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      Dr Martin Makary Chosen to Head the FDA

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      President-elect Donald J. Trump announced on Friday that he would nominate Dr. Martin A. Makary, a Johns Hopkins University surgeon with a contrarian streak, to be commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration.In a post on social media, Mr. Trump said: “F.D.A. has lost the trust of Americans and lost sight of its primary goal as a regulator.” He said that Dr. Makary would work under Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the president-elect’s choice for the cabinet-level role as health secretary, to “properly evaluate harmful chemicals poisoning our nation’s food supply and drugs.”“I am confident that Dr. Makary, having dedicated his career to high-quality, lower-cost care will restore the F.D.A. to the gold standard of scientific research and cut the bureaucratic red tape at the agency to make sure Americans get the medical cures and treatments they deserve,” Mr. Trump said in a statement.Mr. Trump announced two other top health picks on Friday evening as well. He chose Dr. Dave Weldon, a physician and former congressman from Florida, to lead the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.For years, Dr. Weldon championed the notion that thimerosal, a preservative once used widely in vaccines, caused an explosion of autism cases around the world. In 2007, he backed a bill proposing to take vaccine safety research out of the hands of the C.D.C. Health officials reject the idea that research shows any link between thimerosal and autism.Mr. Trump also put forward Dr. Janette Nesheiwat, a physician and Fox News contributor, to be surgeon general. She worked caring for patients after Hurricane Katrina, an announcement from Mr. Trump said, and on the front lines of the Covid pandemic in New York City. She also markets vitamin B and vitamin C dietary supplements.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Yelloh, Formerly Schwan’s Home Delivery, Closes

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      Yelloh, the frozen food delivery service formerly called Schwan’s Home Delivery, which had once been known for its reach with rural Americans and its direct-to-consumer business model, is closing its doors on Friday after decades of decline.Minnesota-based Yelloh was born on March 18, 1952 when its founder, Marvin Schwan, delivered 14 gallons of ice cream. The service’s popularity exploded over the years and later foods frozen at their peak made it onto the menu. At its peak, the company delivered meals and ice cream across 48 states, but critics and experts said the company became frozen in time, ceding ground to competitors and modernity.The Schwan’s name lives on in frozen foods (Red Baron, Freschetta, and Mrs. Smith’s are among their many brands) — that side of the business was sold to CJ CheilJedan, a South Korean company, in 2019. But on Nov. 8, Yelloh permanently parked its fleet of refrigerated trucks that, with their yellow décor, were once instantly recognizable in small towns across America. Friday’s closure means that about 1,100 people across 13 states will be out of a job.In a statement, the company said it made its decision because of “multiple insurmountable business challenges,” including “economic and market forces, as well as changing consumer lifestyles.”Michael Ziebell, a Yelloh board member who spent 22 years with the company and previously held leadership roles, said the shuttering was devastating, calling it a very hard and very emotional decision.But, he said, it was not sudden.In an interview with The New York Times, Mr. Ziebell said demographic and market issues began plaguing the company in the late 1980s and early ’90s; with fewer people home as drivers came, the relationships between drivers and customers that had been built over decades began to diminish. Then came membership stores like Costco, which could compete on frozen food price and quality, and on top of that regulatory changes added restrictions to their truck operations. It was “the perfect storm,” he said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Kennedy’s Views Mix Mistrust of Business With Bizarre Health Claims

