Dilemmas About Food Systems In Times Of US Federal Government Mayhem

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President Donald J. Trump is causing irreconcilable harm to the US environment. His administration is abandoning clean energy investments. Freezing climate, clean air, and clean water federal policies. Rejecting limits on PFAS in industrial wastewater. Eliminating consumer protections. Sabotaging major treaties on plastic production and shipping emissions. With all of this chaos, it’s easy to overlook the dangerous impact the Trump administration has had on food systems.

Trump has made food production more unsafe and expensive, kowtowing to corporate power. Chemical and food manufacturers have the go-ahead to add any of 111 food chemicals for use in numerous products, from cereal to snack bars, sports drinks, and more. Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s Department of Health and Human Services issued dietary guidance in an upside-down pyramid that places steak, cheese, and whole milk as your first and best meal choices — with research from the meat industry.

All of these and so many more Trump administration policies contribute to the ways that global food systems are failing to feed the world. Food systems emit between 26%–34% of greenhouse gases (GHGs), and that amount of GHGs alone could stop the global goal of limiting warming to 1.5 °C or 2 °C above pre-industrial levels.

Just 15% of the world’s population produces as much food-related greenhouse gas emissions as the bottom 50% combined, creating a stark climate divide between rich and poor eaters. To meet the 2°C warming limit, 44% of people already exceed safe food emission levels today, and by 2050, that number jumps to 91% of the global population.

Emissions from food consumption are not uniform among the world’s inhabitants, according to a late 2025 study in Environmental Research Food Systems. “This means that efforts to reduce emissions from the food system will be part of almost everyone’s life up to 2050,” the study authors argue, “but for at least 40% that responsibility starts now.” The study authors argue that high emitters would need to make the largest cuts, while climate policy must ensure that lower-income populations are not pushed below nutritional adequacy as the system changes.

What can we do to ensure that healthy, culturally appropriate food as a human right is part-and-parcel of government policies?

Food Justice: Disagreements about Solutions

Food justice started out as a movement attempting to right the wrongs of our inequitable food system. To address these and other challenges related to food insecurity, the food justice movement encourages communities to take ownership of their food systems. One solution has been floated to offer more nutritious options in urban centers. Can publicly owned grocery stores serve a role in addressing food insecurity in Boston and other US cities?

The question arises families continue to struggle with the Trump administration cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the country’s food stamp program. SNAP has proven to be a powerful tool in addressing poverty and food access needs. A portion of the costs of SNAP benefits from the federal government to state governments starting October 1, 2026.

Switching urban groceries to city control grabbed headlines during Zohran Mamdani’s New York City mayoral campaign. The concept is about facilitating access and recognizing that local governments have a duty of care to residents to ensure they have access to food that is affordable, healthy, and culturally relevant.

City-owned grocery stores can take existing city interventions like tax credits and breaks, grants to businesses and organizations, and cash transfers a step further, suggest advocates in a Boston Globe opinion piece. City-owned groceries, they outlined, would prioritize benefits to local communities over corporate profit, enable lower price, improve food access, and provide greater local food sourcing.

Yet every urban area isn’t necessarily a food desert, which are places where a majority of people who live in the area have little access to groceries or healthy food. But that’s an assumption that sometimes drives well-meaning food justice activists, says Hannah Garth, assistant professor of anthropology at Princeton University. It’s more likely that cultural ways of eating don’t sync with the foodstuffs available in urban areas, Garth explains.

Instead of a problem of knowledge deficit, residents have told Garth that food costs are too high. “Living within conditions of food apartheid,” she says, “they are angry about the food access inequalities they face in comparison to residents of other parts of the city.” Residents also linked the issue of food affordability with other structural problems, including educational inequality, access to well-waged jobs with benefits, or, most broadly, poverty.

