Eating in America Podcast

I love Halloween, especially now that my three trick-or-treaters have grown up, and I am not the parent coping with the giant bag of candy at the end of the night. But we are getting a dwindling number of trick-or-treaters each year. Our numbers have been low…sad, single-digit low.

Halloween is a competitive event, of course, with children competing for the biggest bag of candy, and our house and the other houses on the street competing to have children come ring the bell. It is not a zero-sum game on the street. We benefit if our neighbors have popular treats and our neighbors benefit as we attract customers. Clearly there are good treats streets, dead streets, and must-see streets full of decorations. This year I am determined to do my bit to make our street competitive in the treat department. Trick-or-treating has been reaching extinction levels in our neighborhood.

Last week in the store, I noticed a display of PEZ dispensers in the shape of pumpkin goblins and witches with two little packs of stacked candies per dispenser. Brilliant! Kids love PEZ, not so much for the candies, which are tiny, but for the toy! At $2.49, each pack was way more than we have ever spent per trick-or-treater, but with as little as six kids coming by, this would be not only affordable but likely a great hit with the children.

I bought 16 PEZ dispenser packages, expecting full well, and accepting, that the colorful candy would turn out to have artificial dyes. I just didn’t know which dyes.

From anti-smoking aid to a not-so-innocent candy…

PEZ was invented by the baking powder maker Eduard Haas III in Austria in 1927. PEZ was a mint Haas marketed to people to assist with quitting smoking or overeating.

The PEZ dispenser, created by a product engineer who had experience designing cigarette lighters — it shows in the design he came up with (think BIC lighter) — didn’t appear until 1949.

PEZ was introduced to America in 1952, but Americans at that time were not very interested in quitting smoking. PEZ didn’t sell well.

However, Haas, creating a brilliant success story that can still be found in marketing courses, quickly dropped the adult smoker as his target consumer. In 1955 PEZ added its first two figured dispensers, a robot and a full-body Santa Claus.

Haas changed the candy from mint to fruit flavors and began marketing to children.

Today, the PEZ factory in Connecticut makes 15 billion candies annually for the U.S. and Canada. Billions of dispensers with over 1,500 different figures have been sold around the world: Disney, Star Wars, Republican elephants, Democratic mules, Ninja Turtles, Miss Piggy, Sponge Bob, superheroes. You name it, if it is a character that can be licensed, PEZ has made it. PEZ has stayed so in tune with the times it made Psychedelic Flowers and Psychedelic Hands dispensers in 1968!

An unscientific poll…

I asked some people about their Halloween treat offerings. There was unanimity on two things:

* Leftover candy has to be enjoyable, so a lot of chocolate treats that are attractive to adults are in the bowl for the kiddies.

* There is no good candy from a nutrition or health perspective, but it is a once-a-year event, so what-the-heck?

On the latter point, Jessica Daniels pointed out the obvious: kids love, love Halloween. Everyone loves Halloween. It is a very special couple of hours when children can go up to their neighbors’ and even to strangers’ doors and ask for and be given candy, safely, with joy. And the kids have fun costumes! And Halloween yard decorations seem to be in a competition with Christmas for most holiday spirit and every year are adding more to the festive spirit.

So, yes, what-the-heck!

But this is a Substack about healthy eating…

Yeah, about those artificial dyes…It turns out that one of them is Red Dye No. 3. Of course, Red 40, Yellows 5 and 6, and Blue 2 are on RFK, Jr. and MAHA’s hit list for dyes to do in, but Red No. 3 is already officially scheduled for extinction in America in 2027 due to its association, at high levels, with cancer in rats. Europe, Canada, California, and now the U.S. as a whole have banned Red No. 3.

So my 16 PEZ packages contained a little bit of Red No. 3 in each strawberry flavor pack. Twelve tiny candies ready to be ejected into delighted mouths by pumpkin goblins and scary witches.

A little worried for my reputation, I took them back to the store for a refund.

What to do? What do you do?

Here is where your help and opinions are needed. Now, a couple of people I asked have seen their kids, or themselves experienced, getting books as treats, and loving it. Other folks gave me ideas for other, much less pricey, non-candy treats like sticky fingers, gel vinyl window stickers, and glow sticks. But generally people just said, “What the heck? Let them eat candy!”

Maybe I should set out both candy and toys for the kids. Good to win favor for next year with both the parents as well as the kids and get the numbers up.

What about the parents’ dilemma?

What about that big bag of candy? I got several reports of parents permitting all the candy you can eat for one night and one night only. The remainder of the candy always disappeared mysteriously either overnight or over the course of a few days.

What about you and your household?

Please share your thoughts and Halloween practices in the comments. Thanks to everyone who shared their Halloween practices for this piece.

Photo credits: PEZ archive except PEZ Giveaway, photographer unknown, and Pumpkin Head PEZ, Ric Bayly.

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What Would Jesus Eat? Or for that matter what would Moses or Buddha or Mohammed eat? Let’s just say, they, in their divine wisdom and knowledge, might be a little upset at what we are eating today.

These holy men ate healthy, even though they all spent time on the road, and, as we know, eating well when traveling can be challenging.

In fact, there was deprivation. After fleeing Egypt, Moses and the Israelites were starving in the wilderness until God rained down the bread, “manna from heaven.” Buddha found spiritual strength, but few calories, fasting on one grain of rice and one sesame seed. Jesus famously fed 5,000 hungry followers with five loaves of barley bread and two small fishes.

But for Jesus and the others, when the food was available, recorded history and archeology tell us it was healthy: melons, figs, dates, grapes, olives, vegetables, whole grain barley and wheat, almonds, pistachios, fish. Chickens and eggs were a part of daily life. Herding was common, providing milk and cheese from sheep, cows, and goats. Because of scarcity and lack of refrigeration, meat would have been reserved for special occasions. Cane sugar was not yet developed, but there was honey, a special treat for the prosperous.

And, though Americans today might gag, grasshoppers and rodents were fine sources of protein, energy, and micronutrients, and welcome on the menu – as they still are in some places!

As the Apostle Paul put it: “Your body is a temple.” Our bodies are precious, said Buddha. But since Buddha’s time, with advances in industrialization and rapid changes in our societies, we have developed a food industry which formulates, manufacturers, and immerses us in foods which are cheaper, hyperpalatable to the point of addiction, and unhealthy.

