Leading voices in the food movement respond to a second Trump administration, and discuss where we go from here.
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Leading voices in the food movement respond to a second Trump administration, and discuss where we go from here.
November 13, 2024
The U.S. Capitol at sunset on September 17, 2021. (Photo credit: Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images)
Civil Eats has covered the U.S. food system for nearly 16 years. In that time, we’ve been at the forefront of reporting on the policies—some arcane, some mundane—that impact everyone’s most basic daily need: food. From the farm bill to food justice to deep coverage of how the pandemic cratered our food system, we’ve pursued complicated and often underreported stories while lifting up underrepresented voices. Throughout, we’ve highlighted solutions to daunting challenges and interviewed the people working to create change.
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Now, a week past the 2024 election, we’re at the brink of momentous shifts in how our food system functions—and for whom. Food and ag organizations across the country are weighing in on what the election could bring. What better time to ask our Civil Eats advisors and other leading thinkers in food about how they’re responding to this moment, what to expect from the new administration, and how to move forward? Below, they’ve generously shared their thoughts and insights on the future of food and ag during Trump 2.0. We encourage you to continue this conversation by adding your voices in the comments section.
Chef José Andrés, founder of the Global Food Institute at George Washington University
Food is not just fuel—it’s a powerful way to strengthen communities, rebuild economies, heal the planet, and improve health. But as a country, we often fail to give food the importance it deserves, and too many policies in Washington overlook the real solutions I see in small towns and big cities all across America.
The current political climate of division and exclusion leaves everyday Americans—hardworking farmers, first-generation restaurant owners, children in need of a healthy school meal—vulnerable. When policies fail to recognize their struggles, it isn’t just an oversight; it’s a neglect of the people who make up the fabric of our nation.
But I know we can prioritize food in a way that brings dignity and prosperity to all. That’s why I created the Global Food Institute at George Washington University to help America’s leaders—in government, business, and nonprofits—use food as a force for change. We must ensure that those who feed America are able to feed themselves. This is especially true for immigrant communities who keep our food system functioning, from fields to kitchens. Without them, the system collapses. Fair labor practices and common-sense immigration reform are the solutions, not deportations and family separations that destabilize our country and betray its ideals.
In my work responding to emergencies with World Central Kitchen, I don’t see red or blue communities; just neighbors feeding neighbors. Hunger knows no political party, and access to food should never be withheld or politicized. Working together, I know we can tackle hunger and the many problems it represents, such as poverty and poor health.
I believe we’ll find our strength in building longer tables where everyone is welcome. By coming together around food, we can find common ground and fuel ourselves to continue fighting for a healthier America. This is a moment to choose compassion over division, to recognize that food is a right, not a privilege. Together, let’s make food our first act of solidarity.
Mark Bittman, author and journalist
The plan “before” was to make sure that SNAP benefits remained intact, that the few significant steps forward by the Biden administration in food and farming were preserved, that conditions for immigrants would not worsen, that food workers’ rights would be improved, that newly invigorated agencies would take tougher stands on the uses of pesticides and antibiotics, and that there’d be some progress in supporting new and would-be farmers, marginalized farmers, and farmers who dare to practice agroecology.
Most of those forward-looking goals will have to be pared back. The most important fights are likely to be around defending farmworkers’ and other foodworkers’ right to stay in the United States; against absurd protectionist tariffs; to protect SNAP, and farm conservation programs, and anything progressive that’s happened in USDA; and to continue to hammer home the reality of the need to deal with the climate crisis.
We might have imagined we were finished with some of that, and indeed, a Harris administration likely would have given us opportunities to push a progressive food and farming agenda to a new point, especially because we imagined less energy would have been spent on immigrants’ rights, the climate struggle, protecting SNAP.
We know that Trump is mercurial and unpredictable, and we don’t know where the emphases of his new team will lie. What we think we know—are pretty sure of—is that the actions of the new government will have to be fought with renewed energy and that we will have victories amid our defeats.
We must be prepared for opportunities as they arise, and to find new battlegrounds on which we might win. But at the very least we can be pretty sure we’re going to be struggling to hold the line against cuts in entitlement programs like SNAP, and against the threat and promise of mass exportations, which are inhumane, immoral, and even unpractical. This food system cannot work without foreign-born workers.
