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Friday, 16 October 2026

Latest from Food Politics: Weekend reading: MAHA betrayed

By Marion Nestle

October 16 2026

Weekend reading: MAHA betrayed

In the most complete analysis yet, Protect Our Care has issued a devastating report card on the failure of the Trump administration to keep its MAHA promises.

The report: MAHA Betrayed: Trump, RFK Jr. Keep Selling Out Movement to Corporate Polluters and Poison Peddlers

For over a year, Donald Trump and his Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. promised the Make America Healthy Again movement that this administration would finally take on Big Food, Big Ag, and Big Chemical. Instead, they have delivered a steady diet of broken promises, corporate quid pro quos, and foodborne illnesses….But a year into his [RFK Jr’s] tenure, the receipts tell a different story: cancer-linked chemicals back on the market, food safety agencies gutted, families paying more for groceries, and even the movement’s founders wondering whether they’ve been put out to political pasture.

The report details and documents broken promises about chemicals, pesticides, and corporate capture, especially to women.

Here is one item as an example:

Kennedy Stays Silent While EPA Betrays MAHA on Toxic Chemicals. While MAHA leaders have spoken out about air and water pollutants, Trump’s EPA has now shut down plans to release a MAHA agenda and the NIH has stopped accepting submissions for its flagship journal on environmental health and yanked research grants.. EPA scientists were pressured to alter safety reviews of chemicals in household cleaners and cosmetics to make risks appear less serious than the data shows — whitewashing health risks of the products MAHA’s core constituency was promised would be regulated. At a chemicals summit, Kennedy praised an Oregon State researcher’s microplastics study from the podium — unaware, or unbothered, that an hour earlier she’d learned EPA had just terminated the grant funding that research.

Kennedy has stayed similarly silent as EPA rolls back the very mercury rules he spent decades fighting for. As an environmental attorney, he sued over mercury pollution and personally developed “word retrieval and memory problems” from mercury-tainted fish. EPA announced its rollback of mercury emissions rules the day after the MAHA Commission, which Kennedy and Zeldin both sit on, held its first meeting. A recent report from Climate Power and Protect Our Care details how Trump has eliminated 31 pollution protections that, together, were set to deliver $275 billion in benefits per year and prevent 30,000 deaths annually.

Take a look at the report. The list is long, alas.

The post Weekend reading: MAHA betrayed appeared first on Food Politics by Marion Nestle

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Marion Nestle

Paulette Goddard Professor of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health at New York University, Emerita

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Thursday, 15 October 2026

Latest from Food Politics: The food system uses a lot of water

By Marion Nestle

October 15 2026

The food system uses a lot of water

I was interested to see this chart from the USDA: Chart of Note: U.S. food system required greater share of national water use compared to employment or energy use: Water, labor, and energy are resources relied upon throughout the U.S. food system. The food system comprehensively required more than a quarter of total U.S. freshwater use each year from 2010 to 2023….In 2023, the U.S. food system relied on 27.7 trillion gallons of freshwater, or 29.3 percent of total freshwater withdrawals.