NUTRITION VS. TOXINS

I've had some wonderful conversations over the last couple of days with folks trying to organize the proper requests in this new MAHA awareness moment.  I think all of us who have championed better food and farming realize we have a momentum moment.  

                  But like church denominations, it's like herding cats to get an agenda consensus.  While RFK Jr. seems committed to addressing toxins, many of us realize it's not enough to just get the bad stuff out.  We need to get good stuff in.

                  In other words, if we took all the chemicals out of a Happy Meal, would it be nutritious?  That means you take the antibiotics out of the chicken.  You take the artificials out of the breading.  Is that enough to so change a Happy Meal that it couldn't exist?  I can see the argument that such a policy might be enough.  

                  Some foods are toxin-heavy to the point that eliminating them would simply take them out of the American marketplace.  I don't know how many food items that would be.  Surely getting the toxins out is easier than getting nutrition in.  An argument could be made that whatever has been deemed harmful in Europe should be deemed harmful in the U.S.  That would be an interesting starting point and dramatic:  it would immediately eliminate about 9,600 additives/toxins from America's food supply.

                  But that wouldn't reduce factory farmed animals.  It wouldn't eliminate poisons in vegetables.  It surely wouldn't stop chemical fertilizers and bring in compost.  Therein lies the rub.  When discussing deplorable American food, nobody knows how much of the deplorableness is due to toxins and how much is due simply to not caring about quality.

                  Historically, the USDA has never cared about quality.  The only question is quantity.  How nutritious are apples?  We don't care as long as boxes are full.  How nutritious is corn?  We don't care as long as it fills grain silos.  A broad-based caring about nutrititve quality would be a game changer.

                  What if every chicken killed in the bird flu eradication program had to lay eggs at a certain nutritional benchmark?  In other words, if your chickens were laying inferior eggs, the taxpayer won't pay you when we kiil them.  You're not making eggs worth saving anyway.  Can you imagine if in order for a corn farmer to receive crop insurance he had to submit his corn to a nutritional analysis to determine benchmark?

                  The American Beverage industry is having a fit over the notion that taxpayers should not pay $10 billion per year for Coca Cola, Dr. Pepper, and Mt. Dew through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP--formerly Food Stamps).  This is a no-brainer.  This stuff has zero nutritional value.  To make it an option in a program with "nutrition" in the title is absurd.  But this is surely low-hanging fruit as we brainstorm policy changes consistent with a MAHA agenda. And try to go beyond simple toxicity and address nutrition.

                  I don't have answers.  But if we don't figure out what questions to ask, we won't get to a policy that leverages this moment in history. So today's question has some depth to it; think it over; put some real effort into the answer.  I'm really curious:

                  If you could offer a suggestion to move the nutrition needle in policy, what would it be?