SEPTEMBER, 2025: MAHA PRETENSE #2

Commodity crops include wheat, feed grains (grain used as animal feed, such as corn, sorghum, barley, and oats), cotton, milk, rice, peanuts, sugar, tobacco, and oilseeds such as soybeans. 
Most fruits and vegetables are classified as “specialty crops.”   Lack of subsidies for healthy crops like fruits and vegetables means that farmers are economically discouraged from growing them.
The great bulk of what commodity crops churn out ends up as animal feed and fuel for cars, in the form of ethanol and bio-diesel.
But the rest is transformed into sweeteners such as high fructose corn syrup, fats, and additives that are part of the unhealthy ultra-processed foods that are the drivers of chronic disease in the United States.   These are the foods that RFK Jr supposedly wants to significantly reduce.  Yet under the new ‘Big Beautiful Bill’, more than $60 billion in additional funding will be funneled toward large farms with commodity crops, many of which are in the Midwest and the South.    
With all that farmland going to commodity crops, Iowa may see an increase in corn, but they won’t be able to feed their population with the fresh produce the government says we need to keep us healthy. 
So how will MAHA change the food environment if the foods that contribute to diabetes, heart disease and obesity are made from the very crops the government is subsidizing even more in their new bill?   
Remember, in the past 8 months, our government has cut monies used to bring fresh fruits and vegetables from local farms to food pantries and schools, cut the emergency food assistance program, cut local food for schools, and they are about to cut SNAP (food stamps), which already only offers about $6.00 per day to eligible people.
We all want people to eat healthier and be healthier.  Making is harder to buy the healthy food we need is not going to cut it.