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How bad are the SNAP cuts in Trump’s One Big Beautiful Act? · REAP/SOW

• Theodore Ross: This is Forked: Food Politics in the MAHA Age. I’m Theodore Ross, the editor-in-chief of the Food & Environment Reporting Network, and I’m joined by my co-host, Helena Bottemiller Evich from Food Fix. In this episode, Helena and I talk about the one big beautiful act, its cuts to food assistance for low-income people, and why supposed Senate holdout Lisa Murkowski flipped her vote to yes. We also talk about the real reason food companies may get rid of artificial dyes and how it has less to do with RFK Jr. and more to do with new state laws — and the fact that American consumers may seem to like red M&M’s more than their nutrition. Helena, welcome back. Good to see you again and have you back here with me on Forked, where we are going to talk about all the food politics in the MAHA Age. And I just want to point out, for those of you who are not watching this on video, that there’s a really great painting behind Helena of sailors maybe getting washed overboard. I can’t quite tell what that is. Maybe you can tell us what it is. Helena Bottemiller Evich: It’s an epic, it’s just an epic ship scene. Theodore: Okay. Pretty good. Helena: I think it’s a fishing boat. Theodore: All right. Why don’t we get to it? So, as you know, every episode of Forked we start off with something that we call the double take, which is something within the food system and within food politics that is so crazy or shocking that you do a double take. And in this case, I like to think of it as the Otto von Bismarck version of the double take. Now he’s famous for saying laws are like sausages — it’s not, it’s no good to be there while they’re being made. And what that relates to is the passage of the now one big beautiful act and the flip-flop on her vote by Senator Lisa Murkowski as it relates, and the carve out, related to SNAP cuts. So maybe, Helena, you could do a better job telling people what I’m talking about with that. Helena: Yeah, so it’s kind of, I feel like we’ve kind of emerged from the Fourth of July sort of fog, the fog of Fourth of July holiday weekend. And now everyone is, like, okay, what happened with this reconciliation bill? And I think one of the things that is sparking headlines right now is this idea that there were some special carve outs in some of the SNAP provisions clearly aimed at getting Senator Lisa Murkowski on board. And she really was the critical vote here, to get the bill through. It was actually a tie, and Vice President JD Vance had to break the tie. So, really squeaked through the Senate, and then passed the House by a couple vote margin. So essentially what happened is that the original big beautiful bill, or BBB, or whatever Trump has branded it, otherwise known as the budget package or the reconciliation package. The original provision in the Senate was to force states that had higher than a 6 percent error rate to pay for a portion of SNAP benefits, and the portion would range from anywhere from 5 to 15 percent. Now, the reason this is a big deal is throughout the entire food stamp or SNAP program history, the entire history, the federal government has always picked up the whole tab for the benefits. So states and feds have always shared some of the admin costs, but the benefits are really, I mean, we’re talking about a more than a $100 billion program. This is a huge program that helps people afford groceries. So asking states to pick up some of the actual benefit costs; we’re talking about tens, sometimes hundreds of millions, even billions of dollars of additional costs on them. Anti-hunger advocates are really worried that this will make states cut people from the program or even drop out of the program altogether because they just can’t come up with the money. So this 6 percent thresh — Theodore: Let me just cut in here for a second. So, all right. So let’s just break this down for people who don’t quite know what you’re talking about. So first of all, yeah, there are the cuts to SNAP and the way it’s going to be restructured, which means that the federal government’s going to pay less and they’re going to push more costs onto the state. But these error rates, that’s a separate issue. Helena: No, no. The error rates are actually what determine how much a state will pa. That’s why it matters. So the 6 percent threshold was what was set in the bill, okay? So, and the error rate, we should explain, the error rate is like administrative mistakes. It’s not fraud. It’s like a state isn’t quite accurately determining the benefit for an individual household. And often this will happen because, you know, the household situation might have changed slightly and the paperwork wasn’t updated. So the accuracy of the benefit that they are entitled to just might be off a little bit. Sometimes they’re overpayments … Theodore: And it includes overpay. Yeah, that’s what I was going to say. Helena: It includes overpayments and underpayments. They’re mostly overpayments, but, and we’re talking the, we just got the rates for 2024. The overall average SNAP error rate was almost 11 percent in 2024. Theodore: Let’s talk about that for a second, if we can. Because if you look at these error rates over time, prior to basically the first Trump administration, the rates