By Jessica Scott-Reid for Sentient.
Broadcast version by Zamone Perez for Maryland News Connection reporting for the Sentient/Just and Climate-Friendly Food System-Public News Service Collaboration

Last month, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) effectively banned the use of Red Dye No. 3 in foods, citing concerns the additive may be carcinogenic - based on testing in rats. The push to ban the food dye was long coming, and was supported by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who ahead of the 2024 presidential election stated that one of the first things he'd do is "tell the cereal companies: Take all the dyes out of their food." But of all the potential cancer risks humans face, why has the FDA banned red food dye, while other foods with a similar or even greater carcinogenic risk, like processed meats, continue to be sold without a warning label?

"A lot of it has to do with how a health issue or a specific topic is framed in the public's mind," Doug Evans, a professor at the George Washington University Milken Institute School of Public Health, tells Sentient. Red dye, an additive that doesn't add nutritional value, fits with what the American public is "primed" to understand as unhealthy these days.

The question of why food dyes instead of, say, steak or bacon, gives us insight into the way we humans tend to think about risk. While concerns about food dyes and ultraprocessed foods are currently in the cultural and political spotlight, other noted possible carcinogens are not. Processed meats - classified by the World Health Organization (WHO) as carcinogenic - and red meats (categorized as probably carcinogenic), remain relatively ignored by the chorus of voices, like RFK Jr., pushing for legal restrictions.

How Red Dye Came to Be Banned

Though the FDA banned the use of Red No. 3 in cosmetics and certain drugs in 1990, after studies linked it to cancer in animals who consumed it, the dye continued to be authorized for use in foods. That is, until late last year, when a petition filed by health advocates prompted the agency to take action. FDA officials relied on a provision called the Delaney clause, which prohibits the agency from approving additives that cause cancer in people or animals.

The study prompting the decision found the additive caused some male rats to develop cancer. However, critics say that the small amount of dye found in foods is not likely to be harmful to humans, and that banning it will make some foods less affordable, as natural dyes are more expensive. In fact, according to FDA regulators, Red No. 3 does not cause cancer in humans the same way it does in rats, and relevant exposure levels to the dye for humans "are typically much lower than those that cause the effects shown in male rats."

So then, why bother focusing on red dye at all? As Timothy Rebbeck, professor of cancer prevention at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, tells Sentient, food dyes are a relatively easy thing to focus on and ban, because they are "man-made compounds that people are not culturally attached to."

The same thing cannot be said about processed and red meats, which are heavily embedded in our culture, despite a decade of cancer warnings from researchers - or at least some of them. The WHO's International Agency for Research on Cancer announced in 2015 that processed meats - bacon, ham, salami etc. - would now be categorized alongside cigarettes as carcinogenic, based on a number of studies finding an elevated risk of colorectal cancer.

Much like with food dyes, there was and is a fierce debate challenging the health risk claims against red meat - only this debate has been even more loud and protracted.

Why Ban Anything? Smoking As Case Study for Strong Public Health Regulation

One of the most successful examples of a public health campaign in relatively recent history centered on the dangers of smoking. In the 1970s, as research was mounting around the dangers of smoking cigarettes, public health organizations ramped up public messaging, including the National Cancer Institute's "Helping Smokers Quit Kit."

By the 1980s and 1990s, campaigns led by the American Cancer Society and American Lung Association spread this message further. In the late '90s, the landmark "truth" campaign targeted young people with quantifiable success. The American Lung Association reports that youth smoking rates dropped from 36.4 percent in 1997, to 3.8 percent in 2021; cases of lung and bronchial cancers also dropped over that time.

Taxes on tobacco products also played a pivotal role. The CDC reports that a "10 percent increase in the average price of a pack of cigarettes is estimated to reduce cigarette sales per person by an average of 7 percent."

"It did take a while, but we eventually got there," says Evans. "[Smoking's] no longer a normative behavior. It's been reframed as being not really the thing to do."

What Impact Have Health Warnings Had on Meat Consumption?

