“Something is poisoning the American people and we know that the primary culprits are the changing food supply, the switch to highly chemical-intensive processed foods,” Kennedy said. “We need to fix our food supply, and that’s the number one.” In his opening statement, he also said he “will scrutinize the chemical additives in our food supply.”

Despite those comments, Kennedy’s potential oversight of the FDA—which regulates food additives, food safety recalls, and antibiotic use in agriculture—was barely mentioned throughout the hearing. Instead, Republican senators generally praised his overall commitment to investigating the root causes of chronic diseases, while Democrats hammered him on his past false statements on vaccines and anti-vaccine advocacy, his actions tied to a deadly measles outbreak, and his recent about-face on the issue of abortion and how that might impact access to the medication mifepristone. Medicare and Medicaid were also popular topics.

And while no one asked him much of anything about the FDA, the USDA—an agency he will not oversee—came up several times, with several farm-state Republicans asking Kennedy to commit to working in collaboration with farmers and the agency that supports and regulates them. Kennedy said President Trump “has specifically instructed me that he wants farmers involved in every policy and that he wants me to work with Brooke Rollins at USDA to make sure that we preserve American farmers, that all of our policies support them.”