From Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again” to Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move!” campaign, America is in the midst of a food and nutrition policy awakening. Why are diet-related disease rates so high in the U.S.? What are the potential solutions? What does the science say? Award-winning journalist Helena Bottemiller Evich cuts through the noise to help us understand what’s really happening with our food system and our plates.
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Media roundtable: MAHA meets the midterms with Liz Essley Whyte, Chelsea Cirruzzo, and Marcia Brown
Episode 18
Wednesday, September 30, 2026 • Duration 43:04
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:
– Why HHS moved $12 million out of the Office of Minority Health as Secretary Kennedy's security costs climbed from $10 million to $17 million
– Zach Lahn, the anti-Big Ag Republican running for Iowa governor, and his relationship with Kennedy
– Whether MAHA can deliver votes in the midterms after falling short on parts of its national agenda
– USDA winding down its cyclospora research during one of the largest outbreaks in recent history, and why "boring" ag research matters
– What FDA nominee Heidi Overton, new HHS leadership, and Trump's renewed vaccine push mean
– Where MAHA finds a political home next, as some Democrats start courting it
– New "real food" stocking standards for SNAP retailers, and what they could mean for where people can use their SNAP benefits
Check out Forked, the food politics podcast Helena co-hosts with the Food & Environment Reporting Network.
Credits: This episode was edited by Adrienne Cruz. Original music by David Bottemiller.
The decade-long fight to get SNAP online with Nick Green
Episode 17
Wednesday, September 16, 2026 • Duration 52:01
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 Foods-meets-Costco of e-commerce. Thrive Market was also an early advocate of piloting SNAP EBT benefits for online grocery purchases, pioneering a decade-long fight to take the policy nationwide.
Nick Green is a co-founder and CEO of Thrive Market. We talk about that long SNAP fight, what's happening to enrollment right now as millions of households drop off the program, and Nick's case for why the market might be a faster route to change compared to policymaking.
Highlights:
The nearly decade-long fight to get SNAP EBT accepted online
What the GOP reconciliation package changes for SNAP beneficiaries and states
Why Thrive bans more than 1,000 ingredients
How the company thinks about glyphosate, additives, and the murky definition of "ultra-processed."
Where Nick thinks the private market can move faster than government on food dye and additive rules
What the cyclospora outbreak tells us about food safety in America, with Bill Marler
Episode 16
Wednesday, September 2, 2026 • Duration 51:52
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, we sat down with Bill Marler, widely considered the top food safety plaintiff's attorney in the country (and a thorn in the food industry’s side). Marler is also the founder of Food Safety News (where Helena used to work pre-2013) and is an outspoken advocate for stronger food safety regulations in the U.S.
Marler's read on the current moment isn't exactly what you'd expect from an outspoken, left-leaning lawyer who spends his days suing food companies: he blames not just this administration, but more so Congress's decades-long unwillingness to stay on top of food safety policy and the funding needed to make real reform a reality.
Highlights:
– Roughly 32,000 people (by state counts) have been sickened by cyclospora this summer, and CDC estimates suggest the real number could be dramatically higher
– Why the CEO of Taylor Farms is calling Bill Marler these days
– Why cyclospora is so much harder to trace than E. coli or Salmonella
– Marler connects the dots between the FDA's delayed food traceability rule, agency staffing cuts, and how long it took to identify Taylor Farms as the source
– Fifty infants were hospitalized for botulism linked to contaminated infant formula last November, and it still hasn't gotten a single congressional hearing
– Helena and Bill's takes on personal risk: how they each shop for produce
Where to find Bill Marler:
What's on the tray in America's prisons with Daniel Rosen and Leslie Soble
Episode 15
Wednesday, August 19, 2026 • Duration 49:18
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 food.
Daniel Rosen co-founded the Carceral Nutrition Project after six years incarcerated in Virginia and Washington, D.C. Leslie Soble is a folklorist and ethnographer whose research became Eating Behind Bars: Ending the Hidden Punishment of Food in Prison, which just won a James Beard Award (Soble is also a founding board member of the Carceral Nutrition Project).
