A handful of weeks ago it seemed Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Michael Pollan—two men whose work I appreciate—might meaningfully connect.
And as both are among the most well-known critics of Big Food and Big Ag, and as Big Food and Big Ag are greatly harming human beings, plants and animals, and our earth, the prospect of a connection between these two was encouraging.
Further, the prospect was encouraging as Kennedy might become the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, one of the more powerful roles in our government, and could possibly benefit from Pollan’s years of reflection on matters relevant to this role. (Michael Pollan has been called—by the journal Health Nutrition—“the most prolific and influential public intellectual, teacher, writer, and speaker in the USA on the web of topics that include the environment, agriculture, food, industry, society and nutrition.”)
Also: because our time has become so hardened by division, and as Kennedy is now associated with the red party and Pollan the blue, such a connection could help make things a bit more human.
Finally, amid the onslaught of gibbering that is the Internet, there’s a curious simultaneous gagged quality to our time, a widespread fear of straying outside the bounds of right ideas, of committing an ideological faux pas. This self-censorship has made for what sociologist Thomas Cushman vividly calls “prevention of the mind.” And to see Pollan and Kennedy reaching out to each other—albeit indirectly, and largely via social media—was to think some sort of un-prevention was underway.
I first sensed the possibility of connection while reading a piece published on November 12, 2024 in Civil Eats called “The Path Forward for Food and Ag: Leading voices in the food movement respond to a second Trump administration, and discuss where we go from here.” For this roundtable Marion Nestle, Alice Waters, Ruth Reichl, Michael Pollan, and other voices in the world of food and farming read aloud the tea leaves. A celebrated writer of lucid, carefully researched, and morally searching books, Mr. Pollan focused his words on Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:
I’ll be closely watching the development (or abandonment) of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) agenda set forth by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Leaving aside his vaccine and fluoride nuttiness, Kennedy injected into the campaign a whole set of concerns about food and health in children that resonated, especially with mothers: ultra-processed foods in school lunch; childhood cancer and chronic disease; the reliance on drugs to insure health rather than diet; the need to reform agricultural policy to improve public health. Trump picked up on this late in the campaign and promised to give RFK Jr. the authority to implement his agenda.
Trump did surprisingly well with mothers, and MAHA could well be the reason. I seriously doubt Trump will keep his promise to Kennedy—Big Food and Pharma would rebel, and surely he’s more committed to deregulation than public health. But already Joel Salatin, the regenerative farmer, has been asked to serve as an advisor in the USDA. What happens to MAHA—an issue that long ago should have belonged to the Democrats—promises to be one of the more interesting stories of the next few years.
Discounting the rudeness of “leaving aside his vaccine and fluoride nuttiness,” I found Pollan’s remarks hearteningly discerning. I was also pleased by Marion Nestle’s appreciation of Kennedy in the roundtable. (In a recent blog post the veteran food reformer writes this of Kennedy’s concerns: “These are the kinds of things I’ve been saying and writing about for decades!”) And I was pleased, if doubtingly, by what chef and restaurant-owner Alice Waters claimed. “We have a lot of enlightened politicians still in power,” said Waters. “It might not seem like it right now, but they are there, and more may be coming. I have known the farmer Joel Salatin for years and to think that he might be an advisor to the USDA is amazing.”
A couple of days after the roundtable appeared, Pollan posted an article on his X account from The Washington Post called “RFK Jr. faces battles in quest to change America’s food.” The next day Pollan posted an article from Food Fix: “Trump taps Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead HHS. Washington is freaking out.” Then a few days later he posted “They’re Lying About Robert F. Kennedy Jr.,” an essay from The American Conservative that praises Kennedy. Written by Spencer Neale, this piece is sobering: “the Food and Drug Administration allows chemicals banned in other developed countries into the American food supply to cut costs”; “ultraprocessed foods make up an estimated 73% of the American food supply”; “It has been nearly 35 years since the FDA banned the use of Red No. 3 in cosmetics after studies found it caused cancer in animals, yet the chemical still remains in the U.S. food supply.” At one point in the essay Neale states: “Kennedy is the first real challenge to the biggest game in town.”