Eating bacon is not considered as high-risk as smoking cigarettes. Yet there is research to suggest eating high levels of processed meat and red meat elevates your cancer risk, among other health concerns. Still, public health messaging on the risks of consuming too much processed meat has remained limited.

There are no major "quit salami" campaigns, and no signs of a bacon ban or baloney tax on the horizon. Even the NIH's Healthy People 2030 directive, which "focuses on helping people get the recommended amounts of healthy foods - like fruits, vegetables, and whole grains - to reduce their risk for chronic diseases and improve their health," does not include any objectives to reduce or cease the consumption of processed or red meats.

Rebbeck says the challenge with public health messaging about food and nutrition is that "the information is very difficult to communicate because we're talking about some fairly complex, sophisticated science that has a lot of caveats." The question then becomes, "how do you make a very simple public health message that people can follow?" The answer, he says: keep it simple and focus more on what people should eat, rather than what they shouldn't. "The simple messages that people in government agencies have started making are very much around, 'just focus on [eating] plant forward.'"

While the U.S. government has not launched any policy changes or large-scale campaigns specifically targeting red and processed meat consumption, the National Cancer Institute does point out on its website that red and processed meat consumption is associated with increased cancer risk. And some non-governmental nonprofits, such as the American Institute for Cancer Research, more directly suggest limiting red meat and fully avoiding processed meat, including in social media posts.

Rebbeck believes this health messaging around the risks of red meat consumption has had some impact. "Whereas some things have come and gone," he says, red meat "seems to be sticking around" in the public health messaging as having some degree of risk.

That's had an impact. While overall meat consumption in the U.S. has been on the rise, beef consumption has been in decline in recent years, and is predicted to continue to fall. This is due to a number of factors, including rising prices, as well as growing public knowledge regarding red meat's link to cancer, heart disease and diabetes.

Bacon consumption, on the other hand, has gone up since 2011, along with other processed meat consumption.

Reasons for a Lack of Messaging and Policy Change on Meat

Evans says a number of factors contribute to why meat hasn't received the same attention as red dye or smoking in terms of public health messaging and policy change - starting with a lack of abundantly clear evidence, the kind that we had for smoking.

"If we're going to tell people to change their behavior, we need to be pretty sure we're telling them the right thing," he says. With smoking, there was "mountains and mountains of incontrovertible evidence" linking it to cancer. For red and processed meats, however, "we have some evidence," he says, "but it's not the kind of evidence that we had for smoking."

Andrea Love, a biomedical scientist and science communicator, drilled down even further, explaining that "much of the data related to dietary components like bacon are based on observational studies," where groups of people are studied without the researchers directly intervening in their behavior. These types of studies, while valuable, "cannot directly analyze cause and effect," according to Love. What's more, she told Sentient via email, "there are often confounding variables: like what is the overall dietary composition? Is this person eating enough fiber (which we know is directly related to risk of multiple cancer types)? Are they exercising? Do they have other underlying risk factors?"

In other words, even if an observational study finds a certain result, there are usually a number of other possible explanations, and more research is almost always needed.

Still, Evans believes the WHO is "out front" on the issue of certain meats potentially causing cancer, and while "that doesn't mean they're wrong," he adds, "it just means that the consensus hasn't fully formed yet."

But there are other forces at work here. According to Rebbeck, "as with other areas of regulatory policy, there are a lot of countervailing forces from industry and others. It is also difficult when the item under discussion is a food that is part of our usual diet."

The cultural embeddedness of meat is an important factor, says Evans. "Could we live without meat? Yes, we could," he says, but adds "it's such an essential part of human society, human culture; it's hard to envision it just disappearing."

On top of this deeply embedded cultural connection, the meat industry is actively campaigning to keep its products on consumers' tables, three meals a day. Amid a growing awareness of meat production's many impacts, whether on animals, clean air and water or a safe food supply, the meat industry has put out its own counteroffensive - disinformation campaigns to tar plant-based alternatives, sponsoring academic researchers to downplay the climate impact of milk and training online influencers to spread the good word about beef.

