Episode #254
Tom Philpott: Corporate Control And The Future Of Food

Investigative journalist and author Tom Philpott tours us through the deeper architecture of our food system – from Joan Gussow’s early warnings about “nutritionism” and unhealthy agriculture, to today’s political battles over CAFOs, corporate control, and the future of real food. Philpott, author of Perilous Bounty, brings decades of reporting experience to his conversation with Dave, helping us understand why harmful agricultural systems persist – and what it will take to replace them with something resilient, just, and ecologically sane.

Our Tom Philpott interview has been edited and condensed for clarity:

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Dave Chapman interviews Tom Philpott on Zoom, Summer 2025

Dave Chapman 0:00
Welcome to the Real Organic Podcast. I am talking today to Tom Philpott. Tom, I’ve been trying to interview you for a long time, so I’m glad we finally got here.

Tom Philpott 0:10
I’m very happy to be here finally.

Dave Chapman 0:13
Austin Frerick said, “Oh no, keep trying, Dave. He wants to talk to you.” Here we are. I called you this time because I wanted to talk about Joan Gussow – we’re putting together a thing for Joan. I saw you listed in the people who had posted about Joan on the memorial page. Did you know Joan?

Tom Philpott 0:36
I did know Joan. I met her at multiple conferences over the years. I think the first time I met her, it would have been in the late 2000s, around 2008 or 2009, at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. At that time, they would do these annual food sustainability meetings. I just remember being very nervous to meet her.

Tom Philpott 1:04
Someone, a mutual friend, probably Naomi Starkman, if I had to guess, wanted to introduce me to her. It was just that beautiful, warm, Northern California sun. She was such a beautiful person. She just radiated this love of the earth, of the land, and of people.

Tom Philpott 1:39
I have to say I had been writing for a few years about this topic – the topic of agriculture and food in the United States. It was an incredible honor to hear her say that she read my work, appreciated it, and had even assigned it in classes. I was just taken aback to have that affirmation from her.

Tom Philpott 2:04
When I first became aware of her, it was about a decade before I ever got into writing about food and agriculture. I was a financial journalist in New York City in the late 90s. At this time, I was living in Brooklyn, and I got involved with the community gardening movement. My now-wife worked at GreenThumb, which was the city organization that oversaw the community gardens. At that time, they were under attack from Rudy Giuliani, of all people.

Tom Philpott 2:44
I met a bunch of people in the community garden movement. The name Joan Dye Gussow was just a name that you heard bandied about, and her writings were passed around. This was really the early internet. I read some of her work and became aware of her, and I’m pretty sure I saw her speak at some event at that time.

Tom Philpott 3:09
She was just a tireless champion of the gardens. That’s how I first became aware of her, and then met her about a decade later. After that, I would see her from time to time at New York City events or other sustainable farming events.

Dave Chapman 3:27
I was really lucky to meet Joan through Eliot Coleman, a mutual friend. I did my first interview with her in the height of COVID, so it was all virtual, but she was fantastic in so many ways. Did her work change you? The things that you read and heard from her – were there new ideas in there, or was it just hearing somebody say them out loud?

Tom Philpott 3:58
I think the thing with Joan Gussow is that she’s one of those thinkers who was so early to the game and so seminal that by the time I started to really get into this work, she already had so much influence that I basically absorbed her by osmosis by the time I met her.

Tom Philpott 3:58
What I mean by that is, when you look back at her career now, she was a nutritionist. She was a professional nutritionist, working in a nutrition school in the 70s and 80s. At that time, this was a profession that was very hyper-focused. It didn’t look outside of what was on the plate. It partook of what would later be called – and she didn’t coin this phrase, but she basically developed these ideas – Nutritionism.

Tom Philpott 4:11
That was basically the idea that as long as you ate a certain number of calories and didn’t overeat, and you took in 100% of the RDA of various pre-identified vitamins and minerals, then you had a healthy diet. She was one of the people who really saw early on that this wasn’t going to work – that this sort of idea was not making people healthy. Some of these foods, even if consumed at levels below certain caloric thresholds, just weren’t healthy.

Tom Philpott 5:49
She broadened the lens of the nutrition profession from this very narrow focus on calories and a few micro- and macronutrients, and she trained it to look outside to agriculture. She’s one of the people who brought the Albert Howard insight that agriculture and human health are interconnected, and if we have unhealthy agriculture, we’re going to have unhealthy people.

Tom Philpott 6:20
This caused a slow revolution in the nutritional field. You talk to Marion Nestle, who is just a few years younger. Marion Nestle cites a lecture she saw Joan Dye Gussow give in the 70s on this topic. It changed Marion Nestle’s trajectory to become the phenomenon that she became. That’s one of the ways her influence trickled out.

Tom Philpott 6:55
Another is people like Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser, especially Michael Pollan. They read her work, cited her, and were big fans of hers. They kind of popularized her ideas. I’m not throwing shade at Michael Pollan, but a lot of the ideas he made really popular are ideas that he was influenced by Joan Dye Gussow, and he would be the first to say that.