Navina Khanna, executive director and co-founder, HEAL Food Alliance
This is not the outcome we wanted, but it is an outcome we’re prepared for. The deep love each of us holds for our communities, our shared vision of what is possible, and the ways that we work together continues to give me hope for the fight that is to come.
HEAL launched just weeks after Trump took office in 2017, and since then, we’ve seen time and again that in moments of crisis, organizations across the movement have come together to block the worst outcomes, protect each other and our wins, and build a future in which each of us can thrive. I have so much confidence that we will continue to do so, but we need to be organized.
For example, there are very real threats already being made to immigrant communities, including food and farmworkers. Trump advisor Stephen Miller, who is expected to be named deputy chief of staff for policy in the next term, never really went away, but with him back in the administration, we can expect further attempts to roll back support for BIPOC producers. We know that SNAP and school meals are at risk.
This moment calls on us to show up together. We need to stay connected, to deepen our relationships with each other, and to be ready to mobilize when our communities come under attack. This moment depends on all of us bringing our strengths—communications prowess, legal expertise, organizing skills, financial resources, ancestral knowledge—to the fight.
And even as we fight the worst, now is also a time for us to continue to build a new world. As a movement, folks organizing for food and farm justice have long imagined and cultivated systems that exist beyond and outside of a political system that was never designed for life to thrive.
May we continue to nourish and grow what we are building, and with our blood and political ancestors at our back, to claim power with our people.
Anna Lappé, executive director of the Global Alliance for the Future of Food
There’s a lot about the next Trump Administration that has me deeply concerned, from the implications of electing a climate denier to the White House to the possibility of his making good on his dark promises to deport millions of our friends and neighbors, defund the World Health Organization, and much more. But I’m particularly focused on what this administration will mean for our collective efforts to make our food systems healthier, more resilient, and fairer, particularly in taking on the corporate consolidation that’s increasing prices and giving us less choice.
In the weeks just before the election, the voices of the Make America Healthy Again Trump backers, fueled by millions in dark money, were telling us that Trump will take on the pesticide industry and toxics in food, will tackle junk food, and much more. I and many colleagues were dubious about the proclamations: Trump’s track record points in the opposite direction. His decision to appoint a former tobacco lobbyist with ties to the ultra-processed foods industry as Chief of Staff seems to indicate our concerns were well-founded.
With the election behind us, it’s important to look ahead and be clear-eyed about what this administration will try to do (see this insightful take from the Union of Concerned Scientists) and support the groups and media outlets (like, ahem, Civil Eats) that will help us make sense of the implications of this administration’s actions and what we can do to exert our voices for what we believe in. We can also work to ensure that the litany of perilous possibilities under the Trump Administration do not paralyze us with fear or drain us with despair.
Instead, try internalizing the portmanteau of one of my favorite writers, Astra Taylor, who gives us this twist on labor activist Joe Hill’s line “Don’t mourn, organize!” As Astra notes, we can do both. We can mourganize.
Marion Nestle, Paulette Goddard professor of nutrition, food studies, and public health emerita, New York University
I wish I had a crystal ball to say how food and agriculture issues would play out over the next four years, but all I have to go on is what Trump and his followers say. If we take them at their word, then we must expect them to implement their Project 2025 plan, which replaces one deep state with another that favors conservative business interests and ideology. This calls for replacing staff in federal agencies with Trump loyalists and dismantling them, stopping the USDA from doing anything to prevent climate change, reforming farm subsidies (unclear how), splitting the farm bill to deal separately with agricultural supports and SNAP, reducing SNAP participation by reinstating work requirements and reducing the Thrifty Food Plan, and making it more difficult for kids to participate in school meals.
On the other hand, some of the plans make sense: eliminating checkoff programs and repealing the sugar program, for example. So do some of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s goals: Make America Healthy Again by focusing on chronic disease prevention, getting harmful chemicals out of kids’ foods, and getting rid of conflicts of interest among researchers and agency staff. It’s too early to know how much of this is just talk, but I’m planning to do what I can to oppose measures I view as harmful, but to strongly support the ones I think will be good for public health.
Raj Patel, author, activist, and research professor in the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, Austin
Milei, Musk, and Modi. Now Trump. It’s little comfort that inflation has caused a global mood of anti-incumbency after COVID. When President Biden said he’d run again, my heart sank, and only bobbed up again briefly when it became clear, after the first debate, that his campaign was doomed. Who knows what might have happened with a Democratic candidate who could credibly have recognized the pain that inflation had caused the working class, who acknowledged the rising rates of child hunger after the lapse of the pandemic-era SNAP expansion, and who could have offered a credible alternative to the Biden-Harris administration? (The anti-price-gouging Harris disappeared quickly.)