Even though the fundamentals of what makes for a healthy diet remain uncontroversial, these simpler messages can get lost in the barrage of misinformation. "A diet that's healthy for keeping cancer risk low involves a variety of unprocessed foods," says Rebbeck, and that remains the same as ever: "fruits and vegetables, less meat."


Jessica Scott-Reid wrote this article for Sentient. If you have a climate solution story you'd like to share, you can do that through Project Drawdown's Global Solutions Diary.


get more stories like this via email

By Jessica Scott-Reid for Sentient.
Broadcast version by Kathryn Carley for Ohio News Connection reporting for the Sentient-Public News Service Collaboration

Now that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has kicked off his Make America Healthy Again, or MAHA Commission, food system advocates are wondering which of his ideas will come to fruition. One promise was to revamp the food system with a plan to “reverse 80 years of farming policy.” But what exactly would it mean for the average American to eat like we did in the 1940s? Experts tell Sentient the reality was not as idyllic as Kennedy and his supporters might believe. It’s also not at all feasible, as it would require the U.S. to make drastic changes to the way we eat. To put it bluntly — Americans would have to eat much less meat.

The Way We Ate Meat 80 Years Ago

At first blush, the historical picture does sound like locavore heaven. Food systems were still mostly regional, food historian Sarah Wassberg Johnson tells Sentient. People living in rural areas were more likely to have access to their own fresh produce, drink dairy from their own cow and can their foods for the winter.

The typical middle class family would eat “very Anglo-influenced foods,” Wassberg Johnson says, like “meat and potatoes and vegetables.” But back then, meat tended to be beef or pork, as chickens were considered a delicacy. That would all change after the birth of the industrial poultry farm, which kicked off the era of cheap and abundant chicken.

Dig a little further into the history and you quickly realize that the amount of meat consumed then was far less than what most people eat today. The average American only ate around 113 lbs pounds of meat in 1945 — less than half of the nearly 230 pounds of meat consumed annually today per capita.

Meats were usually prepared in dishes designed to feed more people with less meat. Home cooks incorporated them into sauces, stews and casseroles. The “quintessential American food,” meatloaf, is typical of this practice of meat-stretching. “You’re taking ground beef, which is already the cheapest meat…and you’re stretching it with onions and breadcrumbs, egg or milk. So you’re trying to stretch a pound of beef to feed more than four people,” Wassberg Johnson says.

People also ate more meat alternatives, even if they weren’t called that. Grains, nuts and beans were common sources of protein. Following the war, dry bean consumption in the U.S. was around 11 pounds per capita annually — compared to just 5.5 pounds per capita in 2023.

Americans were encouraged to grow “victory gardens” to help supplement the national food supply, and beans were an important crop, including soybeans, sometimes called “‘wonder beans’ or ‘miracle beans.’”

And yet, the transition to an industrialized food system was already underway. “There’s a lot of romanticization of food production in the past,” says Wassberg Johnson. “A lot of people are like, ‘Oh, if only we ate how grandma ate, everything would be better.’” But even then, she says, there was heavy dependence on things like railroads for food transport and access, and processed foods like flour, cornmeal, sugar and canned goods.

Farming Then, Now — and in the Future

Americans ate less meat back then, and we produced less meat too. In 1945 — prior to the rise of factory farming — there were just under 6 million farms in the U.S., with each operation ringing in at a little less than 200 acres in size on average.

Contrast that with 2024: researchers counted 2 million farms in the U.S., but the average size is much larger at about 464 acres. Over the decades, farms became more consolidated. Smaller farms merged or went out of business, and larger, more industrialized operations flourished.

The massive growth in industrialized farming was made possible by technology that did not exist 80 years ago, such as synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, farms that focused on one or two commodity crops and concentrated animal farming operations, or CAFOs. These developments enabled the U.S. food system to produce massive amounts of cheap meat — primarily chicken — that consumers happily gobbled up.