In fact, the business of food has a tarnished history. Rice was polished to make it white, and Asian populations got beriberi. Midwest milled corn was highly refined to ship it to the American South for the poor farmers and mill workers in the early 20th century who couldn’t afford anything else. With the niacin refined out of the corn, the farmers and factory workers developed an epidemic of pellagra and suffered dermatitis, diarrhea, dementia, and death.

Lately, a more drastic, deadlier trend has appeared. Over 50% of our calories come from ultraprocessed food. Our eating habits have been shaped by ultraprocessed food engineering and marketing, creating a global epidemic of obesity and overweight. In America, obesity is a leading cause of preventable death.

Millennia went by with our species thriving on the food that people could find or grow, all minimally processed and nutritionally diverse. Communities and their leaders figured out how to keep their food healthy and nutritionally complete. The rabbis writing the Old Testament or Torah saw trichinosis larvae infecting their people and simply forbade eating pork, the primary way the parasite entered humans. Allah, in the Islamic Quran, banned pork as not halal. Africans and the first Americans learned to combine plant foods like beans and rice to make complete proteins where meat and fish were scarce.

What made modern leaders allow such a weird, industrialized, and unhealthy food environment as we now inhabit? (Yes weird. Exhibit A is Quorn, a pretend meat made from mold, available in your Whole Foods freezer section. Exhibit B is Froot Loops, available at all more affordable supermarkets.)

RFK, Jr., the Make America Healthy Again would-be-goliath, campaigned against ultraprocessed (UPF) food, but that campaign has stalled out in the Trump administration. The new U.S. Dietary Guidelines, which are due this month according to Kennedy, were undercut by September’s MAHA Strategy Report and are unlikely to make UPF recommendations. Kennedy’s MAHA Report punts on UPF, as did the Dietary Guidelines Scientific Advisory Report before it, asking first for a federal definition of UPF before action is taken.

Meanwhile, California has surged ahead of the Federal government and has a new law to kick ultraprocessed food out of schools. I have read the signed legislation. It provides a clear definition of UPF and allows for three categories. “Ultraprocessed foods of concern” and “restricted school foods” would essentially be phased out by 2032. Ultraprocessed foods that are not in these first two categories would, by default, be allowed, addressing the argument that not all UPF is necessarily unhealthy.

The long timeframe of the legislation will allow almost three years, until June 2028, for University of California scientists to carefully weigh the scientific evidence about UPF substances in question and to consider if other jurisdictions have banned or restricted those products. This is a reasonable amount of time for the job at hand. The scientists will then determine for the purpose of California school food regulations if those substances are in a category to be phased out.

Interestingly, California had already, in 2024, set artificial dyes to be phased out of school food by the end of 2027.

California’s new law, the Real Food, Healthy Kids Act, is a positive and concrete step forward with a reasonable process to achieve a goal that the U.S. should be working toward on the national level with commitment and speed.

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Farming districts, which tend to be heavily Republican and pro-Trump, have been buffeted in the quickly changing tariff, food stamp, Farm Bill, and farm subsidy winds of the Trump administration and Congress, as Eating in America pointed out recently. But agribusiness’s support for Trump has not been forgotten, as we are reminded in news about the way the Labor Department sets farm minimum wages to protect American farm workers.

In affirmation of a long-standing prediction by economists and reiterated in Eating in America last week, the Labor Department has warned that the new shortage of immigrant farm workers, due to Trump’s anti-immigrant policies, threatens a rise in food prices. This alarm, in the text of a Labor Department rule posting which revised the methodology for setting farm wages, was reported by the Washington Post.

Given the drop in migrant farm labor, the Labor Department foresees “imminent economic harm” with the potential for billions of dollars in lost farm operator revenue. The Labor Department, in the rule, states that American workers are unwilling to take the farm jobs migrants are leaving, citing the physical demands, long hours, and exposure to extreme weather.

Ironically, the Labor Department’s sudden switch to new methodology to calculate farm wage rates is required because the USDA in August killed the annual USDA Farm Labor Survey, the most reliable indicator of farm wage levels paid to Americans and, previously, the basis for setting required farm wages. The set rates varied by state but were, in general, considerably higher than state and federal minimum wages. Replacing the Farm Labor Survey with a less accurate method proposed by the Labor Department will have the effect of allowing farms and ranches to pay workers much less, increasing farm and livestock producer profits.

When the first Trump administration tried to kill the Farm Labor Survey in 2020, the move was knocked down by the courts, since the resulting mis-estimation of farm wage levels would indeed have lowered required wages. Farm workers, Americans and migrants both, would have seen $171 million taken from their pockets and put in the hands of farm operators. When Trump’s USDA killed the survey again last month, farm groups rejoiced. The expectation was that many farm operators and livestock producers will be able to lower wages, especially those paid to foreign workers.

This scenario, of course, depends on farms being able to hire foreign workers, who, in fear of ICE, have left farms in great numbers this year. Trump is trying to redress this shortage by making it easier, since the beginning of October, for farm operators to apply for H2-A temporary farm worker visas. 315,000 such visas were issued last year, but it is estimated that the farm worker population has diminished by 155,000 this year due to immigration enforcement.

The number of H2-A visas that may be issued is uncapped, and almost all farm operator applicants are granted visas for use by workers. The hope is that if the application process is easy enough, the number of visas used by migrant workers will be greatly increased.

Ironically, Trump pretends to be protecting American workers’ wages by getting rid of migrants. Instead, in the case of agricultural workers, he is choosing to allow wages for Americans to drop as exploitative wages are accepted by H2-A visa workers. Lower wages will make farm operators richer and, the hope is, by enabling sufficient farm staffing, still protect farm production levels and prevent food prices from zooming, which would cause wide dissatisfaction among American voters.

With the killing of the Farm Labor Survey, we again see American workers thrown under the bus by Trump and two federal departments moving in opposite directions, with the Department of Labor trying to comply with the law protecting American wages and the USDA complying with the wishes of farm and livestock operators and their lobbying groups by paving the way for lower wages.

Thank you for reading. Your comments, likes, and dislikes are highly appreciated.

