Forked goes on the road with the What You’re Eating podcast

For those of our listeners who don't know, what is Maha? Is it a movement? Is it a policy initiative? Is it a commission? Is it all of those things?

OK, so yeah, it's a great question.

What is Maha? So for anyone who has not been following, Maha, the acronym, is stands for Make America Healthy Again.

So it is a play off of MAGA, which is the moniker Make America Great Again.

So MAHA is a phrase that was born out of the alliance between Robert F. Kennedy Jr. when he dropped out of the presidential campaign and endorsed Trump.

So this was late summer before the election.

And that phrase was really sort of, I guess, the moniker under which they melded parts of RFK's agenda into parts of Trump's agenda for the final stretch of the campaign.

That would include things like talking about pesticides and food and vaccines and health freedom.

There's like a lot of things that are interwoven into this.

Maha is a big tent, really big tent, includes a lot of issues.

It includes concerns about, you know, there's people who don't like microwaves.

There's people who don't like fluoride in public water.

There's people who are super worked up about microplastics.

There's a lot of issues that plug into it.

A big chunk of it is concerns about vaccines.

And a big chunk of it, I think a much bigger chunk of it in terms of the number of people, is concerns about food.

What we basically saw is that this marriage, this unlikely alliance between them, because, of course, RFK Jr. had been a Democrat and then an independent, this unlikely alliance between them helped Trump win.

It helped Trump win the election.

How much, you know, it's an interesting, I look forward to reading the dissertations about all of that.

But a lot of folks within Trump's orbit seem to openly acknowledge how much this was helpful to bringing home some independents and some particularly women.

So probably young people as well.

And that alliance has now thrust us into this place where we have, of course, HHS led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

And we have a lot of other MAHA types running key parts of the government.

Like they're inside.

I think it's interesting to think about movement versus like whether that's outsiders or insiders.