Episode #292
Chellie Pingree: Can Healthy Food Bring Left and Right Together?

Congresswoman Chellie Pingree sees an unusual opening for healthy food policy in a deeply divided political moment. Longtime organic advocates and newer voices in the MAHA movement are raising many of the same concerns about pesticides, ultra-processed foods, local farms, and what children are eating. Pingree explores whether those shared priorities can translate into meaningful political action, while acknowledging the enormous influence of chemical companies, industrial agriculture, and corporate lobbyists. She also discusses government support for small and mid-sized farms, the loss of local food purchasing programs, the connection between soil health and nutrition, and why she believes replacing organic with an undefined version of “regenerative” agriculture is a serious mistake.

Congresswoman Chellie Pingree’s interview has been edited and condensed for clarity:

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Dave Chapman interviewed Maine Congresswoman Chellie Pingree Hansch in Maine in late summer 2025:

Chellie Pingree 0:00
Welcome to the Real Organic Podcast. I’m talking today to Chellie Pingree. She’s a Congresswoman from Maine, and it’s a pleasure. We’ve done two interviews before this, and here we are for round three.

Chellie Pingree 0:12
Thank you.

Dave Chapman 0:14
I do want to talk about Joan Gussow before we’re done. But I had a really interesting conversation on my way over here with Hugh Kent. Hugh was talking about the big four things he’s going to try to deal with at Churchtown Dairy next month. I thought they were well said, and I wanted to offer them to you.

Dave Chapman 0:42
One is the takeover of organics by industrial forces that have a very different idea about what organic is, and there’s a lot of impact from that, and the question of, how did that happen? How is that happening?

Dave Chapman 0:57
Two is the huge influx of cheap food from south of the border. I think just for conventional food right now, 40% of our vegetables are coming from south of the border, and 60% of the berries and fruits. It’s a huge wave coming in, and of course, it’s changing the American landscape. I think it’s being done on the backs of those workers down there, and on the back of the environment. We can talk about that.

Dave Chapman 1:29
Three is that small farms just can’t get to the market now in the US. Four is, we seem to be dying from chemicals and junk food. We have a declining fertility rate, shortened lifespan, and some things are going up: obesity, cancer, metabolic disorder, and autoimmune disease. I just landed you with four huge problems, and I’m looking for the string that connects them all. I think there is a string, but can we talk just a little bit about those four?

Chellie Pingree 2:07
Sure. In a weird way, I almost think we should start at the back end, because I think this whole notion of people waking up to the idea, or the growing awareness of how our food is poisoning us, or just the challenges related to what we eat. “Food is Medicine” is what we refer to it as in Congress, and we have a small bipartisan caucus about that.

Chellie Pingree 2:30
Here we are at this convergence of our politics where we’re trying to figure out what’s partisan, and what are the things that we really all agree on. You’ve got this long-time, you could say sort of left-wing movement of people believing we should eat organic, have healthier food, and change our diets.

Chellie Pingree 3:37
Now we have the more recent MAHA (Make America Healthy Again) movement, which you could say represents a part of the Trump administration and RFK, and this convergence of people who are saying, “Should we be banning ultra-processed foods, and should we have more regenerative, as they often call it, agriculture, or just the awareness of that in the diet?”

Chellie Pingree 3:18
That’s the first time I’ve really seen in the political world this coming together in a sense of people who might be voting for a different president, but are saying, “Top of my list is I want my children to have healthy foods, I want the availability of locally grown produce, and I want to support a local farmer.”

Chellie Pingree 3:37
Now it’s one unifying thread that I haven’t seen before. We’re not very good at pulling all those things together. II have certainly been trying to figure out in the short seven or eight months, or whatever, six months we’ve been with this new administration and all the complications we’ve had:

Chellie Pingree 3:55
How do you find a unifying force there that brings us all together about this notion of our food not traveling so far, it should be healthier, it shouldn’t have lots of ingredients, it shouldn’t be ultra-processed. We don’t want all these chemicals in our diet, and we also don’t want all these chemicals in our agricultural system.

Chellie Pingree 4:16
You asked me many other things, but I do think it’s one of the rare moments where I’ve seen this kind of unification. I had hoped in the previous administration, and the previous theme around climate change, that we would get through climate change to an opportunity to get more people aware of the importance of the fundamentals of organic farming, and just to understand it.

