Earlier this month, the wellness entrepreneur Calley Means delivered opening remarks at a symposium called “The Future of Farming: Exploring a Pro-Health, Pro-Farmer Agenda,” held in Washington, D.C., at the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank. Means is prominent in Make America Healthy Again, the clean-eating, vaccine-skeptical movement that opposes corruption in the food, pharmaceutical, and agricultural industries. He is also a top adviser to MAHA’s patron saint, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., now the Secretary of Health and Human Services. Means gave a brief, somewhat flustered speech that barely touched on farming. Instead, he rehashed various MAHA talking points: that the United States is “the sickest country in the world,” that we spend more money on worse health outcomes than any other developed nation, and that most of the diseases plaguing Americans are caused by the terrible ultra-processed food we eat.
Means also noted some “initial wins” on the food front during Kennedy’s first six months of leading H.H.S. A growing number of Big Food corporations are voluntarily removing artificial dyes from their products, for example. And a dozen states and counting have placed various restrictions on Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits to prohibit the purchase of soda, other sweetened beverages, and candy.
What Means didn’t address is how these relatively minor changes balance out against other, far more sweeping and consequential anti-MAHA measures taken by the ostensibly pro-MAHA Trump Administration. The Environmental Protection Agency, for instance, is seeking reapproval for banned pesticides and has lowered standards on forever chemicals in air, water, and soil. The Department of Agriculture ended two programs, totalling almost a billion dollars in funding, that helped schools and food banks make purchases from local and organic farms. And although Means—who has no medical, nutrition, or public-health credentials—has said that he’d like to “fire every single nutrition scientist in the government,” some of the more moderate MAHA rank and file may also blanch at the DOGE-driven purging of U.S.D.A. scientists and food-safety inspectors, or at the National Institutes of Health cancelling hundreds of millions of dollars in research grants related to MAHA priorities such as nutrition, chronic disease, and mental health.
Means acknowledged that some MAHA adherents may be dismayed by the “pace of political change” thus far under the second Trump Administration. “I would suggest, as we’re frustrated, we don’t attack Secretary Kennedy and President Trump,” he advised. “They are fighting against a deep state that is unimaginable and entrenched economic interests and entrenched dysfunction that is impossible to comprehend, and they are our warriors here.” And yet, despite the shadowy forces aligned against the nation’s top health official and the President of the United States, the underdogs, he insisted, are winning: “We have achieved—the Trump Administration—I believe, the most significant food-policy reform in America.”
Critics of the MAHA movement, and of wellness culture writ large, often compare it to a cult, and this kind of rhetoric suggests why. The leader should not be criticized; a vast conspiracy threatens the movement; triumph is ongoing, even if the movement’s crusade against dangerous pesticides and heavy metals in the soil and drinking water has culminated in the election of a President who apparently loves all that stuff. The “MAHA moms,” who helped return Trump to the White House and lifted Kennedy into a Cabinet position, see a kind of messianic power in the Secretary—for some of them, he is, quite literally, their faith healer. “If Kennedy is able to do what he wants to do as the head of the H.H.S., we won’t even need health care,” Zen Honeycutt, the founder of the nonprofit Moms Across America, said in December. “I’m saying we won’t be going to the doctor’s because we won’t be sick.”
In recent weeks, however, the MAHA flock has experienced rapidly intensifying cognitive dissonance. On a recent episode of the podcast “Why Should I Trust You?,” Honeycutt, discussing the rollbacks on regulations concerning pesticides and heavy metals, said, “I’m horrified as a mother who is working constantly to try to reduce the toxic exposure to my children and to the children all across the country.” On another podcast, “Culture Apothecary,” its host, Alex Clark, an influencer who is affiliated with the conservative nonprofit Turning Point USA, asked, “Did President Trump just hand legal immunity to pesticide companies?” She was referring to Republican-backed legislation, currently pending in the House, that would shield pesticide manufacturers from lawsuits; Clark’s guest, the clean-farming advocate Kelly Ryerson, called the bill “the most enormous slap in the face to MAHA.”
It was probably not the last. On August 15th, the Times obtained a draft of a forthcoming White House report on children’s health, “Make Our Children Healthy Again Strategy,” later published in full by Politico. The paper—a follow-up to a MAHA “assessment,” released in May, that was later found to have numerous made-up or garbled citations—mentions the scourge of ultra-processed foods only once, specifies virtually no concrete action on improving food safety and nutrition, and calls the E.P.A.’s existing regulatory process “robust.” The draft reads like a castration-by-bureaucracy of the MAHA revolution—multiple instances of “task force,” “initiative,” “framework,” “collaboration,” and, best of all, “harmonizing authorization processes.” Again and again, it proposes that more research is needed—just not the research that was under way before Kennedy came to H.H.S. (The new MAHA report repeats Kennedy’s vow that he will soon find the “root causes of autism”; according to ProPublica, the N.I.H. has terminated some forty million dollars in grants for autism-related research, including studies on the possible links between autism and exposure to pollution and forever chemicals.)
But the appeal of Kennedy was that he’d already done his own research, and that his conclusions were beyond doubt. “Pesticides, food additives, pharmaceutical drugs, and toxic waste permeate every cell of our bodies,” he said last year. “This assault on our children’s cells and hormones is unrelenting.” He promised a counter-assault, and the MAHA strategy report resembles an instrument of surrender.
