Now that the Democrats are in charge of Congress, what's most important for them to get after?

Hunger.

The amount of hunger by the cruel snap restrictions from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act can be addressed.

Not fully.

That would take new legislation reversing the cuts from 2025 H.R. 1, One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

But snap is part of the farm bill the farm bill got out of the house but not through senate many people despaired it would never be passed again in history why because it requires major collaboration between republicans who are against any kind of food assistance, SNAP is part of it, it's two-thirds of the Farm Bill, and Democrats who need food assistance and need to hold their urban constituents, but the Democrats can withhold all votes through December and then say there are a couple things you've got to do.

You've got to delay for at least two years, which the Democrats have already been calling for, the shifting of the state burdens to SNAP.

Could you, before you talk about what the current issue is, describe what they are and how important they are to restaurants in America.

And is this because of young people and their concern about ultra processed food? Is that what's happening?

Partly the unpopularity of sugar, which is, and the deep suspicion of added sugar, which is a good thing that RFK Jr. and the Maha movement are worried about.

They're also, they being long-time popular commercial breakfast cereals, are full of colorings.

And that has been greatly suspected by the Maha movement.

The one thing the RFK administration has done is is enact a Biden rule against two red colorings, I think.

Otherwise, it's all been voluntary industry compliance and nobody really monitors the industry to say, are you fulfilling your promise? Is this actually happening? But coloring is big in cereals.

Sugar bacon cereals, those are highly suspicious right now.

So tell people who Wendell Berry was and what the issue is Tamar Haspel's addressing.

[laughs]

"We don't want regulations." Uh, and all the things that they, they're trying to combat the message from the Make America Healthy Again movement.

And this is such a mixed picture, because some of the things that this entirely self-interested industry group, which is by stealth, Guardian uncovered all of these videos instructing influencers what to say, the language to use, to hit MAHA people where they live.

A lot of what MAHA puts out about ultra-processed food that isn't yet proved, but is certainly true by association, nobody knows the actual mechanism for all these bad health results from eating ultra-processed food.

But seed oils is just false.

The vilifying of seed oils and, um, making the hero to be beef tallow high in cholesterol, disastrous for the environment, these are messages that should be combated.

But lots of messages, eat real food, have farm-raised food, uh, have whole vegetables and whole foods, those are good.

Great.

So tell people that don't know who he was and your relationship and what you said in this piece.

piece.[clears throat] Wendell Berry was a writer of fiction, poetry, [lips smack] and he was kind of the original advocate for small-scale farming as the way to build and sustain communities.

And the connections of people to land, people to each other, people to food, was what he wrote about in all of his poetry and fiction.

And people love his poetry as much as they love his essays.

There's this fabulous book called, uh, The Need to Be Whole, which is about all those things, and he wrote post-Trump, really up to the minute, even if he died at 92.

He was constantly writing about, about current events, about the corruption of...

He drew a wonderful line.

Right

Tell us about this gentleman.

Well, first of all, I've written an article that will run, and I'm going to be posting it soon with a kind of last word video with Wendell on the afterlife.

Great.

Really, it's just amazing, and I happen to be lucky enough to see him on July, in the middle of July.

when he seemed hale and hearty and terrific at age 92.

Why would anyone really matter? Why would it matter? Wendell Berry was really the poet laureate of farming and community and keeping an eye on the land at all times.

He wrote 50 books, 5-0-8. in his 92 years from Port Royal, Kentucky, about 50 minutes outside of Louisville, also near Lexington, where his father had been a lawyer and tobacco funder.

When you hear the

Can we just call him junior? We'll just say junior.

That really would be good.

So cyclospora is reaching into the tens of thousands, I think 20,000 and maybe that's reported.

So it's 30,000 cases.

This is explosive diarrhea.

It's really bad and it's very unusual and I think that when you read about this awful stuff happening because of Taco Bell shredded iceberg lettuce in Michigan, you think that's far from you.

It's happening in almost every state.

But it's also elitist because the way that they are pricing what they're calling cheap, fresh cooking is absurd.

What have they been doing?

I love this story.

This story is a law guardian report, but it's not guardians investigative reporting.

It's the World Health Organization, which put out a very strongly worded report in the words of Dr. Tedros, its head, calling globally for companies to buy back off their lawsuits which delay the ability of countries to put on warning labels to say listen you shouldn't be eating this food it's not good for you and so on the one hand especially in this country large food manufacturers are saying we're with maha we're with robert f kennedy jr and we think we're going to make better food and we also don't believe in ultra-processed food.

On the other hand, its legal departments are suing states and municipalities.

But also, what was really moving about this story and Dr. Tedros's World Health Organization calls is, It's poor countries that don't have the money to fight these lawsuits that are really suffering.

What's the effect of the lawsuits? They delay marketing efforts by public health departments, which have teeny tiny ad budgets anyway, to say, you know, you really shouldn't be having this ultra processed food.

Why have we as a wealthy country not been able to do this?

So what is the status of the investigation? Are we 100% clear that it's Taylor Farms? What's the deal?

Oh, absolutely not.

It could be a bunch of other wholesalers.

They probably grew their lettuce in Central Mexico.

Whole Foods, which seemed to be ridiculous and cynical, at least said Taylor Farms has very clearly stated in all of its public announcements that anything grown in the U.S. has not been the subject of investigation.