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Editor’s note: Eating in America officially launches today, so we’re celebrating something most of us love – coffee! Or tea, of course, if you prefer. The voices of 11 Eating in America readers are heard in the audio/podcast version of today’s Eating in America, making it a very good day to try the audio version, if that is not your usual choice. Thank you for being a part of Eating in America as we officially launch!

I propose that the Nobel Prize for Science should be given posthumously to the goatherd Kaldi, who, 1,300 years ago in Ethiopia, observed his goats were getting very happy after eating the berries off what turned out to be a coffee bush. Kaldi’s discovery of coffee was a great leap for humankind and probably directly responsible for much of the scientific discovery to follow. To paraphrase the G.O.A.T. (that is, Greatest Of All Time) physicist Albert Einstein and the mathematician Alfréd Rényi, who was the first to say it, people are just machines to turn coffee into intelligible thought.

In even the briefest history of coffee, it is important to identify the heinous role of enslavement. It is horrible that, as with two other addictive substances, sugar and tobacco, the explosion of coffee consumption in the Western world was enabled by the kidnapping and enslavement of people from Africa. Outright slavery was used in large producing countries like Haiti and Brazil, and the coercive semi-enslavement of indigenous people made Central American coffee planters rich.

On the positive side, according to many studies, brightening our minds and our days with coffee or caffeinated tea does not seem to bring a health penalty, on balance, for most moderate users. Some studies show coffee linked to a possible reduced risk of some cancers, although one study shows an association with an increased risk of lung cancer. A study reported this past summer but not yet peer reviewed and published found a modest association between coffee drinking and healthy aging, although the study only involved women who were white. A good review of caffeinated beverage consumption published this summer covers not only biological effects but the societal framework of caffeine beverages, globally. That study examined the potential negative effects of caffeine consumption but still concluded the physical and cognitive performance benefits, as well as modest associations with the reduction of chronic disease risk, favored caffeine consumption for many people.

That all said, what we really need to know about coffee and tea is within the stories we keep in our memories and tell our friends. I received 19 coffee and tea stories to share from 12 people, all of whom are represented here. Together they reaffirm who we are and help reveal what we make of coffee and what coffee makes of us. And these stories open windows so we can see what we share with others. Here are the stories told to Eating in America.

If you’re a coffee drinker, the first two stories will likely strike a note of familiarity.

Joan Higbee in Maryland wrote:

“We went to visit my husband’s family who were all big drinkers. I didn’t drink much that evening and went to bed early. The next morning, I developed a huge headache like a hangover, and I couldn’t figure out why – I barely drank. The next morning the same thing. It was only after breakfast I found out that my sister-in-law had been serving us decaf coffee. I was mad. The rest of them deserved hangovers. I didn’t.”

Mary Waters was in California in grad school, working long hours, trying to produce a book. Having developed a terrible headache and worried she might have a brain tumor, she was referred to a specialist.

[Mary’s voice]

“So I got to go to the neurologist, and he did this whole workup on me. At one point he asked me, after he had done a lot of tests, do you drink coffee? And I was like, yes. Like how many cups? I said, well, I don’t know how many cups, but I make three pots. And he’s like, and when do the headaches start? And I was like, you know, after I drink three pots of coffee.”

Needless to say, the doctor told Mary she didn’t have a brain tumor but she really had to cut down on the coffee.

Chris Williams grew up mostly in Oklahoma and Columbia, South America, the daughter of an Air Force pilot, and reports her story from Texas. Chris found out, as she went off to sophisticated San Francisco to study to be a sociologist – someone whose job it is to understand cultural differences, that the coffee you drink, and how you drink it, can be a signal of differences between people:

[Chris’s voice]

“My coffee stories are both about culture. My first coffee story is about when I started graduate school, and I was very poor. But I also was very unsophisticated in my taste. So I got a job working at the Berkeley Journal of Sociology, and I brought my little hot pot and my Nescafé with me. My little jar of Nescafé, and I just thought that was normal. All of my fellow graduate students just thought I was the most exotic human being ever. Very unsophisticated. Like I just rolled in off the turnip truck or something like that. Meanwhile, they are all drinking these giant cups of Peet’s coffee that seemed to be half, half and half.”

“And you know, I did the calculation, and I figured that was a dollar a day. And that was huge. But you know, the culture, the cultural message was that I was doing something very taboo. So I quickly learned to invest the dollar on the giant cups of Peet’s coffee. And indeed it was more delicious.”

Chris’s San Francisco had the heritage of being the western U.S. coffee center from the start of the mid-1800s coffee boom, with Folgers Coffee there making leaps in the quality of beans bought from Central and South America. Folgers also led the way in the packaging of pre-roasted coffee, coffee previously having been roasted in the consumer’s kitchen just prior to brewing. Founder James Folger basically invented the consistently good cup of coffee. Ironically, the attitude about Nescafé that Chris found in San Francisco, the epicenter of the coffee explosion in America, was the opposite of what she had encountered growing up in Columbia, the source of fine quality coffee beans:

[Chris’s voice]

“Well, I lived in Columbia when I was a high school student and a lot of people there drank Nescafé, which was kind of surprising. So there I think the class meaning of Nescafé was different than it was in the States, more like a class marker that you were kind of at a higher level.”

Chris’s time in Columbia was in the mid-1970s when Nestlé’s, the manufacturer of Nescafé, was using grossly unethical and deceptive marketing practices to convince women in low- and middle-income countries, including Columbia, to feed their babies powdered Nestlé’s formula mixed with water instead of breast milk. By 1981, in places around the world where the drinking water was unclean, over 200,000 more babies died per year than in places with clean water. Nestlé’s, with full knowledge of the danger, was selling formula in places where few homes had a washing facility to clean a bottle and no clean water source. I’ve been to some of these places, and seen many of these homes, and it is still an issue. But a mother spending money on formula was seen as a sign she was doing the best for her baby, despite the cost.

It is no surprise that, with the giant marketing effort Nestlé’s was making in places like Chris’s Columbia, drinking Nescafé, instead of delicious Columbian coffee, was also seen as a marker of prosperity.

A 2023 series of papers on breastfeeding in the respected medical journal, The Lancet, reports that sales of formula to low- and middle-income nations continues, at a pace of $55 billion, annually. Today, less than half of infants and children around the world are breastfed as recommended by the World Health Organization.