So, now we have a second Trump term, set to be crueler and more destructive than the first. These waters aren’t uncharted, though. Argentinian anarcho-capitalist Javier Milei won a mandate in late 2023 to take a chainsaw to government. He did, and has since laid off tens of thousands of government employees. Hunger rates are soaring. He’s now flying over to meet Musk and Trump to advise them on how to do the same.
Milei isn’t the only relevant international leader. Modi is too. In India, fascism has squatted for over a decade under Narendra Modi’s Hindu supremacist government. The persecution of enemies within has left dozens of journalists behind bars, defunded civil society, and created a permanent climate of fear for minority groups, particularly Muslims. Under cover of this nationalism, Modi is passing laws for his billionaire friends and gutting the parts of government that stand in the way. This is part of a broader right-wing international movement: the Atlas Network’s fingerprints are all over Project 2025.
If they’re coordinating and learning, we should be too. There’s much to study.
Look to how Milei’s project was frustrated in Argentina by widespread protests and strikes. His initial and far more radical project couldn’t advance because of overwhelming public opposition, led by unions and civil-society groups. In India, the plan to remove certain kinds of price supports and government markets for farmers resulted in the world’s largest protest, involving 250 million people, led by farmers’ movements but soon spreading across society. It was successful: Modi had to back down, marking a turning point that would result in his losing full control of government in the subsequent elections.
Here in the U.S., although we lack the union density and peasant movements, we are not without hope. The pandemic was an invitation to relearn the arts of mutual aid and protection. We’ll need those skills, together with the more atrophied ones of international solidarity, against the Trump administration. Protecting the families targeted for deportation is a moral calling, and it’ll take organization—local, national, and international—to fight back. But there’s little choice: This is the fight of and for our lives.
Leah Penniman, co-founder of Soul Fire Farm, author of Farming While Black and Black Earth Wisdom
A few days after the crushing election results were announced, community members gathered at Soul Fire Farm for our annual gleaning day –harvesting every last morsel of abundance from the fecund acres and taking it home to share with our communities. Through tears of heartbreak, rage, and overwhelm, we took note that the land continued to do what she always does–generously create life and beauty. So must we. Here’s how.
Squad Up. We protect us. We need to squad up to directly protect people who are targeted—immigrants, farm workers, queer and trans folks, the Muslim community, et al. We can’t have depleted ranks at this moment, so the circle of “we” must widen to include others who may not be in our ideologically pure echo chambers. Empire thrives on atomization, division, and isolation. We resist by building trust and coalitions, engaging in mutual aid, organizing outside the system, and creating unified strategy. Follow and support the campaigns of @undocuprofessionals @nativeorganizersalliance @indigenousrising @lylajune @ibramxk @adriennemareebrown @justice4blackgirls @zhaabowekwe
Ramify. We need to branch out. Remember that the butterfly of transformative social change has two wings, and electoral politics sits on just one of them. On the other: Grassroots reform and harm reduction. We won’t give up on policy pressure and defending civic institutions in the next four years, but we also need to strengthen and fortify our other strategies. It’s up to us, BIPOC farmers, earth workers, queer folks, women and nonbinary people, working class folks, immigrants, and all people of conscience to organize, heal, and build together. Check out this advice from Waging Nonviolence.
Root in Love. Hate will not prevail in the end. There is time for grief, rage, and heartbreak, but it is not a time to blame other demographic groups in the community for this painful outcome. Don’t let them change you, exhaust you, and make you hate. Our playbook’s DNA is love and interdependence. With one another’s support, we will carry on in the long struggle for liberation.
Zoom Out. The world we are dreaming does not settle for having a slightly more benign power-holder on the throne–it dispenses with the throne all together. It’s a world free of colonialism, militarized violence, capitalist greed, hatred of the perceived other, supremacy, and plunder of Mother Earth. It’s a world of compassion, justice, and interdependence. This work is a marathon relay, not a solitary sprint. Our ancestors have faced the burning of the world time and again, and they continued to carry seeds, sing songs, nurse children, and listen to our more-than-human kin that point the way. We are not to give up. We are to continue step by step, hand in hand, hearts leading the way.