Industrial poultry operations were first developed in the 1950s. Around 275 million chickens were raised for meat in 1946 in the U.S; by 2023, that number skyrockets to 9.16 billion.

All of that “cheap” meat is not without other costs. Today, 99 percent of farm animals are raised on factory farms or industrial operations with cramped quarters for dairy cows, chickens and pigs. The beef that Americans eat at higher rates than the global average fuels climate pollution and deforestation. CAFOs and slaughterhouses are responsible for polluted air and water, and worker injuries and poor mental health.

So, why not trade factory farming for the good old days of American food — small-scale farms and the agricultural policies of 80 years ago? Sentient asked American agriculture historian and professor at Purdue University, R. Douglas Hurt, whether RFK Jr.’s proposal is at all realistic. “Of course not,” Hurt says, and here’s why.

Factory Farm Reality vs. Small Farm Fantasy

To turn the U.S. food system back to the small-scale style farming of the early 20th century would be extremely costly for farmers and consumers alike. Small farms, Hurt explains, “historically have not provided enough income to keep farmers on the land.” Farmers need “hundreds of acres to generate a profit and an acceptable standard of living” — with very few exceptions, like “a high value specialty crop such as avocados.”

Small-scale farms — like hobby farms or the homesteads you see on social media — might provide an alternative lifestyle, says Hurt, but they usually aren’t profitable. “To be profitable, the money must come from sources other than free-range chickens, eggs and a few grass-fed beef cattle. Quantity of production matters.”

To revert back to small farms, says Hurt, “the federal government will need to subsidize” those farmers, in order for them to make a living. “This will be very expensive,” Hurt says.

It also might be pretty unappealing. “The good old days, they were terrible,” Hurt says. “Farming is hard work. That’s why so many people leave it if they can for a better job and more money.”

So what if we all turned into subsistence farmers, and grew our own food? Some people are trying to do just that, as I reported on last year, but many learned in the process that raising and butchering their own animals was far more difficult than they had hoped. For some nascent homesteaders, instances of “butchery gone awry” turned out to be cruel to the animals, and upsetting for them.

There’s yet another reason why switching from industrial factory farms to small farms would be a disaster — the environment. Even if we were to only focus on transitioning beef to an all grass-fed approach, at current rates of beef consumption that would require far more land and resources than we have.

In 2018, environmental scientists Matthew Hayek and Rachael D. Garrett found that “a nationwide shift to exclusively grass-fed beef would require increasing the national cattle herd from 77 to 100 million cattle, an increase of 30 percent,” but there simply isn’t enough pasture available.

There is one way a shift to much smaller farms might be feasible, and that’s if we were to drastically reduce how much meat we eat. A transition to a plant-based food system could save an estimated 24 percent of total land use and feed around 700 million people — about double the entire population of the United States. 

That doesn’t seem to line up with the way Americans still want to eat meat. And it’s a far cry from the approach RFK Jr. and his MAHA acolytes are championing. A recent interview on Fox News took place over burgers at a fast food chain — one that had apparently agreed to stop serving seed oils. Even if current trends have made RFK Jr.’s plans for taking the food system back in time sound appealing, his ideas are simply not going to play out that way in reality.


Jessica Scott-Reid wrote this article for Sentient.


get more stories like this via email

The State of Nebraska is asking the U.S. Department of Agriculture to change which items people are allowed to purchase using Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits.

Right now, any food or beverage with a nutritional label qualifies.

The Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services wants to change the list to include only nutritious foods - like grains, dairy, meat, eggs, fruits and vegetables - and exempt sugary sodas and energy drinks.

Eric Savaino, program manager for food and nutrition access with the social justice group Nebraska Appleseed, said the move would further stigmatize low-income Nebraskans already fighting the perception that they have unhealthy eating habits - many of whom are kids.

"Any efforts to limit peoples' purchasing ability is paternalistic," said Savaino, "and is fairly disrespectful for the people who receive those benefits."

A 2016 study by the USDA found the buying habits of SNAP versus non-SNAP families are virtually the same.

Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen issued a news release saying SNAP benefits should only be used for nutritious foods, and offered as evidence high obesity and diabetes rates, driven by poor eating habits and sugary drink consumption.

Savaino and other critics of the governor have asked why the state doesn't ban energy drinks and sugary sodas in public schools, a move that would have even broader public health benefits.

Instead, Savaigno argued, changing the SNAP program would create more confusion for people who already have to navigate a complex set of rules to participate.

"In general, what we think is going on is that they're just targeting folks who are low income and trying to make sure that they're doing their best to control what people buy," said Savaino. "In reality, there's no difference between what low-income Nebraskans buy and what the general population does."

Changing which items are available for purchase with SNAP benefits would require a waiver from the USDA.

By Josh Israel for the Wisconsin Independent.
Broadcast version by Judith Ruiz-Branch for Wisconsin News Connection reporting for the Wisconsin Independent-Public News Service Collaboration

Last year, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced $1.13 billion in fiscal year 2025 funds for a pair of programs to help schools, child care centers, and food banks obtain locally sourced foods. After schools and other facilities had begun working out arrangements with local farmers, President Donald Trump’s administration informed them on March 7 that the programs had been canceled, according to Politico.

A USDA spokesperson told the outlet that the $660 million Local Food for Schools Cooperative Agreement Program and the $472 million Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement Program would be canceled because “these programs, created under the former Administration via Executive authority, no longer effectuate the goals of the agency.”

Wisconsin had been set to receive more than $11 million in fiscal year 2025 from the Local Food for Schools program and about $5.5 million from the Local Food Purchase Assistance program.

The USDA did not respond to a request for comment for this story. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins told Fox News on March 11 that these were “COVID-era programs” and were not reaching their intended targets, saying that the Biden administration was “trying to spend more and more money”: “Right now, from what we are viewing, that program was nonessential, that it was a new program, and that it was an effort by the Left to continue spending taxpayer dollars that were not necessary.”

Kaitlin Tauriainen is president of the School Nutrition Association of Wisconsin, a nonprofit coalition of school nutrition professionals. In a phone interview, she told the Wisconsin Independent that the Local Food for Schools funds had been great for both students and food producers and that the cuts would be felt: ”Moving towards these healthier, locally grown items is a huge step in the right direction for our students. Especially if you want us to be cooking scratch meals that are organic and locally grown, it’s hard for us to do that with the budget that we have. And not only is it hurting the students and the schools that are consuming this food, but it’s really making a huge impact on our farmers.” 

Tauriainen, a registered dietitian, also serves as child nutrition coordinator for the Ashwaubenon School District in the suburbs of Green Bay. She said the program had made it possible for the district to buy more locally sourced meats: “We started a task force probably 15 years ago and have been doing a lot of work in bringing in fresh local fruits and vegetables, but the LFS dollars allowed us to purchase different things, like ground beef and hamburger patties, more center-of-the-plate items.” 

The Trump administration’s cuts will leave a hole in the budget. “It’s difficult,” Tauriainen said. “We have roughly $2 to spend on all of our lunches, which is not a lot of money. And the way that our government funding is set up, the commodity foods that we get from the federal government are typically big box, major corporations. So I’m not buying beef from my neighboring farm and using my government dollars for that. … So it’s difficult, and I fear that, you know, for a lot of school districts, a lot of the new initiatives that they were doing with bringing in fresher items and helping support their local communities won’t be at the level it was the last couple of years.”

Stacy Nelson, director of food and nutrition services for the School District of the Menomonie Area and also an officer of the School Nutrition Association, said in a phone interview that her district had also been able to purchase local grass-fed beef and produce through the program: “It was a really great opportunity to not only be able to afford and fairly compensate the local farmers for their agriculture work, but it was also an opportunity that we could teach the students what it is to support local, where their food comes from, and the importance of that connection.”

