues in more progressive bars including Allegory can effect positive change. In January, Trump’s inauguration drew conservative revelers to the Eaton, where inclusivity and multiculturalism is essential to its brand and mission. That led to some uncomfortable conversations with Republican patrons about the bar’s progressive ethos.“I don’t know how effective the conversations were, but they were constructive,” he said. “We found middle ground about the fact that what Ruby [Bridges] went through was tragic. It’s common ground you don’t find very often around here any more.” More

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      RFK Jr wants bright artificial dyes out of food. Are Americans ready to let go?

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      The Make America Healthy Again (Maha) movement celebrated this month after the US dairy industry voluntarily pledged to remove all artificial dyes from ice-cream by 2028. In April, US health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr prevailed upon the food industry to stop using artificial dyes, and many of the nation’s largest food manufacturers, including Nestle, Kraft Heinz and PepsiCo, have already promised to comply. But the ice-cream pledge made Kennedy especially happy because, he said, ice-cream is his favorite food.Prepare to say goodbye to the brilliant pink (from red dye No 40) that signifies strawberry, the cool green (yellow 5 and blue 1) of mint chocolate chip, and the heroic combination of red 40, blue 1, and yellow 5 and 6 that makes up Superman.One of the goals of the Maha movement is to prevent childhood diseases, which Kennedy argues can be accomplished by, among other things, addressing the use of additives in ultra-processed foods. A recent study published in the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics calculated that, in 2020, 19% of food products contained artificial dyes – “the most egregious” additive, according to Kennedy. Those dyes, he claims, are responsible for a host of health issues, including cancer, hyperactivity and possibly autism.“The American people have made it clear – they want real food, not chemicals,” Kennedy said in a statement.View image in fullscreenAside from jokes on social media about Donald Trump’s skin tone and Kennedy’s alleged use of methylene blue (an artificial dye that some claim boosts “mitochondrial efficiency” and longevity), the initiative has faced little political opposition. In January, when Joe Biden was still president, the FDA announced a ban on red dye No 3 scheduled to go into effect in 2027. Red 3, the FDA explained, was shown to cause cancer in rats, and while it does not show up in food in large enough quantities to affect humans, it still violates a law forbidding additives that contain carcinogens.Meanwhile, states as politically varied as West Virginia, Texas and California have already established their own bans or requirements that foods containing artificial dyes carry warning labels, citing the need to protect kids. (In the UK and the EU, restrictions on artificial dyes have been in place for years.)Why the fuss over food coloring? Are natural dyes really that much better for our health?“They’re better for some people’s health,” says Jamie Alan, a professor of pharmacology and toxicology at Michigan State University. “There is a very small percentage of children who are very sensitive to these dyes. And when they eat these dyes, they display behaviors that we sometimes associate with ADHD.”Alan stresses that there is no evidence that those kids actually develop ADHD. But research has found that after eating foods containing certain dyes, children, including those diagnosed with ADHD or autism, can show signs of hyperactivity, moodiness and inattentiveness. However many of these foods, particularly candy and soda, also contain sugar, which has also been connected to hyperactive behavior.Alan recommends that parents talk to a pediatrician and try an elimination diet to make sure the dye and not another ingredient is to blame. But she largely supports phasing out artificial dyes; most public health advocates think this is a good idea. “In my opinion,” Alan says, “because we’re talking about children and because they are a vulnerable population, I do think this is a great thing to do. But I will recognize that it is not going to impact the vast majority of the population.”One group that the change in dyes will certainly affect is the food manufacturers themselves. Switching from artificial to natural dyes is a complex process, says Travis Zissu, the co-founder and innovation lead of Scale Food Labs in Golden, Colorado, which offers a program to help manufacturers with the dye conversion.View image in fullscreenUnlike artificial dyes, which are derived from petroleum, natural dyes come mostly from plants: turmeric, for example, is used for yellows; algae and butterfly pea flower for blues; lycopene from carrots and tomatoes for reds. These dyes can be less stable, so Scale’s program begins with finding natural pigments that will not be affected by heat and other chemicals, followed by tests to determine which combination of dyes will produce the most reliable color. Next, Scale helps companies lock in contracts that will not force them to raise their prices too much and secure light-sensitive packaging to protect the colors. Finally, there are nine to 12 months of product testing to make sure production runs smoothly and that there are no adverse effects for consumers, such as red-dyed feces (something that has been known to happen with beet powder and extract; Alan says it’s harmless, but admits it can be unnerving).But Zissu’s biggest concern is that there won’t be enough to go around. Natural color demand is already up between 30-50% across the industry since food companies began announcing their intentions to stop using artificial color, he says, and the earliest deadline – 2027 – is still years away.