Tom Philpott 7:26
I don’t know if her work directly changed me, but I can tell you that it indirectly did. She came up with some important ideas at crucial times that changed the conversation about food. I think that speaks to her greater influence – you don’t have to have read Joan Dye Gussow to have been influenced by her.

Dave Chapman 7:53
Yeah. I think a lot of people haven’t read Joan who are influenced by her. It’s interesting. Her first big book, “The Feeding Web: Issues in Nutritional Ecology,” isn’t even in print anymore. I just borrowed a copy from Eliot Coleman. It’s a big book. When I get through the conference, I’m going to sit down and try to read it.

Tom Philpott 8:14
Yeah. One thing that we’ve seen happen over the past few years is that a lot of those old texts that fell out of publication get published again and have renewed influence. I can think of “The One-Straw Revolution: An Introduction to Natural Farming,” which was really hard to get at one time in the United States. They found a new publisher.

Tom Philpott 8:36
I think some of Sir Albert Howard’s works went out of print in the U.S. Someone should do an edition of these early Joan Gussow works and get them back out there again.

Dave Chapman 8:50
Yeah. I think I was probably quoting Dan Barber saying that every time he thought he came up with a really great idea, he discovered that Joan had had it five years earlier.

Tom Philpott 9:04
Yeah. If not 25 years ago.

Dave Chapman 9:08
Somebody said, “No, no, you got that wrong. That was Marion Nestle.” I said, “Well, no. I think it was Dan Barber.” I looked – it was all of them. They all said this. She was leading a bunch of very influential thinkers in coming up with a new vision of what was going on that was at odds with the accepted wisdom of the time.

Tom Philpott 9:33
Yeah. Then by the time I came around in the 2000s, she was continuing to teach, I’m pretty sure, at Columbia University. By this point, she was playing this new role as a gray eminence, but just as a personality that young people, coming into the field and into this consciousness that something is deeply wrong with our agriculture, would notice.

Tom Philpott 10:11
When you get into that and start getting into it professionally – whether you become a journalist like me, go to some NGO, join an organic farming group, or start farming yourself – you start coming to conferences. Her presence there was like you would meet her, talk to her, and learn from her personally.

Tom Philpott 10:34
Especially in New York City, I know dozens of people who had really close relationships with her and were mentored by her. She had a way of encouraging you down this path – a kind of Johnny Appleseed figure for this work that was really wonderful to watch play out. You go to a conference in that period, and there would always be a swarm of young people around her.

Tom Philpott 11:13
One of the rituals of being in this work would be to go out to see her place in upstate New York. It was something that we talked about many times, and I just never made it happen. But I hope that her garden continues, and I still hope to make it out there sometime.

Dave Chapman 11:38
Tom, you’ve talked about how much influence Joan has had, but influence for what? What’s the architecture of Joan’s ideas? What was it that she saw? I know that she taught this amazing course for many years on Nutritional Ecology. What was the essence of that, or the foundations?

Tom Philpott 12:00
I think that the foundation was that something was deeply wrong with the way that 95-plus percent of the food consumed in the United States is grown. These problems go off in many different directions. There are environmental and ecological problems. I’m preaching to the choir here, but water pollution, air pollution, soil erosion, and that there is an overeating problem.

Tom Philpott 12:43
I was talking earlier about how even if you stayed within caloric bounds, this kind of food isn’t healthy. Well, it’s also designed to take you out of caloric bounds and make you eat more and more. We eat way more calories than we’re supposed to. These problems with the way that we eat food go off in all these different directions.

Tom Philpott 13:10
She was someone who really wanted to make that clear – that you had to have a broader lens than simply producing lots of calories in a very efficient way. She wanted to broaden the lens to include ecology, human health, and to drive home the point that this is all one big subject. If we want to be healthy and live in a healthy environment, then we have to change the way we grow food.

Tom Philpott 13:46
Now, I think we could have a longer conversation about why we seem to be stuck in a place where we’re still getting 95% of our food here. That’s no fault of Joan’s. She was out there, in every way she could, from her perch at Columbia University and upstate New York. She was out there making the point that this wasn’t going to work.

Tom Philpott 14:14
I think the answer to the riddle of how little progress there’s been – there’s been plenty of progress, but also, in the bigger picture, we’re still in this paradigm – is corporate control of the food system, corporate power. That is something that she never shied away from writing about or talking about. She always named it.

Tom Philpott 14:37
I think there’s a tendency in this field to be like, “Well, if I shop at the farmers market, if I join a CSA, and if I go to Farm-to-Table restaurants, then I’m doing all I can, and everything’s fine.” She rejected that idea.

Tom Philpott 14:59
She wanted everyone to have access to healthy food and to realize that one of the big impediments was all of the corporate interests in the system working really hard to maintain the status quo. She was just very clear about that, and that’s something that I’ll always appreciate about her.