Chellie Pingree 4:44
Having a foundation that’s about the soil, knowing that the soil is so critical to our ability to grow healthy foods, to have sustainable agriculture, and honestly, to potentially have a long-term healthy planet, and even to survive into the future, is another opportunity.

Chellie Pingree 5:07
But we’ve sort of dismantled that in the first six months, and anything related to climate change and agriculture has been banished. We’re flailing out there trying to figure out what the federal government will fund, what we will be unified around in agricultural practices, and how we are going to go about doing that.

Chellie Pingree 5:30
Again, that doesn’t necessarily speak to this issue of big organic taking over the fundamentals of what we do. But at the federal level, it’s often very hard to bring together these countervailing forces and to combat the power of anything big – big enough to have a lobbying arm, or big enough to sway enough people who are going to take a vote in Congress.

Chellie Pingree 5:53
Usually that vote belongs to the chemical industry, big ag, CAFOs, or all the other things that push everything else out of the way.

Dave Chapman 6:08
Yeah, that’s right. I know people who are hopeful for the first time in a long time about the possibility of a political solution. I’m not so optimistic, but I’m waiting to see. The future is still the future. We don’t know what’s going to happen. Kennedy is unique in being somebody who has even suggested that the massive use of herbicides might be a bad thing. That is unique.

Dave Chapman 6:44
But I also see him bow down to Brooke Rollins and say, “Well, whatever you say about herbicides goes.” The MAHA report was disappointing in what it actually was calling out as action. What’s your thought? We’re seeing people who have always been completely not connected to challenging corporate hegemony about our food system. Are you hopeful? Do you go, “I think that this might be an opportunity?”

Chellie Pingree 7:20
I had my first test run. We had a committee markup in July, and an issue came up related to glyphosate and some of the immunity that the manufacturers wanted, and there was an amendment. It was the first time I’d really had an issue where I was able to work with a variety of the MAHA groups and say, “Hey, we could really use your help in rallying the troops and basically getting enough Republicans to sign on to this so that we could move it.”

Chellie Pingree 7:51
Now, that’s not to say all Democrats are signing on to the right thing, either. So I don’t want to pretend that there’s a golden party and a dark party. But it was the first time where we had a pretty good dialogue about it, met with a lot of people, and started a lot of conversations. Maybe we didn’t have enough time to really do the lobbying effort.

Chellie Pingree 8:07
But I think for many people, it was their first awakening on the MAHA side that “Yes, while RFK may be saying some of the things that we want to hear, when it gets right into the raw politics of it, it’s a much bigger, more complicated lobbying effort.” We didn’t win. I couldn’t prevail on that particular vote to take the amendment out.

Chellie Pingree 8:29
I was met with this… I guess I shouldn’t say “the same level of resistance.” I saw that people had been making calls to offices because my colleagues were less anxious to take a vote, and so we ended up not having a recorded vote on it. In the weird parlance of Congress, that was a little bit of a victory, because I knew they didn’t want to be on record. I was like, “Well, you don’t want to be on record because someone has called you and told you they’re upset about this.”

Chellie Pingree 8:58
Prior to this, we haven’t had a lot of those kinds of calls going in that would come from both sides, in a sense. I’m not going to give up yet on the opportunity that is there. But I also have seen that while RFK has given a lot of space to talk about agriculture, in the end, he’s not the Ag Secretary, and whether they will really let him do those kinds of things is not clear.

Dave Chapman 9:27
I’ve always been struck by the fact that Kennedy has, all his life, been an old-school liberal seeking greater regulation – ethical, honest regulation of industry. That’s most of what he’s fought against – industry. In terms of food, he and I pretty much agree about everything, and he believes that there needs to be regulation in order to control these large corporations.

Dave Chapman 9:27
I think that President Trump has always been a deregulator, and he believes… It’s an interesting thing about the word “freedom.” So, the deregulators say, “We need to have a free market,” and the regulators say, “You can’t have a free market without regulation, because you’ll have monopoly without regulation, and they will control it, and that’s not freedom, and that’s not even capitalism.” What are your thoughts about that?

Chellie Pingree 10:32
We’re not in an ideological administration right now; we’re in an opportunistic one. On the one hand, now we’re going to get off on some philosophical tack here, but you’ve got the president who’s levied tariffs like we’ve never seen before. On the one hand, that could be a way to promote, say, things like more local agriculture and some of the things that we care about, more things happening in this country.