Nestlé’s flipped the script in Columbia, turning Nescafé, a product made in a factory from cheap beans, into a food favored by Columbians over their beautiful native coffee beans. Moreover, Nestlé’s manipulated millions of mothers into feeding their babies formula, when scientists and international health organizations have been loud and clear mothers should breastfeed, as is possible for the vast majority of mothers. These two examples shine a bright light on what has happened here in America, where Nestlé’s and the rest of Big Food have convinced us to eat highly processed food which isn’t healthy for us.

I think of Starbucks as a place to grab a good-tasting black coffee at the airport. As I sip, I feel close to the mountains of Columbia. In reality, Starbucks is more of an ultraprocessed food giant akin to Nestlé’s than our friendly partner with a mission to wake us up, gently and deliciously. The revenue drivers for Starbucks are its blended beverages with long lists of ingredients with chemical names. Nestlé’s, by the way, is the worldwide distributor of Starbucks products outside of Starbucks cafes.

Sandy Waxman from Illinois reached a point when what coffee she drank became a badge for who she was…and Sandy is with me now in grabbing a coffee before getting on the plane at the airport:

[Sandy’s voice]

“When I turned 40, I thought I’m 40, I’m at a really big turning point in my life, I am going to stop doing things that I just don’t love, and that always make me feel bad. One was wearing shorts, and the other is drinking airline coffee. And I stopped, and it was really liberating, and I loved that.”

Wayne Quillan grew up in Upstate New York and related his coming of coffee age story:

[Wayne’s voice]

“When I was probably 10 or 11 years old, was the first time that I tasted coffee. There was some kind of event at the school auditorium. They had opened the cafeteria, so coffee was being served. And a friend of mine, Robbie, who was already a very excitable character, got himself a cup of coffee at the ripe old age of 10 or 11 and insisted that I try it. And I tried it, and I remember spitting it out thinking it was the most vile thing I had ever tasted, even though he had added copious amounts of sugar to it. And of course the next day, Robbie missed school. So I felt somewhat vindicated that I had had the good sense to not consume this awful stuff.”

Wayne went on to relate that he got all the way through late nights studying at college drinking only water, still repulsed by the idea of drinking vile coffee, even when he spent his Junior year in France living with a family who served café au lait every morning, which he didn’t touch. Only his first job after college, spending all day looking for errors in computer program printouts, drove Wayne to coffee.

[Wayne’s voice]

“It enabled me to get through the day without falling asleep, so that is where I became addicted to coffee and have been ever since.”

Coffee can be at the center of the culture of a whole community. Rocio Calvo, who grew up in Spain, where she developed her love of her “morning fix”, began to understand this while living in a small community in the mountains of Guatemala:

[Rocio’s voice]

“The time I spent in Guatemala, in a community that grew the coffee, collected it, to see the whole process … not only of the coffee [production] itself, but how the life of the community revolved around coffee. I learned how to appreciate the drink and the coffee besides my morning fix.”

Melissa Hernandez-Jasso from Mexico City was just a girl when her eyes were opened to what coffee could mean to some other girls:

[Melissa’s voice]

“My favorite coffee story is when I was a kid, I was in my grandparent’s village in Mexico along the southern border with Guatemala. It’s a small town called Guatimoc. You can Google that. I was once looking at children coming back from the mountains, they were collecting coffee. And they were carrying these big bags of coffee that weighed, I don’t know, how many pounds. And I was just so surprised to see people my age carrying that and working that way when, yeah, I just had a very different life in Mexico City with my parents.

And my grandfather told me you should try to carry that. And so I did. I tried. I couldn’t even lift any single, like, centimeter. And I was just so surprised. And I guess that always stuck with me of how effort and work there is involved in coffee. And it also instilled a high sense of class consciousness in me.”

Like Melissa’s story, the most poignant stories involved childhood memories and parents or grandparents and put coffee and tea in the center of family traditions and culture. Paul Blackborow recalled:

[Paul’s voice]

“I grew up in England, so primarily a nation of tea drinkers when I grew up there. But my mother was ornery about such matters, and she only drank coffee. But back in the 60s when I first became aware of this, there was really no ground coffee that anybody drank, certainly not in our social stratum. And so she drank instant coffee. Nescafé Gold Blend if we could afford it. Otherwise, it was the supermarket brand, Sainsbury’s, I think. Us kids would make her coffee when we made a cup of tea. And that involves spooning a spoon of Nescafé into a cup, boiling the water in the kettle and on the stove, of course, because electric kettles hadn’t been invented. And then she drank the coffee, gratefully.”

Steve Bussolari, who grew up in Connecticut, remembers a piece of advice from his father:

[Steve’s voice]

“When I was in my early teens, starting to drink coffee, my father counseled me to only drink it black, to learn how to drink it black because, the way he put it, you’re going to be at meetings. People are going to be searching for cream and sugar, not going to find it. They’re going to be all upset. But you’re going to be happy. You’re just going to go up to the coffee urn, get a nice cup of black joe, and be happy. To this day, I tell him that was the only piece of advice that I found actually useful.”

Martin Button remembered his family’s ritual of sharing tea when he was growing up in New Zealand:

[Martin’s voice]

“Tea is not really tea unless it’s brewed in a pot. This idea of tea bags, where I think everybody drinks tea out of tea bags these days, that doesn’t really count as tea. There’s a ritual about making tea that involves a good teapot, perhaps a very pretty tea cozy to keep the teapot warm while the tea is steeping, putting boiling water into the teapot before the tea goes in so that the teapot is hot and not cold when the tea goes in. Of course, leaf tea out of a container with a teaspoon in it to measure one teaspoon per person, one for the pot. And then the water is boiled and added to the pot. The lid goes on, the cozy goes on, the appointed amount of time elapses, and three minutes later, the tea is poured out, cups lined up.”

“That’s the way to make perfect tea. Growing up, when we would visit grandparents or aunts and uncles, that’s just how tea was made.

I didn’t really know about tea bags until I came to this country.”

Jessica Daniels shared a coming of coffee age story from growing up in New York with her grandparents from Poland nearby:

[Jessica’s voice]

“When I was young, my grandmother used to give me little sips of coffee, but on the other hand, my grandparents also told me that drinking coffee would stunt my growth, and I’ve never been taller than five-four. So, there you go.”

