September 15, 2016

Trump Wants Everyone to Eat Unregulated Food. Or Maybe Not.

The candidate’s call to gut food safety rules mysteriously disappeared from his campaign website.

Donald Trump hunkers down with fast food on his private jet. <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BF4raEHmhag/">realdonaldtrump</a>/Instagram

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Thursday morning, the Donald Trump campaign announced a plan to rein in the police—the “FDA food police,” that is. In a “fact sheet” trumpeting the candidate’s  “pro-growth” economic plan that will “create 25 million jobs,” the campaign railed against Food and Drug Administration rules for “farm and food production hygiene, food packaging, [and] food temperatures,” Mother Jones’ Kevin Drum reports. The document also denounced “inspection overkill.”

Even with these allegedly Draconian rules in place, food-borne illnesses sicken 48 million Americans annually, leading to 128,000 hospitalizations and 3,000 deaths, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates. Yet according to Trump, making America great again means freeing food corporations to regulate themselves.

Or does it? Kevin Drum pulled the below quote from Trump’s fact sheet, linking to this Trump campaign URL. Salon and The Hill also quoted from the same passage:

The FDA Food Police, which dictate how the federal government expects farmers to produce fruits and vegetables and even dictates the nutritional content of dog food. The rules govern the soil farmers use, farm and food production hygiene, food packaging, food temperatures, and even what animals may roam which fields and when. It also greatly increased inspections of food “facilities,” and levies new taxes to pay for this inspection overkill.

But when you click on that link now, you get a blank document.

However, the Trump website offers a fresh link to an economic policy fact sheet very similar to the one Drum analyzed—only this one is completely scrubbed of any references to food police, the FDA, or food at all.

So what gives? Why did the Trump campaign vow to dismantle food safety regulation, only to quickly go silent on the topic? The campaign has not returned my request for an explanation. Maybe someone on the inside put the following facts together: a) The Donald famously loves brand-name fast food; b) some of the worst food-poisoning outbreaks ever have involved fast-food chains; and c) that federal food-safety regulation has made such dining considerably less hazardous in recent years. Something for Trump to mull next time he chows down on McDonald’s from the comfort of his private jet.

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That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

payment methods

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