Chellie Pingree 10:55
Yet, on the other hand, he’s used that as leverage to say, “Well, I’m going to take a stake in your company, and I want a payoff here.” It’s just become this jumble where there’s no ideology that any one economist can follow, and it’s not clear whether they’ll bust up monopolies and believe that we should go back to small… or whether it will just be opportunistic, and your monopoly can function as long as you just give me a share or I can get a tariff off of it. I don’t know.

Chellie Pingree 11:22
I have believed that some of the most important things that we needed to do were to make it possible for small to medium-sized farms to continue to exist. There are differing opinions on this, but a lot of the programming around that from the last administration was to say, “What can we do to supplement the incomes of those farmers who might need something else?”

Chellie Pingree 11:47
Now there are all those people who say, “Keep government out of all my business.” But on the other side of it, there was some thought that because of the conservation programs that might, for instance, pay for your hoop house, subsidize other improvements on your farm, help with marketing, or help with things like the Value-Added Producer Grants, which said, “If you’re building a goat dairy, you could get a grant to actually supplement that, then you’ve got a value-added product, and you might have a better chance of making it to the market or being sustainable on the market.”

Chellie Pingree 12:16
There was also – again, and these things have all become a little bit of heresy – the idea that organic farmers were perhaps some of the most climate-friendly farmers, and so what if you paid people to do those practices?

Chellie Pingree 12:30
If you were paid for keeping high levels of carbon in the soil, or other kinds of ecosystem services, biodiversity, or the things that were going to help your farm retain water, composting, or things that are on that side of the equation, would that be a way for a farmer to see that extra percentage that you need to keep it going when, in a sense, you’re actually providing a great service to the planet?

Chellie Pingree 12:55
That was a philosophical underpinning of things like Climate-Smart Agriculture, which had millions of dollars poured into it, or the increase in conservation funding through the Inflation Reduction Act. The idea was, this is a way to get small to medium-sized farms who are doing the practices that the planet needs, and that we all need, to have a healthy ecosystem and healthy agriculture. It’s a way to support them and say, “Thank you for what you’re doing for the benefit of all of us.”

Dave Chapman 13:33
I find myself turning into a very old-school capitalist. It’s interesting, and I’m surprised by that. But I was interviewed by Al Gore once, and he kept saying, “What could the government do to help you?” I said, “They could keep the integrity and transparency in the organic program.” That’s all. That would solve all the problems, because I believe that the demand is there from eaters. They want real organic food, and they’re willing to pay for it.

Dave Chapman 13:56
Of course, they’re poor for other reasons. It’s not organic’s fault that many people don’t have much money. That’s about tax codes and all that. But I do believe that if the regulation was simple, honest, and strong, the kind of farming we wanted would rise of its own accord.

Dave Chapman 14:30
I’m not against supporting it with government money. I think we can see in Europe where they are. I was interviewing Michael Pollan once, and he said, “The thing about Vilsack is he really favors carrots over sticks. He’s supporting organic and he’s supporting chemical. He’s supporting everything because he wants to make friends.” I kind of would like to see a few sticks out there.

Chellie Pingree 14:58
I hear what you’re saying. I think that government, in a way, has turned more to carrots than sticks, because we’ve been in such an anti-regulatory climate for so long. Honest and transparent regulation is almost always beaten down by the lobby on the other side that says, “Don’t make me do the right thing. I can’t make enough money that way.”

Chellie Pingree 15:22
I’m not disagreeing with what you say. I’m just saying the reality of where we’ve come to is, how do you support the things that you want and allow them to continue?

Dave Chapman 15:34
It is easier to get to a carrot than it is to get to a stick.

Chellie Pingree 15:37
It’s easier for government to offer a carrot right now than a stick. We’re entering into a climate of sticks disappearing rapidly, and a regulatory climate. I’m deeply worried about what that will mean for the unfettered use of chemicals, for toxics in our environment, and also for monopoly control. The consolidation that we’ve been talking about, and unfettered consolidation. I just don’t think you’re going to see a Justice Department pushing back on those kinds of things.

Chellie Pingree 16:22
But we’re several months into this, and I would say, from my perspective as someone who’s been working on these things for a long time, I’m just scrambling to look for opportunities. Is there somewhere where something good could come out of this? Could we get rid of ultra-processed foods? Could we actually regulate some of those things, require that they’re not in our diet anymore?

