American Dish

The Trump administration says it wants to formally define ultra-processed foods — a move that could have big implications for food policy in the future. More than a year into the process, however, this effort has hit roadblocks at the White House amid major opposition from the food industry.

My guests this week have been at the center of the push to get the definition out. Dariush Mozaffarian is a cardiologist, director of the Food is Medicine Institute at Tufts University, and author of the new book Food Is Medicine. Lindsey Smith Taillie is a nutrition epidemiologist at UN...

Seventy-three Republicans and 207 Democrats voted last April to successfully strip a pesticide liability shield out of the farm bill. The provision would have protected Bayer from billions in lawsuits over glyphosate and cancer, and ag interests fought hard to keep it in the legislation. Rep. Chellie Pingree (D-Maine) says she’s never seen a win like it.

It was a case where strange bedfellows teamed up and won big. MAHA activists and Democrats don’t agree on much, and many Democrats want nothing to do with the movement. Pingree has spent years working on food and farm issu...

This week, we have a great media roundtable with Marcia Brown, who covers food and agriculture at Politico; Chelsea Cirruzzo, Washington correspondent at STAT; and Liz Essley Whyte, health policy reporter at the Wall Street Journal. All three have broken big MAHA-related stories this year, and heading into the midterms, they’re watching whether this movement still has the political clout it had in 2024.

We talk about how each of these reporters ended up covering MAHA, how their outlets approach covering the movement and the Trump administration, and so much more.

Highlights:

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A long list of investors said no to Nick Green and his co-founders as they were trying to get Thrive Market off the ground. They were rejected so many times they eventually turned to the people who understood the problem they were trying to solve: moms, wellness influencers, and anyone else whose life had been shaped by not having a decent grocery store nearby.

Twelve years later, their persistence paid off. Thrive Market has grown into a profitable, membership-based online grocer with 1.7 million paying members, hundreds of millions in annual sales, and a reputation as the Whole...

It's been a rough summer for anyone paying attention to food safety in America. Every few days, it seems, we see new headlines about new recalls and foodborne illness outbreaks. And the media is paying a lot more attention to them on the heels of the big summer cyclospora outbreak tied to iceberg lettuce (which is now the largest foodborne outbreak we’ve had in three decades!) What’s going on? Is this the Trump administration to blame here, or has the system been broken for a long time? And what can we eat?

To sort through it...

HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. often talks about reforming prison food in the same breath as school food, a genuinely unusual thing for a top health official to say. At the same time, the Federal Bureau of Prisons has quietly put out requests for information about outsourcing food service to the same private companies that serve colleges, elementary schools, and military bases. Are these two positions aligned? What would it take to actually improve food served in prisons? Why does it matter? We dive into all of it with two of the country’s top experts in prison fo...

At the 2023 HHS Food Is Medicine Summit, one item on the buffet was considered safe for 10-year-old Jax Bari to eat: an apple.

Everything else was a gamble because gluten isn't required on food labels in the U.S. the way it is in 87 other countries. For someone with celiac disease, that disclosure means a whole lot — a tiny bit of gluten can mean days of vomiting, diarrhea and severe pain.

Jax is now 13, and he's still on a mission to convince Washington that gluten labeling should be mandatory. He and his dad, Jon Bari, fo...

Ten percent of Americans are estimated to have food allergies — and that’s probably an undercount. The government hasn't updated its population data in nearly a decade, so the real figure could be more like 12 or even 15 percent.

Despite the scale of food allergies, food allergy research gets a small fraction of the funding devoted to comparable chronic diseases — and the gap has stayed remarkably persistent even as public and political attention has increased.

Ilana Golant, founder and CEO of the non-profit Food Allergy Fund, is on a mission to close this gap. Food allergies are co...

More than 4 million people have dropped out of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program in the past year — an unprecedented drop that hasn’t gotten much attention in the media.

As SNAP Director at the Food Research and Action Center, Gina Plata-Nino is tracking all of this very closely. FRAC fought hard against the $187 billion in SNAP cuts Congress passed through reconciliation last July. That legislation made it much harder (and in some cases impossible) for certain individuals to access SNAP and left states staring down billions in new costs they weren't expecting to carry. Meanwhile, the Trump admi...

This episode is something a little different: a roundtable with three journalists who've been deep in this moment in food policy, talking frankly about what they're seeing as MAHA's promises meet the reality of governing in Washington.

Tal Kopan, deputy Washington bureau chief for The Boston Globe, has been reporting on the politics and also the money behind MAHA. Deena Shanker covers food for Bloomberg Businessweek and recently wrote about MAHA's school lunch ambitions colliding with funding cuts. Lisa Held is a senior reporter at Civil Eats, where she runs the Food Policy Tracker and just finished...

Todd Wagner, a tech billionaire and Hollywood mogul best known for co-founding Broadcast.com with Mark Cuban, isn’t particularly well known in food world — but he’s increasingly having a big impact.

