Margot Ford McMillen

I had just come home from the radio station where my co-host and I had played a few clips from our road trip to the governor’s ham breakfast at the Missouri State Fair. We had interviewed the Fair Queen who, it turns out, comes from a part of the state where the farms are being taken over by developers. Fifth-generation farming families like hers wonder whether they can keep land in their family. At the same time, the Queen was hopeful about the future of agriculture and majoring in college in an ag-related discipline and hoping to spend her career educating kids about where their food comes from.

As my radio partner and I discussed the interview, our conversation moved farther and farther from our planned chat about the state fair and into the future of ag itself. Maybe, we speculated, giant farms will be cut up as the next generation moves into the business. Maybe smaller farms will be a good thing, allowing farmers to control weeds without using so many chemicals. My co-host, an organic farmer, is a youngster, but I remember the days when high school and college kids could count on summer jobs “walking the beans,” which meant walking through the fields and pulling weeds that grew taller than the soybean plants.

In those days, plants were farther apart so there was room to walk. And there were no genetically altered plants, so there was much less use of herbicides during the growing season. Nobody would have thought of flying planes over fields to spray poisons on a crop. Too expensive, too sloppy, too wasteful of the expensive chemicals that drift all over the neighborhood. Today, with agriculture taken over by chemical companies, genetically altered plants resist the weeds.

And when weeds become resistant to a chemical like Roundup, farmers use more potent combinations of poisons.

Those are the strategies the farmer thinks are necessary now. University agriculture programs are heavily subsidized by the chemical companies, so young farmers learn in college to use genetically-altered plants and spray. Spray the field before planting. Spray the field as plants emerge. Spray as needed later in the season and for sure spray before harvest to kill the plants so they’ll be dry for the harvesting machinery.

Those grains and their chemicals go to the mills unwashed, then are ground up together and become the basis for breads, gravies, puddings, pastries, cookies and even the crispy breading on fried foods. With huge acreage, farmers think the poisons are normal and necessary but our human bodies show the impacts. Babies in the wombs are already compromised by what moms have ingested.

The conversation stayed with me and when I got home there was an article in the paper about Robert Kennedy Jr.’s efforts to end chemicals in food. No more artificial colors in Froot Loops. Kellogg’s is quaking in their collective boots, but maybe we shouldn’t be so narrow-minded. We’ve been fighting poisons in foods for years. Let’s take the advantage when we can.

Even The New York Times has started a series about contamination that comes from food, air, water and the environment. In the first of a promised series on environmental health, David Wallace-Wells wrote, “In the aftermath of the pandemic, MAHA has proselytized about the infiltration of our agriculture by chemical contaminants, and though the current risks to human health from pesticides and foods that MAHA has singled out appear somewhere between modest and trivial, the fact of environmental contagion through farming is real.”

Interestingly, NYT didn’t tell us what MAHA is. The acronym stands for “Make America Healthy Again,” and you can guess how that group is aligned. But I have always thought the best strategy for change makers is to stay the course with the issues you care about. If it’s LGBTQ rights, Palestinian homeland security, preservation of the voting system, immigration reform, stick with your plan and work with any powers that will help. By building power, you may be able to flip the narrative.

At this point, it looks like RFK Jr. and MAHA are on our side. Kraft, Kellogg’s, Heinz and Mars are taking steps to remove food dyes from their recipes or replace with safer ingredients. Dyes and flavorings are dangerous but when will RFK and his pals see how unhealthy our agriculture system is and ban some of those industrial strategies? It is impossible to wash poisons like Roundup, 2,4D and others from refined grains. And note that refined grains—wheat, corn, oats, rice and others—make up more than 50% of our diets.

And why did it take threats from MAHA to make food companies care about our health? With brands like Froot Loops and Frosted Flakes being marketed primarily to children, why didn’t anyone think about longterm impacts of ingesting chemicals that are often banned in other countries?

As we say in radio, “Stay tuned ...”

Margot Ford McMillen farms near Fulton, Mo., and co-hosts “Farm and Fiddle” on sustainable ag issues on KOPN 89.5 FM in Columbia, Mo. Her latest book is “The Golden Lane: How Missouri Women Gained the Vote and Changed History.”

Email: margotmcmillen@gmail.com.