Chellie Pingree 16:49
You’re right. Another thing you brought up was the cost of doing good and right. How you compete in that arena is tricky, because the other side of it is people are really worried about the cost of food and want to be able to put healthy food on the table, but healthy food has become the more expensive side of food.

Dave Chapman 17:12
I think it’s better to say that bad food has become the cheap side of food.

Chellie Pingree 17:19
I think you’re right. I agree.

Dave Chapman 17:20
Healthy food is not overpriced. I think that cheap food is underpriced. I think that’s probably…

Chellie Pingree 17:27
Would you have to point out the bald eagle?

Dave Chapman 17:32
Yeah. Beautiful bald eagle. We’re here at Chellie’s beautiful farm on an island in Maine, and there’s all kinds of things flying around.

Chellie Pingree 17:42
Sorry.

Dave Chapman 17:43
No, no.

Chellie Pingree 17:45
But you’re absolutely right. That gets back to the point of this notion that food became a different part of our diet that was meant to be cheap and abundant, and you should have a lot of stuff in your cupboard that doesn’t provide you with a lot of sustenance, necessarily, but is filling, and it was cheap, like bottles of soda and packages of chips.

Dave Chapman 18:08
That’s right. Of course, that’s really expensive for you, but not at the cash register.

Chellie Pingree 18:16
Yeah.

Dave Chapman 18:18
How much of the reason that it’s so cheap at the cash register has to do with government support, in your opinion?

Chellie Pingree 18:25
Most people would trace the corn subsidies, the subsidies of commodity crops, and the commodification of certain crops to why we have wide use of corn syrup and wide use of a lot of products. But I do think it’s bigger than that. We’ve ended up training people…

Chellie Pingree 18:50
The whole question around our ultra-processed food, the addictive qualities, and the necessity for people to have them because they are so used to eating them – I think there are a lot of factors that go into that.

Chellie Pingree 19:06
But I think most people would say we subsidize the wrong things that make us unhealthy and drive up our health care costs, and then we have to pay on the back end for the extreme costs of bad health in our country.

Dave Chapman 19:19
When I was young, tobacco was completely unregulated. Everybody smoked – my mother smoked, and my father smoked until he died. Then there was a slow evolution of a decision by the American people that this was not a good idea, and we put warning labels on cigarettes, and we made it illegal to advertise them on TV. They got around that one by just supporting programs that were historical, so there was lots of smoking in them.

Dave Chapman 20:00
I’m going to interview Naomi Oreskes next month, who wrote “Merchants of Doubt,” a great book about their strategy – simply to create enough doubt to postpone the regulations. I think junk food is not so far from cigarettes. I don’t know if that’s a radical statement, but I think it’s dangerous and bad. It won’t necessarily kill everybody who consumes it, but it will kill many people.

Dave Chapman 20:32
Then it’s a question about, as a society, do we challenge the tobacco and the junk food industry, a lot of which is now owned by the tobacco industry. It’s amazing. They just shifted over and started buying huge junk food companies. What do you think about that?

Dave Chapman 20:52
I interviewed Marion Nestle, and she was one of the first people to be called “handmaiden of the nanny state.” Like, “How dare you tell me what to eat?” Of course, I would say these other professionals are telling you what to eat, and they’re succeeding at it because you’re eating it.

Dave Chapman 21:13
What are your thoughts about that? Is that a place where we can feel good about government using a stick, saying there should be boundaries here?

Chellie Pingree 21:24
Again, until 2025, when we’ve had to confront a whole lot of upside-down actions in government, we thought that there was an important role for government to keep us healthy and safe. We didn’t think twice about them regulating dangerous chemicals or toxic substances. We had made that a practice of government.

Chellie Pingree 21:54
Now we’re in this kind of reversal of what the government will do and what it won’t do. At the same time, you have the president choosing RFK, who came in and said, “I think we should regulate ultra-processed food,” and has already started by banning a couple of kinds of red and yellow dyes. That’s the first time government has taken that step for quite a while.

Chellie Pingree 22:22
This notion that I’ve had to operate under, just as you said, that anytime I would bring up people should eat a healthier diet and all these things, I would often be confronted by people who said, “Don’t you tell me what to eat,” and all those things. Now, all of a sudden, you have the MAHA movement saying, “No, people should be told what to eat, and these things should be taken out of our diet.”

