MAHA's Fascist Turn

A recent attack on Marion Nestle starts to make sense if you're far less kind to the Make America Healthy Again movement than Marion has been.

I was in the weeds of editing and revisions a couple of weeks back, so I missed when Calley Means, Senior advisor at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and a leader within Make America Healthy Again, played the world’s most inept character assassin, first at the Aspen Ideas Festival, and then at the Great American State Fair, trying to blame Marion Nestle for the ills of the food system.

Among the things I did this week so you don’t have to is watch Calley Means at the Aspen Ideas Festival. It is, as the kids say, cringe.

Let me declare an interest: Marion is a dear friend and although we may disagree on a thing or two, as good comrades can, I have nothing but love for her and an abiding appreciation for all she does. So I take personal offence at Means for his fumbling ad hominem against one of the most important voices in the food system, as do many including Robyn O’Brien, Jessica Knurick, Ted Kyle, Jane Black, and Jerry Hagstrom (paywall).

Here’s a short summary of what happened. Means claimed, at the Great American State Fair — as reported by the Washington Post — that in the 1980s a body called the Sugar Research Council paid Marion to conduct research. There’s no such thing as the Sugar Research Council either in the Sugar Association’s own history nor in the IRS nonprofit records. The sugar industry funding that he seems to be thinking about went to three researchers at Harvard in 1965 and 1967. That’s roughly when she was a graduate student in molecular biology at Berkeley. Her only connection to that episode is a commentary she was invited to write condemning the sugar industry. Means said that this money induced Marion to promote carbohydrates and grains and to warn against fat and against natural foods. But the 1988 Surgeon General’s Report she edited recommended vegetables, fruits, whole grain foods, fish, poultry and lean meats, and she has maintained a stated policy of taking no payments from food companies. Means said she claims credit for being the architect of the 1992 food pyramid. This can’t be right because, in addition to there being no evidence for it, the pyramid was released in April 1992 and she joined the 1995 dietary guidelines advisory committee in 1993. She was involved in the 1992 pyramid, but only to the extent that she exposed the meat industry's 1991 role in suppressing it. You can find the full anatomy of disinformation on Marion’s site.

There’d better be a good reason for me to add to the volume of ink spilled on this and, reader, there is.

I’ve been reading some nauseating right-wing food literature, in part so that I can write something on its imaginaries for a forthcoming Journal of Peasant Studies forum on Degrowth and Agrarian Change, and in part so I can peer review Limn’s upcoming issue on the far right. So I’m feeling pretty sordid, and looking for as large a dividend as possible of having to suffer this toxic swill.

Here’s the payoff: there’s a nasty similarity between Means’ accusations and the structure of one of the far right’s most influential food system texts, The Eggs Benedict Option. I’m not going to link to it but let me save you the trouble of searching for what it says, as Eamon Whalen did here for Mother Jones.

The argument, quoting approvingly from Michael Pollan and citing Tom Philpott, starts from many of the premises that animate lots of us to think about food. There’s a rise of chronic disease, glyphosate is everywhere, climate change is changing the horizon of possibility.

And then we part ways.

The argument presents the Neolithic Revolution as a disaster, because it was the way that settler agriculture parasitised free people. It was the first Great Reset, in which states made people farm and deprived them of nutrients. Its modern version is the Planetary Health Diet, the result of a study that does the arithmetic about the food required to support everyone living on the same planet with a healthy diet, which therefore urges moderation in meat consumption and which therefore, apparently, has the power to turn its consumers into cucks.

The foreword, by Noor Bin Ladin (an outspoken Trump supporter, niece of Osama ) explains why. We suffer today under “an almost total stranglehold over the media, entertainment, tech sector and academia,” “underpinned by the financial structure headed by the central banks that ensure and perpetuate the citizens’ enslavement via debt and usury.” It amounts to a programme of “population-manipulation techniques” and “the rewriting of history” that has succeeded “the herding of the masses blindly towards the slaughterhouse.” In other words, “the people at the very top of the pyramid have gone to great lengths to deliberately poison us.” The injury she catalogues is not only metabolic but genetic, “the downgrading of our DNA,” “the marring of our physiognomy.”

Guess who’s at the top of the pyramid? At the World Economic Forum, there are “supposed ties to the Rothschild family”. The book’s author, Charles Cornish-Dale, doesn’t use the word ‘Jew’ in the text, but you don’t have to scratch terribly deeply to find anti-semitism either in the text or, indeed, in his opinions.

