RFK Jr. and the paradox of Pepperoni-Pizza

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If there was a pet to represent everything Robert F. Kennedy Jr. You see badly with food, it would be the Big Daddy’s Primo Pizza. A basic element of school coffee shops, Big Daddy’s pizza is invoiced as an “exceptional slice at the top to attract students” that is made of full wheat flour. It occurs in mass in a factory with industrial additives so you just need to be heated just before serving. This makes the pizza an ultra -processed meal, which Kennedy has withdrawn from school lunches. Except that you cannot. The Department of Agriculture, which establishes the rules for school nutrition, is not under its jurisdiction as Secretary of Health and Human Services.

Sometimes RFK Jr. He speaks as if he has the power to solve unilaterally eating problems in the United States. But their attempts to do it only so far, at least in part by virtue of the absurdity of how food is regulated. The work is divided between the FDA and the USDA, sometimes in ways that make little sense. Consider the problem of food safety. Regardless of whether a pepper pizza will be sold in schools or in the grocery store, their safety is supervised by USDA. Inspectors usually visit facilities where frozen pizza is complemented by pepper at least once a day, inspectors are also present in the slaughterhouse where the pig is located and the plant where the actual pepper is made. In the meantime, since frozen cheese pizza has no meat, its safety falls to the FDA, which inspects most of the facilities at least once every five years. The open -face sandwiches that contain meat are also regulated by the USDA, but you blow another bread on top, and they are the FDA problem.

Yes, two different agencies use inspectors to apparently do the same thing – in some of the food products – in some of the same factories, only because a USDA employee inspected a company that makes open -face sandwiches is not allowed to address the health and safety of closed sandwiches nearby. None of this is efficient. In fact, it is so inefficient that the Government’s accounting office, the independent government watchman, has warned that the food safety system has a high risk of “fraud, waste, abuse and mismanagement”. Are you listening, Elon? The Trump administration is sleeping in a movement that would like both Maha and Stoge sponsors to create a single agency for food safety and nutrition. Name it to the Optimal Supervisory and Diets Department.

Democrats should also want a food department. In fact, democratic legislators in Congress have introduced legislation by proposing a single food agency at various points over the last twenty years. The deployed approach to America’s food is the by -product of bureaucracy worth a century. In 1906, Congress passed two separate laws by establishing different standards of food safety for meat and non -meat products. At that time, the two sets of rules were applied by the USDA, until the FDA was cut off in 1940. Since then, the question of who is responsible for the one who has only achieved the most complex. When the EPA was created during the Nixon administration, for example, regulating the number of pesticides that can be presented to the food you buy was transferred to the new agency.

Perhaps the most angry about the status quo is that food is at the same time and little regulated. The USDA is understandably rigorous about meat safety, but Pepperoni’s pizza is inspecting three times different from justifying, argues that Sandra Eskin, who directed the USDA food security arm during Biden’s administration. At the same time, the FDA does not have the staff to inspect all factories, and the result is that the meat receives much more scrutiny than many other products, such as bags of fried potatoes and frozen cheese pizzas. The different levels of supervision are “difficult to defend”, told me Thomas Gremillion, the director of the food policy of the Consumer Federation of America, who defends the stricter food safety regulations. A single food agency would be able to more easily reassign the resources even to overcome the gaps. (Neither the FDA nor the USDA responded to a comment request.)

The Food Department would not be more efficient; It could also help address the discomfort of the country’s diet. Consider salt. It is estimated that the North -Americans will consume almost 50 percent more than those recommended by US dietary guidelines and defense groups have long urged the FDA to do something about it. But Congress has been affected by the relatively modest attempts of the USDA and the FDA to reduce the amount of salt in our food. Last March, legislators added a language to a Government Financing Bill that would delay the FDA to release new sodium reduction goals and prevent USDA further restricting the amount of salt at school meals. The hands of the regulators were tied.

A Food Department funded regardless of Congress would be a way out of this mess. Independent agencies can pursue policies without so afraid of reviving Congress its funding to pursue politically unpopular government. All this may look like a little cake in the sky; Creating a new independent agency is not a small feat. Congress should pass a law to make it a reality, although the Food Department would be isolated from its demands. To create any new agency it requires “only a large amount of work to eliminate,” said Peter Lurie, the head of the Center for Sciences in the public interest, which led to the FDA campaign to tune the lower levels of salt. But something similar has happened before: the consumer’s financial protection office centralized the responsibilities of various agencies in an independent organization after a series of subprime mortgages caused the 2008 financial crisis.

Political inertia is on the side of the Trump administration. Diet related disease is a crisis in itself. More than 40 percent of North -Americans are now obese, as is approximately one in five children. Kennedy himself talks a lot about how food is sick in the North -Americans and other Republicans listen. Various Republican legislators have insisted in recent weeks that the FDA has to be more serious about the regulation of food additives, such as dyes. If Kennedy argued that a new food agency was the best way to achieve these goals, the Republicans would probably have to hear. At the same time, the Elon Musk government efficiency department and its efforts to dissolve entire government agencies are opening the door to drastic action.

Of course, Musk seems to be more intended to directly destroy federal agencies than to create government reform. Kennedy, in the same way, seems to focus more on too simplistic solutions, such as saying goodbye to the FDA food center staff, which, when altering the structures that have made these workers so inefficient. That neither Kennedy nor Musk have said anything about the consolidation of the food agencies say a lot. If you really wanted the Government to be more efficient, the Food department would be an easy place to start. But right now in Trump’s administration, proposing a new agency is not as good a conversation point as to do one.