American Sustenance
· The Atlantic
When I first set out to report and write about what we now call the food system, I ran into a brick wall with editors in New York. This was in the late 1990s and early aughts. I was chasing stories about the new genetically modified crops, the fight over the federal definition of organic, and the rise of gigantic factory farms—stories that would eventually find their way into my book The Omnivore’s Dilemma—but few editors seemed interested.
At first I was baffled. I had read my Wendell Berry and had taken to heart his famous dictum, “Eating is an agriculture act.” Didn’t everybody know that?
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A century or so ago, the question of where our food comes from would have been too obvious to pose, let alone investigate and write a book about. In 1900, about four of every 10 Americans were farmers, and everyone else was likely related to one. But as the food chains that fed us grew longer and more intricate, they became invisible to most of us, to the point where urban Americans seemed satisfied with the answer “Food comes from the supermarket.”
For cosmopolitan Americans around the turn of the millennium, the seemingly obvious connection between agriculture and eating was not obvious at all. Maybe that was my problem! “Agriculture” was a distant and musty abstraction, something that happens in I states such as Iowa and Indiana, and was of no conceivable interest to urban readers.
I revised my pitches, dropped the word agriculture, which to the typical editor in New York might as well have been something that happens in Alpha Centauri, and replaced it with food. Instead of pitching a piece about factory farms, for instance, I proposed a story about “how a prime cut of beef finds its way from a pasture in South Dakota to a steakhouse in New York.” It worked, almost like magic. Who isn’t interested in food? It turned out that editors in New York were especially keen on it; many of them were foodies and, at least in those days, had healthy expense accounts.
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Mine wasn’t the only or even the first such book: Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation (2001) and Marion Nestle’s Food Politics (2002) had come out a few years before. All three books sought to connect a series of far-flung dots: between the way we farm and the way we eat, but also between industrial agriculture and obesity (and chronic disease); farm policy and the environmental crisis; the rise of fast food and the collapse of home cooking; monoculture farming and fossil fuels; concentration in the food industry and the hollowing-out of rural America. Another concept you hardly ever heard about back then was “food politics,” as Marion reminded me recently. When in the early 2000s she told the dean of her school at New York University the title of her latest book, he wrinkled his brow and asked, “What does food have to do with politics?” (“No one ever asks me that question anymore,” Marion recently pointed out.)
Food has become a political issue. In the years after The Omnivore’s Dilemma came out, in 2006, something that looked very much like a movement began to take shape. True, it never coalesced around any single issue. For better or worse, the food movement was and remains a baggy coalition of a great many groups pushing a great many different issues: fighting food insecurity, curbing pesticide use, reforming farm policy, promoting farmers’ markets, advancing farmworker and food-worker rights, passing stiffer food-safety laws, promoting animal welfare, and so on.
These factions sometimes work at cross-purposes. For example, activists working to strengthen food-safety rules sometimes run afoul of local food advocates, who worry that the burden of new regulations will hinder the revival of small-farm agriculture. Still, to watch so much activism galvanize around food and farming filled many of us with hope that things might actually change. For me, the high-water mark of that hope came during the 2008 presidential campaign, when Barack Obama gave an interview to Time magazine in which he referenced my critique of the food system.
Because “our entire agricultural system is built on cheap oil,” he said, “our agriculture sector actually is contributing more greenhouse gases than our transportation sector. And in the meantime, it’s creating monocultures that are vulnerable to national security threats, are now vulnerable to sky-high food prices or crashes in food prices, huge swings in commodity prices, and are partly responsible for the explosion in our health care costs because they’re contributing to Type 2 diabetes, stroke and heart disease, obesity.”
Could the nascent food movement have found a powerful new champion? It certainly seemed that way. Obama campaigned aggressively in Iowa, promising to stand up to Big Food and vowing to regulate concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs, “just as any other polluter.” On the campaign trail, as I’ve previously written, he told Iowans that they had a right to know where in the world their food came from and whether it had been genetically modified. To critics of the food system, the Obama campaign gave many of us hope that we would have an ally in the White House. (By the way, Obama won Iowa—twice!—the last Democrat to do so.)
But as the candidate and the movement soon learned, the power of agribusiness is formidable. A few short days after his interview with Time, Senator Charles Grassley, a.k.a. the Senior Senator From Corn, seized on Obama’s Time interview as evidence that he was blaming farmers for obesity and pollution. A campaign spokesman played down Obama’s remarks, saying he had simply been “paraphrasing” something he’d read. The episode taught Obama and the rest of us a painful lesson about just what we were up against with Big Food.
Once in the White House, the Obamas occasionally nurtured the hopes of food reformers. In the spring of 2009, Michelle Obama planted an organic vegetable garden on the White House lawn. The small patch excited the food movement but brought down the wrath of the chemical industry.