Wagner first got interested in American food policy after noticing his migraines would all but disappear when he traveled to Europe. He did some research and realized that the U.S. was letting thousands of food additives onto the market without regulatory oversight. In 2023, Wagner and film producer Lori McCreary launched FoodFight USA, a non-partisan non-profit aimed at cleaning up the U.S. food supply...

The debate about ultra-processed foods is loud in America right now, but zoom out, and it's everywhere. Governments around the world are trying to figure out what to do about diet-related disease, and the food and beverage industry is under pressure at every turn.

Rocco Renaldi is secretary general of the International Food and Beverage Alliance, the group that brings together some of the world's biggest multinational food companies — Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Mondelēz — for coordinated action on nutrition and public health. He's also an executive at Edelman and is based in Brussels, which gives him a vantage point...

Schools are the largest restaurant chain in America, bigger than Subway, Starbucks, and McDonald's combined. Nearly 100,000 locations, 30 million kids, and roughly 7 billion meals a year. Right now, the lion’s share of the calories served through this system are ultra-processed at a time when there’s growing concern about chronic diseases among children.

Nora LaTorre is the CEO of Eat Real, a nonprofit that's transforming school meals scale — certifying school districts against doctor-developed standards and helping food service leaders pivot to fresher, more local, more scratch-cooked food. Since 2019, the organization has grown from one district in one state...

HHS Secretary Kennedy says the food industry is poisoning us. The White House shares AI videos of him body slamming a Twinkie. And somehow, the trade group representing the companies making those ultra-processed foods — and thousands of other products Americans buy every day — has to figure out how to respond.

The Consumer Brands Association represents the CPG industry, not just food and beverage, but household products and personal care too. It's the largest manufacturing sector in the U.S. by employment — 22.3 million workers, contributing $2.3 trillion to the GDP. And right now, it's contending with one of the most h...

Infant formula isn't some niche parenting topic. It's a public health issue, a food security issue, and in many ways an infrastructure issue.

The 2022 infant formula crisis was one of the most alarming food system failures in recent memory. Shelves were suddenly empty. Parents were driving across state lines to find cans of formula. The Department of Defense was flying it in on military planes. And most of us — including me — realized we knew almost nothing about how infant formula actually works, where it comes from, or how consolidated the industry really is.

Mallory Whitmore, know...

The American diet has become dominated by ultra-processed foods, but it’s taken a while for scientists to even begin to understand what this really means for our health.

One of the researchers at the cutting edge of our nascent understanding is Kevin Hall. A physicist by training, Hall spent 21 years at NIH becoming the country's foremost nutrition scientist before resigning from the agency in 2025.

Julia Belluz is an award-winning health journalist and contributing opinion writer at the New York Times who has done some of the best reporting on nutrition and obesity anywhere.

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The FDA is nearly a year into its MAHA era. The rhetoric has been bold — food dyes, ultra-processed foods, infant formula, GRAS reform. But what's actually happened? And what might still be coming? Helena got down to brass tacks with FDA Commissioner Marty Makary during a fireside chat on stage at the National Food Policy Conference in Washington, D.C.

Commissioner Makary came into this role as a surgical oncologist and researcher who spent decades at Johns Hopkins — and who had already written extensively about food and nutrition before taking the job (unusual for an FDA commissioner).

Sam Kass calls RFK Jr. "the greatest threat to public health this country has ever faced."

He’s not joking. Sam led Michelle Obama's Let's Move campaign, served as senior policy advisor in the Obama White House, and fought some of the most brutal food policy battles in recent memory. He knows what it takes to enact regulation and how hard industry will fight to protect its interests.

Hearing MAHA panic about seed oils and food dyes while the administration weakens the FDA and CDC all while championing beef tallow french fries is downright alarming, he...

She says she hates politics. She's also been on the White House lawn with the FDA commissioner, helped pressure food companies to drop artificial dyes, and is now one of the most influential voices within the Make America Healthy Again movement.

Vani Hari, better known as the Food Babe, built a massive following pressuring food companies to ditch controversial ingredients long before MAHA was a thing. How did she go from an activist food blogger to one of the most dominant forces in food policy?

Note: This interview originally aired on Forked, the food politics...

The Trump administration says we're being poisoned by our food system. HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. talks about ultra-processed foods, pesticides, and corporate capture of our health agencies. It's rhetoric that in many ways sounds like it came straight from the progressive food movement.

Marion Nestle helped build that movement — and so far she's not impressed.

An emerita professor at New York University, Nestle is 89, has written 17 books about food policy, founded the field of food politics, and writes the must-read blog foodpolitics.com.

She's earned the right to be blunt. And in...

Everyone is suddenly talking about food policy. But this conversation has been building for a long time, and I've been closer to it than most.

I'm Helena Bottemiller Evich, and I've spent years in congressional hallways, school cafeterias, and farm fields, covering the stories that people in power would rather keep quiet. Now, as these once-wonky topics go increasingly mainstream, I'm launching a podcast to help make sense of all of it.

American Dish is where I'll talk with some of the smartest and most influential people in food policy about what we're eating, why...