(Neale’s piece, by the way, seems partial evidence of the political realignment many have noted. Not long ago, such a “crunchy” essay—censuring “soft drink companies” and nodding to Pollan’s “fantastic” book The Omnivore’s Dilemma, which traces the social, ethical, and environmental impact of four different meals—would’ve been improbable in a right-leaning periodical and likely would’ve appeared in The Progressive or The New York Times. Now The New York Times, reflecting the Left’s more intimate alliance with dominant and decidedly un-crunchy power structures, publishes not only Michael Pollan but pieces like Michael Grunwald’s recent “Sorry, but This Is the Future of Food,” which argues that the development of high-tech factory farming is the wisest way forward for humans and our earth.)
After Pollan posted The American Conservative essay on his X account, Kennedy posted a response to Pollan:
Thanks @michaelpollan! I’d love to work with you to restore our public health agencies to their rich tradition of gold-standard, evidence-based science and Make America Healthy Again.
For a brief moment this social media dalliance inspired passionate—delighted and biting both—attention. Many thought Pollan admirable for posting sympathetically about Kennedy. (“For a minute, I thought 1 of my thought heroes had been assimilated by the political crazies. I was wrong, or you’re breaking free and returning to your brilliantly objective self. Thank you for your previous brilliant writing and work and courage to post this.”) Others thought Pollan reprehensible. (“WTF, Pollan?!? You’re in favor of polio and measles now? These are not trivial diseases—they incapacitate and kill.”)
Three days later an interview with Pollan appeared in Politico magazine. Titled “Michael Pollan Is Not Endorsing RFK Jr.,” the piece billed itself as a “Q&A with the food reform advocate about the common ground he has with RFK Jr. — and why he does not want him to be HHS secretary.”
And this interview in Politico was seemingly done to thwart a meaningful cooperation between the two men and the overlapping yet culturally opposed constituencies they represent.
Openly pained by the attention he was receiving because of this social media dalliance, Michael Pollan—the well-known advocate of reform in our food and agriculture—seemed to beg Katelyn Fossett, senior editor at Politico magazine, to help prevent Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—the well-known advocate of reform in our food and agriculture—from contacting him.
Here is that interview’s curious, disturbing conclusion: “Are you going to publish this soon? Because I really want to stop this. I don’t want to get a phone call from RFK Jr. I want him to read and not call.”
Michael Pollan, who’d recently applauded Kennedy in a published roundtable and who’d recently posted many pieces sympathetic to Kennedy on his social media platform, now asks an editor to run an interview about Kennedy immediately so Kennedy will read the interview and learn that Pollan does not want to receive a phone call from Kennedy.
Odder yet, earlier in the interview Michael Pollan asks Politico, “Did you see him responding to my tweet?” Fossett of Politico responds, “No, I don’t think I did.” To which Pollan replies: “It was really disheartening to see.”
This is odd because Pollan had been publicly invoking Kennedy for weeks. (And Kennedy’s disheartening tweet is the one above.)
What happened here?
In light of Pollan’s decades of work (the books, articles, lectures, interviews, documentaries, and symposia) isn’t a call from Kennedy—a man who’s professedly bent on addressing two of Pollan’s biggest concerns: America’s dietary guidelines and the corrupting corporate influence in our government—a call that Pollan would be eager to answer? Couldn’t Pollan—with his years of reflection under his belt—offer Kennedy policy ideas and tactical advice? And of course such a call shouldn’t merely be pats on the back. If Pollan has criticisms of Kennedy and his plans, Pollan should share those criticisms. Such criticisms could improve Kennedy’s agenda and help Kennedy locate his blind spots.
So why did Pollan make such a show of not wanting to be in touch with Kennedy?
An online group called “Citizens MAHA” published a response to Pollan’s Politico interview on X. In “A Response to Michael Pollan’s Non-Endorsement of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.,” the writers assert that Pollan chose “optics over principles.” They also characterize the interview with Politico as a “calculated act of self-preservation.”
Another characterization might be this: when an aspiring David steps up to take on Goliath, one of Goliath’s biggest enemies tries to tie David’s shoelaces together.
After this almost-connection between Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Michael Pollan, my wife received a text message from a friend who admires both. A husband and father, Ramsey runs a local landscaping business and has set up school gardens all over central and southern California. A handful of years ago Ramsey’s work building school gardens landed him an invitation to the Obama White House. This is Ramsey’s text sent in response to the Politico interview:
Hi guys. Love you. I didn’t realize how much the Michael Pollan thing upset me until I woke up in the middle of the night thinking about it. He had a huge influence on me since I read "Botany of Desire" 22 years ago. Led me to farm, Alexis, school gardens, all of it…what I do and am passionate about. It was a highlight of my life to meet him around a garden. His work and my life’s work have kind of gone in tandem. This is a big deal and so sad and a blaring sign of what’s wrong with our society. I’m guessing immunizations do lots of good but also cause harm (where there is risk there has to be choice) and we just don’t know how to deal with this yet. I keep thinking about the time in church when the priest says peace be with you and we then shake all those neighbors’ hands. It always felt so good. Xoxo. Thanks for listening and helping me process this on a beautiful rainy Saturday morning.
