Can RFK Jr rebuild the American body? He is the high priest of purity culture

Yet despite their dietary differences, Trump has promised to let Kennedy “go wild on food”.  “The key that President Trump has promised me is control of the public health agencies which are HHS and its subagencies: CDC, FDA, NIH and a few others, and also USDA,” Kennedy rasped in a post-election video posted by Newsmax reporter Alex Salvi. That’s a lot of initials, a lot of agencies, and a lot of money, as Congress allotted more than one-and-a-half billion dollars for Health and Human Services in 2022.

Fears abound that Kennedy will send America’s regulation of food and drugs swirling into a chaos of contradictions. RFK and transition team co-chair Howard Lutnick are infamous for their aversion to vaccines, and are apparently already drafting 30-, 60-, and 90-day plans to end chronic diseases. Of course, the alt-Right Twittersphere is agog with the prospect that fluoride in the drinking water, the longstanding hobbyhorse of the conspiracy theorists, may at last have met its match.

In many ways, RFK Jr presents a paradox, as no one in their right mind can ignore America’s addiction to fast-food and cheap calories promoted by genetically modified insecticides and ever-abundant harvests of food porn. Amid a supersized obesity crisis, RFK Jr has tapped into our collective obsession with what shall or shall not pass the most holy threshold of our mouths. He embodies our national addiction to diets, from vegan to paleo. MAHA’s gospel of personal purity channels the spirit of long-lost digestive heroes such as the mid-19th-century Samuel Larned, who left society behind to live in a perfectionist community called Fruitlands. There, he spent one year of his life eating nothing but crackers. Another year he subsisted entirely on apples.

Much like Larned, when faced with real problems, MAHA offers absurd solutions. Lurking beneath Kennedy’s appeal lies the long-standing issue of the sanctity of the American body — not simply the body politic, but the actual bodies of Americans which have been eviscerated by junk food, GMOs, and pharmaceuticals. Into the polluted battlefield gallops RFK Jr on his white horse, promising to stop the FDA’s suppression of sunshine (yes, sunshine. Check X feed @RobertKennedyJr). He has vowed to make America safe for psychedelics, hyperbaric therapies, horse tranquilisers, and of course raw milk — the vaunted cure for ailments as varied as hypertension, heart disease, chronic gastritis, eczema, and psoriasis. As for the concomitant risks of salmonellosis, brucellosis, listeriosis, tuberculosis? Nothing but fright tactics of the Deep State, co-opted by dairy-industry stooges to ensnare lacto-fermentation scofflaws.

Kennedy exploits a fear of impurity that has always haunted America — and more often than not has been centred around the gut. In the 17th century, puritan divines, led by Cotton Mather, were firmly convinced that the cure for a cough, dropsy, nightmares, and “bloody flux” (whatever that might be) was a gentle vomit. Mather’s list of enteric aphorisms included the dire warning: “Look after thy stomach.” And long before the great Satan was diabetes-inducing breakfast cereal, it was that demon, hasty pudding. “Few things are more deceptive to children or adults, than these soft lazy dishes,” food philosopher Dr. William Andrus Alcott warned in 1838.

RFK channels the days when America was truly Great — when frontier eating raged and nothing was safe from our imperial mouths, not bear, skunk, rattlesnake, nor alligator, nor, as legend has it, the natives themselves, whom Davy Crockett scalped with his teeth. Liberals were stunned at the rumour that Kennedy had devoured a dog. What would they have made of the great Henry Hudson, who in 1609 sat down for a solemn feast with some upstate New York Wappingers for a feast of fatted canine? Much like Trump, Kennedy has positioned himself as the chosen one, promising to return us to the golden age of American consumption and re-invigorate our long-lost notion that we are the city on the hill, sacrosanct, strong in our isolation, confident in our direct relationship with the great god, the stomach.

It’s a trick that goes back to the days of Trump’s strongest presidential antecedent, Andrew Jackson. While the old general duelled on the White House lawn, the great American diet guru Sylvester Graham was the first to rail against store-bought processed foods, thus anticipating RFK Jr’s favourite political talking points. Ordained as a Presbyterian minister in 1829, Graham soon became an advocate of extreme temperance. The harsh physical regimen he championed — proscribing meat, hard liquor, wine, coffee, tea, and tobacco — would have impressed the staunchest of contemporary podcasting bros (except, of course, that part about no sex).

Above all, Graham believed in the transcendent wonders of bread — that is, bread created from unsifted and unbolted flour. He scorned the professionally baked varieties with their immoral additives, such as alum and chlorine. Thousands attended his histrionic lectures, which gained credence the more they were threatened by throngs of apoplectic butchers and bakers. Naturally, he would have been appalled by the sugar content of his modern, eponymous cracker. Though oddly enough, like so many health gurus who came after him, Graham did not live to be old. He was 58 when he succumbed to what his physician cited as a superfluity of warm baths and an overdose of mineral water.

Two centuries later, the American cult of the body and body-image has grown even more pervasive. As is clear from TikTok and Instagram, the online Right is not only obsessed with micromanaging ingestion, but with muscle mass, protein packs, anabolic protocols, and Popeye forearms. The MAGA male body can and will be remade by any means necessary, to hell with the heart palpitations and suicidal ideation. The result has been the newest entry into the taxonomy of body dysmorphia, Bigorexia.

When it comes to Kennedy, the swole American’s idol, all this eating and not-eating and buffing and vomiting may be moot, as Trump officials have recently expressed doubt that the Senate will confirm a man for a Cabinet-level position who has been known to deposit dead bear cubs in Central Park. Then again, new Chief of Staff Susie Wiles may give the go-ahead for an appointment as some sort of hazy “Health Czar”, which only requires a wave of Trump’s royal hand.

The problem with America is not sexism, racism, inflation, immigration, or boys playing girls’ volleyball. It’s not income inequality, China, or the price of gasoline. The real crisis is and always has been dyspepsia — which way back in 1830, the Encyclopedia Americana declared the most common of all American ailments. And RFK Jr, a man who possesses not a single scientific or medical credential, has at long last arrived as the saviour of the American stomach. He has railed against the threat of Froot Loops — and in these parts, that’s enough.

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Frederick Kaufman is a contributing editor at Harper’s magazine and a professor of English and Journalism at the College of Staten Island. His next project is a book about the world’s first political reactionary.

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