Kennedy for Safe Food

Kennedy answers the question, how do we make food safe again:

"Americans are living six years less than our European counterparts. We've got dozens of diseases going exponential, and we have a new Farm Bill coming up. How can we address the toxicity, and how can we support responsible practices in farming?

Robert F. Kennedy II:

That is a very good question. I mean, we created the United States Department of Agriculture to support the small farmer, which generations of our leadership believed was critical to our democracy. Thomas Jefferson said that American democracy is rooted in tens of thousands of independent freeholds, each owned by a small family farmer with a stake in our system, both our political system and our economic system. For democracy to survive, we had to keep the landscapes in the control of small farmers.
The USDA was created to ensure a wholesome food supply. Unfortunately, the USDA has been captured by big agricultural interests: Cargill, Monsanto, Smithfield, Tyson, and Purdue—all of these giant mega-industrial agriculture factory food producers. They're doing the opposite of what's supposed to be done; they're making war on the small farmer and on public health. You have to eat eight carrots today to get the same nutritional value that one carrot would give you a generation ago. And that carrot is loaded with chemicals: aldrin, neonicotinoid pesticides, glyphosate, and an entire universe of terrible chemicals, none of which have been adequately tested for safety.
When chemicals are approved by the FDA, USDA, and EPA, the burden of proof is on the agency to prove that the chemical is dangerous. The assumption is that all chemicals are good for you unless proven guilty. It's up to the industry to finance the tests, so of course, those tests never get done. We've got all these chemicals that should not be in food.
How do we switch? The obstacle is that the industry is so powerful, and the regulatory agencies are completely captive to those interests. The USDA is one of the most difficult regulatory agencies to unravel from corporate agriculture. I'm going to start using every mechanism I can to incentivize regenerative agriculture. Farmers don't want to be in the commodity business, producing essentially fiber for us to eat and feel like we've had a meal. Most farmers want to create food that is beautiful, nutritious, and healthy for us.
I've been on farms all over Iowa and Kansas where farmers can't drink their own well water because it's so loaded with poisons. Those farmers are among the dispossessed. They have been deplatformed by corporations, subjected to short-term interests over the long-term productivity and economic viability of their farms. Nobody wants to live like that, but they're locked in a system from which nobody can escape. I've got to provide them ways to escape. I'm going to incentivize the transition to organic and regenerative agriculture, and the regeneration of soils which we've depleted of microbiomic communities that can process carbon and give us good food.
One of the things I can do is weaponize other agencies against chemical agriculture by conducting good science on the chemicals that are poisoning us. Our children didn't suddenly get lazy; they are being mass poisoned, and we're doing it with commodities we label as food but are merely fibrous materials laced with poison. We've got to change that."