I want to explore the above-mentioned immunizations—or what Pollan calls Kennedy’s “vaccine and fluoride nuttiness,” as that underlies, for many, any discussion of Kennedy and certainly underlies the Politico interview.
Of vaccines, I first want to share a few words from Wendell Berry. Wendell Berry, interestingly, is one of Michael Pollan’s heroes. In Pollan’s elegant introduction to Berry’s book Bringing It to the Table, Pollan writes: “I challenge you to find an idea or insight in my own recent writings on food and farming that isn’t prefigured (to put it charitably) in Berry’s essays on agriculture.” In that introduction Pollan also notes Berry’s capacity to “scrub the crud of received opinion from our everyday thoughtless thinking.” The following crud-scrubbing words are from Berry’s essay “Paragraphs from a Notebook”:
It has been remarkable how often science has hired out to the ready-made markets of depravity, as when it has served the military-industrial complex, which is solidly founded upon the hopeless logic of revenge, or the medical and pharmaceutical industries, which are based somewhat on the relief of suffering but also on greed, on the vicious cycles of hypochondria, and on the inducible fear of suffering yet to come....
We may say with some confidence that the most apparently beneficent products of science and industry should be held in suspicion if they are costly to consumers or bring power to governments or profits to corporations. There are, we know, scientists who are properly scrupulous, responsible, and critical, who call attention to the dangers of oversold and under-tested products, and who are almost customarily ignored….
…valid criticism [of the products of science and industry] does not deal in categorical approvals and condemnations. Valid criticism attempts a just description of our condition.
When it comes to immunizations it seems we have not yet engaged in “valid criticism.” As a country we arguably fail by categorically (and thoughtlessly) approving the vaccine program (a program which is growing). Such categorical approval doesn’t seem to be scientific or humane. Can we admit that the vaccine program casts a shadow like everything else? Robert F. Kennedy Jr., one might say, is (borrowing from the language of psychology) inviting us to “eat the shadow” with respect to this program. He is prompting us to acknowledge the rejected, hidden aspects of this complex reality. And he is one of categorical approval’s biggest threats.
To be clear, I would emphasize that we likewise fail if we categorically condemn the vaccine program. In Dick Russell’s book The Real RFK Jr., physician, author, and assistant professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School Martha R. Herbert frames the situation thus: “Many people are aware of only two black-and-white options: you are either pro-vaccine, or anti-vaccine. I ask you to consider that, at minimum, there is a third alternative: you can be pro-vaccine and at the same time seek to improve the vaccine program.”
Kennedy himself says, “People who advocate for safer vaccines should not be marginalized or denounced as anti-vaccine.”
And what is the shadowy material that is difficult for us to collectively acknowledge?
There are many troubling realities in the world of immunizations. Kennedy himself has spoken about the lack of accountability and the conflicts of interests. Right now we lack accountability because of the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, a law passed in 1986 whose purpose is to shield vaccine manufacturers from liability. Think about this. Doesn’t such a law strike you as a possible enabler of great mischief? Might such a law conduce to what Berry calls “oversold and under-tested products”? Says Kennedy of this law: “So no matter how grievous your injury or your child’s injury, no matter how toxic the ingredient, no matter how sloppy the protocols, no matter how negligent that company, you cannot sue them for redress. There is no discovery, no depositions, no medical malpractice, no class actions, zero consequences if they kill you or injure you.” Kennedy has also said: “Doesn’t it require a kind of cognitive dissonance to believe that the company that would cause 100,000 heart attacks to make a buck on Vioxx suddenly has found Jesus when it comes to vaccines, where by law they have no liability?”
One of the conflicts of interests is the “revolving door”—government employees hired from drug companies; drug company employees hired from government. (The revolving door, by the way, is something Pollan has long criticized in our food and agriculture systems.) Another conflict of interests is the FDA’s budget. Half of the FDA’s budget is provided by Big Pharma through “user fees” that Big Pharma pays to the agency to review Big Pharma’s products. Might these conflicts be a recipe for mischief, too?