A late chapter argues that what made Americans great was the frontier, the thesis Frederick Jackson Turner set out in 1893 in his Significance of the Frontier in American History and which has been under sustained attack since the 1950s for treating conquered land as empty. Cornish-Dale knows the objection. He notes a few lines earlier that “the racial overtones and the emphasis on sacred soil of course began to rankle with academics, especially after World War II.” Then he affirms it anyway:

Because the fact remains, however much the academic 'deboonkers' might kvetch and wail about blood and soil, that the Turner Thesis is very definitely true.

This is the only use of Yiddish in a book published by Antelope Hill, whose other works include Hitler’s speeches among other far-right texts. Cornish-Dale himself has quoted Hitler on his twitter account, among whose two-hundred-thousand followers is the US Vice President, J. D. Vance. After Mother Jones profiled him in under the headline “Blood, Soil, and Grass-Fed Beef,” Cornish-Dale leaned in, had the slogan printed on t-shirts and sold them from his website. He was still boasting about it this May. The same account carried a quotation from Mein Kampf set against a swastika flag, a reference to "zog," and the shorthand HH.

In this book, he lets readers fill in the blanks, inviting them to substitute their pet cultural pollutant into thoughts like:

This is why the Biden administration is doing its best to criminalize America First and its supporters, in addition to ramping up the policy of demographic replacement and other forms of social and cultural disintegration.

To be clear, I’m not saying that Calley Means has read The Eggs Benedict Option.

I am saying that Calley Means is participating in a fascist trope, a storytelling device that propels a wider narrative. It explains not only why Means should continue with these lies, but the broader effort to which they contribute.

It’s a strategy that has a direct parallel with National Socialism in Germany, and it works like this:

1. Find a real grievance, such as worries behind industrial food and its health effects, a concern as widespread in the 1930s as today.

2. Pivot, so that the force behind the grievance is a cabal out to pervert national purity (whether the plot to undermine the German race, or the World Economic Forum out to degrade DNA, or a nutritionist in hock to Big Sugar poisoning America’s children)

3. Impugn scientific critique as urban/impure (by indicting specific scientists as treasonous members of that cabal, like Julius Moses or the EAT Lancet report, or Marion Nestle).

4. Once you have your dirty monsters, offer a doctrine of Blood and Soil as the sole and purifying means to address the grievance.

This is why Means’ behaviour is so poisonous, and needs to be condemned. The only way to do this — and here’s where Marion and I differ — is by rejecting MAHA in toto, as many people of colour, who can see MAHA’s racism a mile away, already have.

Some premises of the Make America Healthy Again movement are the same as any genuinely democratic one, but many aren’t, including concerns with individual bodily purity that are ripped from Dr Strangelove. In that concern with individual bodily purity lie the seeds thinking about a master race.

If you can recast Marion Nestle, one of the world’s most relentless critics of food industry influence, as a paid shill for Big Sugar, you can collapse the distinction between legitimate public health research and corporate capture. Once you do that, you’ve cleared the stage for reactionaries to posture as the only true defenders of the food supply, swapping peer-reviewed science for blood-and-soil populism and for the opportunity to buy bidets from Means’ company using your tax-free health savings account to keep your colon sparkling clean.

As I explained in the Boston Review last year, this is why “MAHA’s stock in trade is biomonitoring devices, blood tests, and mail-in stool samples—all services available from MAHA proponents for a fee—so that vigilant individuals can avoid the worst. “You are the primary person responsible for understanding your body,” says the website of Casey Means,” Calley’s sister. The responsibility for vigilance for bodily and national purity is one that falls on every MAHA supporter.

It’s not a terribly far from this to MAHAspital.

There are proper alternatives on offer. If you want the opposite of MAHA, the Boston Review piece argues that Mamdani’s programme in NYC offers the possibility of radical public health, grounded in multi-racial working class politics. These are the struggles worth fighting for. And, in the meantime, it’s critics like Marion Nestle who deserve the most vigorous defence against the pathetic and sickening lies that Means peddles.

Want final evidence that Marion’s not a shill for Big Sugar? Have a look at the cover of her latest book, co-authored with Lisa Sutherland, and put in a pre-order for it. Sugar Coated is out in September. The best possible outcome of Means’ mendacity is a sales bump for this breakfast cereal take-down. And if you can, go see Marion at a book signing. She’s always magnetic.