The cuts have been difficult, Nelson said, and forced the Menomonie schools to cancel their arrangement with the local beef farm: “I had to let him know that I couldn’t partner with him again this school year, and that was really devastating on my end, just because we did have such a great relationship. His product was wonderful. So it was really hard. And then, on his side of it, he had already planned and knew that he had this beef spoken for. And so then he had to find other avenues to get it sold. And so it puts not only the schools in a bad spot, but it put that farmer in a bad spot, and then it also affects the local economy.”

“It gave us that extra money so that we wouldn’t have to buy from big box, already prepared items, and we could grow our menu a little bit,” Nelson added. “I know we’re going to do everything that we can to still do that, but it’s getting really tough, because, I mean, everyone that goes to the grocery store knows that food costs went up. It went up for us too.”

Seasonal Harvest, a De Pere business that connects local small- and medium-sized producers with wholesale markets, received Local Food for School funds to provide foods to Ashwaubenon and other Wisconsin school districts. Co-owner and general manager Sheri Howard told the Wisconsin Independent that the program had been a great boost to local farms: “What that money did was allow us to go back and say, Hey, we want you farms, we want you to put some crops in the ground for this program. We’ll buy them from you. When you think of a farm raising vegetables and going to the farmers market and hoping somebody buys them and that the stall next door isn’t undercutting them, in price, this is a great opportunity to give them another income stream where it’s wholesale, it’s there, it’s stable, and many of them used that money to help improve their infrastructure. So buy a tractor, buy a truck, put in a new cooler. The money itself allowed for growth in our farming community, which is what Seasonal Harvest is all about, allowing these farms to thrive, not just survive.”

“We got $250,000, I would say, in LFS funds,” Howard continued. “And some of the schools also got LFS funds. So as a financial, fiscal impact, maybe $500,000 for the area. That’s a lot of food when you’re talking vegetables, it is a lot of food, and it’s a lot of money going back to the farms. Will it take us down? Absolutely not, because we were operating before the LFS, and we’ll operate after. But the added advantage of allowing for growth, a bigger growth that will be diminished? Absolutely. … It also is going to diminish the amount of products that the schools are able to serve their kids because they don’t have a budget that can replace that.”

Wisconsin Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin and 30 Democratic colleagues urged Rollins to restore the programs in a March 14 letter. 

“We ask that you reverse the cancellation,” they urged. “We have grave concerns that the cancellation … poses extreme harm to producers and communities in every state across the country. At a time of uncertainty in farm country, farmers need every opportunity to be able to expand market access for their products.”

The elimination of the programs comes as Congress is considering massive cuts to safety net programs. The Republican majority in the House of Representatives passed a budget resolution on Feb. 25 that requires at least $230 billion in cuts to programs that are under the jurisdiction of the Committee on Agriculture, for fiscal years 2025 through 2023. 

In January, Politico published a document circulated by House Budget Committee Chair Jodey Arrington (R-TX) listing possible spending cuts to offset President Donald Trump’s proposed tax cuts and spending priorities. Among the items on the list was $3 billion in cuts to the Community Eligibility Provision that allows many school systems to offer free meals to all students.

Another possible measure on the list is the requirement that all kids receiving free or reduced-price breakfast and lunch in schools provide documentation to prove need. Such a measure, Arrington estimated, would save $9 billion.

According to a fact sheet published by the nonprofit Food Research & Action Center, Arrington’s proposed cuts would kick 666 Wisconsin schools out of the Community Eligibility Provision program, affecting more than 320,000 students.

“We’re giving them fresh fruits and vegetables, we’re giving them protein and whole grains, and we’re doing it on a really small budget, but we’re still providing them the best food that we can,” Nelson said. “And the reason that that’s important, I know everyone’s been hungry, and having to sit through something, it’s really hard to retain any information or to participate and have a good attitude about things if all you can think about is that you’re hungry and you’re not sure where that next meal is going to come. And unfortunately, it’s the reality that kids throughout not only the state of Wisconsin but the whole United States are facing and continuing to pull programs that are meant as a support to those kids isn’t going to make America healthy again, which is what we keep saying we’re trying to do.”


Josh Israel wrote this article for the Wisconsin Independent.


get more stories like this via email