Dave Chapman 15:31
This is such an interesting point, where people talk about, “Your plate is your garden, and your fork is your pitchfork,” and that you can make personal choices about what you’re going to eat and what you’re going to buy. Ultimately, if we all do that, the whole system is forced to change.

Dave Chapman 15:45
But I’m curious – it sounds like you have… I’m sure there’s nothing bad about that, but there are some problems with that point of view. It’s missing something.

Tom Philpott 15:55
I think Joan would agree with this – that it’s very necessary, but not sufficient. The momentum, the inertia of the system, is so strong that individual choices, while they do matter and are important, you can eat a healthy diet in society.

Tom Philpott 15:55
Because of the work of people like you, Eliot Coleman, and farmers across the country, if you seek out these kinds of alternative foods – fresh fruits and vegetables that don’t have a lot of poisons in them, whole grains, and pasture-raised meats – you can have a very healthy diet, and that’s great. That is way more true than it was 30 years ago. There’s no question about that.

Tom Philpott 15:55
But if we’re going to transform the whole system and make that the rule rather than the exception, then… I feel like I’m just parroting Joan here. We have to have policy change, because these corporations have huge influence over the lawmaking process, the congressional legislative process, and the laws and resources that come out of the federal government, which just completely enshrine these kinds of ultra-processed foods. We still see them infusing school lunches to this day.

Tom Philpott 15:55
I stand with Joan in that these personal choices are incredibly important. I’ve made them myself. I’ve worked on a small farm. I am still very careful about where I get food. Luckily, I live in a very robust food shed here in Baltimore, Maryland.

Tom Philpott 15:59
In the mid-Atlantic region, there’s lots of great farming and food provision around here. But I stand with Joan in saying that this is necessary, but not sufficient – that we have to change policy as well.

Dave Chapman 18:18
Yeah, that’s great. That’s important. I’m going to ask you a question I’ve asked a lot of people, and I’ll use the publication of Joan’s book, “The Feeding Web: Issues in Nutritional Ecology,” as a starting point. That was about 50 years ago that she wrote it. In your opinion, has the food system gotten better or worse in those 50 years?

Tom Philpott 18:40
I think it’s gotten better and worse. One of the things that I’ve done in my career, almost to a fault, is look at the two most important and biggest growing regions in the United States – that would be California’s Central Valley and the Corn Belt. In these areas, the intensification and pesticide treadmill that you see in a place like the Corn Belt are staggering.

Tom Philpott 19:03
I was just looking for an article about how there are something like 11 different herbicides used on at least 10% of soybean acres in Iowa in this decade – right now, as we’re speaking. This has intensified since 1975.

Tom Philpott 19:41
In the Central Valley of California, there is aquifer drawdown that’s been intense and excessive. Pollution of groundwater from agrochemicals in these areas is just tragic and has gotten worse over the past 50 years. In that way, the food system is basically getting worse every day.

Tom Philpott 20:07
On the other hand, there has also been this incredible movement of small- and mid-scale farms. It’s now the case that you can go to any American city on a Saturday, almost 100% year-round – maybe some places in the extreme north there isn’t anything year-round – and find a farmers market. Even in the really cold cities, there’s usually some indoor market happening in the middle of the coldest season.

Tom Philpott 20:41
Fifty years ago, we might have had the remnants of the old truck farming economy, where there were something like farmers markets. I remember them growing up in Austin, Texas, in the 80s – the sort of pre-farmers-market, truck-farm situation.

Tom Philpott 21:02
But the farmers who were supplying that were all under severe pressure from competition from grocery stores and supermarkets. We’ve had this sort of revitalization. CSAs, that Joan was a big fan of, Dave, have absolutely exploded since that time. Now there are new models being experimented with that are really interesting.

Tom Philpott 21:29
In that case, if you have the resources and the knowledge, it is way more possible in 2025 than it was in 1975 to have a diverse, healthy diet with food that wasn’t grown with a lot of chemicals. I think we’ve taken some steps forward and some steps back, and it’s really hard to net it out. But the indicators I see, like soil erosion in the Corn Belt and water pollution in the Corn Belt, are only getting worse.

Tom Philpott 22:08
We know where that food is going – it’s going to the supermarket, to corn sweeteners, industrial fats that are injected into ultra-processed foods, and things like that. It’s a real mixed bag, but there is undeniable progress with things like local food economies that Joan championed for the entire 50 years that we’re talking about here.

Dave Chapman 22:43
Yeah. One thing I wanted to ask about – it seems to me that there was a period about maybe 8 to 10 years ago when I saw a real upswing in major supermarket chains buying local, organic food and putting it on their shelves. To me, that looks like it’s mostly disappeared. Are you aware of that?

Tom Philpott 23:12
Yeah, I sure was. I would say I’ve observed similar things. I remember covering, when I was at Mother Jones, the Walmart push to do something like that. It always seemed a little half-hearted. I’ve seen it with grocery store chains where I’ve lived, like in Austin, Texas, the HEB chains. It’s one of those things that were brought to bear by consumer pressure. That’s a victory – people making choices, and the existing institutions having to respond to those choices.

