Primary complications to a healthier food supply

– OPINION –

Nothing else plays the same role in our lives as food. In addition to the nutritional and health impacts, food has huge emotional and social components.

While achieving a healthier, safer food supply is desirable, there are at least four overriding obstacles to creating clear, beneficial policies.

• You can’t walk away from food the way you can walk away from alcohol, a cigarette, or a family fight. There is no alternative to food. There is no dropping out or taking a holiday from our food choices.
• “Everything affects everything.” An inspired idea for increasing the availability of healthier foods often requires action in another part of the food cycle, where there is indifference, a lack of financial incentives, consumer resistance, or other roadblocks.
• Americans enjoy the benefits of a national market in which products often travel far and remain edible and nutritious for extended periods. We benefit from the scale of production. On average, we spend barely more than 10 percent of our incomes on food (here). Local growers and home vegetable gardens should be encouraged, but they can’t replace the abundance we experience every day in our grocery stores.
• Incentives and regulations can affect the behavior of food companies and farmers. Ultimately, however, companies and farmers are not going to back food products with no or limited consumer demand. Every proposed supply-side solution needs to incorporate strategies for developing commensurate demand.

Is food policy more echo chamber than change agent? 
Eating food is the only thing that ties together all 350 million Americans. Isolating “healthy” as the primary objective risks missing important elements of choice and situation. Food needs to be safe, affordable, accessible, palatable, plentiful, convenient, as well as healthy.

Notably, in A Message to MAHA: Every American Should Have Access to a Healthy and Affordable Diet  (August 2025), I pointed out the need to consider affordability and accessibility to food, as well as time constraints, age, culture, etc. as part of any comprehensive plan for a healthier food supply.

After the new 2025-2030 Dietary Guidelines for Americans (DGAs) were released on Jan. 7, 2026 (here), I returned to the topic (here). The DGAs had nothing useful to say about improving the diets (and lives) of millions of Americans who face hunger. I also questioned whether the DGAs mean anything “outside the bubble of individuals with enough time to figure it out and enough time and money to act upon it.”  It seems fair to ask whether these guidelines are more an echo chamber than a change agent.

In particular, I am still trying to understand the inverted food pyramid that replaced My Plate. Unlike bar charts and pie charts, there is no common understanding of how the graphics and information relate to each other in an inverted pyramid. I miss the intuitive clarity of using a pie chart to represent a dinner plate. Why make things more difficult if the objective is to help people make better food choices?

Fixing food is not like fixing tobacco
Former FDA Commissioner, Dr. David Kessler, in his recent 60 Minutes interview (here), correctly said “fixing” our food supply is much larger, more far-reaching, and more difficult than adopting national policies to restrict tobacco use.

Despite Secretary Kennedy’s efforts to paint food executives as if they were 1970’s tobacco executives, the comparison is misguided. The tobacco industry stonewalled for decades, intentionally making their products more addictive while denying incontrovertible scientific evidence of the deaths they caused. Without a doubt, there was a conspiracy.

Improving the food supply, while ripe for debate and action, is not similar. The scientific case against ultra-processed food (UPF) is emerging, not settled. We don’t even have an agreed-upon definition of UPF. There is no comprehensive list of UPF that are healthy or at least non-deleterious. And UPF is just one aspect of the food supply.

Unlike tobacco, there is no conspiracy. The quintessential McDonald’s French Fries may have some food science behind it but surely owes most of its appeal to hundreds of focus groups that have defined and refined the product.

The farm and food production industries are essential to improving the health, safety, and abundance of our food supply. Demonizing the food industry is neither fact-based nor a productive way to engage.

About the author: Steven A. Grossman, JD, is president of HPS Group LLC, a policy and regulatory consultant and former government official. Grossman co-founded and later served as Executive Director of the Alliance for a Stronger FDA. Grossman’s advocacy is rooted in public service, having spent six years as counsel and Health Staff Director on the Senate HELP Committee and four years as a Deputy Assistant Secretary for Health at HHS.