were on average pretty low. Mostly they were under 6 percent, this 6 percent threshold. They went up during the first Trump administration. Then they really went up during the pandemic. Then they started to slightly come back down in 2024. Do you have a sense of, what are we talking about here? What was the change? Just that many more people came on to SNAP? Helena: There’s a few things happening here. First, there was a period of time where SNAP error rates were artificially low. So states were doing some funny math to get lower error rates than they actually had, and there was a bit of a reckoning over that. That was a whole other saga. We also had the pandemic. A lot more people, you know, are on SNAP, and at the same time, states were really strapped for people to, you know, the administrators that you need, the actual staff that you need to process all this stuff. So when you get short-staffed and you have more people on the program, you’re going to have more mistakes. It’s like not, you know, rocket science. And in some cases, like Alaska’s been really, really bad there. And this is where we get to Senator Murkowski. Alaska’s error rate was almost 25 percent in 2024. Theodore: Worst in the country. Worst in the country. Helena: Worst in the country. By quite a bit. And so the 6 percent threshold was supposed to be, okay, if a state can get to below, you know, below 6 percent, they’re not going to have to pay part of the benefit. So that’s the incentive for the state, and this would be by about 2028. So the incentive in the bill is supposed to be to get states to drive down their mistakes. Now there’s some people who worry they’ll go back to doing some funny math, because there’s a huge financial incentive to get that number down. Theodore: Let’s talk about that in a second. But let’s talk about Murkowski specifically for a minute. Helena: So what they did — oh, go ahead. Theodore: Well, I was going to say. No, you go ahead. You go ahead. Helena: So the 6 percent was like the magic number, and the Senate, the Senate staff were very, like, we wanted to have a number where if states got to this number, the Feds were going to pick up a hundred percent of the benefits. So basically this cost share idea that is so controversial, that anti-hunger advocates are so worried about, that would sort of almost take it off the table, because if states could get below this number, you know, it would just be the feds would pick up a hundred percent of the SNAP benefit. So what ended up happening at the very last minute to help get Senator Murkowski’s vote is to delay that cost share provision. And they raised the bar, they raised the threshold to, I think it was like 13. There was some weird math equation, but basically … Theodore: 13.3 percent. Helena: Yeah, basically the highest error-rate states now will be delayed along with Alaska. So it created this weird two-tier system where actually the states with the worst error rates are going to get a break. And that’s because you can’t write in a reconciliation bill that only Alaska doesn’t have to do this, right? They had to create a threshold, and that’s sort of how it worked out. And so now we’re getting to the double take, we’re having these, you know, mostly Democrats saying, this is really hypocritical. If you’re actually trying to incentivize the states, this is not the way to do it. You’ve created this weird, you know, two-tier system. Theodore: You’ve set an incentive for them to increase their error rates. I also think — and this is where we talk about hypocrisy — it’s a little bit hypocritical for the Democrats, too, because we’ve seen these kinds of things from a senator like Murkowski before, right? So here you have Lisa Murkowski, she’s from Alaska. By the standards of the day, she is something of a moderate Republican.. And in the run-up to the passage of the bill, she just kept talking about how, oh, I can, I’m a no, I can’t decide. It’s an agonizing choice. All of these things about the bill. And then eventually, and this is again, the sausage, she changes her mind about this much the same way that Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema did when Biden was in office. So these things do happen, but I think it’s worth reading what Murkowski had to say when she eventually changed her vote. And she’s quoted, I think it’s in the New York Times: “Do I like this bill?” Murkowski said. “No. But I tried to take care of Alaska’s interests. But I know that in many parts of the country, there are Americans that are not going to be advantaged by this bill.” And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what’s passing for moderate as we go through these political processes at this moment. Helena: I saw a lot of heat about this on social media. People saying, like, if you have to carve out your state from a bill, if you believe that it is harmful, why are you imposing it on the rest of the country? There was a lot of that. I think there was just a lot of — ,it almost comes back to what you mentioned, that it’s normal to flip votes in the middle of the night and, you know, make these carve outs or make these compromises or these deals or whatever. But this one felt, I think, particularly craven, just because of how much attention has been on this bill and really how Democrats, I think, are pretty effectively juxtaposing, like, you know, it’s