Between Worlds: Toward a Post-Partisan Good Food Movement
Over the past year, I’ve found myself in rooms I never expected to be in, where MAHA leaders speak of freedom, sovereignty, and food as medicine, and rooms where public health experts recite decades of data on chronic disease, inequities, and the need for stronger federal nutrition policy.
At first glance, these worlds seem impossibly far apart. One distrusts government and rails against Big Food’s corruption. The other sees government as the only lever strong enough to counter corporate power and set standards for health. Each side often frames the other as naïve, dangerous, or complicit.
But if you sit quietly long enough, a different picture comes into focus. Beneath the talking points and suspicions, I hear the same needs surface again and again:
To be seen. Farmers in rural America want their struggles recognized, not dismissed as backward. Public health advocates want the scale of diet-related disease acknowledged as the emergency it is.
To be heard. Parents want someone to listen when they say their kids are sick from the food system. Researchers want policymakers to take their findings seriously instead of shelving them under industry pressure.
To feel good. Whether it’s framed as sovereignty, wellness, or prevention, people on all “sides” want bodies, families, and communities that are thriving, not just surviving.
To be in community. At the end of the day, people long for connection around kitchen tables, in churches, at schools, on farms, in clinics. Food is always at the center of those gatherings.
What if we started here, with shared needs and goals, rather than focusing only on what divides? What if the starting point for a post-partisan good food movement was not whose diagnosis of the crisis is correct, but how we might together reclaim food as a pathway to health, resilience, and belonging?
This doesn’t mean ignoring real differences in worldview. Public health NGOs often underplay the role of culture, sovereignty, and local control. MAHA often underplays the structural forces that make “choice” an illusion in a rigged food economy. Both have blind spots.
But both also have truths worth honoring:
MAHA is right that centralized institutions have failed to protect our health and are often captured by industry.
Public health experts are right that systemic change is required, not just personal responsibility.
Instead of tearing down what the other misses, can we braid together what each sees clearly?
The food system is too broken, too consequential, and too entangled with our lives to leave to one ideology, one party, or one playbook. Regeneration requires us to learn the difficult skill of holding multiple truths, while building new pathways together.
Perhaps that’s the work of this time: to become pollinators between worlds. To sit at tables where unlikely allies gather, not to erase differences, but to begin weaving a movement rooted in the needs we all share: to be nourished, to be connected, and to belong.