Dave Chapman 22:43
Even though kids love them. They love the dyes. There’s no doubt about it. If one company pulled the dyes from their breakfast cereal, the other companies would get more of the market share. The decision to do this is not motivated by just consumer demand; it’s motivated by a lot of people who are very concerned about a health crisis in this country.

Chellie Pingree 23:10
True. Now the companies are scrambling to squeeze a bunch of beets into their cereal to make them look red again. We know enough about everything to know you could find another way to do it. Usually, it was just cheaper, or it had already been commonly used, and they didn’t want to make a change.

Chellie Pingree 23:10
I’m just saying, I feel like we’re going to go through this funnel here for a while that’s figuring out, like, “Wait, could we both be voting for different presidents, but we don’t think we should have toxic substances in our food, and that maybe there’s some way to go about doing that?

Chellie Pingree 23:42
Or will that all just get pretty much brushed by the wayside? Because they’ll pat people on the head, like, ‘Oh, that was nice. We got rid of yellow dye, but don’t be touching our ultra-processed foods.'”

Dave Chapman 23:53
Or our glyphosate.

Chellie Pingree 23:56
Or our glyphosate, yeah. A conversation like this would have been very different a year ago, and now we’re really in a time of uncertainty. I’m not clear where we’ll head, but I do appreciate that more people are in the conversation about “Is there a role for government, and what is healthy food, and how should we determine that?”

Dave Chapman 24:24
Maybe one last little political question. I’m just curious. You’re in Congress representing Maine. The only representative?

Chellie Pingree 24:35
Two.

Dave Chapman 24:36
You have two. Vermont only has one for so little.

Chellie Pingree 24:41
Right. I know.

Dave Chapman 24:44
Is Maine receiving a lot of unhappiness from the Trump administration for their willingness to stand up? They have stood up several times, and I know that the governor and the president had words. Is that something that you feel, or is that just part of a swirl out there?

Chellie Pingree 25:09
The Trump administration certainly tried, many times, to retaliate against Maine. They lost most of their battles, either by public attention that pushed back on things they were doing that were ridiculous.

Chellie Pingree 25:21
They tried to take all the money away from our Sea Grant program, which helps fishermen. That just got so many people mad. They backed away. They took a lot of money away from the university. They backed away. Then they lost a couple of court battles because they didn’t really have the legal authority to do that, just because the president doesn’t like what you’re doing. We were just following the law in the last court decision.

Chellie Pingree 25:45
We’ve mostly won, and I think now the president has gone on to other states and other opportunities, so we seem to be out of his sights. But I would knock on wood, because it’s a pain when he does it. You really have to wander around and figure out what to do.

Chellie Pingree 26:02
For the most part, people are, I think, generally kind of grumpy at the president because he has taken away a lot of vital funding for things that small- to medium-sized farmers were getting, or educational programs, or just a whole variety of funding that’s gone now.

Dave Chapman 26:18
Yeah. That fantastic program of buying food from small farmers for food shelves in schools.

Chellie Pingree 26:25
Three billion dollars.

Dave Chapman 26:26
What a wonderful program?

Chellie Pingree 26:28
Yeah. That was a good example of something the government can do. It was for school lunch programs and food pantries. It’s not really a handout or anything else. It’s just like, “Let’s use our purchasing power and buy it locally, and let’s give farmers these contracts that they can count on and plan ahead: ‘I’m going to put more carrots in, or I’m going to do these things, maple syrup, milk, yogurt, all the things they were doing.'” Then the meal of the night is gone. That was a lot of money.

Dave Chapman 26:57
Yeah, that’s right. Okay, thank you. Let’s talk a little bit about Joan Gussow. When did you meet? Was it at the James Beard Award?

Chellie Pingree 27:11
Yeah. I always hesitate, because I’ve done so many things in the world of food, farming, and agriculture over the years and met so many people. It’s amazing how many have gone somewhere in my memory bank, but I can’t always call them up.

Chellie Pingree 27:26
But we were both given a James Beard Award on the same evening, which is kind of a busy, complicated time. She was certainly somebody who I knew of, who people had quoted, and who I know has had a huge impact on so many of the things I do and the people I’ve worked with over time.

Dave Chapman 27:40
Could you think of a few of those that you realize this person was really deeply influenced by Joan?

Chellie Pingree 27:56
Oh, yeah. Some of it is just because I’ve read more about her in the obituaries and stories, and people like Michael Pollan, who have been out there in the public eye, so much about eat food, eat less of it, fewer ingredients, all those things, and realizing that sort of came from her. That her original remark was just eat food; don’t make it complicated.