It was only Taylor Farms de Mexico, which only sold wholesale, did not even sell on supermarket shelves.

but because fda and cdc keep releasing new subjects of investigation sometimes saying what those companies are usually saying what they're not it's cast all salad greens into doubt so there's nothing that is saying taylor farms of the us is absolutely fine but what i want to add always is Michigan does have thousands and thousands of cases.

Can you expand upon, for those who don't know, these nutrition education programs the feds used to do? What are they doing? And what's the value of them when they're not being eliminated by people like Donald Trump?

So, Corby, what is the latest with this cyclospora outbreak at Taylor Farms? I mean, it's now more than just contaminated lettuce at Taco Bell, right?

Oh, it's Taylor Farms, which is one of the country's largest suppliers of lettuce greens, that has recalled not just what it shipped to Taco Bell, but what it shipped to a lot of food service places.

I hesitate to say so far it is only big, industrially bagged.

lettuce that goes to food service and not what you see in your supermarket and not what comes from Taylor Farms' U.S. locations.

It's only been in Mexico because that might give false reassurance in case there's tracing cyclospora to other.

So far, however, it's to big food service organizations like Cisco, like hospital, college, and school, cafeterias and such, but taylor is not very good about saying here's where we shipped everything they make the job hard for people who are trying to trace the origins of it it's already amazing that the cdc and the fda strapped for budget strapped for personnel were able to trace this outbreak because unlike most other foodborne illnesses Cyclospora is really hard to trace to one particular food from one particular place.

It's amazing they did it as quickly as they did.

Corby, walk us through that.

And she's going to be drinking on the job, which sounds like a lot of fun.

So do you remember the picture of Cosmopolitans in her East Hampton mansion spread that really revived us during the pandemic? She acted half drunk as she was putting essentially an entire bottle of vodka and some fruit juice into a tall crystal pitcher with one of those endlessly tall spoons as bigger than knitting needles.

and say, you know, this is how you're going to get through the next couple of years, everybody, and why don't you just be as mellow as I? So she's enormously popular in that.

Same as East Hampton Kitchen and Studio, she's filmed her hugely popular TV shows, and now she's going to podcasting, which she'll be doing from her equally fabulous New York Manhattan Upper East Side kitchen and inviting friends for longer discussions that she could have while she was telling them how to spatchcock a chicken.

So she's going to be inviting influencers, not necessarily food people, and talking about how they changed careers.

Ina Garten is 78.

She didn't start broadcasting until her 50s, and she's hugely, hugely popular, so much so that every podcast company demanded to get in on this deal.

this this piece in politico that specifically looked at maine and the unraveling of the of the snap program there and i know this was a deep dive in maine but this is this is happening across the country um again is there an explanation as to why why this needs this is happening

you know, I've

read about.

I've wondered, are food engineers quite that calculating and evil? There are new exposés coming out about how Deeply, the tobacco industry and food industry were intertwined when they were merging.

Kraft Heinz was owned by Philip Morris, I guess, and Nabisco.

A lot of these companies, the tobacco side was helping increase addictiveness and flavor.

It was their technology.

There are some terrific pieces coming out.

Can you just briefly explain why it's coming back and what it does?

Like, is it diff- how difficult is it to own and operate a small local restaurant group or food group in the Boston area?

You know, it's hugely difficult, and The Globe article, uh, quoted John Pepper of Boloco and also, um, Ron Shaich, who were both investors in it and for various reasons pulled out and, uh, severed their connections, but they both talked about the huge challenges of opening a, a restaurant.

But you know, we should also look at the huge challenges of operating a farm, and again, it's you can't own your own farmland.

And one of the main reasons that the average age of farmers is over 60 in this country is because it's so tough ever to actually purchase land.

So yes, in most cities you go into, in most airports, just every place, it's not locally owned restaurants or chains.

It's places that can raise venture capital and have lots of economies of scale.

Um, why, why is he able to say that these prices are now more affordable, and is he corre- [laughs] correct?

Well, for so many reasons outside of his control, which is to say weatherUm, ability of farmers to have labor to, um, harvest things.

Tell us what you wrote and why we're talking about it today.

Thank you very much.

And we're talking about it because the founder, Carlo Petrini, sadly died young at 76, uh, last night.

And he is somebody who really galvanized the world to think, "If I have delicious, wonderful food I wanna travel a long time to get," which kind of all of us do, "I can do good at the same time by thinking about the health of the people who grew it, the soil it grew in, and the air it, uh, is nurtured by." So Carlo Petrini married the environmental movement, which was very fashionable in the mid to late '80s when he founded it in 1986, with, um, a new kind of complete enjoyment in traditional, wonderful, handmade artisan food, which was being threatened by, uh, s- uh, fast food.

The name was a joke.

It was in the middle of the Spanish Steps tourist part of Rome-

Oh, oh

... and other wonderful local chefs who cared about regional food and finding out what people grew.

Sure

...

Community Servings and God's Love We Deliver were founded, just as Kim said, to keep HIV patients alive, wasting disease, just getting enough food into them that they could tolerate without throwing up and could help literally put meat on their bones.

That was the whole goal.

Then along came the drug cocktails, much longer survival rates, and it instead became, well, you know, they've got diabetes.

They've got kidney disease.

We'd better be caring for that because they still have HIV, so we've got to be looking at the overall health needs of this person.

Corby, what about you?