Tom Philpott 24:51
If you’re running a supermarket chain, you want to be able to say “locally grown,” especially during the growing season, and have a little section that’s like that. As we know, and as Jon knew for sure, if we’re going to have robust local and regional food economies, you need mid-sized farms as well as small farms – you need both.

Tom Philpott 24:51
To be a proper diversified mid-sized farm, the farmers market and the CSA might not really fit what you’re doing. You might have too much to sell into those markets, or maybe you have to go to five farmers markets, and that stretches you really thin.

Tom Philpott 24:51
To have institutional buyers, like a regional supermarket chain saying, “We’ll buy all the squash you have, and we’ll give you a decent price for it,” that really can be a linchpin of a local and regional food system. I think the problem was that because it was based on consumer preference, the chains could commit to it briefly and then decide, “Yeah, this is great, but we’re not making enough off of it.”

Tom Philpott 25:11
We’ve seen that dramatically over the decades with Whole Foods and its policies. Whole Foods was always a very regionalized company – different regions would have different managers making different decisions. They were making a big effort to get local organic in.

Tom Philpott 25:34
Then just anecdotally, from reporting and from talking to people and farmers, their commitment – what they were able to do between “We’ll buy your stuff at a decent price that is fair to you,” versus “We’re happy to buy your stuff, but you have to beat this price we’re getting from California” – that kind of transition ended up cutting the legs out from under it. I do think it kind of flounders now.

Tom Philpott 26:08
I think what it’s resolved down to is that now every grocery chain does have an organic section, but it’s not real organic. It’s the USDA organic model with exceptions, dominated by stuff grown fairly industrially in California and shipped across the country. Those commitments, I agree with you, seemed a lot more robust a decade ago.

Dave Chapman 26:44
We hope we can bring them back. I think it’s important that the small farm revolution is the greatest hope that we have. But those mid-scale farms, and being able to go to the grocery stores – where most people are still buying most of their food – it would be really nice to have more choices there so that people could get what they want.

Tom Philpott 27:04
Yeah. You see it sometimes, and in some places. We have a regional chain here in the mid-Atlantic called MOMs. I think M-O-M stands for Maryland Organic Market. One here in Baltimore, I have to say, does a pretty good job of getting stuff in during the growing season that’s from within 50 to 75 miles of Baltimore.

Tom Philpott 27:33
When you shop there in the produce section, it’s a whole different world from Whole Foods. There is an effort to get really good quality stuff from around here.

Dave Chapman 27:46
Yeah, that’s great. Those small independent stores are certainly threatened. We want them to succeed, but in the retail space, there seems to be this constant consolidation. I’ve seen many chains, and now they’re all owned by only three companies.

Tom Philpott 28:11
The era of Whole Foods snapping them all up appears to be over. It doesn’t seem like Amazon wants to get into that, but that doesn’t mean that the ones that are remaining are always doing great, and there are other entities, private equity and things like that, that might salivate over them. Yeah, the consolidation problem continues.

Dave Chapman 28:35
Yeah. We sold to Stop & Shop and Hannaford, and they’re both owned by Ahold, which is a Dutch multinational. They also own Giant down more your way, and they also own FreshDirect in New York City.

Dave Chapman 28:51
So, it’s just amazing to see this happen. There’s always a change in the culture of the company, usually about three years after they get bought, and all of a sudden profit becomes a lot more important in the conversation.

Tom Philpott 29:03
Yeah. You get shareholders, or maybe Jeff Bezos himself, saying, “Why are we doing this?” Just going down a list like, “Why are we buying this stuff? Why are we paying this price when we could be getting this other price?” Yeah, this transformation happens.

Dave Chapman 29:24
Let me ask you, you certainly have read Michael Grunwald’s article, “Sorry, but This Is the Future of Food.”

Tom Philpott 29:32
Oh, yeah. In fact, I’m working on a review of his book right now.

Dave Chapman 29:38
Great. He seemed to me to be the anti-Joan. I mean, what he is proposing seems like the almost diametrical opposite of what Joan Dye Gussow was promoting. Could you describe his vision and her vision, and how these contrast?

Tom Philpott 29:55
Unfortunately, I can describe them in all too great detail, because I’ve been grappling with his text. Just before we got on this call, I was working on the section of the review where he basically centers crop yield. I’m guessing I’m talking to a nerdy enough audience that I don’t have to go into a lot of detail about that as the be-all and end-all of agriculture. That is what the whole book is about.

Tom Philpott 30:29
He has this statement in the book that, if you don’t mind, I can actually read to you, where he makes this point that I think is fundamental to where he goes wrong. Once again, it’s at the very center of the book. He talks about the Green Revolution, the sort of Norman Borlaug–U.S. Foundation-funded effort to bring industrial agriculture to the global South, most famously in India, although it started in Mexico.