During the 2024 election cycle, the top five PACs affiliated with agribusiness companies made more than seventy-one million dollars in campaign donations, almost all of which went to Republican candidates and groups. Trump’s 2024 reëlection PAC received ten million dollars from the multinational conglomerate British American Tobacco, which farms an especially polluting, soil-depleting, and pesticide-intensive crop, and which has been sued for profiting from child labor. (The case is pending trial.)
The simple political fact is that these corporate donors are more important to Trump than MAHA moms are. “If the Trump Administration went after agriculture and food companies, the ripple effects throughout Republican House districts, in particular, will be pretty major,” Christopher Bosso, a professor of public policy and political science at Northeastern University, told me. Republicans, he added, will likely have to wage their midterm campaigns without the support of a newly irate and activated MAHA coalition. “I doubt that MAHA has staying power within the Trump ecosystem,” Bosso said. “Unless Trump wants to expend serious political capital against one of his most loyal constituencies, I can’t see reforming the food system getting very far beyond the on-the-margins, performative kind of stuff.”
The most prominent of these marginal reforms has been the removal of some dyes from mass-produced foods, a development that Honeycutt, Ryerson, and other MAHA influencers have loudly celebrated. But “even if a Nutri-Grain bar doesn’t have food dyes, it’s still a Nutri-Grain bar,” Juliana Cohen, a professor of nutrition and director of the Center for Health Innovation, Research, and Policy at Merrimack College, told me. “It’s not like it’s no longer ultra-processed because they took out the Red 40.” (And, in any case, no self-respecting MAHA mom would let her kid anywhere near a Nutri-Grain bar in the first place.)
Swapping out one dye for another, Cohen went on, “is akin to placing a filter on a cigarette, when we should be thinking about policies that prevent kids from smoking in the first place. We have to think strategically about how to reduce ultra-processed foods and make nutritious foods more accessible and affordable for everyone.” One way not to do that—to take yet another example from this Administration—would be to end the Patrick Leahy Farm to School Grant Program, which started during President Barack Obama’s second term and came to a close in March, when the U.S.D.A. abolished it.
On “Culture Apothecary,” Ryerson speculated that Republican indifference to MAHA will hurt them in the 2026 midterm elections. “They are completely underestimating what this bloc of young conservatives want and expect out of our elected officials,” she said. But it may be more accurate to say that MAHA grossly overestimated the potential transformative power of Kennedy’s appointment to H.H.S.
If MAHA influencers are finally waking up to elected Republicans’ contempt for much of their project, they are also emphatic that they do not see Kennedy as complicit or culpable in how Congress, Trump, or other Cabinet officials have betrayed their promises to the movement. It’s as if Kennedy alone had been vaccinated against the corrupting virus that infects everyone around him. (Kennedy has undeniably delivered on behalf of MAHA’s anti-vaccine constituency, through acts such as dismissing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s entire vaccine-safety panel and scrapping half a billion dollars in funding for mRNA vaccine development.)
The moral firewall around Kennedy is illustrated by the case of glyphosate, an herbicide so singularly reviled by MAHA that, on social media, Ryerson goes by the Glyphosate Girl. Glyphosate is often categorized as carcinogenic and as an endocrine-disrupting chemical; for years, Kennedy contended that it causes non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and, in 2018, he was part of the legal team that won a two-hundred-and-eighty-nine-million-dollar settlement from Monsanto on behalf of a terminally ill man who was exposed to glyphosate in one of its products. Yet, in May, Kennedy indicated that the Administration would not move to restrict glyphosate in the U.S. “One hundred per cent of corn in this country relies on glyphosate,” he said. “We are not going to do anything to jeopardize that business model.” Few in MAHA appeared to raise any strong objections.
Of course, it’s the E.P.A. that decides how pesticides are regulated; it’s the U.S.D.A., now overseen by the self-proclaimed MAHA mom Brooke Rollins, that administers farm-to-school grants, soil-health initiatives, and other MAHA-friendly programs that have been pulverized during her brief tenure at the agency. These distinctions did not seem to matter much at the time Kennedy was nominated to lead H.H.S.—back when leading supporters, such as Vani Hari, a.k.a. the Food Babe, were suggesting that Kennedy could single-handedly reform and purify America’s food systems—but they appear to matter now. On “Why Should I Trust You?,” when Honeycutt expressed horror at MAHA’s fate under Trump, she took pains not to project that horror at Kennedy. Her belief in what she calls “the magic of Bobby Kennedy” is undimmed: “He is compassionate, he’s brilliant, he’s humble, and he’s collaborative.”
He is also, within the current MAHA narrative, surprisingly powerless on many issues. On August 16th, the nonprofit MAHA Action posted an upbeat news roundup to Instagram with the caption “Maha had some huge wins this week and we’re here to break it all down.” One of these supposed victories—that the government is “no longer bribing hospitals” to vaccinate their staff—appeared to be misstated; in fact, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services simply revoked a rule requiring hospitals to track COVID-19 vaccination rates among their workers. Among the other “wins,” according to MAHA Action: U.S. Customs officials seized three tons of suspicious meat from China, and Secretary Kennedy went to the gym. ♦