Chemical-industry groups labeled the Obamas “organic limousine liberals” while an agribusiness trade organization called on the first lady to use pesticides in her garden, never mind that she had no need for them. The dustup was a preview of things to come: Whatever steps the Obamas took to reform the food system would be met by ferocious attacks from industry—and, alas, would all too often result in retreat by the administration. Although Michelle did notch a significant victory with the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010, which made meaningful reforms to the school-lunch program—reforms that the first Trump administration has rolled back.
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Big Food’s favorite line of attack? Depicting efforts to improve the food system as “elitist,” leading America down the path to a “nanny state.” The charge of elitism stung, not least because it contained more than a kernel of truth. The food movement has been mainly a coastal phenomenon, attracting the well-heeled and well educated who could afford to buy sustainably and humanely grown food. Many of the changes the movement sought—such as tighter regulation of factory farms and pesticides, higher pay for food workers, and rules favoring organic agriculture and grass-fed meat—threatened to increase the price of food.
This fact, I think, sharply circumscribed the movement’s power and appeal. Cheap food—which stands as the single great accomplishment of the industrial food system—is bound to be politically popular, even if that cheap food comes at a very high price to our health and the health of our planet, not to mention to the taxpayers footing the bill for crop subsidies. And food has become dramatically more expensive since the Obama years. Americans are living through the biggest jump in grocery prices in half a century; prices have climbed by roughly 33 percent since 2019 alone. Since at least the French Revolution, politicians have been very fond of cheap food, and understandably so.
The legacy of the Obamas’ engagement with food issues has been to make clear to anyone paying attention that food is political, a matter of public debate, and is likely to become more so in the future. How do we know that? Because it will be difficult, if not impossible, to address the climate crisis without addressing the carbon footprint of industrial agriculture—and difficult, if not impossible, to address the explosion in health-care costs without addressing the American diet, which contributes to many of the chronic diseases that most of our health-care dollars go to treat.
Twenty years after the publication of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, you might think—and I certainly hoped!—that my book would have fallen hopelessly out of date. But looking at the landscape of food and farming today, I’m sorry to report that things haven’t changed all that much. King Corn still rules the American heartland, where 95 million acres are dedicated to that single crop, up from 78 million acres when the book was first published. Chemically intensive monoculture farming remains the rule, encouraged by lavish federal subsidies that discourage farmers from trying anything else. The American taxpayer continues to subsidize the least healthy calories in the supermarket. Our government is backing both sides in the war against type 2 diabetes and obesity, spending billions to treat these chronic diseases while subsidizing the crop that gives us high-fructose corn syrup.
Corn remains the essential building block of the food Americans eat; along with soy, its partner in the fields, it gets turned into the meat and dairy and processed foods that dominate the American diet. Meanwhile, the small number of corporations that dominate meatpacking, seed production, chemical fertilizers and pesticides, grain trading and processing, fast-food chains, and supermarkets has only gotten smaller since 2006, as oligopolies tighten their grip on the industrial food chain that feeds most of us.
But not all the news is dire. Some things have changed for the better. Americans are paying more attention to what they eat—both the food’s healthfulness (or lack thereof) and its provenance. Many of us have opted out of the industrial-food economy. Today, you can find organic food in virtually every supermarket; organic is now a thriving $65 billion industry (up from roughly $13 billion in 2005). Add to that the market for local food—the Department of Agriculture estimates that there are now more than 8,100 farmers’ markets in America (up from about 4,000 in 2005) and another 7,200 CSAs, or subscription farms—plus all the animal products labeled grass-fed or humanely raised, and you have an alternative food economy easily approaching $75 billion a year. While the government dithers, consumers are voting with their forks for a different kind of food system.
Another important change since The Omnivore’s Dilemma was published was the emergence of a word: ultra-processed, as in ultra-processed foods. The term does not appear in the book, because it wasn’t used to describe a particular type of food until 2009. It was introduced by Carlos Monteiro, a Brazilian epidemiologist, who had been puzzling over a paradox: Brazilians were getting fatter and more diabetic and yet, as a population, they were eating roughly the same quantities of fat, carbohydrates, and protein. He investigated and discovered that what had changed was the form in which people were consuming these nutrients. In place of traditional dishes, they were consuming more ready-to-eat meals, snack foods, and soda. He dubbed these products “ultra-processed,” which he defined as ready-to-eat foods you can’t make at home, because they require a factory and a suite of ingredients—including additives, dyes, and emulsifiers—that no ordinary person keeps in their pantry. (I call them “edible food-like substances.”)
Monteiro’s insight is a powerful one: that the form in which we get our nutrients—whether as traditional whole foods or highly processed food products—has a significant bearing on our health and weight. Subsequent research has shown that people who eat ultra-processed foods end up consuming several hundred more calories a day than those who don’t. Consumption of these foods—most of which contain ingredients derived from corn and soy—has also been linked to several chronic diseases. How big a problem is ultra-processed food? Today it is the source of 55 percent of the calories in the American diet, and that figure is even higher for children—62 percent.