Tom Philpott 31:25
He says in the book very early on, sort of setting the stage, that the Green Revolution and its innovations saved billions of acres of land throughout the world from agriculture by ramping up yields in India and other places in Asia and Latin America, because they had these big yield gains. He says billions of acres were saved.

Tom Philpott 32:02
It turns out that it’s actually not true that ramping up yields leads to farmland being saved. Because when you ramp up yields, one thing that happens is that someone’s going to get the idea that, if you can get this bin-busting amount of wheat from this piece of land, let me expand over into this other piece of land and do the same thing.

Tom Philpott 32:31
I was just looking at a report from some researchers from CGIAR – which is this Green Revolution institution that grew out of that movement as a global network of agricultural researchers. They did a paper in 2013 that said that, at most, the Green Revolution saved 65 million acres. I’m not a math whiz, but 65 million is a lot less than billions. In fact, it’s orders of magnitude less.

Tom Philpott 33:01
That’s the entire premise of his book: that if we ramp up yields, then we’re going to spare all this land, and this land can all go and be “rewild” and sequester carbon that way. That’s just not how it works. Then the other big problem – and this is where we get into Joan Gussow’s world – is that he’s operating under this idea that you can basically separate human activity from “nature.”

Tom Philpott 33:32
That we humans are here, and nature is there. And so, if we take our agriculture and confine it into the smallest space possible, then we can contain all of the problems it creates and rewild the rest. But it turns out that’s impossible.

Tom Philpott 33:56
When you try to contain agriculture, like I said, I’m just working on a piece about how in Iowa, industrial agriculture has polluted the water to such an extent that it looks like it’s one of the causes of the state’s cancer crisis. The pollution from this kind of farming can’t be kept out of the water supply, and it’s getting into people’s bodies and triggering an upswing in cancer.

Tom Philpott 34:32
Then, obviously, these excess nutrients – nitrate and phosphorus – make their way down to the Gulf of Mexico and cause that giant dead zone every year. These are just examples of how it’s a fantasy that you can contain this kind of agriculture. Another example that terrifies me is his love for the feedlot – the CAFO model of growing meat.

Tom Philpott 35:01
We confine meat into these tiny barns, concentrate them in places like Iowa and North Carolina, and by doing that we minimize the amount of ground it takes. One problem is that the corn and soybeans needed to keep that system going cause all the nitrate problems I just talked about.

Tom Philpott 35:31
The other issue is that when you concentrate the same species of animal with the same genetics that intensively, you’re creating perfect conditions for pathogens to develop and mutate in ways that are novel to our immune systems.

Tom Philpott 35:55
We saw in 2009, there was a swine flu outbreak that started in Mexico in a U.S.-owned industrial hog facility that combined bird flus with human flus, escaped into the population, and caused a global pandemic. It didn’t turn out to be that bad, because the strain it created wasn’t very virulent and didn’t cause many deaths.

Tom Philpott 36:25
But scientists I’ve talked to say it’s basically a numbers game. You are creating these opportunities and at some point in the generation, there’s probably be a pathogen that’s created in these facilities that jumps into the population, that our immune systems are naive to, and could cause another global pandemic.

Tom Philpott 36:49
We saw with the last global pandemic that we’re just not prepared for that. Our society doesn’t handle that kind of risk well. I go through other examples in this review showing that it’s a fantasy to think you can contain this stuff. When you contain it, you generate problems that don’t stay in place – they move around and cause all kinds of trouble everywhere.

Tom Philpott 37:15
That’s something we’ve been talking about in Joan’s legacy. She knew intimately that people are part of nature, that we have to behave like we’re part of nature. We have to farm like we’re part of nature. We can’t keep overapplying nutrients and expect them not to cause all kinds of trouble.

Tom Philpott 37:43
That, for me, is the fundamental fantasy he builds his argument on: that we need more industrialization of agriculture, that you can contain it, and that by ramping up yields, we’ll somehow magically save all this land from the plow.

Dave Chapman 38:05
Yeah. This was also the kind of theme of that article in Nature, which said that organic farming is worse for the climate than heavy chemical farming because the yields are lower per acre. That equation. I thought, “That’s got to be so insane. That can’t be right. You can’t create an unhealthy system to try to be the cure to an unhealthy system.”

Dave Chapman 38:37
It didn’t make sense. But it was the head of a department at an Ivy League college who told me that, and he was quite convinced. He said, “Well, of course, organic farming is bad for the climate.” I was like, “What?”

Tom Philpott 38:50
Yeah. It’s completely based on this yield idea. There’s a thing called the rebound effect. You increase yield by 10%, and there’s more opportunity. A really great example of that happening is Brazil, has emerged as the other epicenter of global industrial agriculture. It’s the rival of the Corn Belt, the Brazilian savannah.

Tom Philpott 39:18
They’ve seen these huge gains in yields over the past half century, the same period we’re talking about. Has it spared any land in the savannah? No, in fact, the savannah continues to be plowed for industrial agriculture because it produces very high yields. It doesn’t make sense on its own terms, because it’s actually not sparing land.