Together, Rosen and Soble lay out what's actually on the tray, who's profiting from it, and why the whole "you did the crime, you do the time" doesn't actually make sense when you consider how to feed incarcerated people.
Highlights:
Prison and jail systems spend $1.50 to $2 a day feeding someone, a fraction of what the federal school lunch reimbursement covers
The wild imbalance between healthcare and food spending in correctional facilities
How privatization works (about a third of prison food service is outsourced)
The science connecting better nutrition to lower violence in correctional facilities
What the Trump administration is/isn’t doing to reform prison food
What national standards for prison food could actually look like
Lessons from a 13-year old lobbying for gluten labeling, with Jon and Jax Bari
Episode 14
Wednesday, July 22, 2026 • Duration 49:48
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, founded the non-profit Celiac Journey, and have spent the past several years lobbying both the Biden and Trump administrations. They’ve filed a citizen petition with the FDA, met with lawmakers, and even cornered the FDA commissioner in an elevator — all in pursuit of one specific ask: add gluten to the FDA's list of major food allergens.
Highlights:
– Jax's advocacy started with a second-grade persuasive-letter assignment addressed to David Muir, which turned into national ABC News coverage and a White House invitation.
– The FDA's January 2026 request for information on gluten labeling drew more than 6,000 public comments, with about 99.5% in support.
– Per Jon Bari: The opposition includes the Consumer Brands Association and, more surprisingly, the Celiac Disease Foundation itself, which is funded by General Mills, the largest oat seller in the U.S.
– Three possible paths forward are now on the table: Secretary Kennedy's existing rulemaking authority, a potential executive order, or new legislation, including the bipartisan Faster Act and the separately introduced Celiac Safety Act.
Inside the race to understand America’s growing food allergy epidemic with Ilana Golant
Episode 13
Wednesday, July 8, 2026 • Duration 45:12
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 common, so why are they being funded like a rare disease? Food Allergy Fund advocates for more federal research funding and also directly funds microbiome research, drug repurposing trials, and work to develop new AI diagnostic tools for allergy testing, among other research.
Ilana didn't come to this work through a traditional public health career path — she came to it as a mom and also as a patient with food allergies.
Highlights:
– Why 75 percent of food allergy kids under 12 now have multiple food allergies, and what happened to "the peanut-allergic kid"
– The funding gap between food allergies and comparable chronic diseases, broken down per patient
– What early allergen introduction did and didn't do to change allergy rates for children
– Inside the Food Allergy Fund's drug repurposing program and cutting edge microbiome research
– Why so many food allergy clinical trials are now running in Australia instead of the U.S.
– The growing problem of unlabeled allergens hiding in medications
– How the sesame labeling law backfired, and ended up putting sesame in more foods, not fewer
– Alpha-gal syndrome, ticks creeping into city parks, and the rise of adult-onset food allergies
Why millions of people are dropping from SNAP and what comes next, with Gina Plata-Nino
Episode 12
Wednesday, June 24, 2026 • Duration 49:49
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 administration has stopped measuring food insecurity rates. New data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York indicates hunger levels are higher today than at the peak of the pandemic.
Gina came to this work from the ground up — through legal aid in Massachusetts, representing clients who couldn't navigate a benefits system so complex it sometimes requires a lawyer to navigate it. She ultimately landed as a senior advisor in the Biden White House where she helped build the national strategy on hunger, nutrition, and health. Now she's at FRAC, fighting to protect access to SNAP, a program that helps feed nearly 37 million people.
Highlights:
– Who uses SNAP, and what the program's average recipient earns per month
– The reconciliation law passed last July (the biggest cuts to SNAP in history) and how states are scrambling to prepare
– Why Arizona's SNAP participation has dropped nearly 50%
– Why some states may stop running SNAP entirely
– What the FNS relocation to regional hubs — now renamed the Food and Nutrition Administration — means for the 16 nutrition programs that serve one in four Americans
– SNAP restrictions: how half the states now have waivers to ban certain products, and why FRAC believes the evaluations are inadequate
– New York Fed data showing hunger now exceeds pandemic-era levels, and why USDA's decision to stop measuring food insecurity makes this even more alarming
Media roundtable: Covering MAHA with Tal Kopan, Deena Shanker, and Lisa Held
Episode 11
Wednesday, June 10, 2026 • Duration 01:08:56
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 a four-part investigative series on what USDA cuts have meant for small farms and local food systems.