SNAP and Medicaid cuts to try to pay for some of the tax cuts, which, by the way, are not paid for. It adds $3 trillion to the debt. Theodore: To the deficit. Helena: So, yeah. Yeah, so it’s like, it’s like … Theodore: Well, let’s think about that cravenness. Let’s think about that, because if you’re in Murkowski’s shoes, I think the prologue or the context is Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, and both of them are out of politics today. Both of them stood in the way of the Democrats with the Inflation Reduction Act and got changes made to it. And they got their own sweeteners, and now they’re both out. I mean, look, I’m not a prognosticator. I don’t have a crystal ball about Lisa Murkowski’s political future, but I don’t think it’s great when you, when you do that so publicly. Helena: Well, I don’t know. You know, it only matters in Alaska, and I haven’t looked at the Alaska headlines. But they’re probably pretty clear on the fact that she did get the state a break on SNAP. But, you know, the reconciliation process, I think in general, is kind of a bad sign that we have to keep using it. Like even for the Inflation Reduction Act. I mean, it is a workaround, right, of a dysfunctional Congress. And even when we were getting, the reporters were getting briefed on the agriculture portions of the reconciliation package, the staff were even, like, we don’t like reconciliation. We don’t, we want to do a regular farm bill, which is normally where we deal with SNAP and farm policy and all this stuff. But this is what it is. This is the train that’s moving. This is what’s happening. And so I think that’s, you know, why all of this stuff got attached to it. But it is a sign of dysfunction that we’re even using reconciliation. And by the way, speaking of the Inflation Reduction Act, a number of those provisions were undone in this bill. And so again, just going back to the lack of function, and it is just really not how I think policymaking is supposed to work, where you do this huge thing and then you undo it a couple years later and you undo it by one vote or a tie. I mean, and you know, of course, reconciliation lets you do much more partisan things, which is why they were able to make the biggest cuts we’ve ever seen to SNAP and the biggest cuts we’ve ever seen to healthcare, or, you know, Medicaid specifically. Theodore: I just want to say one last thing about Murkowski, and then let’s move on to our next segment. The thing about, there was a narrative around Murkowski in the media, in the run-up to the vote, that maybe she was going to vote against this bill, right? And I think that is a genuinely false narrative. There was no chance. I mean, I don’t have any inside information. Helena: I don’t know know. Collins voted against it. Theodore: But Collins voted against it in a way that she could, right? Once Murkowski voted yes, it didn’t matter how Collins voted, right? And they’re in different circumstances. I do not think there was any meaningful chance that this bill was not going to go through. Maybe there would’ve been changes to it, but that’s the nature — when you talk about the dysfunction — that is the nature of it. It’s not necessarily using reconciliation or not using reconciliation. It’s passing legislation that is potentially unpopular nationally. Helena: It’s very unpopular. Theodore: But very popular with the base. So I just think the exact … Helena: Well, that’s an interesting question. I don’t know how popular it is with the base. I mean, the polling on this bill is quite bad for Republicans. You know, I think right now the conventional wisdom is they’re going to pay a political price for it. Some of the changes don’t kick in until, a lot of the changes, I think, don’t kick in until after the midterms, which I’m sure was, you know, sort of intentional. Theodore: Shocking, shocking event that they did it that way. Helena: Yeah, I mean, I think there is probably going to be a political price, and there often is for these big bills. I mean, I was thinking back to the Affordable Care Act, which was passed via reconciliation. And that was a really rough political time, too. I think it’s a little bit more popular in retrospect, if people know what it is. Like if you explain some of the provisions, right? Most people don’t know, what was the Affordable Care Act? But if you explain, you know, preexisting conditions or some of the expanded Medicaid, some of the pieces of it, I think they’re more popular in retrospect. Theodore: They like those, they like having health insurance. Helena: There’s a lot of, there is a lot of difficulty, I think, in messaging this stuff, especially now, when it’s so decentralized and you have to do messaging on social. I think it’s really hard to do. It’s really hard to get. Theodore: So let’s jump on to our next part. And this is our Forks and Knives segment, which is basically just a look at the status quo of what’s happening in food politics. And I think this one’s pretty obvious. The status quo is the passage of the big beautiful bill, now act. And I just want to point out before we jump into it too much, here’s this One Big Beautiful Act, right? That’s the name. It was signed by Donald Trump on July 4th, Independence Day, right? So you know, there’s a lot of stuff with people talking about Trump as playing four-dimensional chess and being