An interesting thing happened when President-elect Donald Trump nominated Robert F. Kennedy Jr. last month for head of the Department of Health and Human Services: It wasn’t immediately panned by everyone on the left.
Now, that’s a low bar to qualify as interesting; alas, we live in a divisive time. But that support came, in part, because many of the food reform ideas Kennedy has proposed are shared by progressives: cutting subsidies for industrial farms, banning dyes and food additives, shifting research funds toward exploring how diet affects health outcomes, and supporting organic and regeneratively grown food.
But while some on the left have expressed support for Kennedy and are appreciative that food reform has found its way into the national headlines, those in agriculture and food reform advocacy — in New Jersey and beyond — are skeptical.
“Unfortunately I think this is a case where a stopped clock is right twice a day,” says Andrew deCoriolis, executive director of the food reform group Farm Forward. “I don’t think this is a situation where he has a cohesive set of values and then corresponding policy prescriptions that are going to follow from that in the ways that most of us advocates, or even people like Senator [Cory] Booker, who have a long track record and consistent perspective on these issues, would have.”
Indeed, if people are encountering Kennedy’s positions on food reform for the first time, they probably sound similar to the things stalwart left-leaning food reformers like Booker have been saying for years.
For instance: “We subsidize everything that makes us sick and nothing, very little, that makes us healthy. Ninety-three percent of our [agriculture] subsidies go to the stuff in junk food and only about 7% goes to the stuff that makes us healthy,” Booker told reporters on Nov. 19.
Here’s Kennedy, meanwhile, back in June, while he was still running for president: “Our harmful farm policies and agricultural practices are destroying our soils and poisoning our food, while empowering processed food companies to fuel America’s chronic disease epidemic.”
Sounds like the same team, right? The novelty of Kennedy and Booker sharing a perspective made headlines in November. Kennedy shared a video Booker posted in which he outlined the issues in industrial farming, writing, “Let’s work together to end this.” Booker told reporters he has concerns about Kennedy but that on food reform issues, they’re “talking out of the same playbook.”
Booker says he’s resolved to continue his work in food reform, regardless of how the incoming administration approaches it.
“I’ve long led the fight to reform our food system to address our nation’s nutrition crisis, get toxic chemicals out of our food, and make the farm safety net work for small farmers in New Jersey and across the country,” Booker said in a statement to The Record. “I’m eager to continue my advocacy; I have plenty of reforms in mind, and if the incoming administration is serious about making meaningful progress on these issues, they are welcome to join me in my efforts.”
‘It’s a good message with a bad messenger’
Of the 15% of registered voters who backed Kennedy before he dropped out of the presidential race, most shifted their support to Vice President Kamala Harris instead of Trump, by a 2-1 ratio. That’s due to Kennedy’s history as an environmental advocate and support of other liberal policies, but also his push to “Make America Healthy Again,” the catchall term for his food reform platform. (Trump himself called Kennedy a “Radical Left Lunatic” on Truth Social in April.)
Prominent left-leaning politicians like former Sen. Tim Ryan, an adviser at the Progressive Policy Institute, have called for Democrats to work with Kennedy on food reform, and Sen. Bernie Sanders said Kennedy is “exactly correct” on food issues.
More broadly, Kennedy’s platform has resonated with a new wave of people of all (or no) political persuasions for whom food and health autonomy is a primary issue — including so-called “crunchy moms,” a modern archetype of women who eschew modern medicine and processed food in favor of natural alternatives.
These folks have found a champion in Kennedy in their efforts to remove seed oil and dyes from food, legalize raw milk and psychedelics, and end mandatory vaccine schedules, among other pursuits. (There are over 15 million posts tagged “Seed Oil Bad” and 28.3 million posts on raw milk on TikTok, for reference.)
But it’s also those beliefs, which are hardly rooted in science, that undermine the genuine optimism food reform advocates have for Kennedy, once a leading environmental lawyer.
“This isn’t new. This goes back decades,” deCoriolis says. “RFK’s opposition to industrial animal farming and support for independent farmers and ranchers, his concerns about the consolidations of the meat industry — all those things are right, and he’s got a 20-year track record of talking about it. From that perspective I welcome that conversation, but unfortunately I think his policy prescriptions don’t necessarily flow from those values.”
DeCoriolis says there are plenty of people in the sustainable food movement, from farmers and ranchers to nonprofit leaders, who are “very enthusiastic about RFK.” At the very least, it’s gratifying for many to see food reform enter the public sphere.
