The New Yorker, August 2025
Earlier this month, the wellness entrepreneur Calley Means delivered opening remarks at a symposium called “The Future of Farming: Exploring a Pro-Health, Pro-Farmer Agenda,” held in Washington, D.C., at the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank. Means is prominent in Make America Healthy Again, the clean-eating, vaccine-skeptical movement that opposes corruption in the food, pharmaceutical, and agricultural industries. He is also a top adviser to MAHA’s patron saint, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., now the Secretary of Health and Human Services. Means gave a brief, somewhat flustered speech that barely touched on farming. Instead, he rehashed various MAHA talking points: that the United States is “the sickest country in the world,” that we spend more money on worse health outcomes than any other developed nation, and that most of the diseases plaguing Americans are caused by the terrible ultra-processed food we eat.
Means also noted some “initial wins” on the food front during Kennedy’s first six months of leading H.H.S. A growing number of Big Food corporations are voluntarily removing artificial dyes from their products, for example. And a dozen states and counting have placed various restrictions on Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits to prohibit the purchase of soda, other sweetened beverages, and candy.