Bahaa Fam’s grandmother was Egyptian. Bahaa’s memory of her roasting coffee, says it all:

[Bahaa’s voice]

“My best memory of coffee is that when I was about three years old, my grandmother lived with us. She was a very lovely woman, very smart and very small in stature. And every morning she would get up, and she would fry coffee beans on the stove. It would fill the apartment with this incredibly wonderful smell, which I remember to this day.

And when I got married, I told my wife about this experience. And we went out, and we bought a coffee roasting machine. We run it every other day and roast coffee. And when I smell that smell, I think of the warmth I felt with my grandmother in the house with us and the delicious odor of roasting coffee in our little apartment.”

There is so much that could be said about coffee and tea. We heard from our guests about the way they used and enjoyed, or maybe at first didn’t enjoy, coffee and how coffee and tea helped bind them into their families and the communities they were a part of.

To wrap up by returning to the goat theme, the G.O.A.T., again Greatest Of All Time, baroque musician Johann Sebastian Bach, said,

“Without my morning coffee, I am just like a dried-up piece of goat.”

Thank you for listening. Please add your coffee, tea, or any caffeinated beverage story in our comments below! Links to facts used in this podcast are in the text version.

Remember, you can’t buy happiness, but you can buy coffee and tea, and those are pretty close!

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.eatinginamerica.co/subscribe

We are a nation with some big superpowers – like military might, for example. One of our greatest superpowers is agriculture. America is the world’s leading single nation food exporter. (The European Union in aggregate is a larger exporter.) We produce enough food to feed the U.S. population and a third more.

Why can’t America put healthy food on every plate?

Why, as an agricultural superpower, do we not as a nation simply do what it takes to make healthy food affordable to all Americans and central to American eating habits? Secretary of Health RFK, Jr. is right that we can’t be as strong as we should be, individually and as a nation, unless our food is healthy.

Subsidies are not helping put healthy food on our plates

Our agricultural policies are often directed away from healthy solutions. The vast majority of our agricultural subsidies go to commodity farmers, producers of corn, wheat, cotton, rice, and soy. Only 1% goes to growers of fruits, and 1% goes to growers of vegetables. Corn production, America’s most heavily subsidized commodity, is for animal feed (46%), ethanol for gas (43%), and ultraprocessed food (10%.)

And who gets the subsidies?

Ten percent of commercial farmers get three-fourths of the subsidies. Many of these farm operators have annual incomes over $1 million.

What would a good king do?

As U.S. agricultural policy expert Parke Wilde has said, people tend to think about American agriculture by taking the “benevolent monarch” approach to fixing problems: what would I do if I were Queen or King? But our agricultural policy has been shaped by the influence of multiple constituencies, all with their own priorities, making it difficult, in normal times, to change anything.

Who are the players?

The most important and by far the most powerful constituency is agribusiness, from the wealthy and industrial plantation end of farming and its large suppliers to the small, struggling farmers. Agricultural policy reporter Helena Bottemiller Evich recently pointed out that due to the modern-day efficiency of farming methods, actual farmers are only about 1% of voters. They may not be a big voting block, but farm operators punch far above their weight in political power. Farming, including ranching, is the at-home job of 5% of Congressional Representatives and 8% of Senators.

Other stakeholders, as described by Wilde, include farm workers; food manufacturers; input suppliers like seed, fertilizer, and equipment manufacturers; anti-hunger advocates and nutrition advocates, two distinctly different constituencies; environmentalists and climate activists; and agricultural product trading partners internationally.

I would add American food shoppers to Wilde’s list. Consumers, while not well represented by lobbyists, get angry and loud when food prices rise, and prices have been outpacing inflation in recent years.

Don’t touch the Rubik’s Cube

With all these players jostling for a place at the table, creating change in agricultural policy has been a Rubik’s Cube of twisting pieces into place to find a solution. Once a solution has been found, most agricultural stakeholders are not eager to start the puzzle over.

Nutrition in the realm of chaos

As the traditional balance in U.S. government power dynamics has collapsed into chaos, two things happened this summer that signaled a shift of power in the world of agriculture.

Nutrition funding moves to the Big Beautiful Bill

First, the nutrition piece of the Farm Bill was tucked away into Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill which was signed into law in July. In doing so, the Republicans in Congress made heavy cuts into the biggest piece, by far, of the nutrition money: SNAP, or Food Stamp, benefits. SNAP was cut by 20%: $186 billion over the next ten years. SNAP is relied on to put food on the tables of 12.5% of our population, 41 million Americans. Between 2 to 5.3 million Americans will lose some or all of their SNAP benefits under the new cuts, and all benefits will be reduced.

Bipartisanship: a long-standing tradition in the fight against hunger

Since 1969 when Republican President Richard Nixon got the anti-hunger ball rolling with the first White House Conference on Food, Nutrition, and Health [note: the Wikipedia page linked here was authored by me and Katrina Sarson with subsequent anonymous contributors], fighting hunger has been a fully bipartisan issue.

Nevertheless, in 2025, hunger has still not been solved. Twenty percent of children are living with the stress and fear of food insecurity, 50% in some rural counties. Yet even before the Big Beautiful Bill SNAP cuts were passed, Trump cut $1 billion in food for school lunches and food pantries, both critical sources of food for children and families in need.

Let’s hope the decimation of SNAP in the Big Beautiful Bill does not signal the end of the bipartisan agreement that hunger has no place in America.

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But what about the Farm Bill?

Traditionally, the Farm Bill is massive and complex, with a confusing array of subsidies and protections for farmers. The Farm Bill has always stood on its own as a piece of legislation. Changes have been made incrementally on a five-year cycle, avoiding the great difficulty of constructing a new Farm Bill from the ground up.

However, with nutrition pulled out, nutrition and food security having been 81% of Farm Bill spending, the rest of the Farm Bill, mainly the subsidies, is in limbo, and the outcome a question mark. The Democrats required to help the Republicans meet the 60% threshold for Farm Bill passage in the Senate have little appetite to engage.

The cutting of SNAP, school lunch, and food pantry assistance signals a power shift

Clearly, the voices of anti-hunger advocates and nutrition advocates on both sides of the aisle have been quieted or ignored by the unprecedented power grabbing of Trump. But these nutrition and anti-hunger cuts also represent significant reductions in American agricultural purchases.