“Personally and professionally, I’m thrilled to see food as a national headline,” says Devin Cornia, executive director of the Northeast Organic Farming Association of New Jersey. “The health of our country, the health of our food system, maybe some breaking up of corporate control of our food system … It’s a good message with a bad messenger.”
How effective could RFK be in Trump’s administration?
Cornia shares others’ skepticism that Kennedy will be able to accomplish the type of transformation for which he and other food reform advocates are asking, but adds that it’s folly to look to politicians for perfection.
“I think there’s always going to be some good and some bad; it doesn’t matter who’s in the executive office,” he says. “Find me the candidate that’s going to be a perfect person with a perfect policy platform, and I’ll show you a liar.”
Because food reform hasn’t been a campaign issue for either party in decades, it has been shielded from the ideological divide that has split people on other issues. It’s not surprising, then, that those on the left who are passionate about food reform might be willing to support the Trump administration’s efforts to tackle it.
That’s especially true because there’s little difference between the food and agriculture policies of Democratic and Republican administrations, deCoriolis says. U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, for instance, served as a lobbyist for the dairy industry in between his stints in the Obama and Biden administrations and, according to Food & Water Watch, oversaw numerous programs that benefited only industrial agriculture.
Offering a historical perspective, Allen Carter, president of the New Jersey Farm Bureau, agrees that it’s hard to predict what will change in food and agriculture based on political party.
“I’m 57 years old and have gone through quite a few presidential elections,” he says. “They all talk about everything they’re going to change, but how much change is going to happen is yet to be determined.”
But Kennedy may be accomplishing more as a nominee than previous Democratic-led administrations did, simply by talking about food reform, deCoriolis says: “That conversation wasn’t happening with Vilsack.”
To be clear, the optimism for Kennedy is not universal among food reform advocates. Rebecca Wolf, senior food policy analyst at Food & Water Watch, says Kennedy espouses “dangerous, anti-science beliefs” and that if he were serious about reform, he would endorse “scientifically sound policies” like removing antibiotics from animal feed and banning harmful chemicals in food.
And while folks like Carter point out that Trump endeared himself to farmers and ranchers by showing up at the American Farm Bureau convention during his first term, Wolf says Food & Water Watch is not expecting much from his second term, Kennedy or not.
“At the end of the day, if Mr. Kennedy is confirmed, he would work for Trump,” Wolf says. “And if we know anything about Trump, it’s that he demands complete loyalty from his underlings. We are highly skeptical that anything good for everyday people will come from the Trump administration, regardless of who is heading up HHS.”
How could RFK and others actually improve our food system?
There might be support for Kennedy for much the same reason there’s support for Trump, deCoriolis posits: a sense that the system isn’t working, and rather than tweaking it gently, a full blowup would be better at this point.
“At that point, you’re making an attenuated argument about creative destruction or destruction leading to something better, which I think is often the attitude people have: ‘Well, this person has such heterodox views that they’re going to burn it down and, out of the ashes, we’ll build something better,’ and I think that’s often not true and misguided,” he says.
It remains to be seen what tack the second Trump administration will take, but the hope is that while food reform is in the spotlight, actual change occurs. In fact, there are several ways lawmakers can immediately improve the food system that might not require as much disruption as stripping subsidies from industrial farms or banning certain additives.
Carter says here in New Jersey, where most farmers produce specialty crops, adding subsidies for loss of those crops (as was experienced during the drought in late summer) would be beneficial. Inclusion of that in the Farm Bill, currently being discussed, would be one avenue for that.
DeCoriolis says change could come in the forms of added financial support for farmers and ranchers, continued monopoly-busting of industrial farms and passing bills like the PRIME Act, which would allow producers to use local slaughterhouses and thus help local food systems.
But given that this is a moment when food reform has a platform for the first time in a while — and while a Farm Bill and nutrition guidelines will set the course for food quality over the next five years — Cornia advises not to lose sight of what would help local food systems and improve health outcomes for consumers most, maybe more than anything Kennedy could propose.
“There’s always going be that seesaw between different political parties and movements, but we completely neglect advocacy on a local level and supporting the communities that are around us,” Cornia says. “We spend so much time worrying about national politics, we lose sight of our immediate community. If we really cared about agriculture, we wouldn’t pay so much attention to national headlines; we would go to local farmers’ markets.”
A previous version of this story misstated the name of the senior food policy analyst at Food & Water Watch. She is Rebecca Wolf.
Matt Cortina is a food reporter for NorthJersey.com/The Record. Reach him at mcortina@gannett.com.