Much to the dismay of the food industry, the term has broken through with the public. (Just the other night, I saw an ad on television for a brand of dog food that boasted it was “real food, not ultra-processed.”) A poll taken in 2025 by a conservative think tank found that 70 percent of likely voters opposed serving ultra-processed foods in school meals; 96 percent favored putting warning labels on such foods. The current secretary of health and human services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has no doubt driven up these numbers with his vow to get ultra-processed foods out of the national school-lunch program. We shall see if Big Food lets him.
But the secretary has at his back a large army of activists and voters who are changing the politics of food in ways that could help propel reform. I’m referring to the “Make America Healthy Again,” or MAHA, movement, which Kennedy helped galvanize and then brought into the Trump tent. This is potentially significant. As long as the food movement was coded liberal or left and vulnerable to charges of elitism, there was a ceiling on its political power. But now the people who are calling for a ban on certain pesticides and getting ultra-processed foods out of the school-lunch program are the MAHA moms, and you no longer hear talk of elitism or the nanny state.
I should have seen this coming. There’s a moment in The Omnivore’s Dilemma when I ask a farmer named Joel Salatin who his customers are. His Polyface Farm is one of the most radical in America, and he is a libertarian free spirit with no patience for government regulation or agricultural convention.
He’s designed an intricate food chain that starts with sunlight and grass and supports half a dozen animal species living symbiotically. Who, I wondered, would schlep all the way to Swoope, Virginia, the remote, far-off-the-interstate burg where he farms, to buy his pastured chickens and grass-fed beef?
He described young mothers concerned about the health of their children, many of them drawn from the homeschooling and homesteading community. “People who have already opted out once,” as Joel points out. I met some of these mothers the week I spent working on Joel’s farm. They held fierce views on nutrition that weren’t always aligned with science: Seed oils and grains were a problem; raw milk was a solution; “clean” food was medicine.
These moms were deeply suspicious of institutions of all kinds, including food corporations, the medical system, and especially the FDA; they bridled against the agency’s food-safety rules. Many of these moms had kids with serious health issues that they hoped to address with a change in diet—hence their willingness to travel hundreds of miles to fill their coolers with Joel’s pastured meat and eggs.
I didn’t know it at the time, but I was meeting future MAHA moms; it never occurred to me that they might coalesce into a movement that would have the ear of a president. Perhaps not surprisingly, Salatin has become a MAHA hero, invited to appear at rallies and brought in to consult with administration officials. He recently told me that the administration had reached out during the transition to gauge his interest in becoming the agriculture secretary. Imagine that!
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It’s not at all clear what, if anything, will come of this new politics. The underlying DNA of MAHA is very different from the DNA of the first-wave food movement. MAHA is fundamentally libertarian, allergic to the sort of government intervention that people in the earlier food movement consider necessary to build a healthier, more just, and sustainable food system.
MAHA’s primary interest is our health as individuals, not the health of the environment; the movement has shown little interest in food insecurity or the rights of food workers. As Marion Nestle put it to me in an email, “The MAHA movement is like Joel Salatin. Everything up to the individual with little attention to policy.” And yet there are promising areas of overlap—around banning agricultural chemicals and the ingredients in ultra-processed foods, as well as supporting local food systems and regenerative farming.
The prospect that MAHA will get very far with an administration that regards all regulation as anathema seems doubtful. The Trump EPA is bent on deregulating agricultural chemicals, much to MAHA’s frustration, and the Trump USDA has been gutting support for small farms and local food systems. (It’s also worth pointing out that a diet of real food is not going to save children from the measles; what the Trump administration is doing to public health in America needs to be viewed in its totality.)
What is encouraging, I think, is that a vocal constituency seeking reform of food and agriculture has emerged on the right, adding its numbers and energy to the earlier wave of food activism coming from the left. Should the Trump administration disappoint or frustrate the MAHA moms, as appears to be happening, they may well look to form alliances with groups that share their priorities. They are nothing if not fierce. Could a new, bipartisan, and far more powerful food movement be built upon these areas of overlap? Early this year, we saw the first evidence of the power of that alliance, when MAHA activists teamed up with Democratic Representative Chellie Pingree, a Maine organic farmer and a leader of the food movement, to strip a provision from an appropriations bill that would have shielded pesticide manufacturers from lawsuits.
The building of coalitions like this one is surely cause for optimism. The demand for healthy food produced in a safe manner is something with the potential to unite us. Who can be against that kind of food? Only a powerful lobby, and one that has been very good at dividing us along lines of class and culture. But that strategy may no longer work, now that there are tens of millions of Americans on both sides of the ideological divide who recognize that our food system is badly broken, that it is responsible for our national eating disorder. This could be the start of something big. We can hope.
This essay is adapted from the introduction to a new edition of The Omnivore’s Dilemma.