Michael Pollan, author, journalist
I’ll be closely watching the development (or abandonment) of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) agenda set forth by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Leaving aside his vaccine and fluoride nuttiness, Kennedy injected into the campaign a whole set of concerns about food and health in children that resonated, especially with mothers: ultra-processed foods in school lunch; childhood cancer and chronic disease; the reliance on drugs to insure health rather than diet; the need to reform agricultural policy to improve public health. Trump picked up on this late in the campaign and promised to give RFK Jr. the authority to implement his agenda.
Trump did surprisingly well with mothers, and MAHA could well be the reason. I seriously doubt Trump will keep his promise to Kennedy—Big Food and Pharma would rebel, and surely he’s more committed to deregulation than public health. But already Joel Salatin, the regenerative farmer, has been asked to serve as an advisor in the USDA. What happens to MAHA—an issue that long ago should have belonged to the Democrats—promises to be one of the more interesting stories of the next few years.
Ashanté M. Reese, author, associate professor, department of African and African diaspora studies, the University of Texas at Austin
After I saw the election results and after I’d read texts from the wee hours of the morning, I sent a text of my own: “We for sure have a [mandate] and it’s been consistent: take care of each other. In very real ways. Real care happens at the community scale. Governments can make that easier or harder. But they can’t stop it from happening.”
This is what I believe to my very core, and this is what I will continue to be invested in. There is no way to avoid the reality of what elections mean for our movements and ourselves. This administration has pledged to destroy the earth, continue to pillage and plunder other parts of the world, and rip through the few social safety nets we still have. That is scary. But imperial power isn’t the only form of power.
My hope is that what we are calling a moment turns out to be more than a simple blip in history. My hope is that more people will reckon with a fundamental reality that the state and policy have failed to make equity and liberation priorities. That is not likely to change. My hope is that we coalesce around the belief that now is the time to collaborate and imagine and experiment and fail and build the most radical version of collective society we can. My hope is that we practice collaboration, imagining, experimenting, and building at every scale of our lives; that we do not cede that sacred, life-sustaining work to the state.
But we cannot build on a large scale what we do not practice at an everyday scale. To me, this means that the building blocks of justice and liberation—in the food system and otherwise—are organized, rearranged, and laid in our organizations, in our neighborhoods, in our families, and beyond. I am orienting my work and whole being towards intentionally gathering and building right where I am. I hope you are, too.
Ruth Reichl, writer, cook, editor
My fear is that Trump really will carry out his threat to deport all undocumented immigrants. It will, of course, be a humanitarian crisis of unimaginable proportions.
Beyond that, the impact on our food system will be catastrophic. Our entire food system relies on the work of undocumented immigrants. Without them we will no longer be able to grow food (as opposed to commodities) in this country. Commodity crops—wheat, corn, soy and the like—can be harvested by machines, but the produce that we eat requires human harvesters. The plain fact is that Americans will not do that work.
Even if they can find people willing to harvest their crops, independent regenerative farmers across the country will be competing with foreign farmers who pay their workers very little. This cheap produce will flood the markets and put American farmers out of business.
We will then be completely dependent upon imported produce that has very little nutritional value, creating an even larger crisis of obesity and diabetes. Combined with the possible end of the Affordable Care Act, this will create a serious national health crisis.
Restaurants, which also rely on undocumented immigrants, will be stressed by the new policies too. Prices will rise, and a huge proportion of American restaurants will go out of business—leaving us with a thriving fast food system that relies on commodity crops and robot workers.
I plan to spend my time trying to make people understand how important our food choices are to our health, our communities, and our environment. And trying to persuade them that paying more for food is ultimately a bargain.
Teresa Romero, president, United Farm Workers
Farmworkers of all immigration statuses are continuing to work to feed America today, just like they do every day. Farmworkers don’t care if the food they are picking is going to end up on a Democrat or Republican’s table—they just want to be paid fairly and treated with dignity for their essential work and go home safely to their families each night.
Right now, many farmworkers are fearful. They worry about being separated from their children, or the holes in their communities that would be left by mass detention or deportation. Yet, most have lived through one Trump presidency already. They have deep and strong roots in the country which their labor feeds. And they know this country’s agricultural economy would collapse without them. Farmworkers are resilient. They have to be.
