Conservative ‘wishlist’ of policies for a future Trump administration goes so far as transforming food and farming
Cecilia Nowell at The Guardian:
When Project 2025 began making headlines this summer, it was largely for the ways the conservative “wish list” of policies for a future Trump administration would restructure the entire federal bureaucracy, deepen abortion restrictions and eliminate the Department of Education.
But the document – a proposed mandate for the next Republican president authored by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative thinktank – also outlines steps that would radically transform food and farming, curtailing recent progress to address the excess of ultra-processed foods in the United States. Among those: weakening the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Snap), ending policies that consider the effects of climate change – and eliminating the US dietary guidelines. “This is a deregulatory agenda,” said Marion Nestle, a professor of nutrition and food policy at New York University. “And what we know historically from deregulation is that it’s really bad for consumers, it’s bad for workers, it’s bad for the environment.”
Project 2025 proposes changes to the country’s food assistance programs, like Snap and the Women, Infants and Children supplemental nutrition program (Wic), that Nestle believes are intended to dismantle such programs. It also calls for ending support for school meals. But one of the most notable of its proposals is calling on the next Republican president to eliminate or reform the dietary guidelines. Those guidelines form the basis for all federal food policies, from school meals to Snap, Wic and other programs.
“There is no shortage of private-sector dietary advice for the public, and nutrition and dietary choices are best left to individuals to address their personal needs,” the document reads. The food industry has long pushed the idea that chronic, diet-related health conditions, like diabetes and obesity, are the result of individual choices – like not exercising enough. Today, nearly 42% of adults in the US are obese and about 12% have diabetes. But nutritionists emphasize that those conditions are not the result of a moral failing, but rather conditions caused by the ingredients and policies (like aggressively advertising to children) pushed by food companies. Nestle sees that as one of many pro-business policies outlined in Project 2025’s agricultural provisions that trusts companies to prioritize public health over profit. “There’s twice as many calories available in the food supply as the country needs on average. So the food industry is enormously competitive in selling calories,” she said. “Republicans want to deregulate, and give those food businesses every opportunity to make as much money as they possibly can, regardless of the effects on health and the environment.” Experts also fear the way Project 2025 could undermine the work being done by the Food and Drug Administration and the Department of Agriculture to limit the flow of ultra-processed foods in the US food supply.
Today, ultra-processed foods make up 73% of the US food supply, according to Northeastern University, and provide the average US adult with more than 60% of their daily calories. While the science is still emerging, researchers are increasingly linking UPFs to a range of health conditions including diabetes, obesity, depression and certain cancers. At the FDA, work is currently under way to develop a front-of-package label that corporations would be required to print on the fronts of products indicating when an item is high in sugar, fats, sodium or calories (the exact label has not yet been made public). Although the label wouldn’t specifically indicate when a food is ultra-processed, it would likely apply to a high percentage of UPFs in the food system because many contain large quantities of those nutrients.
Warning to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and co. who are backing Donald Trump on the basis that he would clean up the food supply: Project 2025 calls for rollbacks that would limit the tools needed to fight against ultra-processed foods.
