The McDonald’s Election
Making America Healthy Again, one Big Mac at a time: First it was the Kamala Harris claim that she worked at McDonald’s, a probably true but not totally proven story about a job she took back in college, told to try to make her seem middle-class and relatable. Then it was Donald Trump’s shift at a McDonald’s in Pennsylvania in the final month of the campaign. Now it’s Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which oversees the nation’s food regulators—being hazed by Trump and co., forced to eat burgers and fries on a private jet flying to a UFC match.
RFK Jr. essentially being hazed here with the McDonalds pic.twitter.com/hH3N8GwkhE
— Andy Kaczynski (@KFILE) November 17, 2024
Theories abound about what RFK Jr. will do as HHS head. The discourse has turned to possible culprits for mass obesity and chronic disease. Seed oils? Food dyes? Too much added sugar in food? (Certainly that last one.) And of course, this has all spiraled into a discourse about elites unwilling to admit that McDonald’s tastes good, further purported proof of the disconnect between the ruling class and the masses.
All of this is to say that the coming health culture wars will be tedious and miserable, made worse by RFK Jr. serving as generalissimo.
“President Trump has asked me to do three things: 1. Clean up the corruption in our government health agencies. 2. Return those agencies to their rich tradition of gold-standard, evidence-based science. 3. Make America Healthy Again by ending the chronic disease epidemic,” writes Kennedy on X. Note the rhetorical trick here: the use of the word return implies these agencies are not currently engaged in evidence-based science but Kennedy will come to the rescue.
There’s a bit of a tension here, in that RFK Jr. wants to slash major parts of these agencies, ridding them of festering corruption, but he also wants to empower the regulators further to drive various food products and additives out of circulation.
Some changes Kennedy might make could be a good thing. He is a proponent, for example, of raw milk, which consumers should be free to buy and producers should be free to sell. (Many states make it quite hard to do so.) But he also frequently goes after the wrong culprits, like when he talks about how using high-fructose corn syrup, instead of real sugar, is a major factor contributing to obesity. That much is true, but the way to solve for that is not to direct more state muscle to cracking down; it’s to remove the sugar tariffs and corn subsidies that led to it being this way in the first place. The cheapness of high-fructose corn syrup is an artifact of government policy, and sometimes the solution is as simple as repealing existing bad laws on the books. As for the last bit—getting Americans to consume less sugar—that may be an area where the culture should change, but it isn’t one where health bureaucrats should punish people’s choices.
This is all par for the course with Kennedy, though. He gets a few things right, but he consistently muddles the details and blames the wrong culprits.
Another example: Kennedy wants to review vaccine safety data, to figure out which vaccines should be pulled from market. “People ought to have a choice, and that choice ought to be informed by the best information,” Kennedy told NBC earlier this month. “So I’m gonna make sure the scientific safety studies and efficacy studies are out there, and people can make individual assessments about whether that product is gonna be good for them.” If Kennedy wants to put those studies in a more prominent part of the HHS website so citizens can review them more easily, that’s fine with me. But this isn’t exa
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