Tom Philpott 39:51
Your professor at this Ivy League college – if you know the 20% or whatever yield penalty that organic has, whatever it is – I know it’s extremely variable, and it really depends. But if that 20% meant that it was translating to saving land, then there might be something to grapple with in the argument. But it’s not.

Tom Philpott 40:20
So, what are the other outputs? What does the water look like coming out of this conventional system? What does the air look like coming out of this conventional system? Now we’re seeing significantly worse outputs.

Tom Philpott 40:38
Basically, on the climate front, it seems to me that this argument between organic and conventional that these papers are trying to foment is looking at the wrong question. The question is, what sort of diet should we have, and what diet would lead to a smaller footprint?

Tom Philpott 41:04
I think it’s clear that this sort of feedlot model, where everyone eats – whatever it is, I’m forgetting what the per capita U.S. meat consumption is – but it’s one of the highest in the world, and it’s based on this incredibly land-intensive system of growing lots and lots of corn and soybeans.

Tom Philpott 41:28
Cutting the amount of meat that we eat down and bringing animals back outside in a place like the Corn Belt, but everyone eating less meat, better meat, seems like an obvious climate winner.

Dave Chapman 41:48
Okay. Agriculture and food seem incredibly difficult to change the system in a positive way. I won’t say it’s impossible to change, because I think the big companies have changed it, and pretty radically, but it’s been a hard thing to regulate. Do you have any thoughts about how we citizens address that issue?

Tom Philpott 42:18
That is the really big question. A few days in 2019, early 2020, just before the pandemic hit, I did have some hope. If you look at the agriculture platform of Bernie Sanders, it was incredibly progressive, definitely calling for a crackdown on the CAFO model, and definitely calling for reining in the power of the four or five corporations that control seeds, pesticides, and meatpacking in all these various fields.

Tom Philpott 43:13
Just a few fertilizer companies dominate these markets. He was also calling for a huge overhaul of the Farm Bill. It was incredibly popular, even in Iowa. In the Iowa primary, the Iowa caucus of 2019, I think early 2020, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren came in one and three, and Mayor Pete Buttigieg was right in there.

Tom Philpott 43:48
Both Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren had these incredibly progressive agriculture platforms that, according to conventional wisdom, you can’t go into Iowa and say, “I’m cracking down on CAFOs. I want to diversify away from this corn and soybeans,” but they did exactly that, and they combined for 45% of the delegates.

Tom Philpott 44:09
Joe Biden, who picked Tom Vilsack to run his campaign in Iowa – a very conventional ag guy who said, “We can’t challenge the corporations, they’re too powerful in Iowa. We just don’t talk about it” – got like 13 or 14% of the delegates. This resonated.

Tom Philpott 44:30
Well, you can say, “Tom, that was just in the Iowa Democratic caucus,” but let’s go back to 2008. Barack Obama, running in 2008, explicitly called for a crackdown on CAFOs in Iowa. He explicitly talked about raising water and air quality standards from CAFOs, and he surprisingly won the Iowa caucuses. Then he actually won the general election, and I think he carried it in 2012 as well.

Tom Philpott 45:05
I do think that, as horrible as things look right now, and as regressive as Donald Trump’s USDA and EPA are on these questions, despite the brouhaha around RFK Jr., who has proven to be a paper tiger on these issues and doesn’t seem to care very much about them now that the rubber has met the road in his tenure at HHS, even though we’re in this really dark time, I do think that a party that makes these issues paramount and communicates them well can do well nationally.

Tom Philpott 45:50
I think there’s a constituency out there. I think these ideas make sense to people, and we can have this in the future, but it’s going to take electing better politicians. I think even the success of MAHA, as much as it drives me crazy, showed that there is a constituency out there.

Tom Philpott 46:13
There are a lot of angry people right now who are mad that the administration isn’t taking on pesticides and chemicals and is gutting the EPA as we speak. But that energy can be galvanized, hopefully by politicians that don’t have fascistic tendencies.

Tom Philpott 46:37
Hopefully, the Democrats can see what Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren did in 2020 in the Corn Belt and translate it into some kind of message that takes that energy and pushes it in progressive directions.

Tom Philpott 47:00
I think it’s a winning issue, even in places like Iowa, potentially. There are other cultural issues in Iowa that keep it from rising to the top, but I think the idea that you can’t walk into Iowa and talk like this is wrong, and we’ve seen that demonstrated multiple times.

Dave Chapman 47:27
Yeah. Unfortunately for Obama, Tom Vilsack was his Secretary of Agriculture.

Tom Philpott 47:35
Oh, I know. You can Google my despairing article I wrote in either 2007 or 2008, as soon as he made that decision. Remember that Michael Pollan had written a piece called “Farmer in Chief” in The New York Times Magazine. One heard that Obama read it, and it was laying out this new vision of how Obama could be this transformative president.