We go behind the scenes on what it’s like to cover MAHA in this moment — and what comes next.
Highlights:
– How food dyes became the issue that pulled MAHA into the mainstream
– The political and financial infrastructure being built behind MAHA, and what it suggests about Kennedy's long-term ambitions
– Why MAHA's vision for school meals is running headlong into the administration's own budget cuts
– What USDA's cuts to local food programs mean for small farms, and why those cuts are seen as anti-MAHA
– The tension between MAHA as a federal policy driver versus MAHA as a growing grassroots movement at the state level
– What reporters are watching next: Iowa's governor's race, Vani Hari's next political move, and whether MAHA survives its own contradictions
Meet the billionaire trying to clean up the food supply: Todd Wagner.
Episode 10
Wednesday, May 27, 2026 • Duration 01:00:49
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. Since then, Wagner and his team have played an integral role in passing historic state food additive bans and are also pressing Washington to revamp food additive oversight nationwide. In this conversation, Wagner shares some behind-the-scenes details from meeting with California Gov. Gavin Newsom and HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
He sees the fight against ultra-processed foods as similar to the fight against Big Tobacco: long, messy, and ultimately winnable.
Highlights:
– The inside story of urging Governor Newsom to sign the California Food Safety Act
– What GRAS actually is, why Wagner calls it the linchpin of America's food crisis, and why no other country has an equivalent
– The fight over New York's GRAS disclosure bill and what it would actually require of food companies
– Why Wagner thinks the Big Tobacco playbook maps almost perfectly onto ultra-processed foods
– Using AI to triage tens of thousands of food chemicals for post-market safety review
– Front-of-pack labeling, the black octagon, and why warning labels matter even if they can't fix everything
– The "real cost" of a can of Coke: subsidies, SNAP, downstream healthcare, and margin-stacking against smaller, healthier brands
Where to find Todd Wagner:
What Big Food wants in the ultra-processed foods debate, with Rocco Renaldi
Episode 9
Wednesday, May 13, 2026 • Duration 45:20
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 on these debates that we don’t hear as much stateside.
Highlights:
– Why the industry sees the UPF debate as a threat to the work already done on product reformulation
– What the science does and doesn't tell us about processing as a health risk
– Whether a workable, science-based UPF definition is even possible, and who's likely to define it first
– How voluntary commitments like global trans fat elimination and salt reduction are going
– What MAHA and RFK Jr.'s rhetoric look like from Brussels
– GLP-1 drugs as a market force versus warning labels as a policy tool
Gesch et al. (2002) Gesch, C.B., Hammond, S.M., Hampson, S.E., Eves, A., & Crowder, M.J. "Influence of supplementary vitamins, minerals and essential fatty acids on the antisocial behaviour of young adult prisoners." British Journal of Psychiatry, 181, 22–28. https://doi.org/10.1192/bjp.181.1.22
Zaalberg et al. (2010) Zaalberg, A., Nijman, H., Bulten, E., Stroosma, L., & van der Staak, C. "Effects of nutritional supplements on aggression, rule-breaking, and psychopathology among young adult prisoners." Aggressive Behavior, 36(2), 117–126. https://doi.org/10.1002/ab.20335
Schoenthaler & Bier (2000) Schoenthaler, S.J., & Bier, I.D. "The effect of vitamin-mineral supplementation on juvenile delinquency among American schoolchildren." Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, 6(1), 7–17. https://doi.org/10.1089/acm.2000.6.7
Schoenthaler sugar studies (1980s) Schoenthaler, S.J. (1983). "The Alabama Diet-Behavior Program." International Journal of Biosocial Research, 5(2), 79–87. (Pre-DOI era; search via Google Scholar)
Check out Forked, the food politics podcast Helena co-hosts with the Food & Environment Reporting Network.
Credits: This episode was edited by Adrienne Cruz. Original music by David Bottemiller.
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