“There is simply not enough supply to replace every single item in the market,” he says. “You’ll see the largest companies locking down colors soon, but there will not be enough until 2030.”There is also the worry that American consumers will reject the new colors altogether. While their counterparts in Europe, Canada and Japan have peacefully accepted the duller hues of natural dyes, Americans remain stubbornly attached to neon-bright candy and cereal.Case in point: in 2015, General Mills pledged to remove all artificial colors and flavorings from its products. The following year, it rolled out a natural version of Trix, the kid-friendly fruity breakfast cereal. But the muted Trix, colored by radishes, purple carrots and turmeric, was a flop. Customers missed the vibrant colors and complained that the new version didn’t taste right. By 2017, “classic Trix” had returned to grocery stores.On the other hand, when Kraft reformulated the powder for its macaroni and cheese and quietly began selling the all-natural version in December 2015, there was much less protest. As an Eater headline at the time put it: “Kraft Changed Its Mac and Cheese and Nobody Noticed.” Perhaps it was the marketing strategy – Kraft did not bother to make a big announcement until after it had sold 50m boxes – or maybe it was because the natural dyes were just as orange as the original. (Alan recalls that her young nieces and nephews were slightly worried about the change but accepted the new mac and cheese without much fuss.)As the adage goes, we eat with our eyes. The appearance of food should not change our perceptions of how it tastes, but, as anyone who has ever bought produce knows, it definitely does. In nature, brighter colors indicate that foods are ripe and will taste good. This principle also applies to human-made food.As far back as the middle ages, according to Ai Hisano, a professor of business history at the University of Tokyo and author of Visualizing Taste: How Business Changed the Look of What You Eat, dairy farmers would mix carrot juice and annatto from achiote trees into their butter to make it a more appetizing yellow. When scientists discovered petroleum-based dyes in the mid-19th century, the dairy industry was one of the earliest adopters: the artificial dyes were cheaper, and they helped create uniform yellows for butter and cheese that appealed to shoppers.Other food producers quickly followed suit. Meat would be red! Sandwich bread would be white! Oranges – which sometimes stayed green, even when they were ripe – would be orange! By the early 20th century, the US government had started regulating food coloring to make sure it didn’t kill anyone.This was also the beginning of the golden age of industrial food such as candy, breakfast cereal and, most notoriously, Jell-O, which came in colors never seen in nature. Food dye became vital for branding, Hisano writes. Even if brighter color didn’t really affect flavor because the food was entirely manufactured, people perceived that it did, and that was what mattered. Would a beige Flamin’ Hot Cheeto taste as spicy?View image in fullscreen“I assume many consumers in the early 20th century were frightened by those bright-red foods,” Hisano told the Atlantic in 2017. “But one reason consumers liked them is because they were excited about these colors they had never seen before.” And the knowledge that they were regulated by the FDA made them feel they were safe to eat.Because the identity of their products depends on color, the most resistance to Kennedy’s initiative has come from America’s candy manufacturers. A spokesman for the National Confectioners Association said that candy makers will not adopt natural dyes until federal regulations compel them to. Of all the biggest US food companies, only Mars, maker of M&Ms, Skittles and Starburst (incidentally, Trump’s favorite candy), has not yet pledged to give up artificial dye, except for the already banned red 3. However, FDA commissioner Marty Makary told Fox News that he thinks Mars will come around sooner than later.Zissu, the food dye consultant, foresees “an R&D sprint” to develop natural dyes before the 2027 deadline. And indeed, since May, the FDA has approved four new natural colors – three blues and one white – for a wide range of food, including juices, milk-based meal replacements, cereal, chips, sugar and ready-to-eat chicken products.But Zissu does not think that a transition to natural dyes means that the color of food will revert to a pre-industrial dullness. “I believe we will always see the bright colors in candy and other items that consumers come to expect,” he says. “There will just be a lot more research dedicated to getting those colors if artificial [dye] is banned.”It may also help if America’s food manufacturers act en masse, as they appear to be doing: the change will be so overwhelming that, as Zissu puts it, “neon synthetics will look as dated as trans fats.” Perhaps in a few years, we will look back at green mint chip ice-cream in wonder. (Some people already do: many ice-cream producers, including Ben & Jerry’s and Häagen-Dazs, don’t use green as the signifier for mint.)It seems Maha is poised to help shake America of its affair with artificial colors. But it celebrates this victory at the same time as the Trump administration guts public health infrastructure.The ice-cream industry’s pledge came just 11 days after Congress passed a spending bill that will cut Medicaid spending, and therefore healthcare for millions of children, and slash Snap food assistance for US families. It came the same day that the Department of Health laid off thousands of employees. Under Trump, the government has also cut research grants to scientists studying, among other things, disease prevention and vaccines (of which Kennedy is a notorious skeptic). Underlying issues such as food and housing insecurity and child poverty that devastate children’s wellbeing are likely to worsen.Alan thinks that if Kennedy is serious about improving the health of America’s kids, there are much more pressing issues than food dye to work on. “I just can’t believe that someone would be given a chance to make such an impact,” she says, “and this is what they choose to do.” More