Chellie Pingree 28:28
Also, I was able to actually pull up… I found the testimony from her hearing before the Senate on the nutritional content and advertising for breakfast cereals. I can remember, on the Ag Committee several years ago, being in a nutrition hearing and fighting with my Republican colleague about why we should be more careful about how we advertise certain products to kids.

Chellie Pingree 28:53
Realizing that this goes back to 1972 and just looking at some of her testimony and how clear-eyed she was about… One of my favorite things that she talked about was how, when she was born, let’s say there were 7,000 foods in the world, and now there’s, I don’t know, or maybe there were 700 and now there’s 17,000. I think that’s something about what it was.

Chellie Pingree 29:17
You think about it like, if you’re just eating regular food and that’s all you do, there aren’t that many different things that you’re going to eat. But when you make all these weird chemicals and processes and everything else, and dyes and additives…

Chellie Pingree 29:32
But anyway, how she was emphasizing that back in 1972, and also helping people to understand what influences us to eat food, and particularly children, and in those formative years about how you are going to determine what your eating habits are going to be for the rest of your life, or what will impact even some of your genetic makeup in your body and all those things.

Chellie Pingree 29:53
Advertising is very influential, and kids are easily swayed by what you’re seeing, whether it’s product placement or an ad itself. It was nice to see that.

Chellie Pingree 30:04
I’ve been so involved in Congress on the Food is Medicine idea, and getting more of my colleagues to be involved in that, and to understand how fundamental how you grow things is to the nutritional quality of it. Those are things she was talking about, but also tying people to this idea that you can work on policy – nutrition policy, ag policy – but having your own garden, knowing exactly how plants grow, growing some of your own food, is not only just fulfilling but also an important connection to make.

Chellie Pingree 30:37
She did that with so many of her students. That’s always been a big part of my life, and a real benefit to me to have been a gardener and a farmer, and also a policymaker, and understanding that you need to know a little bit about both. She was a great model for that.

Dave Chapman 30:51
Yeah. Can I ask, when Joan testified to a committee, what’s the impact of that? Does it change people? Do they go, “Oh, I didn’t know that. I’m going to vote differently”?

Chellie Pingree 31:11
Absolutely. Look, I’d like to say that because she testified in 1972 our children only ate healthy food for breakfast. We know that’s not true. But we also know that many more people have the basic knowledge of, “I should be eating this. I should be doing that. Or this would be better for my kids.”

Chellie Pingree 31:35
I don’t think there’s a parent alive who puts a bowl of Frosted Flakes in front of their kids who doesn’t know, “That’s not really that good for them. I’m just giving them a treat. Or they really like it, and that’s the only thing I can get them to eat, or whatever it is.”

Chellie Pingree 31:47
But I’m just saying, I know from being in these conversations myself for decades now, that you can always say to people, “I’m sure you’ve had a doctor sometimes say, ‘There should be less salt in your diet, or you should eat fewer carbohydrates, or whatever it is at that moment in time.’ While you may not always do that, you do know that’s better.” We all know certain things are better for us.

Chellie Pingree 32:11
I think those people who have been nutritionists working on these issues and training others to do it have seeded that many more people who are out there. Again, we’re at an interesting political time. We have them on all sides of the political spectrum who are now starting to say, “I’m worried about the health of my kids. I’m worried about my own health and how much my food has an impact on that.”

Chellie Pingree 32:43
We can be concerned about where people access their organic food, but the fact that they want to buy organic food is reflective of the fact that they have learned somewhere along the way that it might be healthier for their kid to drink organic milk, that they don’t want that other stuff in there.

Chellie Pingree 33:01
Parents will often pay more for the food for their children and buy organic for their children because they’re really worried about making that investment in a kid’s future. I know that comes from wonderful people like her.

Dave Chapman 33:16
Yeah. Okay, so it’s worthwhile to have people like Joan testifying to the Senate. That’s a good idea?

Chellie Pingree 33:24
You have to keep doing it. The day you stop doing that, the day you say, “You can’t get anything done in Congress, why bother?” Well, you just ceded it all to the bad guys. You just ceded it all. It’s really frustrating…

Dave Chapman 33:38
They’ll keep showing up.

Chellie Pingree 33:39
Because they’ll keep showing up. You’ve got to have that level of pushback. You just have to, or it will get worse fast.