Regarding fluoridation, you can read about its possible shadow in a variety of books and articles. Several Nobel Laureates (for whatever this might be worth) oppose it. Many other nations don’t allow it (93% of the population in Europe, for example, drinks water that is not fluoridated). “The Benefits and Risks of Fluoride, Explained,” a recent article from The New York Times, is one of the more damning indictments of the mass medication yet. This is another hit piece against Kennedy that—because of certain against-thesis facts that the piece includes—scuppers its own schemes. Here are a few sobering excerpts from the Times article:
The legal fluoride limit for drinking water in the United States is four milligrams per liter….
Some studies have found a link between exposure to fluoride above 0.7 milligrams per liter during pregnancy and slightly lower IQ scores in children.
In a highly publicized 2019 paper, researchers compared the IQ test scores of 512 young children in Canada to their mother’s urinary fluoride levels during pregnancy, a proxy for fluoride intake. For every increase of one milligram per liter in urinary fluoride, they saw a 4.49 point drop in IQ in boys. The researchers found no relationship with IQ in girls.
The amount of fluoride the women had consumed “is well within the normal range of what you would find in populations living in fluoridated communities,” noted Christine Till, one of the authors of that study and a clinical neuropsychologist at York University in Toronto.
Other studies have also found links between fluoride and cognition. In August, the National Toxicology Program, an arm of the federal health department, released a report reviewing the evidence to date. That report concluded that exposure to drinking water at 1.5 milligrams per liter or higher is “consistently associated” with lower IQ in children.
It can be difficult for many to consider such shadowy material. Some might say it’s difficult because of the influence of scientism (and a related descent into dogmatism). Huston Smith (back in 2000) wrote: “We have turned science into a sacred cow and are suffering the consequences idolatry exacts.” One of the consequences of that idolatry is an intellectual claustrophobia, a prevention of the mind, a diminution of the traditional scientific norms of disinterested inquiry, unfettered doubt, and the free expression of opinion. In light of this, it’s not a stretch to say that many who “believe in science” seem to be promoting a science denialism.
Looking at the vaccine question through the lens of scientism might help explain the seemingly out-of-proportion reactions the question causes. When we talk about vaccines, in other words, we are perhaps really talking about a dogma of someone’s religion. We might also remember that not long ago discussing the shadow of the vaccine program was not taboo. And if anything it was a concern of the Left.
To put the matter differently, we might say that the reason it’s difficult for many to consider such shadowy material is because it’s become radioactive. In an interview recently presidential candidate Marianne Williamson said (addressing the unwillingness of her supporters to speak up on her behalf), “What they [the media] do is they make somebody radioactive. Then people are afraid if I say something in support… I’ll be radioactive too.”
Today any sort of skepticism of the current vaccine program is radioactive. And any person who articulates any sort of skepticism is radioactive, too.
So we are afraid.
Because of my abiding appreciation for Michael Pollan, my desire to give him the benefit of the doubt, and my curiosity, I reached out to him about the Politico interview. Here is that email:
Dear Mr. Pollan,
I am writing an essay that explores, among other things, your recent interview in Politico regarding RFK Jr.
In that piece you say, “Are you going to publish this soon? Because I really want to stop this. I don’t want to get a phone call from RFK Jr. I want him to read and not call.” I wonder if you stand by those words. I ask because those words seem curious in light of your common ground with Kennedy, your years of work, and the direness of our situation. Do you really not want to receive a phone call from RFK Jr., the person who could help shape our country's dietary guidelines? Don't you think your many insights could possibly be of service to him? And if you have criticisms of Kennedy's agenda, wouldn't it be best to share them with him directly? And if you still don' t actually want to talk to Kennedy, why is that?
With thanks for your time, consideration, and work,
Teddy Macker
This was Pollan’s response:
Teddy: That comment was not part of the interview, and I was annoyed that it got included—it was something I said to the journalist after we had finished speaking, half in jest. I was being portrayed as a supporter of his nomination on social media, and did not want him to feed that narrative by consulting with me. If RFK Jr wins confirmation and wanted to speak to me about subjects I know something about—like the food system—I would of course speak to him and shared [sic] what I knew and any policy ideas I might have. But I don't support his nomination at HHS Secretary.
