If you don't know any scientists or Republicans, and NRDC employs neither, it is easy to demonize them because you never have them looking at you over lunch.(1)
NRDC knows a Republican insider now. Their former lawyer Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is part of the Trump administration and the "mainstream" positions they prize, that food science is evil, medicine is evil, technology is evil, are becoming government policy.
Link: Politico
Farmers and scientists don't think there is anything "mainstream" about anything that Kennedy and NRDC claim, especially not when it comes to food, an area so successful that the progressives of two generations ago who were promoting Population Bomb hysteria and calling for world government to promote forced sterilization now have to claim science has made us too fat. The seed oils they promoted because animal fat was too environmentally intensive now needs to be banned and they are selling beef tallow to their wealthy elites. Spatulas, food coloring, Secretary Kennedy wants to undo every FDA ruling made since 1958.
He will make every item of food that has an ingredient science knows is Generally Recognized As Safe, like a strawberry, go through FDA approval again. Unless it has an organic sticker handed out by 80 companies that sell them to farms who fill out some paperwork.
The US Department of Agriculture generally plays nice with other agencies. When President Clinton, the most anti-science White House winner of the 20th century, decided he was going to round out his legacy of undermining medicine by getting FDA out of regulating supplements and giving science funding to acupuncturists by also giving niche "organic" food a government seal to make his fellow Boomer Environmentalists happy, farmers were alarmed. They knew that old pesticides didn't work well. USDA assured them that "organic" was just a marketing designation, they wouldn't be able to claim their food was healthier or better for the environment (they did it anyway), it was just going to be for rich people and 'all farmers are good farmers.'
And they were right. Organic food revenue, like electric cars, has flatlined because there are only so many wealthy elites out there. Unprompted, only 7% of people on surveys mention "organic" as being important on a label, everyone else cares about this one:
Credit and link: Capital Press
But USDA has limits. Though playing nice early on, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins has put the protective food down on the "MAHA" - Make America Healthy Again - agenda by Kennedy and his ilk.
Kennedy is a guy who invented a brain illness to try and get out of paying alimony to his second wife so he could have his many mistresses without her complaining - but then dropped that claim after she committed suicide so he wouldn't have to pay alimony anyway. He says he found a dead bear cub, he definitely put it in his car, took a photo with it, did some falconry as Democrats do, went out to dinner, then took it to Central Park and made it look like a bike hit it.
He claims there are more transgender people now because of chemicals in water. He believes in homeopathy.
Secretary Rollins has assured farmers that Kennedy's MAHA agenda will not be allowed to harm the country and she has results on her side. American agriculture uses less energy, less water and less land to produce more food than ever. We are down to just 17% of America being cropland thanks to science helping 2,200,000 family farms feed us affordably. They have been so successful that we are only 3% urban space and 51% of the country is open. Far more than the entire continent of Africa. American science is so successful that if the rest of the world caught up, farmland equivalent to the entire country of India could revert to nature.
Kennedy instead wants to do to America what western environmentalists did to Sri Lanka; create food riots by adopting the beliefs he espouses. Even Europe, which has a natural breadbasket, recently scrapped the Farm To Fork initiative that Kennedy wants to try here. It cannot work without ruining the poor.
Who will it help? Only trial lawyers, like Kennedy and his friends at NRDC.
Kennedy is not for public health, he is simply against science, just like he was when he was the prize attorney at NRDC and such a Democratic party insider President-Elect Obama floated him to run EPA. His ideas about food are as wrong as his claims that wi-fi causes "leaky brain; so goofy that once upon a time Republicans had to pay people to start rumors that Democrats believed this stuff.
NOTE:
(1) It is the same issue academia faces with intolerance when it comes to hiring committees. Republicans only wish they had the representation that Native Americans and people with disabilities have when it comes to faculty.
Comments