Tom Philpott 48:09
I think it was after the election, before he took over. That was one of those moments, like, “Wow, things are changing. We’ve got the ear of the White House.” Then this cold hand comes down with the choice of Vilsack.

Tom Philpott 48:29
Vilsack, as you would expect from his past, was very open to industrial agriculture. He paid nice lip service to organic, but Vilsack kind of represents the vision of all of the above, like, “Hey, if you want organic, you should be able to go into a grocery store and get organic.” But the main way that we’re going to grow food is with these industrial practices.

Tom Philpott 49:06
That’s what we have now. Like, I can go to Harris Teeter in Baltimore and see this organic section, but it’s not real organic; it’s industrial organic, produced by many of the same firms that do the conventional stuff. We are living in Vilsack’s world, and it’s terrible.

Dave Chapman 49:32
You said that MAHA drives you crazy. Can I ask why? Do you have words for that?

Tom Philpott 49:40
Because it comes out of someone like R.F.K. Jr. I know his work at Waterkeeper Alliance and with Riverkeepers in a place like North Carolina. They were an important force for exposing the harms of industrial hog production on largely African American rural communities in North Carolina. They did a lot of important work, and that’s one part of his legacy.

Tom Philpott 49:40
Another part of his legacy is this anti-vaccine stuff, which he has done a lot of verbal gymnastics around and played both sides against the middle. These are the twin legacies that he brought into when he went MAGA and threw his weight behind Trump in the 2024 election. He basically talked more about ultra-processed foods, food dyes, and things like that.

Tom Philpott 49:40
He let the vaccine thing hang out there but galvanized a lot of energy around this idea of Make America Healthy Again and these ultra-processed foods. Donald Trump said late in the election, “I’m going to let him go wild on health, but he’s not going to get anywhere near fossil fuels.” I think that was a signal of what was going to come.

Tom Philpott 49:40
What ends up happening is he gets all this energy. What really drove me crazy about it was the Democrats should have had that energy. The Democrats should have been making those points. Someone like Cory Booker should have been the Democrats’ ag policy arm and should have been galvanizing energy around that.

Tom Philpott 49:40
Although that was hard for someone like Kamala Harris because she was running on this “Biden is great, I’m not changing anything from what Biden did,” and that sort of saddled her with this Vilsackian reality of, “Oh, we’re not going to talk very much about that. We’ll get killed in the Midwest if we take on ag.”

Tom Philpott 49:40
The Democrats were silent on it. Kennedy drummed up all this energy around it. The election happens, Trump wins very narrowly, and names Kennedy head of HHS (Health and Human Services). He’s over the FDA, but no part of his portfolio is about ag policy or chemical policy, except for chemicals as they might show up in food.

Tom Philpott 49:40
He gets into power, and what he ends up doing is pushing the craziest part of his agenda, which is the anti-vax stuff, and basically abandoning the food and agriculture part of it. He can have the excuse of, “Well, I’m not over that. They didn’t give me the USDA,” but he’s not even using his bully pulpit for it.

Tom Philpott 49:40
What he’s doing is making a big deal about things like food dyes, which I agree should come out of the food system, and he’s getting these voluntary agreements with companies that probably mean about as much as those commitments to buy local that we saw 10 or 15 years ago. He’s doing that while basically undermining the U.S. vaccination system, which I think is going to be a public health disaster. Meanwhile, he’s completely de-emphasizing chemicals in agriculture.

Tom Philpott 49:40
I was just looking at this – it turns out that the EPA regulates nitrate in water at 10 parts per million and has been doing this since the early 1990s. It turns out there are a lot of harms from chronic exposure to nitrates at much lower levels – at five and six parts per million. The EPA was in the process of reviewing the standard and maybe changing it.

Tom Philpott 54:44
So, in 2017 Trump ended the process. Biden restarted it. The EPA was back to looking at this in a long, deliberative way. What does Trump do in 2025? He guts the department within the EPA that is overseeing this process – completely guts it, fires everyone in it, and guts the EPA’s ability to do that. Do we get anything from Kennedy about this? Do we get any public or reported pushback on this? Not a bit.

Tom Philpott 55:22
This standard of 10 parts per million is going to be around indefinitely. That same EPA agency that regulates drinking water has not added a new chemical to its regulated list in many, many years. Kennedy has suddenly gone silent on this issue. I think he’s preserved the status quo on food and agriculture, or the administration has, and he has not said anything about it.

Tom Philpott 55:58
Your listeners know what a catastrophe the One Big Beautiful Bill Act
was. It guts food aid and adds the worst agricultural subsidies in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act
. We get not a peep from Kennedy about this. No pushback. I just think he’s been a disaster.

Tom Philpott 56:25
From reading about him, I think he’s probably a megalomaniac. That’s why he vibes with Trump so well. I have no respect for any of these people, including Kennedy. Even though I appreciate his work on CAFOs – where is he on CAFOs? Where is the Trump administration on CAFOs? They’re not doing anything about it.

