RFK Jr.’s hill to dye on?

If you’re to believe media accounts of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s extraordinary Tuesday press conference, the Health and Human Services Secretary has “banned” eight toxic colored dyes from American food products. Milder accounts say that the agency has ordered Big Food to “phase out” these dyes by the end of 2026. No one legitimate will argue against food-dye restrictions and anyone who does is either reflexively anti-Trump to an absurd degree or is a paid food-industry shill.

But the problem is that there were no food-industry shills present at the press conference. RFK Jr. has essentially asked the food companies to do the right thing by American consumers – by self-deporting. “We don’t have an agreement,” RFK Jr. said. “We have an understanding.”

FDA Commissioner Marty Makary added: “You win more bees with honey than with fire. I believe in love. Let’s start in a friendly way. They want to do this… they are eager to do this.”

But are they? We can only take RFK Jr.’s word. When asked what the plan is if General Mills and other corporations don’t agree to this idea, he said, simply, that they do: “We’re getting food companies and fast-food companies that are calling us every day. I think the industry is ready to change. They have children too. Most of them really want to have a healthier America. They want clear guidelines and they want to know what they can and can’t do. And we’re gonna give them that.”

This has a whiff of wishcasting to it, like the Sting song where he says he hopes the Russians love their children too. The plan right now, Makary said, is to not go down the “complicated road” of congressional legislation, which implies those complications will arise because the corporate food industry has historically owned the soul of Congress.

State legislatures are a possibility: food-dye bans are already in place in states as ideologically diverse as California and West Virginia. But, Makary said, the industry doesn’t want to deal with a “patchwork of 30 different state plans.”

The food-dye battle has a broad coalition across the ideological spectrum, which makes this play-nice strategy extremely curious. The week before he left office, President Biden managed to push through a ban of the food dye Red #3, fully revoking FDA authorization for it.

Surprisingly, the Trump administration, which has made tackling the chronic disease epidemic among American children a major plank of its worldview, isn’t going nearly as hard against the food paint – yet.

RFK Jr. insisted that he’s also targeting many other food additives, which he didn’t name. He also promised heavy nutritional guidance against adding sugar to processed foods. “Sugar is poison,” he said, something I never thought I’d hear uttered in a federal-agency press conference. “The industry,” he said, “is making money keeping us sick. We have them on the run now. Four years from now we will have a ban on most of these products or you will know about them when you go to the grocery store.”

That was the only mention of the word “ban” in the whole half-hour affair. So is the supposed food dye ban a real ban, or isn’t it?

RFK Jr. is probably the third most-divisive figure in contemporary American politics, behind only Donald Trump and Elon Musk, who appears to be slowly fading back into the shrubbery like Homer Simpson. All RFK has to do is utter the word “autism” and social media explodes in an agonized chorus of shrieking.

But he has a chance with food additives to go at the problem with a hammer, not a set of tweezers. He speaks righteously, and has broad support. So we have to wonder what’s going to happen if resistance arises from predictable suspects. The FDA Commissioner may believe you win more bees with honey than with fire, but what if RFK Jr. needs to catch some bees with fire?

“If they want to eat petroleum, they can add it themselves at home,” Kennedy said of food-industry executives. “They shouldn’t be feeding it to the rest of us without our knowledge or consent.”

Right on, cousin. So make sure it happens.