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      Seven years after Americans celebrated the licensing of Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine, President John F. Kennedy called on Congress to finance a nationwide vaccination program to stamp out what he called the “ancient enemies of our children”: infectious disease.Now Kennedy’s nephew, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is the nation’s chief critic of vaccines — a public health intervention that has saved millions of lives — and President-elect Donald J. Trump’s pick to become the next secretary of health and human services. Mr. Kennedy calls himself a vaccine safety activist. The press calls him a vaccine skeptic. His detractors call him an anti-vaxxer and a conspiracy theorist.Whatever one calls him, Mr. Kennedy is a polarizing choice whose views on certain public health matters beyond vaccination are far outside the mainstream. He opposes fluoride in water. He favors raw milk, which the Food and Drug Administration deems risky. And he has promoted unproven therapies like hydroxychloroquine for Covid-19. His own relatives called his presidential bid “dangerous for our country.”If there is a through line to Mr. Kennedy’s thinking, it appears to be a deep mistrust of corporate influence on health and medicine. In some cases, that has led him to support positions that are also embraced by public health professionals, including his push to get ultra-processed foods, which have been linked to obesity, off grocery store shelves. His disdain for profit-seeking pharmaceutical manufacturers and food companies drew applause on the campaign trail.People close to him say his commitment to “make America healthy again” is heartfelt.“This is his life’s mission,” said Brian Festa, a founder of We the Patriots U.S.A., a “medical freedom” group that has pushed back on vaccine mandates, who said he has known Mr. Kennedy for years.But like Mr. Trump, Mr. Kennedy also has a tendency to float wild theories based on scanty evidence. And he has hinted at taking actions, like prosecuting leading medical journals, that have unnerved the medical community. On Friday, many leading public health experts reacted to his nomination with alarm.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      New York City Will Stop Giving Debit Cards to Migrants

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      Mayor Eric Adams is ending a contentious pilot program that gave 2,600 migrant families debit cards to purchase food.New York City will end a contentious program that provided debit cards to migrant families to purchase food, city officials announced on Thursday.The pilot program came under fire from the moment it was announced in February, with critics concerned that the cards could be misused and questioning whether it was fair to give preferential treatment to migrants over others in need.Mayor Eric Adams has defended it, arguing that the program would bring down the costs of feeding migrants and give them a wider array of healthier options at supermarkets and bodegas.But his administration has decided not to renew the one-year contract, which had been given to Mobility Capital Finance, known as MoCaFi, on a no-bid emergency basis.The city’s Department of Investigation is investigating the contract with MoCaFi, The New York Daily News reported in October.In explaining the city’s decision on Thursday, Mr. Adams made no mention of the investigation. He said that given the city’s “constant decrease in our population” of migrants, there was no need to renew an emergency contract.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Elections

      The Hard-Shell Taco Deserves Your Respect

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      The version that once thrived at the midcentury fast food stands of Los Angeles is now a regional treasure.Bar A Tí is a serious taqueria: fresh blue-corn masa, a dark and cryptic mole that ferments for a full school year, duck confit, the works. The crispy taco, however, is a crinkled half-moon of braised beef shank flickering with garlic, chiles and cilantro under a heavy fringe of neon orange cheese.This is not, at a glance, a serious taco. Though Andrew Ponce uses thin Kernel of Truth tortillas for his crispy tacos, and excellent tomatoes for the salsa, he also invokes the tacos of Cal-Mex diners, fast-food chains and family meal kits. He calls back, with some nostalgia, to the American hard-shell tacos that thrived in midcentury California and, for better or worse, shaped the iconography of tacos around the world.Mr. Ponce, a Mexican American chef who opened his Echo Park restaurant about a month ago, grew up in Culver City, and when he wanted to go out for crispy tacos at Taco Bell or his local spot Tito’s Tacos, his father disapproved. Hard-shell tacos were a goofy and inauthentic misunderstanding. Besides, the family had real Mexican food at home!”I wasn’t supposed to have it,” Mr. Ponce told me, “and that made it so much better.”Andrew Ponce opened his cheffy taqueria Bar A Tí just over a month ago.Michelle Groskopf for The New York TimesThe crispy tacos are fried with braised beef shank inside, then crammed with orange cheese.Michelle Groskopf for The New York TimesThe seasoning-from-a-packet, Cheddar-crammed, hard-shell taco was my childhood introduction to the form — an exotic box kit delivered to my family in France by an American relative. But I’ve minimized its once- thrilling effect and long since learned to wave it away as a meaningless speck in the taco universe.So much so that when I stopped recently at Taco Lita, in Arcadia — open since 1967 and conveniently close to my doctor’s office — I realized I’d forgotten the pleasures of this style entirely.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump’s Vile Lie About Haitians Is the Latest in a Long and Grim Tradition

