The Real Reason Our Food System Is Broken

Ingredient swaps won’t change a food system engineered to maximize profit, not health.

---

Hi - I write this to cut through the noise and bring you the truth about what’s happening in science and public health. If that matters to you, please consider upgrading to become a paid subscriber. Every new subscriber helps me reach more people and do more of this work.

---

This week, the USDA officially canceled the Regional Food Business Centers program, a key initiative launched by the Biden administration to support small farmers, rebuild regional food supply chains, and strengthen local food economies.

The program was designed to address two longstanding problems in the American food system: the overwhelming consolidation of food production in the hands of a few industrial agribusinesses, and the collapse of the regional infrastructure that once connected small producers to nearby consumers. The 12 centers funded under the program were intended to serve as regional hubs, offering technical assistance, issuing small business development grants, and building partnerships across the supply chain. By late 2024, a USDA report showed that the centers had already supported over 2,800 producers, helped 287 businesses increase their revenue, and facilitated more than 1,500 new partnerships.

The goal was to help make it possible for small and mid-sized farms to thrive in an economy dominated by massive corporations, while making fresh, local food more accessible to schools, food banks, and communities.

But in a press release dated July 15, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins announced the program’s termination, citing its lack of “sustainable” long-term funding. She framed the move as a necessary fiscal correction, saying “The Biden Administration created multiple, massive programs without any long-term way to finance them. This is not sustainable for farmers who rely on these programs, and it flies in the face of Congressional intent.”

The irony, of course, is that the program was working. And the real reason it’s being eliminated appears to have little to do with fiscal sustainability, and much more to do with political priorities.

This termination is part of a broader pattern at the USDA where programs designed to support small farmers, rebuild regional supply chains, and increase access to fresh, local food are being dismantled. In their place, we’re seeing expanded support for large commodity producers and industrial agribusiness, which is largely reinforcing the same food system many of us, including many in the MAHA movement, want to see changed.

How Did We Get Here?

Our food system didn’t end up dominated by shelf-stable, ultra-processed products by accident. It’s the result of decades of deliberate policy choices that prioritized corporate profits over public health, economic equity, and regional resilience.

In the 1970s, President Nixon’s Agriculture Secretary, Earl Butz, radically reshaped federal farm policy. For decades, farm programs had focused on supply management by paying farmers to limit production in order to stabilize prices and prevent market oversupply. Butz abandoned this long-standing New Deal model of supply management and parity pricing in favor of a new directive to farmers. He famously popularized the phrase “get big or get out.” Price supports were replaced with subsidies that encouraged maximum production of commodity crops like corn and soybeans, regardless of demand, which led to massive overproduction. As a result, prices plummeted, and the market was flooded with cheap ingredients.

That policy shift set the stage for what came next.

In the early 1980s, the Reagan administration took these changes further, doubling down on deregulation and aggressively advancing pro-corporate, anti-labor policies. Longstanding controls on crop production were scrapped entirely. Sugar import quotas raised the price of cane sugar, while subsidized corn made high-fructose corn syrup a far cheaper alternative, accelerating its use in processed foods. Farm policies during those years heavily favored large-scale agribusinesses, squeezing out small, diversified farms and fueling a wave of farm foreclosures.

At the same time, the Reagan administration redefined antitrust enforcement, abandoning efforts to limit corporate consolidation unless it directly harmed consumer prices. This shift opened the floodgates to mergers and acquisitions across agriculture and food manufacturing, concentrating power in the hands of a few dominant firms and weakening the position of small farmers, suppliers, and local food systems.

This was also when the shareholder value movement was gaining momentum, which reframed the purpose of a corporation as maximizing returns for shareholders above all other values, including serving workers, communities, or the public good. This shift fueled a business model focused on cutting costs, boosting profits, and prioritizing short-term growth, no matter the long-term consequences for health or equity.

For food companies, that meant relentless pressure to cut costs, expand product lines, and generate profits in a saturated market. And that pressure helped accelerate shifts in the food supply. Companies leaned into shelf-stable, ultra-processed products made from the cheapest subsidized ingredients and optimized to be hyper-palatable, rather than nutritious. And they turned to aggressive marketing, particularly targeting children and low-income communities, where health disparities were already deepening.

Meanwhile, government subsidies continued to support the industrial-scale production of profitable commodity crops, including corn, soy, and wheat, while little support was given for fruits, vegetables, or regenerative practices. Local and regional food systems, which had once played a vital role in feeding communities, collapsed in the face of a system built for scale, shelf life, and shareholder returns.

The result is the food environment we have today, which some estimates suggest is about 70% ultra-processed, deeply unequal, and increasingly disconnected from the people and places that produce our food.

And it’s why programs like the Regional Food Business Centers were so significant. They were designed to begin rebuilding what decades of policy had eroded. To reconnect farms and communities, improve food access and equity, and reduce our heavy reliance on shelf-stable, ultra-processed products. To make it easier for schools to serve fresh food, for small farms to access markets, and for families to find something healthier than soda and shrink-wrapped snacks at their local corner store.

But that vision doesn’t align with the priorities of an administration increasingly guided by corporate interests. The decision to cancel the RFBCs is just one example in a series of moves that defund local food initiatives while expanding financial support for large-scale commodity growers.

The Trump Administration’s Agricultural Priorities

In July, the Big Beautiful Bill allocated an additional $66 billion to farm programs over the next decade. And nearly all of it is directed toward expanding subsidy-like programs for commodity crops like corn, soybeans, wheat, and sorghum. These programs, including crop insurance and price support mechanisms, overwhelmingly benefit large-scale, industrial farm operations, not small, diversified farms or local producers. The bill also makes permanent a host of tax breaks and estate tax exemptions that favor corporate farm structures and inherited wealth.

At the same time, the bill failed to meaningfully expand support for small or local food systems, and excluded targeted investments in fruit and vegetable growers, beginning farmers, and those at the very foundation of a more resilient and equitable food system.

This, of course, is part of a broader pattern of policymaking. Just this year, the administration has cancelled or scaled back multiple programs that once supported local producers. From terminating the Local Food for Schools program, which helped schools buy directly from nearby farms, to cutting funding for food hubs and farm-to-school efforts that connected small farms to their communities. Even programs aimed at helping farmers adopt sustainable practices, like the Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities, have been eliminated. Taken together, these cuts reflect a clear set of priorities to support large agribusiness at the expense of small farms and local food systems, reinforcing the same industrial model that created our current food environment.

The Misdirection

The MAHA movement gained popularity based on this idea of a broken food system. But they are so focused and distracted by corporate promises to change ingredients in ultraprocessed foods that they are missing the bigger picture of why the food system is broken in the first place, and what would need to change to fix it.

Because the real reason our food system is broken has nothing to do with the color of your candy or the fat source used in your fast food french fries. It’s about decades of policy that have prioritized corporate profits over public health, regional resilience, and economic equity. And while MAHA influencers celebrate voluntary label changes, the current administration is actively, and quietly, dismantling programs that could build a healthier, more resilient food system, and reinforcing the same profit maximizing model that created the problem to begin with.

The real fight to fix our food system isn’t about swapping ingredients. It's about why our food system looks the way it does, and who benefits from keeping it that way.

And until we recognize this and change those incentives, nothing truly changes.