I then responded to Pollan, sharing many of the points about vaccinations and fluoridation that I’ve shared above. This is what Pollan wrote back:
Teddy: I'm sorry but I don't have time to get into these questions with you, especially since you haven't told me who you're writing for.
I responded to that second message and have not heard from Pollan since.
In “To Uncage His Voice,” a beautiful essay by Jonathan Montaldo on writer and Trappist monk Thomas Merton, I learned about parrhesia.
“Thomas Merton’s spiritual legacy,” Montaldo writes, “exhibits a special relationship to the philosophical notion of parrhesia… . Parrhesia is generally defined as the right to voice a fearless, risk-taking freedom of speech. To exercise free speech, as opposed to muted and restrained speech, is a primary category in Merton’s diagnosis of the inner tension in personal development between one’s ‘true’ and ‘false’ selves.”
French philosopher Michael Foucault, reports Montaldo, wrote about parrhesia, too. Foucault’s definition has more fire. “In parrhesia, the speaker uses his freedom and chooses frankness instead of persuasion, truth instead of falsehood or silence, the risk of death instead of life and security, criticism instead of flattery, and moral duty instead of self-interest and moral apathy.”
Parrhesia, Montaldo suggests, should not be understood as an end in itself, as boldness for boldness’s sake, as mere unstopperedness or reflexive antagonism. Merton saw it in service of “perhaps the deepest and most crucial need of the human person”: “spiritual liberty.”
And what is spiritual liberty according to Merton?
Merton defines it thus: “freedom from domination, freedom to live one’s spiritual life, freedom to seek the highest truth, unabashed by any human pressure or any collective demand, the ability to say one’s own ‘yes’ and one’s own ‘no’ and not merely echo the ‘yes’ and the ‘no’ of state, party, corporation, army, or system.”
How many of us today exhibit such freedom? How many of us today care about such freedom?
And how many of us (perhaps it’s all of us—to a certain extent) merely regurgitate opinions and ideas supplied by the official factories that turn out mental food?
That my friend Ramsey connected the Kennedy-Pollan almost-connection to the Sign of Peace ritual in mass haunted me.
Ramsey’s text made me think of another ancient ceremony which was memorably depicted in Wendell Berry’s recent book The Need to Be Whole. Writes Berry:
There has been a good deal of talk of the way political division has been intensified perhaps mainly by social media, so that people need to deal little or not at all with the others who are politically unlike themselves. Such exclusiveness, it seems to me, is possible only in large towns and cities. In my own rural community, oriented to the very small town of Port Royal, it is not possible. This is not to Port Royal’s credit, but is a matter only of the size and density of its population. This precinct voted for Mr. Obama in his first race, but in 2020 the majority of its supporters voted the Republicans and Mr. Trump. My family and I are not Trumpists, but there is no chance that we could live here and have to do only with people who voted as we did. That impossibility in fact reduces our interest in who voted for whom. Often we have no idea. Almost never do we try to find out. When on our visits to town we meet our neighbors face-to-face, it does not occur to us to question if they may be our political opposites. We are asking how they are, and how are their families, and did they get enough rain. Somebody tells a joke, and we laugh. Our one store, which sells farm supplies, hardware, and some groceries, also serves breakfast and lunch. At the long table in the back, where mostly men sit and there is much talk and laughter, both political sides surely are represented, but there is almost no talk of politics. Perhaps this is because we live more in the wide world than city people do. All of us have had engine trouble or been stuck in mud or snow out on the roads somewhere, and who was there to help us but one of our neighbors? And we have all participated, on one side or both, in the ancient ceremony:
“Many thanks. What I owe you?” “Aw, I may need help myself someday.” “Well, much obliged.”
In Port Royal, thanks mostly to its nature and circumstances, humanity remains a larger category than political allegiance.
If two neighbors know that they seriously disagree, but that either of them, given even a small change of circumstances, may desperately need the other, should they not keep between them a sort of pre-paid forgiveness? They ought to keep it ready to hand, like a fire extinguisher, in case it may prove useful.
I would qualify Berry’s wise, moving words by saying that we need each other wherever we live. Mutuality is inescapable regardless of zip code. Our flouting of that truth is what got us into this mess. (Perhaps the illusion of independence is simply less compelling in rural communities.) In other words, humanity ought to remain a larger category than political allegiance whether we live in Port Royal or Berkeley, Thief River Falls or New York City.
I would also contend that humanity should remain a larger category than political allegiance even as we openly—and, one hopes, bravely—discuss and work through our politics.
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