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      When my family moved back to the United States from East Africa in the mid-1980s, one might have thought it was a peak time of compassion for people suffering in faraway places. A glittering group of music superstars had recorded “We Are the World,” a smash hit charity single to raise money and awareness for the victims of a brutal famine that had gripped my mother’s home country, Ethiopia.But when I told my new grade school classmates of my origins, I was met with cruel taunts. I was awfully fat for an Ethiopian, one said with a snigger. Must be nice to be able to have access to so much food, another joked. At the time, this was puzzling and upsetting — I had moved from Kenya, not Ethiopia, to my father’s home state, Minnesota. But the facts didn’t matter. These unkind remarks did the job the bullies hoped they would: They made me feel like an alien, an unwelcome stranger.We live in even crueler times now, with humanitarian catastrophes unfolding on several continents, but the response of the wealthy world has been to demand tighter borders and higher fences. There is no blockbuster charity single raising money for starving refugees from the civil war raging in Sudan. And now, the cruel taunts come not just from schoolyard bullies and cranks on the political fringes, but from the lips of a man who stood on the presidential debate stage on Tuesday, a former president who once again has a coin-flip shot at regaining the most powerful office in the world.And so I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised by that lowest of moments at the debate, when Donald Trump repeated a vile, baseless claim that Haitian immigrants were killing and eating household pets in Springfield, Ohio. This allegation appears to stem from viral social media posts and statements at public meetings. It was picked up by some of the most rancid figures at the fringe of the MAGA-verse, then quickly hopscotched from there to a social media post by Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, and finally to the debate stage, sputtered by Trump himself.There is a temptation to treat this as yet another Trump rant, a disgusting lie about immigrants like the ones he uttered as he began his presidential bid in 2015, describing migrants crossing the border with Mexico as rapists and criminals. He’s done it time and again since. He is the master of exaggerated and fabricated claims against the boogeymen, a skill he has used for decades to polarize public opinion and raise his profile and power at the expense of others.But there is something particularly insidious about this claim, uttered at this time, from that stage. Food and pets are, to use a Freudian term, highly overdetermined symbols in our political life. They are capable of receiving and holding a multiplicity of very potent meanings, transmitting deep messages about identity and belonging.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Are Some Ultraprocessed Foods Worse Than Others?

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      A new study may offer the biggest clues yet.Name a common condition — heart disease, Type 2 diabetes, cancer, dementia, irritable bowel syndrome — and chances are good that following a diet high in ultraprocessed foods has been linked to it.But the ultraprocessed food category is large and wide-ranging. It makes up an estimated 73 percent of the U.S. food supply, and contains stereotypically “unhealthy” products like sodas, candies and hot dogs as well as seemingly “healthy” ones like whole grain breads, breakfast cereals, flavored yogurts and plant milks.It’s a “hodgepodge of foods,” some of which are likely more harmful than others, said Josiemer Mattei, an associate professor of nutrition at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.On Monday, Dr. Mattei and her colleagues published one of the largest and longest studies on ultraprocessed foods and heart health to date. In it, they analyzed the risks of consuming these foods, and teased out the worst offenders.An Overall Risk of Ultraprocessed FoodsThe new study, published in a Lancet journal, included more than 200,000 adults in the United States. They filled out detailed diet questionnaires beginning in the 1980s and early 1990s, and completed them again every two to four years for about 30 years. Most of the participants in the study were white and worked as health professionals. The researchers looked at how the participants’ ultraprocessed food consumption related to their chances of developing cardiovascular disease.After adjusting for risk factors like smoking, family health history, sleep and exercise, the researchers found that those who consumed the most ultraprocessed foods were 11 percent more likely to develop cardiovascular disease and 16 percent more likely to develop coronary heart disease during the study period, compared with those who consumed the least ultraprocessed foods. The highest consumers also had a slightly, but not significantly, elevated risk of stroke.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in US Politics

      How Philando Castile’s mother helped pioneer Tim Walz’s free school lunch program

