President-elect Trump’s cabinet will soon be taking shape, with the Ag industry watching closely.
Pam Lewison, Ag Director at the Washington Policy Center, says the pending confirmation of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human Services could make the recent debate over our dietary guidelines interesting.
“He has shown an unusual interest in what I will call alternative health priorities.”
She says RFK, Jr. has curious cohorts.
“He helped host a Senate hearing several months ago that featured what were supposed to be experts in agriculture and health, and they were largely not. They were all sort of, I guess, what you could consider health gurus and marketers rather than people with any actual expertise in food production.”
And for food producers, Lewison says that’s awkward.
“The trouble with that is when you have people guiding food policy who’ve never actually grown it and who list in their bios things like aspiring clean gardener, you don’t have any real connection to how food is grown properly.”
Lewison says that when you have those kinds of people making policy decisions it puts U.S. agriculture at a real disadvantage, and that is concerning.