The “crunchy moms” who helped power Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Make America Healthy Again movement are splintering, as a year of food recalls and the nation’s largest recorded Cyclospora outbreak push some to turn on the Health and Human Services secretary, as Alyssa Goldberg reports for USA Today.
Recalls of everything from lettuce to blueberries to chocolate milk have rattled parents. Instagram creator @brimotherhood, a self-described “semi-crunchy” mom of two, now tells followers that “RFK Jr. and MAHA do not care about our children’s health.”
Not everyone is defecting. Courtney Luna, author of “Carnivore in the Kitchen,” still embraces the MAHA mom label and is counting on the movement to keep fighting artificial food dyes and seed oils.
The numbers complicate the blame game. A USA TODAY analysis of FDA enforcement reports found an average of 126 food recalls per month under the current Trump administration, versus 135 under Biden and 164 during Trump’s first term. But fewer recalls don’t mean safer food, said Robert Custard, an environmental health expert representing the West Virginia Association of Sanitarians: “The number of recalls does not necessarily correlate with the level of surveillance.” This summer’s Cyclospora outbreak ranks as the third-largest U.S. foodborne outbreak by people sickened, per the U.S. Public Interest Research Group.
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Trust is thin across the board. A May KFF Health Tracking Poll found only 4 in 10 adults support MAHA, and only about a third of Americans trust the FDA and EPA to act without outside influence.
Marion Nestle, professor emerita of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University, said MAHA moms “have plenty to worry about,” arguing that “decimating the FDA, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and National Institutes of Health and destroying the public health system put Americans at much greater risk of foodborne and other illnesses.”