In the past, food and nutrition programs have had a symbiotic, quid pro quo relationship with agriculture. The reason food and nutrition and agriculture are losing out together is because of Trump’s overriding desire to help fund trillions in tax cuts for the wealthy and hundreds of billions for ICE to deport immigrants. He needs the anti-hunger funds for these priorities even if it hurts his strongly pro-Trump farm constituents.

How agribusiness and Big Food fared in the MAHA Strategy Report

The second marker of a power shift favors agriculture. RFK, Jr.’s Make America Healthy Again initiative took aim at pesticides, an agricultural issue, and ultraprocessed food, a food issue. While the MAHA Assessment report released in May contained a hearty indictment of pesticides, agribusiness successfully lobbied pesticide restrictions out of the MAHA Strategy report issued in September.

The success of agribusiness stands in contrast to Big Food’s considerably less than complete victory with the MAHA Strategy report. The September report pledged an ultraprocessed food definition instead of action, a major let off. On the other hand, the report presented the link between highly processed food and chronic disease prominently; promoted front-of-package labels for saturated fat, salt, and sugar; proposed marketing guidelines for children-targeted food; and pledged to at least partially close the Generally Recognized As Safe food loophole through which many toxic substances are added to our food supply without our knowledge.

JFK, Jr., the X factor

Big Food, although the largest lobby in America, was outperformed in Washington this year by the agribusiness lobby. The X factor was RFK, Jr., who, although his success in nutrition policy has been very limited so far, has brought significant issues to the forefront for discussion.

Is getting ICE off the farms a win for agricultural power?

Perhaps a third marker of agricultural power in this environment of chaos is how quiet ICE has been on the farms recently. Over 40% of farm workers are migrants without authorization to work. In June Trump proposed backing off the targeting of farm workers, and, judging by the news since then, ICE may be largely doing that.

Does the fleeing of farm workers spell trouble for Trump?

Despite Trump’s musings about calling ICE off the farms, farm employment dropped 7% between March and July, with many workers worried about being detained by ICE. The increasing farm labor shortage this year could portend an impending crisis for Trump. Without enough farm workers to tend and harvest crops and animals, food prices will continue to increase, to the great dissatisfaction of American voters. Trump knows to worry about this. He quite possibly would not have won the 2024 presidential election without voter dissatisfaction over rising food prices.

Where’s the nutrition superhero?

If Trump completes his quest for autocracy, he is not going to amend the agricultural system and be a nutrition hero, nor will JFK, Jr. While at least Kennedy might be headed toward getting a small piece of MAHA’s nutritional agenda enacted (not all of which is actually healthy), he has a long way to go on any of these proposals. And it is easy to envision that in a normal political environment that was not susceptible to fantasy science, the limited nutritional reforms on the table could just as easily be enacted without an RFK, Jr. Meanwhile, solving America’s Rubik Cube of a food system to provide healthy food for all, will require political will beyond what MAHA can bring.

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Zero parts per billion is the safe level of lead in the water we drink. Any lead, at all, is unsafe. Who agrees? The EPA, CDC, World Health Organization, and the American Academy of Pediatrics all concur.

How much lead is in our water? According to EPA data reported by the NRDC, the National Resources Defense Council, between 2021 and 2024 community water systems serving over 250 million Americans had tap water with more than the American Academy of Pediatrics recommended level for school children of one part per billion of lead. That is 81% of the households getting their water from community systems. Worse, 44 million Americans have water now with at least 10 parts per billion of lead, the level at which, beginning in 2027, systems will be mandated by the EPA to take corrective measures. Again, the EPA is clear that the only safe lead level is zero:

“Lead is very dangerous to human health. For children, lead exposure can cause irreversible and life-long health effects, including affecting IQ, focus, and academic achievement.”

In comments to Eating in America, the world’s most cited nutrition scientist, Dr. Walter Willet of the Harvard School of Public Health, noted the gaping omission when this month’s Make Our Children Healthy Again Strategy Report didn’t mention lead. Willett told me, the report:

“…left out lead in water, which has demonstrated adverse effects on cognitive development and is a real problem in the U.S., especially in communities with older water systems.”

Willett noted that due to Trump administration budget cuts:

“programs at the EPA for monitoring lead and other heavy metal contamination have already been disrupted and or eliminated.”

Willett further pointed out that instead of providing leadership on childhood lead exposure, which it failed to even mention:

“the report focused water concerns on fluoride, which has major benefits for the prevention of dental caries…”

Given Trump’s recent moves to control economic data, and the killing of the Household Food Security annual report, which could potentially reveal the hardships caused by the massive new Food Stamp cuts and Trump’s cuts to school food and food distributed to food pantries, it should be no surprise if national collection of data on the widespread lead contamination in our water supplies is soon discontinued.

What about lead in your water?

Your municipal records might tell you if the water pipe coming into your house or building from the street is lead or you can usually look at it where it enters in the basement to tell. Better yet, test your tap water in the kitchen, first thing in the morning. The Safe Drinking Water Act banned new lead in plumbing in 1986, but lead joints, solder, or fixtures installed prior to 1986 might be leaching lead into your tap water. Some states and utilities offer free tests.

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September 23, 2025

On Saturday the USDA gave notice it would no longer collect survey data on food insecurity, saying:

“For 30 years, this study…failed to present anything more than subjective, liberal fodder.”

In fact, through Republican and Democratic administrations, the USDA reported on food insecurity with a consistent, unbiased, scientific process.

Commenting to Eating in America, economist Parke Wilde, an expert on the history of the government’s research on food security, said:

“For many years, USDA's annual report reflected a bipartisan interest in improving food security in the United States. Everybody -- Democrats and Republicans -- wanted to see a lower prevalence of food insecurity and hunger.”

Canceling the evidence won’t cancel the problem, but it will go a long way to hiding it.

And the problem is both persistent and, lately, growing rapidly. The 2023 Household Food Security report found 13.5% of households, with 47 million adults and children, were food insecure, indicating stress and difficulty providing enough food at times. That’s compared to a 20-year low of just over 10% in 2021. Over 5% of households, over 16 million adults and children, had very low food security in 2023, usually experiencing hunger at times, sometimes with no food all day, due to bare cupboards.