highly strategic. Maybe that’s true, maybe that’s not true. But that in and of itself, that name and that time, shows you this is a guy that’s not messing around when it comes to politics. So let’s jump into it. I think it’s worth us talking — go ahead. Helena: No, I think that point is really important. It is so clear to me, and I think to a lot of people who follow this stuff, that President Trump cares a lot more about the politics than he does the policy. He’ll kind of let some of this, you know, the idea that you impose work requirements on Medicaid or SNAP, these are boilerplate Republican ideas that, you know — Paul Ryan was trying to get these through. I mean, these are old-school Republican ideas, and I think Trump himself seems to care much more about the optics of getting a big thing done, signing it on July 4th, and is much less concerned with the policy details, which is just sort of a different scenario. I think usually when presidents are trying to get these big packages done, they’re extremely into the details. That’s not what we hear from President Trump. Theodore: That’s not Trump. Yeah. Helena: That’s not, yeah. Theodore: So let’s talk about the bill itself for a second, just so we can catch up a little bit. And I don’t know if you have this at your fingertips, but do we know right now — well, first of all, we know, or we read, that this bill, the cuts to healthcare and to SNAP are the largest in history. Helena: That’s true. Theodore: This is a genuine precedent shatterer of a bill. The other thing that I wonder if you know is, what is the final tally on SNAP cuts? I mean, the number was a moving target, reconciliation. Where did it land? Helena: So I believe that it landed at $186 billion over 10. So that had come down somewhat. We were closer to $300 billion in the House version. That is over 10 years. So, you know, it’s I think maybe about a 20 percent cut-ish, that’s rough, to SNAP spending over a decade. So really significant in terms of the overall, just overall spending for SNAP. And there’s a few ways that they achieve these savings. I think the most important one is the expanding work requirements for older adults. So, I think it’s the age between 55 and 64 will now be subject to work requirements, which means you have to show that you’re working or in training or some other similar program for 20 hours a week. But really that’s like the paperwork, the admin, and every state will do that differently. What we have seen generally … Theodore: We should point out that admin, the resources for the states to do that admin is part of the cuts, so you’re adding the paperwork and you’re cutting the money from the federal government to help do the bureaucracy of it. Sorry to interrupt. Helena: Yeah, yeah. So that is part of the bill, too, which I think that’s one of the earlier provisions that kicks in. So historically states and the feds have shared 50/50 percent of the admin costs. So it’s just a split down the middle of whatever, you know, the cost to the state to administer SNAP. And this bill shifts that 75/25 onto the states. So the states are already going to have to pick up more of the cost. And that is coming at a really hard time, because a lot of states are already, you know, first of all, a lot of them have to balance their budget. So anytime you’re taking away federal money in this way, it has to come from somewhere else. Theodore: The constitution. Many states are required to balance their budget, unlike the federal government. Helena: So that is a big deal, theadmin costs. What we know about work requirements is, I think the ideal of work requirements is that they encourage work, they encourage people to, you know, if they don’t have employment, to seek employment so they can keep their Medicaid and keep their SNAP if they don’t have, in this case, I think, it’s dependents under the age of 14. So if you have kids that are under 14, if you have dependents, then you’re not subject to this. But it’s really the older people, like 55 to 64, we’re increasing the age that would be subject to work requirements. And what that means is you can only, if you aren’t working 20 hours or you can’t show that you’re working 20 hours a week, you can only get SNAP benefits for 90 days in a three-year period. So it’s a very short time period where you can get those benefits. What we know about these is that ideally, you know, I think the argument for them is they’re going to promote work. We have just not seen that play out when these are implemented. They’re really good at getting people off the program because it’s another administrative hurdle. They reduce the rolls, for sure. But we just have not seen evidence that this increases labor and participation or earnings for the folks who have been dropped. And so it’s going to reduce the cost of SNAP by cutting people from SNAP, and it’s a little bit hard to predict how many people. There’s definitely millions of people that are going to be subject to this new work requirement. There’s going to be households that lose SNAP, and there’ll be people who, you know, are still eligible but just can’t figure out how to navigate meeting the requirement. The other thing in this bill is that it actually is going to subject a lot of people who were in that 18-to-54 age bracket that right now is supposed to be subject to these 20-hour-a-week work