In America the suburban mother weaves her shopping cart through a chemical minefield. Everywhere she looks are unnerving boasts: packets of ham brag that pigs have not been pumped with antibiotics (phew?); the phrase “non-GMO” distinguishes the classier veg from the bioengineered freaks; cancer warnings emblazon sweet packets bursting with Red 40 and Yellow 5. Instead of milk, office workers lighten their coffee with creamer — a blend of hydrogenated vegetable oils, sugar and thickeners. Fanta has a radioactive orange glow that would knock Europeans sick. Even the smaller delis reserve aisles for the thousand and one varieties of boxed mac and cheese. And then there are the apocalypse-proof legions of shelf-stable snack cakes, the dystopic Ding Dongs and Ho Hos that will outlive their doughy devourers. This is a weird place to buy groceries.
No wonder the “MAHA Mom” has become such a political powerhouse. A satellite of the MAGA movement, MAHA — “Make America Healthy Again” — has been spearheaded by the health and human services secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr, a lifelong campaigner against the rogue’s gallery of toxins which, to varying degrees of plausibility, are apparently making us fat, ill and mental. The MAHA coalition is increasingly reliant on the concerned mother, a particularly incensed slice of the electorate politicized by health concerns around her children. As waves of both paranoia and rational concern have arisen in recent years — over 5G towers, ultra-processed foods, fluoride in water supplies and so on — this otherwise fairly passive contingent has become practically radicalized, coming to see the assault on the American body as a story of venal elites punishing the little guy, in the tradition of MAGA more generally. Amid rough seas — a Supreme Court ruling against Trump’s emergency tariff regime, alongside the Epstein files furor and a general sense of financial malaise — the MAHA Mom looks to be more critical than ever in securing Republican dominance on the Hill.
All of which turns one of the more minor-seeming news stories of recent days into a potential catastrophe. On Friday Trump issued an executive order protecting the manufacturing of glyphosate, the preferred herbicide for commercial farming and the active ingredient in the domestic weedkiller Roundup. The administration argued that the chemical was critical to agriculture and defense, meaning the decision was a matter of national and food security. Glyphosate has been connected to high-profile lawsuits due to the alleged link with cancer; during his time as an environmental lawyer RFK Jr himself once won nearly $290 million in a case against Monsanto, Roundup’s manufacturer, on behalf of a man who had developed the disease. Only on Thursday did Monsanto’s owner Bayer announce a $7.25 billion settlement to a class-action suit about the cancer claims.
As it happens, glyphosate is also at the top of one very important voter’s hit list. Ken Cook, who leads the Environmental Working Group, called Friday’s executive order a “middle finger to every MAHA Mom”. Naturally, RFK Jr had to lend his support to the capo di tutti capi: in a way that must have stuck in the craw of many a crunchy Trumpette, he aped parental devotion, arguing that Trump’s decision in fact “protect[ed] American families” by warding off trade and security challenges from abroad. One mama-bear, Kelly Ryerson aka the Glyphosate Girl, underlined the irony of the movement’s figurehead agreeing to “expand… the very same carcinogenic pesticide that MAHA cares about most”.
As one of the Russian dolls in modern American populism (at the center of which is a plump, painted Trump), MAHA has one of the most passionate, yet also precarious, support bases. They are led by furious moms such as Zen Honeycutt, who set up the grassroots group Moms Across America in response to her sons’ struggles with allergies, autism and mental-health problems. Hers is a typical case within the movement: devastated by family misfortunes, she turned to politics as a solution. Honeycutt appeared on CNN on Monday to express her “outrage” at Trump’s “love letter to glyphosate”, a chemical which she blames for many of her children’s ailments (she once claimed to have cured her son’s autism by feeding him only organic food). Her crusade is personal, and her vote rests on a single issue. Honeycutt was not always a conservative voter; she changed tack when she and her mom friends felt “abandoned by the Democratic Party”.
Rather than a single, destiny-defining battle such as those around immigration and abortion, the MAHA movement is a clutch of flashpoints which matter most to the suburban mother, inspired by an Erin Brockovich-style empathetic instinct. Like Brockovich, the MAHA Mom sees what experts can’t or won’t — in that case, a contaminated water supply quietly poisoning an entire community. She is enthused by the same institutional mistrust that drives her fellow populists: where others might have been swept up in the QAnon pizzagate frenzy claiming to expose a baby-killing paedophilic political elite, she might take her placards to the gates of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who insist — evilly, to her mind — that regulated levels of fluoridation in municipal water supplies is good for teeth and not, in fact, turning our brains to flubber.
Her stock is rising because she is often right: few of us would call her daft for being concerned about carcinogenic food additives, ultra-processed slop and, yes, weed killer — but many of us would sniff at her obsession with unpasteurized dairy, chemtrails and heavy-metal chelation treatments for autism. In some cases MAHA Moms’ views are downright dangerous: Erin Elizabeth, wife of uber-rich homeopathic medicine peddler Joseph Mercola and founder of Health Nut News, claims that turmeric is better for cancer patients than chemotherapy. Of course, the MAHA Mom encompasses many thousands of women, and MAHA is as varied a group as MAGA itself. But the underlying facts tend towards shock and alarmism, favoring the most extreme within the movement: obesity rates have more than tripled in the past 60 years, while autism diagnoses have tripled in 20 (helped in no small part by changing diagnostic criteria). If the body politic feels unstable, the body proper is a mess.
Many have made this connection before. The MAHA Mom’s American progenitors shaped public mores with their reformist stances on the body, from the Progressive Era’s fixation with sanitation as a spiritual companion to the cleaning-up of city governments to the Temperance finger-waggers ushering in the Prohibition. Of this last lugubrious lot, Carrie Nation, the most dramatic of the anti-booze brigade, may be a compelling model for the MAHA Mom if only for her theatrical flair: armed with a stash of rocks or a small hatchet, she would maraud illegal Kansas saloons smashing liquor bottles while singing hymns. Were she here today, Mrs Nation may well be found booting bottles of Roundup out of gardeners’ grasps to the strains of Onward, Christian Soldiers. Or maybe she’d be hanging out with Zen Honeycutt, making her children pose moodily by trolleys full of cereal boxes wearing matching T-shirts that say “GMO-free kid”.
It shouldn’t surprise anyone that one of the most furious frontiers of contemporary populism is manned by mothers; the “Farage fillies” backing Britain’s Reform UK have a similarly maternal angle. So much of American family life has been destabilized by the chaotic past decade: identitarianism, gender debates, a pandemic. The body of the child is the most urgent symbol of vulnerability in a state of chaos: protecting it is therefore a true crusade, which has emboldened and ennobled the MAHA Mom.
Some of her reasoning may be shaky but this voter is nevertheless a folk heroine, a final barrier between the family and entropy if only as the gatekeeper of what goes in the lunchbox. In a West where biopolitics — the statistics-driven interventions into public health — is the norm, she asserts a stubborn sovereignty. She feels most viscerally the weird American paradox of the supermarket shopper, which stands in for the broader national malaise motivating MAGA: how can a country be so rich and yet feel so unwell? Given that she represents Trump’s essential channel to the suburban female electorate, her political capital is only likely to grow — meaning it may be crunch time for Monsanto and, if he fails to stick to his guns, RFK Jr himself. Perhaps our worm-brained secretary of health would be wise to heed mother’s advice. And if she deserted him, where would she go? Perhaps many of these not-natively-conservative voters would be enticed by a future radical among the Democrats: in that case, the parties could find themselves in a minimally processed bun fight for the MAHA Mom’s love.