The United Farm Workers (UFW) will continue to organize, helping farmworkers to empower themselves. The threat of deportation is commonly used to keep workers afraid, but our worker leaders are courageous. We will look to the wider labor movement and our movement’s many supporters to stand in solidarity with immigrant workers and refuse to allow them to be intimidated into accepting unjust or dangerous working conditions.
We will also continue our advocacy efforts, both large and small. The UFW has always worked to protect farmworkers. We will continue to do absolutely everything we can, but we can’t do it alone. We will need support.
Ricardo Salvador, advisor, Union of Concerned Scientists
The second Trump administration was voted in because of avian influenza. Here’s how that worked: As numerous post-mortems have documented, significant numbers of 2020 Democratic voters shifted to the Republican column in 2024, and their top issue was the economy. Specifically, “about 9 in 10 voters were very or somewhat concerned about the cost of groceries.” Eggs are the most cited example of food prices gone wild, because anyone who shops has seen their cost rise 85 percent over the past year. But food costs don’t stem from President Biden’s mysterious failure to twiddle a Food Price Knob in the Oval Office. Instead, they reflect the practices and values of an industrial food system operating within a highly distorted market system.
We depend on a concentrated, specialized, and linear food system that is easily disrupted, most notably as a pandemic, regional wars, and drought coincided over the past four years. Specifically, the model of producing eggs in massive facilities housing millions of laying hens, and concentrating those facilities geographically, leads to periodic outbreaks and the rapid spread of highly contagious diseases such as avian flu. Millions of hens must be euthanized, and facilities must be closed and sanitized to attempt to eliminate the contagion. Which is exactly what happened in Colorado this past summer, constraining supply, driving up prices, and bringing us to the present straits.
The outcome is that, a week past the election, rather than working on policies to transform the food system, President-Elect Trump is rapidly assembling a governing team to deliver measures that played well on the campaign trail but will exacerbate high food prices by further reducing the supply of eggs, dairy, fruits, vegetables, and meat. This will most certainly result from his promised deportation and restrictive immigration programs. His doubling down on the fossil-fuel economy and sanctioning the repurposing of “climate-smart” funding at the Department of Agriculture will further affect future food prices by accelerating the disruption of the predictable weather patterns that make crop production possible.
A lesson well known to Civil Eats readers is that food literacy matters. This election turned on a series of false narratives foisted on the electorate, with those about immigrants “poisoning the blood of our country” and “Kamala Harris’ policies” being directly responsible for high egg (and food) prices. As our leading food voices have not tired of reminding us, competent food and agriculture discourse needs to be part of the nation’s policy conversations at the highest levels. And those of us in the business of informing public perceptions and narratives about food, from scientists to experienced practitioners, need to redouble our efforts—and correct misinformation wherever it occurs. As we have seen, the costs of not doing so are existential.
Alice Waters, chef, author, food activist, and founder of Chez Panisse restaurant
I know that there are many things to fear: I am worried about international separation. And global connections, which are so important for climate and for peace.
But I still believe in the power of gathering and the education of the senses—and I believe that the public school system could transform agriculture, health, and education overnight.
We have a lot of enlightened politicians still in power. It might not seem like it right now, but they are there, and more may be coming. I have known the farmer Joel Salatin for years and to think that he might be an advisor to the USDA is amazing.
My work moving forward will be exactly what I have been doing and have believed in for decades, with this added mandate: Could we use the new interest and energy in regenerative farming that has swelled over the past decade? Could we harness it to support school-purchased food directly from local, regenerative, and organic farmers and ranchers who take care of the land and their farmworkers? I believe School Supported Agriculture could be a national and global policy that could address the climate crisis and boost local economies immediately. This is what I continue to call a “delicious revolution.”
On October 19, 2024, we gathered 200 farmers, educators, activists, and nonprofit leaders in Washington, D.C. around the table for an example of what school lunch could be. We called it Climate Food Hope, and it made me realize a few things. We all have something to contribute to the big picture. That day, we brought together people from around the nation and the world to address climate change through regenerative agriculture, and that can continue. I believe it’s possible for school-supported agriculture and universal school lunch to be everyday realities, improving the health of our children and our future on this planet.
July 30, 2025
From Oklahoma to D.C., a food activist works to ensure that communities can protect their food systems and their future.
I am 50 and have always struggled with weight.
My Ex wife is from Peru and when visiting her family
I would eat more and lose weight. They don't
Process foods like we do in the US. I never
Thought much about it until RFK was talking
About the US food system.