requirements. But a lot of states have been waiving those. This bill really clamps down and makes it a lot more difficult for states to do that. So there’s going to be folks that are in that younger age bracket who have not had to deal with this, who are going to have to deal with this going forward. So a lot of administrative burden there for states, and then just a lot of people who are going to lose access to SNAP. Theodore: I just want to point out one thing. Helena: The other point you talked about earlier is the cost share. That’s the other major way that this bill saves money, because 40, I think it’s, based on the 2024 error rates, 44 states, if you were to just do this right now, 44 states would have error rates over 6 percent. So that’s a lot. And depending on how bad their error rates are, they could go from having to pick up the tab 5 percent to 15 percent. And it varies, but they don’t have that much time to get those error rates down to avoid having to pay those costs. Theodore: So it is what it seems like. It is an effort at the national, at the federal level, to kick many, many people off of the rolls of SNAP. And I just want to point out one thing, because we’re talking about … Helena: And the same work requirements will apply to Medicaid. Theodore: Right. And that’s the point I wanted to make. So we’re talking, you know, this is a food policy and food politics podcast, but you can’t separate food policy from healthcare easily. And I want to quote, this is a report from KFF, which is, I like to think of them as the artist formerly known as the Kaiser Family Foundation. And they say that the majority, 78 percent, of people who received SNAP benefits in 2022, which is the most recent data that they had, were covered by Medicaid, including 18 percent who are covered by both Medicaid and Medicare. So we’re talking about the same, really talking about, in a lot of ways, the same pool of people being cut from both directions. That’s why, and I want to toot our own horn here a little bit, Helena. Why does it matter to follow food policy and food politics? It’s because it’s at the center of everything that’s happening in this country. People tend to think of insurance, you know, healthcare maybe being more important, but they really are one and the same thing, right?. Helena: Yeah. And we have seen way more focus on Medicaid, which is, you know, I think goes back more to what you were saying. I think we just tend to think of healthcare as a more pressing thing. And I get it. It is very important to have, you know, health insurance or coverage under Medicaid. It’s huge. But the SNAP cuts are going to be really widely felt, and also, they are going to, I think, affect people more quickly in terms of just the impact of it. You may not realize that you’ve lost your Medicaid coverage until you try to go to the doctor. But the SNAP requirements changing will affect people a lot more quickly because SNAP is a monthly program. And so, you know, we’ll have to see how this all plays out. I think some states will do more to make sure that their participants and their SNAP programs can stay on the program, like helping. You know, there’s a way to design all these systems to be easier to use or harder to use. Harder to use is a great way to kick people off. I was reading about the Medicaid work requirements that were tried in a couple of states, including Georgia, and their website would just be down a lot. You know, for updates. Well, I don’t know if that was intentional — I’m not saying it was — but that’s a really good way to just — I mean, people just give up. They’re like, well, this doesn’t work. And they had to check in, like, monthly to stay on Medicaid. And so, I mean, that’s just a really big administrative, you know … Theodore: You know the cliché. Helena: I struggle to get the kids’ paperwork for school, when that’s once a year. It’s not a small thing. Theodore: You know, the cliché about the states being a laboratory for innovation, right? Like you’ve heard that before. Helena: And they are. And they are. Theodore: We’re going to find out if they really are. That is about to happen. Helena: The other thing I want to mention is that, you know, this bill also completely cuts funding for SNAP-Ed, SNAP-Education, and this is about a $500 million pot of funding for nutrition education programs. So cooking classes and different programs that help low-income families make healthier choices, learn how to cook on a budget, things like that. Theodore: Let’s talk about why that’s important. Just SNAP-Ed itself, I mean. Because I think what’s interesting about SNAP-Ed is that you have SNAP, which gives people access to food, right? They, they’re allowed to go and buy food as part of the program. But you also want to do sustainability, right? You want to create an environment where people don’t have to remain potentially on SNAP benefits permanently. And one of the ways you can do that is by teaching them and training them in how to seek better nutrition and how to cook and all the things that SNAP-Ed is supposed to do. So it is, in its own way, somewhat designed to get people off of SNAP. But through capacity building rather than through driving them out through attrition. Helena: Well, so there’s a couple of different avenue programs here. So SNAP-Ed is mostly aimed at trying to improve diet quality among