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The final Household Food Security report under the Trump administration is due out in October and will report on the numbers for 2024. Meanwhile, new Food Stamp cuts to 4 million people and Trump’s cuts to school food and to food distributed to food pantries will create impacts on struggling Americans in 2025. However, this year’s data will go uncollected and the effect of these cuts on food insecurity will remain unknown, for the first time in 30 years.

Dr. Wilde, a professor at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University and former scientist at the USDA, pointed out that while some advocated addressing food insecurity with safety net programs and others urged focusing on supporting a robust labor market:

“…everybody agreed that the United States could provide a road to prosperity for all people. This household food security report is not partisan; it is something we all need to understand how well our country is meeting basic needs.”

Your reactions to this podcast are welcome.

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The Food and Drug Administration’s oversight of food safety has a giant loophole, really a series of giant loopholes, allowing cancer- and chronic-disease causing food ingredients to reach American plates every day. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who has oversight of the FDA, made clear his dismay about this back in March:

“For far too long, ingredient manufacturers and sponsors have exploited a loophole that has allowed new ingredients and chemicals, often with unknown safety data, to be introduced into the U.S. food supply without notification to the FDA or the public.”

RFK, Jr. is right. He is talking about the “Generally Recognized As Safe”, or “GRAS”, status: the heart of a broken food additive oversight system. In 1958 Congress passed a law meant to streamline approval of common ingredients that were already in use, in order to focus on new ingredients. The 800 or so ingredients on the initial GRAS list included household substances like salt and sugar, along with lab-produced chemicals like the artificial sweetener cyclamate.

FDA’s oversight during this period, worked, sort of. In 1970 the FDA banned cyclamate on the basis of contested evidence that it might cause cancer in humans. On the other hand, strong evidence has accumulated about the health harms of too much salt or sugar, but the FDA so far refuses to take up the question of revoking the GRAS status of these substances when consumed in levels beyond those recommended by the science.

What has appalled RFK, Jr. and nutrition scientists and policy makers alike is the direction that food additive oversight took at the FDA in 1997. That is the year in which the FDA turned over the responsibility for assessing the safety of new food ingredients to the food manufacturers themselves, without them being required to turn over any safety data to the FDA. Consequently, for the last 27 years, food ingredient creators could make their own, private determination of GRAS, using any method they chose, without letting anyone know they were adding a new ingredient to the food supply.

Since 1997 about 1,300 notices of new GRAS ingredients have been provided voluntarily to the FDA but without any safety evidence. Incredibly, if the FDA flagged any concerns with such a notice, the manufacturer was free to withdraw the notice and introduce the ingredient into the food supply anyway! And it is likely that hundreds or thousands of products have been declared GRAS by manufacturers and introduced into the food system without any notice at all to the FDA or public. Since there is no public notice of these new ingredients, there is no way of knowing how many there are or what they are.

This is the mess Kennedy would like to clean up, and so on March 10th he instructed the FDA to explore how to eliminate the GRAS pathway to introducing a new substance into the food supply.

But is GRAS really all that bad? Let’s look at some examples.

The FDA maintains a database of the 1,300 or so ingredients that food additive manufacturers have notified the FDA that they, the manufacturers, have self-affirmed as GRAS. Most of the ingredients, especially those added more recently, have chemical and scientific biological names consumers won’t recognize. A recent example is “Algal oil (≥40% docosahexaenoic acid) from Aurantiochytrium limacinum H Sc-01”. The notice for this oil, submitted by a Chinese intermediary company, is for a mix of triglycerides containing 40% or more of a beneficial omega-3 fatty acid, DHA. Theoretically good for you.

This oil is manufactured from micro-algae – the green stuff on ocean rocks and in waters and wet surfaces everywhere – and is intended as an additive for baby formula. The FDA responded to this notice in June, saying it was not judging safety, which was the responsibility of the manufacturer to determine, but that the FDA had no questions, case closed. I’m not in a position to judge whether there is anything scary about this particular manufacturer’s notice of a food additive they are making from algae to be sold for baby consumption. However, it is certainly scary that this notice and hundreds more like it have been filed with no offering by the manufacturers of any evidence of safety and no safety review by the agency in charge of food safety, the FDA.

Mycoprotein is made from mold, a fungis, and is on supermarket shelves as Quorn, a meat substitute. The creator of Quorn, Marlow Foods, asked the FDA to approve it as a food additive, but when the FDA did not make a decision, Marlow withdrew the petition, declared they had determined Quorn was GRAS, and started to sell it. Since 2002 over 2,900 reports of allergic and gastrointestinal reactions to Quorn have been recorded by the Center for Science in the Public Interest. Among these reports was that of an 11-year old boy with a known mold allergy and asthma who died after eating Quorn. When he stopped breathing, he could not be revived by an EpiPen and had no pulse. Paramedics arrived and brought back his heart beat, but the boy died in the hospital the next morning. After eating Quorn, a 16-year old Swedish girl with asthma died following two days of effort to revive her in the hospital. Many other hospitalizations were reported as well.

As with cyclamate, some GRAS determinations have been revoked, but not before plenty of harm was done. Partially-hydrogenated oils, or trans-fats, were very popular and used widely at home and in restaurants. However, scientists calculated that trans-fats had been causing 50,000 heart attack deaths each year. In 2013, the FDA finally revoked the GRAS status and in 2015 banned trans-fats.

Of the GRAS products we know about – and, remember, all of the undeclared GRAS substances are an unknown unknown – there are many for which scientists have found evidence they are, or may be, unsafe. Consumer Reports’ top candidates for GRAS revocation include, and sorry for all the chemical names, I’ll hurry through them:

* brominated vegetable oil, used in sports drinks and sodas, is linked to nervous system, thyroid, heart, liver, developmental, and reproductive problems

* potassium bromate, a flour improver, is linked to cancer

* propylparaben, a preservative, is linked to reproductive issues

* titanium dioxide, a food coloring, is the mineral that makes paint white and that is used in sun block for our skin; titanium dioxide is linked to DNA and cell damage and cancer; a recent study found titanium dioxide nanoparticles omnipresent in human, animal, and infant formula milk.

What are the prospects for elimination of the GRAS system, for needed FDA funding for oversight in the face of massive job cuts this year, and for the removal of politics and commercial influence in what should be scientific and health protection decisions?

