One of the toughest tension points in the incoming GOP trifecta could be the Republican identity crisis when it comes to food. A growing number of Republicans who for decades have been staunch allies of the corporations who create and market what we eat are starting to feel like it’s up to them to regulate what those corporations sell.
“It’s not a fad. It’s a growing trend. People are taking their own health into their own hands. They’re learning more about nutrition, educating themselves,” Sen. Kevin Cramer of North Dakota told NOTUS. “And so my wife and my two daughters and their families, they are very into it. And they love Bob Kennedy. They love Robert Kennedy Jr.”
Days before the election, Howard Lutnick — who would go on to co-chair President-elect Trump’s transition team and become his pick for commerce secretary — told CNN that Kennedy had converted him into a vaccine-policy skeptic after a two-plus-hour conversation they had together. He also insisted then that Kennedy would not be put in charge of the Department of Health and Human Services.
Lutnick left the impression that Kennedy would be listened to in a Trump administration but his ideas would be kept at arm’s length. Then, Trump won and nominated Kennedy to run HHS.
Just how far Kennedy will be allowed to go inside a Republican trifecta remains an open question. The answer will likely come from how the GOP navigates the fight between conservatives convinced that corporations have conspired to make the nation less healthy and need to be constrained and Republicans who hate to restrain corporate power. Call it the battle between the granola conservatives and the Lunchables kind.
“There’s a lot of people that don’t realize that Congress has the ability to legislate on what’s being exposed to American consumers,” Rep. Anna Paulina Luna said. The Florida Republican has introduced bills to ban certain food dyes and high-fructose corn syrup in food. She’s about as conservative as they come, but she sounds like a Prius owner in line at Whole Foods when it comes to warnings about food regulations.
“Why is it more expensive to buy healthier food products when that simply just consists of stuff without all the extra bullshit?” she said. “You look at stuff that’s, you know, in Europe or in Japan or in even Australia, and then you look at the American version and it’s gross what they put in our food.”
The crunchy conservative has been around for a long time: The kind of off-the-grid, grow-your-own-food, keep-your-hands-off-my-guns type that has embodied a right-wing fringe for eons. But Luna represents a new kind of crunchiness that has spread to younger and on-the-grid audiences in recent years through conservative media. Alex Clark, a popular influencer associated with the pro-MAGA Turning Point USA, told The Washington Post last month that she shifted her focus to healthy living (and some unproven theories) during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“The fact that the general public has now, via, thanks to RFK and Trump, a totally different focus on these issues is why it’s becoming more and more important,” Libertarian influencer Simon Goddek, who has been talking about the dangers of high-fructose corn syrup for years, told NOTUS. “It’s like a great awakening regarding seed oil.”
Multibillion-dollar industries have long counted Republicans as their allies in fights over new regulations. When Michelle Obama in 2014 called on banning junk-food marketing from schools and questioned the healthiness of high-fructose corn syrup, industry linked with the GOP pushed back and conservative commentators railed against her, claiming she was for taking away Americans’ freedoms. Years later, when progressives pushed for increasing access to healthy food as part of the Green New Deal, Democrats were met with the same barrage of attacks.
These same forces haven’t publicly pushed back on the Lunas of the world yet. Trade groups representing numerous parts of the food industry currently under the granola-conservative microscope — from soy to seed oils to corn to snack foods — either didn’t respond to NOTUS’ requests for comment or declined to participate.
“I think we will sit this story out,” one agriculture-related lobbyist responded.
Though when NOTUS asked another lobbyist from an unrelated industry with deep GOP ties about the granola-Lunchables debate inside the party, they said never count out the abilities of the processed-food or pharmaceuticals industries to get what they want in Washington.
Early signs suggest the war on processed food might be refashioned by conservatives as a war on government spending, namely on programs that may help poor people buy food conservatives increasingly say is bad for them. A super PAC that emerged from Kennedy’s presidential run recently posted a video of Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders calling on the future Trump administration to ban SNAP benefits being used on “soda, candy and dessert.”
G. William Hoagland lost his job as a young budget staffer in the Reagan administration after he became the face of a cost-cutting plan that let schools count condiments in lunches toward the vegetable serving required by law. He later became an advocate for more nutritious and expanded (and expensive) school lunch programs, which put him at odds with his old colleagues. Now more and more Republicans sound like him when it comes to food policy.
“It’s weird,” Hoagland told NOTUS. The MAGA populist movement’s skepticism toward corporate America mixed with Kennedy’s stances has resulted in “something somewhat interesting and strange in terms of political bedfellows that are being created.”
He’s in favor of the policy shift, but the budget hawk in him warns against some of the promises conservatives are making about reducing government spending through granola policy. “The type of budgeting that we do in this town tends to be focused on a shorter time frame than what I think the benefits might produce,” he said. He also worries that Trump’s promised tariffs could make vegetables more expensive just as conservatives are talking about pushing people to eat them.
“There’s a lot of complications here with the proposals as I see them, and some inconsistencies,” he said. But overall, “there’s a, I won’t say seismic, but there’s certainly a shift in the plates out there as it relates to nutrition and ag policy.”
There is a great deal of political power, of course, among farmers and food producers. They are regularly united against nutrition advocates in debates about the use of chemicals and other aspects of large-scale production. But even some farm state Republicans like Cramer and others are sounding granola these days.
“The ag industry, maybe it’s gonna have to pay more attention to what would be the best food to produce,” Sen. Mike Braun of Indiana said. “I think the farmers do a pretty decent job, whether it’s produce, whether it’s row crops. And then, it’s what you do with further processing that generally impacts quality.”
Not every Republican feels this way. “That’s where I’m looking forward to talking to RFK, because he needs to understand the realities of how we farm,” Sen. John Hoeven of North Dakota told NOTUS on Wednesday when asked about the implications of Kennedy’s views on the agricultural industry. Voters in red, rural places overwhelmingly voted for Trump, and it’s unclear how they’d react if Trump’s policies threaten their businesses — or how Trump would react to their reaction.
There is no clear idea of how much political capital the Trump administration wants to spend on Kennedy’s ideas, which he rebranded “Make America Healthy Again” after he dropped out of the presidential race and endorsed Trump. But it seems clear a significant number of conservatives are ready to embrace MAHA like they did MAGA. Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky recently joined the call to bar people from using food stamps to pay for “full-sugar soda,” which is not a new idea — just ask Michael Bloomberg — but is one that may have finally found its moment.
Is the granola conservative movement growing? NOTUS asked Paul.
“It’s hard to give a short answer to that,” he said, “but yes.”
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Evan McMorris-Santoro is a reporter at NOTUS. Ben T.N. Mause is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.