SNAP participants. And that’s, you know, so that’s funding nonprofits to do, or food banks or, you know, whatever the group is to do programs like — a really classic SNAP-Education program would be, you know, SNAP participants can go to a cooking class. They learn how to cook on a budget, cook healthfully, incorporate lots of fruits and vegetables. They might learn how to cook with more frozen items or things that are more cost-effective. It’s designed to improve diet quality. And one of the reasons why this is so baffling, this cut, is that, you know, it comes amid Make America Healthy Again and this really big focus, in terms of rhetoric, from Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and so many of these, you know, advocates for MAHA. It just seems really hypocritical to cut the program that actually promotes healthier eating within SNAP. Now, it should be noted that the MAHA policy right now is much more focused on restrictions. So they are, the administration is approving, they’ve now approved six states to do certain SNAP restrictions. They’re mostly going after, like, candy and soda, so actually dropping products out of SNAP. But a lot of people who work in the food space and work in nutrition are, like, you have to work on this other piece of it, which is access and cooking and knowledge and all of that. Now critics of SNAP-Ed would say, look, it’s not working, right? The country’s really unhealthy. It’s really hard to measure if these programs are working. And so this was an easy cut, I think, for Republicans to make. There isn’t a huge constituency around SNAP-Education. Now SNAP Employment and Training, which is another SNAP-E program, SNAP E&T, is designed to do training and employment programs to help people get off of SNAP or increase their earnings. One of the big problems with SNAP E&T, though, is uneven funding capacity in the states. And so it’s one of those things that sounds good and I think has really good intentions. But when it comes, you know with so much of this — with school meals, with SNAP, with whatever — it always comes down to money, right? You can have great intentions, but if the money is not there and the resources are not there to actually do these things, then it’s sort of meaningless. And I think nutrition education would be one of them, SNAP E&T would be one of them. It’s a good question. I’m not sure what, if anything, this bill did on SNAP E&T, but that has in the past been one of the focuses of folks who really want to promote work through SNAP, like looking at SNAP E&T, right? Theodore: So why don’t we switch gears here a little bit and get into our final section, which is the good vibes, right? So this is something where something happening out there in food land is, at least in some way, a cause for optimism. And I think what we should talk about this time, there’s a lot of conversation, a lot of debate about RFK Jr. and the MAHA Commission going very hard against food companies over synthetic food dyes. But so far it’s been a lot of light but not a lot of heat coming from the federal level. And what we have seen, in fact, and what I’d like you to talk about, is what’s happening in the states and why that’s important. Helena: Yeah, so in the last couple weeks we’ve seen a ton of major food companies announce that they’re getting rid of synthetic food dyes, or they’re phasing them out. The timelines vary, but a lot of them are by the end of 2027. And the reason why the end of 2027 is interesting, it’s because in January 2028, West Virginia has a ban on the most common synthetic food dyes. And so food companies are trying to get in front of that. You can’t, the way our food system works, the way food is distributed, you cannot just make products. You cannot just make Jello and M&M’s special for West Virginia. You’ve got to do it for the whole country, because that’s just how it works. And you can’t just disobey the law in West Virginia. So a lot of these companies are scrambling to get this out by 2027. Of course, RFK Jr. is praising these companies for doing this and saying, you know, really trying to take a victory lap. But RFK Jr. and the Trump administration had actually asked these companies to take dyes out by the end of 2026. So, okay, yeah, there’s a year difference. But it really goes to show you that regulations and laws are the hammer or the carrot or the — at the end, right, that is the timeline that these companies view as real, not that they were asked to do this by the Trump administration. Not a single dye has been banned. FDA has taken no actions against these. The one thing they’ve done is they have approved a couple of alternative colors. I think they’re technically considered naturally sourced colors. There’s a couple that have been approved. Even the dyes that RFK Jr. said we are going to ban within no time at all, that are barely, have been mostly not used by food companies, those haven’t even been banned. So the feds really have not taken any action here. But a lot of it is the rhetoric, and they’re trying to put pressure on the food industry, and the food industry, what I’m seeing, is really planning to comply with West Virginia’s ban. So the states are playing a really big role here. Texas … Theodore: But it’s not that easy, right? Helena: … recently passed … Theodore: Go ahead. Helena: I was going to say Texas of all places