Tom Philpott 56:52
They just canceled a grant from the NIH (National Institutes of Health) – this actually ties directly to Kennedy. The NIH cut a big grant to monitor air and water quality in eastern North Carolina, CAFO country. The reason they cut it is because the people who live amid this filth are predominantly African American, and they cut it on the grounds that it was DEI-related.

Tom Philpott 57:25
They cut a big grant to the University of North Carolina to study this. That’s the kind of thing HHS is doing. I say, to hell with it – kick the bums out and let’s get a Democratic Party that can get out from under the heel of big agribusiness. That is my rant on MAHA.

Dave Chapman 57:59
Well, I asked it because I was curious what you’d say. Can I ask about sewage sludge and PFAS? Because that’s something that has finally broken through to people’s awareness. It’s my sense that the administration is backing off on regulating that as well.

Tom Philpott 58:20
That is my sense as well. I am about to dive into that in my podcast, which is called “Unconfined,” here at the CLF (Center for a Livable Future). We’re going to interview a farmer from Maine about that topic in about six weeks.

Tom Philpott 58:41
You’re going to make me dig into my computer. He was an organic farmer whose business was destroyed by PFAS contamination from sewage sludge. He’s now working for an NGO fighting against it.

Dave Chapman 59:00
Adam Nordell?

Tom Philpott 59:03
That’s exactly who I’m talking to.

Dave Chapman 59:05
I just interviewed him, and it was the most moving interview I’ve ever done. Adam Nordell and his wife, Johanna Davis, are two amazing people who had a really terrible thing happen to them and responded like the amazing people they are. But it’s a grim story. They’re very generous in being willing to share it with the world because it’s so painful.

Tom Philpott 59:37
I think it’s just another example of things that could be happening if there were a real MAHA kind of ethos and effect here, but I think it ends up being yet another bitter joke of our times.

Dave Chapman 59:54
Yeah. I saw a lot of people get very excited about MAHA. It is interesting in being the most bipartisan mini movement that I’ve seen. I just saw shocking people from Congress who were not friends of organic farming, not friends of environmental regulation, embracing Make America Healthy Again.

Dave Chapman 1:00:22
I thought, “Well, okay, maybe something important is happening here,” but it seems to have become theater, actually.

Tom Philpott 1:00:31
I agree with that sentiment. I remember, I guess it was during Kennedy’s congressional confirmation hearing, when all these Republican senators were telling him, “I agree with you 100% on food, but I have this problem about vaccinations.” That was stunning to see.

Tom Philpott 1:00:56
I have not seen that in my time. In my time, those senators used industry talking points: “We have the safest and the cheapest food supply in the world,” and they all seemed to abandon that. That was amazing to see. But then that same crew of people went and passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which doubles down on the worst kind of agriculture.

Dave Chapman 1:01:24
Yeah, that’s right. All right, Tom, I wanted to talk about “Perilous Bounty: The Looming Collapse of American Farming and How We Can Prevent It” as well – your excellent book, which I’ve gone through twice, and I’m not done. I’ll go through it again at least once more, so maybe we’ll have another conversation sometime.

Tom Philpott 1:01:44
I’d be happy to do that. That would be great.

Dave Chapman 1:01:46
It’s an important book, and people should read it. You did an excellent job. It’s so well researched. It looks at these two different worlds, California and Iowa, and they’re very different, but, boy, they’re haunted. It really goes into why, what’s wrong, and what better would look like. Before we end, have you got any last words about Joan you’d like to share? That’s where we started.

Tom Philpott 1:02:17
It’s been a few months since she died, and we go through the sort of grieving of the loss. But now I’m just at the point of the celebration of her life: just how much life she had, how much joy and effervescence she brought to her work and to the people around her.

Tom Philpott 1:02:46
As we talk about her, I can just see her. I met her five or six times and got to hang out with her five or six times over those years. I can just picture her so vividly – laughing, telling a story, and bringing so much wisdom. The outpouring of appreciation that we’ve seen since her death reminds us that she’s not with us here on earth anymore, but her memory, her example, and her legacy are with us as long as the people who were around her are alive.

Tom Philpott 1:03:32
I think if we’re able to have a fraction of her influence, then it will go down generations. We’re recording this a few days after Fred Kirschenmann died. He died very recently as we record this, and what I said about him in the CLF memorial that we did for him also applies to Joan.

Tom Philpott 1:03:59
We’ve been talking about fifty years. If, in another fifty years, we have a robust food system – despite all these coming climate insults and the terrible politics that we’re in right now – if we have a robust food system that creates healthy food for everyone in 50 years, it will be because policymakers finally got wise to what Fred, Joan, and that generation of people spent decades of their lives trying to get across.

Tom Philpott 1:04:34
Their legacy, their work, and their influence are the hope that we carry forward over these next fifty years.

Dave Chapman 1:04:46
Yeah. All right. Tom Philpott, thank you very much.

Tom Philpott 1:04:52
Thanks so much for having me.