Since the politics of non-profit work and funding structures force food justice activists to focus on tangible outcomes that they could accomplish within short time frames, they don’t have the time to focus on diasporic food traditions that have long existed in the community, or work  holistically on healing, inspiring, and supporting community members — which are “long-term strategies for personal and community self-sufficiency and liberation,” Garth continues. “We need to move away from the idea that nutrition education and dietary advice are adequate solutions for the deep-seated, historically constituted structures underlying our unequal food system.”

Do Citizens of Wealthy Nations Eat the Healthiest?

Usually, we assume that the wealthiest nations in the world provide the healthiest food for their citizens. It seems that assumptions may be faulty, according to late 2025 research published in Nature Food.

The research team collected information about the diets of the most commonly-consumed foods in 171 countries. Then they compared that typical diets with ones that used the same local foods but were adjusted in ways that could lower greenhouse gas emissions or reduce costs. They find that foods with the lowest greenhouse gas emissions for a healthy diet would emit 0.67 kgCO2e. A healthy diet using the least expensive items in each country would emit 1.65 kgCO2e and cost $3.68 in 2021, while using foods most commonly consumed would emit 2.44 kgCO2e and cost $9.96.

Animal-source foods and starchy staples account for 91% of the difference in emissions between the lowest-cost and lowest-emission diets. Other food groups, especially fruits and vegetables, vary widely in cost but not in emissions. These results show how changes in food policy and choice can most cost-effectively support healthier and more sustainable diets worldwide.

California is pushing ahead to help its citizens eat healthier. A set of rules aimed at reducing ultraprocessed foods in schools emerged as many health experts and consumers are becoming increasingly concerned about ultraprocessed foods, which make up 62% of the calories US children consume. The Real Food, Healthy Kids Act, as the new legislation is called, defines ultraprocessed foods as products that contain one or more of certain additives — such as synthetic food dyes, flavoring agents, emulsifiers, thickeners, and stabilizers — as well as high amounts of saturated fats, sodium or added sugars, or any amount of sugar substitutes like artificial sweeteners or sugar alcohols.

In fact, there are similarities in the production processes of ultra-processed foods and cigarettes, according to a paper from researchers at Harvard, the University of Michigan, and Duke University. Manufacturers work very hard to optimize the “doses” of products and how quickly they act on reward pathways in the body, yet little is currently being done in the marketplace to distinguish between harmful ultra-processed foods other foodstuffs.

If it can be done with alcoholic drinks, which are differentiated from other beverages, more policies should be implemented to preventable pressures on already stretched health systems, say the researchers. Without publicly led interventions on the rising burden of non-communicable diseases, they say, we risk health systems’ collapse.

Scheffert and DiFelice write on Food and Water Watch that we do have mechanisms within our individual and collective power to counter Trump’s madness and ignorance as he undermines food systems. They suggest we start at the state and local level to win important environmental protections. We must block the worst of Trump’s policies, they say, while building support for the bold solutions we need. We can fight Trump’s agenda through the courts.

Resources

• “California will ban certain ultraprocessed foods in schools.” Alice Callahan. October 8, 2025.
• “Dietary GHG emissions from 2.7 billion people already exceed the personal carbon footprint needed to achieve the 2 °C climate goal.” Juan Diego Martinez and Navin Ramankutty. Environmental Research Food Systems. November 11, 2025.
• “Environmental impacts and monetary costs of healthy diets worldwide.” Yan Bai, et al. Nature Food. 2025.
• Master list of GRAS chemicals. EWG.org.
• “Publicly owned grocery stores could be Boston’s answer to food insecurity.” Julian Agyeman, Shannon O’Callaghan, and Sophia Olivieri. Boston Globe. October 21, 2025.
• Rewriting the narrative: Advancing justice and equity in the US food system.” Marie A Bragg, et al. Environmental Research and Public Health. April 18, 2025.
• “The state of our Food and water in 2026.” Jeanine Scheffert and Mia DiFelice. Food and Water Watch. March 2, 2026.
• “Ultra-processed foods should be treated more like cigarettes than food.” Kat Lay. The Guardian. February 3, 2026.
• “Why food justice isn’t being served in America.” Hanna Garth. The Guardian. February 25, 2026.