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      When the Democratic nominee, Kamala Harris, named the Minnesota governor, Tim Walz, as her running mate two weeks ago, the public lauded Walz for bringing free breakfast and lunch to all students throughout the state. Ever since, the topic of universal school meals has become a nationwide discussion. But it’s little known that the work of Valerie Castile, the mother of Philando Castile, helped drive Walz’s legislation.After Philando was fatally shot by Minnesota police during a traffic stop in July 2016, Castile learned from her son’s co-workers about his passion for reducing school lunch debt – the amount of money that households owe to school districts for covering meals they can’t afford. As a school nutrition supervisor in Saint Paul, Minnesota, Philando was intimately familiar with food insecurity. He often paid for students’ meals when they couldn’t afford them and interjected when kids were bullied for receiving free lunch. Affectionately deemed “Mr Phil” by students, he knew the names of all 500 children at JJ Hill Montessori school, their food allergies and how to keep them safe.Students would “try to be slick, and get something they’re not supposed to have. If they were lactose-intolerant, [Philando would say] ‘you want that chocolate milk, but you can’t have it,’” Castile said.In 2017, she launched the Philando Castile Relief Foundation in her son’s honor to help pay off lunch debt and to support other families who lost their loved ones to gun violence.For years, she worked with lawmakers to ensure that all Minnesota children had access to nutritious meals at school. Due to Castile’s advocacy, as well as the work of Hunger Free Schools Campaign, last spring Walz signed legislation to provide free breakfast and lunch to all students, regardless of their qualifications. Castile and other advocates hope that the spotlight on Minnesota will lead to the passage of similar laws throughout the nation.“It’s been great to see that early work come to full fruition,” Leah Gardner, the campaign manager of Hunger Free Schools Campaign and the policy director of the non-profit The Food Group, said about the Philando Castile Relief Foundation. “The ideal is that the federal government should just make this be a thing across the country.”At the onset of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, the federal government provided free meals to all children. But that program ended in 2022, leaving states to draw from state funds if they wanted to continue the initiative.In Minnesota, before the passage of the free school meals legislation, about a third of students received free and reduced lunches, “and that doesn’t count low income families that are just over the qualifications required for free and reduced meals”, said Minnesota state senator Heather Gustafson, the bill’s author, during a committee hearing. At the time, lunch debt in Roseville area schools, one of more than 300 school districts in the state, totaled $120,000.Black and Latino families in Minnesota are twice as likely as white households to lack access to nutritious food, according to Gardner. The Hunger Free Schools Campaign, which is composed of 30 organizations, saw free meals as an opportunity to address racial inequality throughout the state. “When they’re at school and can have two of their three meals at school at no cost, that goes a long way to making sure that they’re getting access to food,” Gardner said.So far, eight states including Michigan, California, Maine, New Mexico, Minnesota, Massachusetts, Colorado and Vermont have passed universal school meal programs. And on the national level, the representative Ilhan Omar from Minnesota introduced legislation to provide free breakfast and lunches throughout the nation last year.View image in fullscreenThough the Hunger Free Schools Campaign is still analyzing the impact of the Minnesota program’s first year, Gardner said that participation in breakfast had increased by 41% and lunch by 19% since 2023.Castile said she was grateful that fewer students are going hungry in the state, but wished that the legislation also forgave students’ prior lunch debt. “Unfortunately, there was no retroactive thing in place when the bill was passed … to wipe all this away,” Castile said. Still, school districts are prohibited from denying children free meals based on their unpaid lunch debt.“The ultimate goal was to get them guys to see it our way and actually do something about that issue,” Castile said about the legislation’s passage. “It was a hidden burden on family.”Since Minnesota launched its meal program, the Philando Castile Relief Foundation has pivoted to helping single mothers find housing. “There are quite a few parents that are dislocated because of the economic problems that we’re having,” Castile said.Over the past seven years, the foundation has donated goods totaling upwards of $250,000 through its various initiatives, including providing turkeys on Thanksgiving, backpacks with school supplies to children, and $50 gift cards to families during the holiday season.For other states that are considering similar legislation, politicians who worked on the bill recommend centering the voices of people who are personally affected by food insecurity. “This was always about Philando and Mr Phil and why I voted yes on this bill,” the Minnesota state senator Clare Oumou Verbeten said.Ultimately, Castile wants to see free school meals throughout the nation and has considered taking “this show on the road and go and speak with other legislators and representatives and let them know how important it is”, she said. “Children, they don’t learn to their full capacity when they’re hungry.” More