(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- Most Americans don’t know about the complex and, by many accounts, unfair system that puts chicken on their plates—but President Barack Obama did, even if he never managed to change it.
The chicken industry isn’t a particularly nice one, and one part of that is how it treats the farmers doing the work of raising all those birds. The farmers have to compete against one another in what’s known as a “tournament” system to raise the most fowl, by weight, on the least feed. The two most important factors—the chicks and the feed—are supplied by the company, whether it be Tyson Foods, Sanderson Farms, Perdue Farms or others. So, some say, a farmer’s fate is foretold before he or she does any animal husbandry at all.
When you come out at the top of the competition, you do OK, or even well. When you lose, you don’t: A farmer can do all the work of raising a flock of chickens and end up in the red, because the payment doesn’t cover the cost of the labor, the mortgage, electricity and any of the other outlays required. Complain, Obama learned, and the company could cut you off, driving your finances completely into the ground. It’s all part of what makes it possible to buy chicken at a fraction of the price of tofu. (“The vast majority of chicken farmers in rural America are happy,” the National Chicken Council said in 2016, “and they don’t want the government meddling on their farms.”)
Obama tried to make it easier for farmers to sue the chicken companies if they thought they were getting a raw deal and even to change the tournament system itself. But he moved slowly, really slowly—sometimes not moving at all. And in 2016—four years after current Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan wrote about his failures in “Obama’s Game of Chicken,” for Washington Monthly, and eight years after he was elected—Donald Trump beat Obama’s putative successor, Hillary Clinton, with a lot of help from the very farmers who would have benefited from the Obama rules. (Obama declined to comment.)
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Obama left office before they were finalized, but farmers thought Trump would take their side. “Big Meat doesn’t want it to happen,” a former poultry farmer who wanted the rules but voted for Trump told me in January that year. “People down here are expecting Trump to pull it off,” she said.
He didn’t. That October his US Department of Agriculture took industry’s side and killed the Obama rules, putting another nail in the coffin of his presidency’s half-hearted attempts to capitalize on a growing movement of Americans who wanted to change the way the country’s food is produced.
The first Trump administration knocked down other Obama-era efforts to fix the country’s food system, too, such as removing a ban on pesticides linked to declining bee populations and, most famously, softening Michelle Obama’s healthy school lunch standards. (“I wouldn’t be as big as I am today without chocolate milk,” Sonny Perdue said in his first days on the job as Trump’s Agriculture Department secretary.) Rather than fight the meat companies, Trump let them author a Covid-19 executive order to keep meatpacking plants open.
The Obama school food changes weren’t entirely undone and are still widely considered by public-health advocates to represent a major step in the right direction. Other important Obama-era laws have also stuck, such as the ban on artificial trans fat and the Food Safety Modernization Act. But all these changes are still relatively peripheral to our nation’s broken food system and never took center stage in Democratic campaigning. There was never any comprehensive Obama-era “food policy” to speak of—despite growing consumer demand for organic, healthier foods and a chorus of experts pointing out how mass-produced junk food, America’s health issues, regular foodborne disease outbreaks, struggling farmers, hunger, a broken immigration system, abused animals, a polluted environment and a warming climate are all interrelated problems.
Biden’s administration has its own track record on food policy: It further improved school nutrition standards, and expanded access to free school meals—something that got a brief bit of attention because of Governor Tim Walz’s support for the policy. There was a summit on hunger, nutrition and health in 2022, and “food is medicine” in January of this year. The USDA picked up the torch on the chicken rules and the Department of Justice did reach a settlement with some chicken producers to reform it that could portend bigger industry changes eventually. But they didn't finish the job; the system is now more transparent but still essentially intact.
These are real achievements, if sometimes incomplete ones. But the laundry list makes it all the more stunning that neither the party nor any Democratic presidential candidate ever dared call for a bold remake of food and agriculture writ large—not Obama, Clinton, Biden or Vice President Kamala Harris in her run.
Now Trump—who actually campaigned at a McDonald’s—has. In his post on X announcing the nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as secretary of Health and Human Services, Trump wrote that Kennedy would end the dominion of the “industrial food complex” and protect Americans from all the “harmful chemicals, pollutants, pesticides, pharmaceutical products, and food additives that have contributed to the overwhelming Health Crisis in this Country.”
If approved by the Senate, Kennedy would oversee agencies including the Food and Drug Administration to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. While his most dangerous views, such as opposition to vaccines and fluoridated water, have gotten the most attention, his plans for reforming the food system, according to what he’s said during the campaign, are as ambitious as Trump describes them. He wants to get ultraprocessed foods out of schools, artificial dyes out of cereals and pesticides out of agriculture. He’s advocating for the kind of changes that usually come from the left. That’s less surprising when you realize Kennedy was once not just a Democrat but also an environmental lawyer who sued Monsanto Co.
So, are these changes really possible?
Kind of. Maybe. Over time, with a lot of money, a blind eye to undocumented agricultural workers, some serious interagency cooperation and a real willingness to anger major corporate interests, perhaps. Taking artificial dyes out of cereals should be easy enough—you can already buy them that way overseas. But removing ultraprocessed foods from schools? That will take a massive initial capital investment to equip schools to do their own cooking, and then continued financial support for the higher costs of ingredients and the salaries of the people who make the food. Taking pesticides out of agriculture sounds wonderful. But in a country that depends on less than 2% of the population to grow the food that feeds more than 300 million, pesticides are part of what allow farmers to cultivate acres and acres of identical rows of crops with little human intervention. Getting rid of pesticides, or even dramatically reducing them, means a lot more work for a lot more people, many of whom the Trump administration is planning to deport en masse. (The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment.)
But neither Trump nor Kennedy—who dined on McDonald's together aboard Trump’s private jet over the weekend—appears overly concerned with these complexities and policy contradictions. In an October video supporting the Trump campaign, Kennedy stands in front of the USDA building and recites the same talking points I’ve been hearing from left-leaning advocates for as long as I can remember, and he does it without mentioning any of his more troubling views: The food industry is destroying small farms, soil health and the health of consumers. The dietary guidelines have been “hijacked” by conflicts and corporate interests, propping up ultraprocessed foods and ruining everything else. A Trump administration, he says, would fix it all.
“Show me a movement,” President Obama told chef and activist Dan Barber the night before his first inauguration, when the two talked about fixing the food system, according to Michael Pollan in the New York Times in 2016. “The food movement still barely exists as a political force in Washington,” Pollan concluded.
Fifteen years later, “Make America Healthy Again,” the Kennedy strand of MAGA-ism, was born—and whether Trump really wants to go up against the makers of the foods he’s so fond of while his new appointee tries to break the system that props them up, it is, in some ways, too late. That message the Democrats neglected to seize on all these years has already been recast to help get him elected.Read next: The Future of Junk Food Could Be Healthy Food
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