I Welcome Their Hatred

MAHA influencers and lefty foodies are pissed at me

You shouldn’t drink Roundup. You shouldn’t bathe in it, either. But you shouldn’t worry about eating crops sprayed with Roundup. Even though President Trump’s brain-wormed health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., says it’s fueling a disease crisis. Even though Trump’s weird nominee for surgeon general, Casey Means, tweeted that it’s driving a “slow-motion extinction event,” begging her followers: “For the love of God, never buy Roundup.” Even though the all-natural-food purists on the left and the right hate it more than any other chemical.

Now they hate me, too, because I wrote an essay in the New York Times debunking the health hysteria swirling around Roundup. Glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, sounds nasty, but it’s less toxic than caffeine, and way less toxic than most other pesticides used by American farmers. The International Agency for Research on Cancer calls it “probably carcinogenic,” but that agency also calls red meat and working as a barber “probably carcinogenic,” and it relied on studies that exposed rats to absurdly large doses of glyphosate. If you insist on worrying about Roundup, worry that Roundup-phobia will lead to its replacement by much nastier chemicals.

You can read the piece here: “Spraying Roundup on Crops Is Fine. Really.”

As you can imagine, I’m getting roasted online, and this morning, one group that had invited me to speak rescinded their invitation because of my glyphosate heresy; I’m surely the only idiot who’s ever lost money defending Big Ag. (If your group wants to rectify this injustice, here’s a link to my speakers bureau.) In the food and ag space, vibes about what’s “natural” routinely outweigh facts about what’s safe.

I don’t know how to fix that. But I did want to flag a paragraph I wrote about why RFK and other MAHA influencers—as well as many liberals who have read too much Michael Pollan—are so hellbent to stop Roundup, which is the most widely used pesticide in history, and is almost always sprayed on genetically modified crops:

“The MAHA movement’s war on glyphosate is part of a broader war on modern farming—not only herbicides and other pesticides, but synthetic fertilizers, genetic engineering, and factory feedlots. It reflects a fantasy of agricultural purity where less intensive food production can heal the land and reverse climate change, even though less intensive farms that make less food per acre need more acres and more deforestation to make the same amount of food. Many liberals repulsed by Mr. Kennedy’s unscientific bias against vaccines and now Tylenol share his unscientific bias against agri-chemicals, GMOs and industrial agriculture.”

There’s a powerful global movement to take farming back to its roots, to replace extractive agriculture with “regenerative agriculture,” where the soil is nurtured with love and the animals have names instead of numbers and all the bad carbon that we’ve pumped into the sky is magically repatriated into good carbon under the ground. It’s an alluring vision, and it’s backed not only by foodies, hippies and celebrity-studded documentaries like Kiss the Ground, but by the United Nations, the World Bank, big philanthropies, green groups, and even giant agribusinesses like Archer Daniels Midland and food conglomerates like General Mills. The problem is, it’s usually less productive than conventional agriculture, and that means it eats more of the earth.

Speaking of which: The regenerative movement is pissed about WE ARE EATING THE EARTH. You can get a hint of their anger from this article quoting a bunch of agroecology leaders complaining about my focus on making more food with less land. Now they’re even angrier about my Times piece puncturing their Roundup rhetoric. They’re especially upset that I mentioned the all-organic example of Sri Lanka, which banned all agri-chemicals in 2021, leading an immediate crash in yields, food shortages, food riots, the fall of the government, and the reversal of the policy.

My book includes some positive examples of regenerative agriculture’s capacity for productivity, and I do think agricultural debates have gotten too polarized. I’ve enjoyed sparring (and even finding some common ground) with regenerative advocates like Danielle Nierenberg of Food Tank , Michael Dimock of Roots of Change, and Tom Philpott of the Center for a Livable Future. But I’m starting to get pissed, too. There’s too much pseudoscience out there, and too much handwaving about the brutal challenge of feeding 10 billion people without frying the planet.

Anyway, I’ll have more to say about that soon. For now, let me just thank those of you who have supported the book. It’s been a wild ride. Here I am on The Daily Show! There’s been so much cool coverage—in The Guardian, on the great Slow Boring podcast with Matt Yglesias, on Morning Joe, and even on The War Room with Steve Bannon, who told me: “Man, Grunwald, everyone’s gonna hate this book!”

You can decide if he’s right by clicking here.