Dave Chapman 33:47
Okay. Let’s talk about two things that are a little confusing to me about these movements. One is Food is Medicine. I watched a panel of people for the Aspen Institute, and they have a whole Food is Medicine program, and it’s very hopeful in its aspirations.

Dave Chapman 34:14
But one person on the panel was the head of Mars, one was the head of some other huge corporation, and one was the former head of Koch North America. He was actually my favorite. He had left Koch because he decided it was evil, and he went and joined a carrot company. That was a move in the right direction.

Dave Chapman 34:40
But I thought, “How is it possible for a candy company and a processed food company to be taken seriously as the advocates for Food is Medicine?” Joan would not have approved of their perspective because it completely excluded food and farming from the conversation.

Dave Chapman 35:02
In fact, Bob Quinn went to the Food is Medicine conference at Tufts last year. He said there were 150 people in the room. Two of us were farmers. They’re not thinking of farming. They’re not thinking of how the food is grown, even though we know it has a huge impact on health.

Dave Chapman 35:22
What are your thoughts about that? What’s the conversation in Congress? Is it strictly limited to ultra-processed foods? Should we discourage that in some way, or is it starting to take a bigger viewpoint – the Joan Gussow viewpoint of food as a system? It includes agriculture, distribution, retail, and processing. We have to look at the system. I believe food is medicine, but…

Chellie Pingree 35:51
All good questions. One of Joan’s classic remarks was about, “You can make a Twinkie out of all organic ingredients, but once you ingest it in your body, you still put a Twinkie in. Maybe you didn’t take any of the glyphosate or anything else that would have been residual, but you still ate a lot of processed foods, carbohydrates, sugars, and all those other things. You can’t just substitute it for that.” I do think that’s a worry.

Chellie Pingree 36:19
I guess I would say that it has been hard to move my colleagues all the way to the place of understanding that how you grow your food has an impact on the nutritional quality of that food.

Chellie Pingree 36:34
One of my great victories a couple of years ago was moving some money through the appropriations process into requiring a study at the USDA about soil quality, soil health, and the nutritional quality of the food that it grew, because I believe that’s a fundamental about organic growing. Eliot Coleman, who was my first teacher in college, said, “Healthy soil, healthy plants,” just sort of that fundamental.

Chellie Pingree 36:59
But it was interesting, because when the money came to the USDA, even under a more sort of enlightened USDA, I think they still found it a little baffling. They thought they were supposed to be researching something about fungus in the soil, or toxins, or something else. They didn’t really know how to make this connection in the way the research proceeded. It’s probably been buried in a deep, dark cellar now, if it’s ever been finished.

Chellie Pingree 37:26
But that kind of notion of really connecting the farming practices to the health and quality of the food is more difficult to do, because you’re rarely dealing with people who have that level of desire and sophistication on the Agriculture Committee. They may be able to argue a little bit about the quality of our diets and understand better that some of this food shouldn’t be in our diet.

Chellie Pingree 37:55
To your last point, there’s always this fine line between what is greenwashing on the part of a big processed food company that’s now going to say, “We really are going to try to reduce the amount of salt, sugar, and certain ingredients in our foods,” and saying, “Well, good. I’m glad you’re looking at it in a slightly different way, or at least you have this level of awareness.”

Chellie Pingree 38:20
But in the end, drinking a quart of sugary soda is still a quart of sugary soda. It adds no benefit to your health and probably a detriment. If the choice is whether you buy a packaged snack or you’re eating some carrots and broccoli, there’s just no comparison. Those two shouldn’t have even been compared. Part of what we need to do is make more fresh, healthy food part of people’s diets. That’s where I come at the idea of food is medicine.

Chellie Pingree 38:53
Even as this has become more popular, which it has, and these panels – I’ve been on them or watched them myself – I know what you’re saying. It’s like, “I want to be able to say that we’re doing that in my company.” But it’s like, “But you’re still a company getting pre-packaged foods to people.” We’re not dealing with the other thing that you said, which is that we have a broken food system.

Chellie Pingree 39:18
The further you go for your food, the longer it has to survive on the road, and the more nonperishable it has to be. The closer you’re able to buy it to where you live, the more likely you are to have fresh, healthy foods that came from down the road, or a product that was made in your area with less chemicals involved in it, because you don’t have to preserve it for so long.