RFK, Jr. has taken a baby step towards eliminating the GRAS system, but its replacement is in question. Congress and Trump are unlikely to restore FDA funding Trump removed, let alone increase it to appropriate levels. FDA Commissioner Marty Makary lied, or failed to examine the cuts he made in his department, when he said no scientists were fired in the 2,000 jobs abruptly axed in April. And political and commercial control over science has become overt in the Trump administration and Kennedy’s Health and Human Services department so little hope of improvement there.

However, there are a couple of sparks of hope. In August, Former FDA Commissioner David Kessler filed a 60-page petition full of scientific evidence that the sugars, flours, starches, and additives used in ultraprocessed food are unhealthy in ultraprocessed food and therefore cannot be GRAS. This is a petition that should be making RFK, Jr. happy. If the FDA follows it own rules, the ultraprocessed food industry would suffer a great blow. However, the ultraprocessed food industry spent $1.15 billion on lobbying, 1998 to 2020, the most of any group in America, so, in my mind, the odds are good the FDA will never respond to the GRAS questions involved.

The more promising spark of hope are the moves by California, New York, and Illinois to ban specific food additives like propylparaben, or even, in New York’s case, to require evidence supporting GRAS status before a new ingredient could be sold in the state. In 2023, California banned Red Dye No. 3, along with three other food additives. Perhaps spurred by the California ban, in January the FDA banned the use of Red Dye No. 3 in food and drugs.

A functional, funded food safety system could make a significant difference in our nation’s health, because so much of our chronic disease is associated with what we are sold on eating. If only the FDA picks the big targets: salt, sugar, and refined flour and starch, in combination with the additives to ultraprocessed food.

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Today we’ll catch up a bit on the news about one thing we need in our diet, lithium, and two we may love: alcohol and sugar.

Lithium, mood, and dementia

The element lithium found in the water we drink every day supports a positive mood and may reduce the risk of dementia. That is good. But don’t let ultraprocessed food deprive you of lithium’s benefit!

Lithium found in trace amounts in drinking water is related to reduced risk of: dementia, death by Alzheimer’s Disease, and suicide. The higher the lithium intake from water, the less the risk.

However, a new study has found that eating ultraprocessed food can be related to a reduced level of lithium in the blood. It might be that the higher levels of salt commonly found in ultraprocessed food cause the kidneys to excrete excess sodium, taking out beneficial levels of lithium along the way.

On the other hand, patients prescribed high levels of lithium for mood regulation – common for the control of bipolar disorder – may be advised by their doctor to have a steady but moderate intake of salt to maintain a not-too-high, but still therapeutic, level of lithium.

Our takeaway from the new study is the possibility that ultraprocessed food can be making our bodies get rid of lithium that can help regulate our mood and maintain our brain function. This is just another compelling reason for us to avoid food that is formulated and packaged and, typically, ultraprocessed. And, the evidence about the reduction of the body’s lithium in an ultraprocessed food diet is another great reason for Make America Healthy Again leader RFK, Jr. and Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins to include recommendations for limits on ultraprocessed food in the upcoming U.S. Dietary Guidelines. Sadly, though, indications are Kennedy and Rollins may barely mention ultraprocessed food in the 2025 Guidelines.

Alcohol and cancer

The bad news is that a new National Academies of Sciences study, a 2025 Surgeon General report, and a new article in the Journal of the American Medical Association summarizing all the evidence, make very clear that drinking alcohol can cause cancer: breast, liver, mouth, throat, voice box, esophagus, and colon and rectal cancer.

U.S. Surgeon General:

“Alcohol consumption is the third leading preventable cause of cancer in the United States, after tobacco and obesity.”

As we await the government’s presentation of the 2025 U.S. Dietary Guidelines, I’ll note that the alcohol lobby was the next biggest spender after the tobacco lobby in the U.S. from 1998 to 2020, with over a half-billion dollars spent on lobbying by alcohol vs. three-quarters of a billion by tobacco. The 2025 Dietary Guidelines Scientific Committee punted on alcohol recommendations in their report, in deference to the (then) coming National Academies of Sciences report and another report being finished by Kennedy’s Health and Human Services Department. The chance of the new Guidelines presenting stronger language about limiting the use of alcohol because of cancer and other health consequences do not seem hopeful to me.

Nonetheless, this recent focus on alcohol and cancer in science and the media could be, and should be, huge: impactful to our drinking culture and to the alcohol industry. We’ll return to the topic soon here in Eating in America.

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Coke vs. Coke. Loser vs. loser.

The absurd news is that Donald Trump and his Secretary of Health, Robert Kennedy, are bragging about making Coca-Cola use cane sugar in Coke in the United States. Coke is expected to provide cane sugar Coke this fall in addition to the high fructose corn syrup version they switched to in the early 1980s to save costs.

Coke with sugar, no matter corn or cane, is not a healthy drink.

Cane sugar is sucrose, which is half glucose and half fructose, two other sugar molecules bonded together in the sucrose molecule. High fructose corn syrup is typically 55% fructose and 45% glucose, so about the same chemical balance as cane sugar. Once either high fructose corn syrup or cane sugar is absorbed to your blood, your body can’t tell the difference, so the health outcome is essentially the same.

It will take the sucrose a little longer to be absorbed because the bonds between the fructose and glucose molecules have to be broken down first. But both high fructose corn syrup and cane sugar are associated with obesity, diabetes, heart disease, fatty liver, tooth cavities, and cancer.

How about the taste? Trump seems to prefer the cane sugar Coke.

Trump is not alone. Many people, including me, prefer the less-sweet cane sugar taste. I no longer drink Coke like when I was young, but it still makes me feel better when I am sick.

Coke bottled in Mexico with cane sugar is available in glass bottles at Home Depot. With all the plastic and plastic chemicals in our bodies these days, perhaps more than the taste, the use of a glass container over plastic may be the best reason to choose cane sugar in a Mexican bottle of Coke over high fructose corn syrup in a plastic American bottle. But the plastics story is for another time, coming up soon, on Eating in America.

What’s been your relationship to sugar-sweetened beverages in your life?

Thanks for listening. As always you can check the text version of this podcast for links to the science and factual sources of information I used.

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