recently passed a warning label bill where they’re actually going to mandate front-of-pack warnings on food packages or food products that contain ingredients that have been banned in other countries. So it’ll say, like, warning, it’s something like, you know, warning: this product contains something that has been deemed not great for human consumption by Europe or Australia or whatever. Texas did that. And so we’re now facing another state policy where the rest of the country’s going to have to figure out how to either comply or take this to court. I mean, there’s going to be a period of time where everyone’s going to figure out how this is going to land. But the states really are taking actions here in a bipartisan way, and yet we’ve still seen almost nothing from the feds. It’s just really interesting. Theodore: I want to talk about two things that relate to that, okay. So the first one you mentioned, you know, you’re surprised: oh look, Texas is regulating these kinds of things. And I think one of the things that’s really interesting … Helena: Regulating. Theodore: Yeah, or regulating anything, right? Yeah. One of the things, one of the things that’s interesting to me is, what is the nature of this movement politically? When we talk about the MAHA movement, we talk about RFK Jr. Oftentimes we think that it’s related, not surprisingly, to food and nutrition. But it’s not quite that simple. I was reading a report from farmdoc, this organization, they did a survey of a bunch of people about why they did or didn’t support the MAHA movement. The main thing that emerges from it is basically it is a partisan movement. The people who most likely support it, they voted for Trump. They consider themselves very, very conservative. That’s why they are, they identify with MAHA. The other thing that’s really kind of interesting about it is you drive down into it a little bit more. People are more, so people who, say, for example, go to a farmers market regularly, right? They are very supportive of MAHA and its goals. But people who work in the food system, let’s say you own a farm, right? Or used to own a farm, or have family that own a farm, or if you get benefits like SNAP, they are very much opposed to it. So when you whittle it all away and you look at why Texas is doing it, it sort of makes some sense. I mean, you know, first of all, it’s just a Trump policy. That’s it. People support Trump. Trump voters, Trump states, they support his policies. And along with it is this weird sort of bougie farmers market component about not wanting petroleum-based artificial dyes and not wanting to use seed oils, right? I mean, that’s really what we’re talking about, right? It’s power. Helena: So, yeah. I’ve taken a look at that survey, too. I think if you use the term Make America Healthy Again, that is probably a more partisan phrasing because of just … Theodore: That’s fair point. Helena: But I actually disagree. I think of the food policies within MAHA, there is incredible bipartisan support for the ideas — the vaccine stuff, not so much. Theodore: Not much. Helena: That’s really, really, it’s not even popular among Republicans. It’s, you know, it’s like low or high thirties. It’s not this overwhelmingly supported Republican position. But the food ideas — like banning synthetic food dyes, cracking down on food additives, mandating they teach nutrition in med schools, getting rid of or reducing processed foods in schools — these are like 60, 70, 80 percent approved out of both Republicans and Democrats. Theodore: Sounds good to me. When you put it like that, it sounds good to me. Helena: Yeah, but I think if you get into the food parts of it, like, what are the actual parts, it’s really popular. And I think that’s one of the reasons why they have, the Trump administration has talked more about the food stuff, because it is really popular. It’s really popular with moms and parents and low-information voters who are just, like, yeah, that sounds great. Let’s do that. Like I’m tired of being pestered about bright blue candy. Get it out. Right? I think these ideas are popular, and if you look at the states, what they’re doing is really bipartisan. I mean, in Texas it was Democrats and Republicans. Now, when you go to Washington, it is more partisan because it is so associated with the Trump administration, and Democrats so far are, they’re not really engaging on this. But some of the ideas, like cracking down on food additives or increasing oversight, I mean, those have been pushed by more progressive consumer groups and food advocates for decades, right? They’ve wanted this to happen. And so if the Trump administration actually gets something like that done, which again, questions: where is the federal policymaking? I’ve seen none of it so far. If they actually get that done, it’ll be really interesting to see how those groups respond, because these are ideas that they have been pushing for such a long time, and it’s just kind of something no one saw coming, that it might be the second, you know, the second term of the Trump administration that might have the opportunity to get it done. I was recently talking to Sam Kass about this, who ran, you know, Let’s Move! under Michelle Obama, and his quote was something like, I feel like I’m living in upside-down world. You know, it just sort of doesn’t make sense compared to