Dave Chapman 39:42
No, it gets crazy. I’ve told this story, but I once went to the Whole Foods in Mill Valley, California, in the height of tomato season, in the middle of August. I’d just been at Full Belly Farm, and I saw a beautiful two- or three-acre field of tomatoes unpicked. It was going to be tilled under because they had no market.

Dave Chapman 40:07
I went to Whole Foods, and the only certified organic tomatoes in the store were from Mexico. They were hydroponic, and I thought, “This is madness. It’s like taking coals to Newcastle. It’s easy to grow tomatoes in California.

Dave Chapman 40:23
Yet, the way the system worked, that not-tiny farm – Full Belly Farm is 500 acres of mostly vegetables – did not have shelf space in Whole Foods in Mill Valley, which is one of the most upscale communities in the country.”

Chellie Pingree 40:41
You would assume people have a high level of awareness, that that’s what they would want and what they should have. Yet we’ve just made all this too acceptable and allowable.

Dave Chapman 40:56
It’s kind of a crazy system.

Chellie Pingree 41:00
Yeah. Which is actually why – back on that policy issue – it was so devastating to take back that $3 billion, which is small in government spending. But the $3 billion that was going to go to farmers who were selling their produce, milk, or whatever it was locally, using government procurement money. While that’s only $3 billion, those kinds of things are ways that government can support a system that should work differently.

Chellie Pingree 41:23
Even that funding grew out of a little bit of the understanding that had grown during the pandemic – that we were making a huge mistake to ship food everywhere, because people wouldn’t have it on their shelves when you had this shutdown of trucking, shipping, and everything else. So, what could we do? We grew this idea out of that. It got the funding, and then to take it away was a way of taking away just a tiny little bit of that support system.

Chellie Pingree 41:54
Because for many farms, if you have just a couple of contracts, you might have a little more latitude to be out there pitching to another store: “Well, I’ve already got these two. I’m selling to the school lunch program. I sell to this network that goes to the food pantry.” Losing that, which is part of the dismantling of the USDA, will actually be losing one of the programs that I think was really beneficial.

Dave Chapman 42:20
Right. What about regenerative in Congress? Linley told me that the last time she was in Washington and talking to people in Congress, organic was dead to them. All they wanted to talk about was regenerative. I understand why that’s happening, because regenerative is a kind of happy answer to people’s concerns about the food system.

Dave Chapman 43:03
But regenerative, as it’s evolving, is going to use a bunch of herbicides, and it’s going to use chemical fertilizers. It’s not organic. Not to say that there aren’t some people who call themselves regenerative who are organic. I would call them real regenerative, but there’s no movement of real regenerative.

Chellie Pingree 43:27
And there’s no definition. You can throw the term around. It’s a devastating blow, honestly. I’ve seen, over the last couple of years, how even people of good intention have taken over the word “regenerative,” I think somehow because they feel like organic is an old liberal word, or there’s something about it they don’t understand. So now they feel like that’s more of a new term to use.

Chellie Pingree 43:51
Then, of course, it’s co-opted by all the people who can say, “I’m doing some regenerative practices.” I’ve seen big industrial ag entities do presentations and call it regenerative. Just as you said, they can still use chemical herbicides, pesticides, or all the things they want. They’re just saying, “Well, we’re going to get more organic matter in the soil,” or, “We’re using no-till,” or all these things, and doing so in such a way that…

Chellie Pingree 44:18
You can argue it’s a better practice than what they used to do, but it’s certainly not organic, and it certainly doesn’t get you to the point of the kind of respect for the soil that you have to have to build long-term healthy soil and a sustainable situation.

Chellie Pingree 44:34
It’s a nightmare, in my opinion. There’s no definition, and there are no plans for a definition. If there was a definition written, it would just be a bunch of half-baked slogans, I think.

Dave Chapman 44:46
Yeah. They tried in California, and it just didn’t work. It was pathetic.

Chellie Pingree 44:51
I’m just trying to figure out the psychology of, like, “Why are people of good intent thinking that’s a better term now?” It’s almost like they just wanted the next new thing, and organic sounds so old-fashioned that they’re not sticking with it anymore.

Dave Chapman 45:07
Is there anything else you would like to say, a question you might have, or a question I didn’t ask but wish I had?

Chellie Pingree 45:16
No, this has been great. No, this has been really good.

Dave Chapman 45:20
All right, Chellie. Thank you very much, Chellie Pingree.