where we were even a few years ago, where Republicans would’ve just carte blanche hated all this stuff or been opposed to it. Theodore: Let’s go back to the dyes for a second because one of the things that’s interesting about it is you do have this regulation at the state level taking place, but it’s not — I’m curious to hear how you think this is all going to play out, because on the one hand, it’s good to regulate this and to get rid of these dyes if you’re able to. But it’s not that easy to actually change the food products themselves. I was reading an article in the Times about today, and they were talking with a guy who is the, what did they say, the fourth-generation owner of Spangler Candy, which makes Dum-Dums, which are still out there somewhere, right? And he was saying how difficult it is to replace artificial, synthetic dyes with natural dyes. It’s going to cost more money. There’s not enough of them. And this is the part that I thought was really great. He said that there are ways with some natural ingredients, like beets, to replace the synthetic dyes, but they don’t always do that well. Sometimes they’re not good in the light and the heat. And, and this is the kicker here: They taste like beets. Is that really what we want for our candy in this country? Helena: You know, the thing about it, having covered the food industry for 15 years, is the food industry always says they can’t do things, and then they figure out a way to do it. And it’s always hard to tell, is this the one thing that they really can’t do in time? I think we’ll see. I think the bigger companies are going to figure it out. But the colors are not going to be as bright. I mean, that is true. Like, you know, I think if you look at brightly colored things like, you know, sour candies or Mike and Ikes or Red Vines or whatever, I don’t know that those are going to be as bright as they are now. And we’ll see if their consumers care. You know, in the past, consumers have cared, but it’s been because one company has done it, they took dyes out. I think General Mills was one of them, and then people complained, and they’re looking around and all the other cereals are still brightly colored. So it’ll be an interesting, I guess, experiment to see if everyone has to do it at the same time. Do consumers sort of accept this is the new reality and move forward, or is there going to be a lot of, you know, really angry TikToks about this? I don’t know. Theodore: States are the laboratory of innovation. We will see. Helena: Well, and I will say the one downside though to having states do this, and this is where you get to the idea of good government and sort of good policymaking. There is a deep concern that the more you let states do these policies, it’s going to be much more populist in the outcome, right? They’re going to do things that are popular. It’s not going to follow, like, what is the preponderance of scientific evidence? It’s not going to be, you know, if you looked at FDA or USDA, even when they would, people would get really mad at them. For better or for worse, they did have to have, they had to show their evidence. They had to have some, you know, real science behind whatever ban or, you know, even banning trans fat took a really, really long time, way too long. But they have to show a scientific docket of, like, this is why we’re banning this. This is, you know, the health effects. States don’t have to do that. They just, the legislature just votes. And, you know, the upside is it’s really quick. It’s responsive to maybe what consumers and Americans want. And maybe that’s the system we want. Maybe that is what consumers are asking for, or maybe that is a more popular way of doing things. But it is certainly a departure from what we’ve had, which is a really slow, really measured, thoughtful, you know — huge dockets, with all these studies in it. And so it does make all of this more political because of they’re political bodies, they’re legislatures that are making these decisions. And so I think we’re going to see some really popular and probably really good stuff come out of it. And then we’re going to see some really bizarre and weird and probably, we’ll probably see some bad policy, too. Theodore: Well, let’s leave it at that because that’s always the case. We’ll see. Right? We never know. I think we should wrap it up on that. Helena. Why don’t you tell everybody out there about your really cool newsletter that you publish. Helena: Yeah. So if you’re interested in these issues, I write about food policy every week. You can sign up for free at foodfixx.co or just Google Food Fix newsletter. You’ll find it. Get on the email list, and yeah, there’s so much going on right now. Never a dull moment. Everyone’s opening the email right now, right? Everyone is reading it because they’re, like, wow, there’s a lot, there’s a lot going on. All right. Theodore: Thanks a lot, Helena. We’ll talk in two weeks. Helena: Thank you. See you soon. Forked is a production of the Food & Environment Reporting Network. Our executive producers are Theodore Ross and Tom Laskawy. Our sound engineer is Lauryn Newson. Katie Gardner is the producer and video producer for Forked. Our hosts are Helena Bottemiller Evich and me, Theodore Ross. To find out more about FERN and donate to support our independent nonprofit reporting, go to www.thefern.org.