In today’s Morning Jolt, Jim Geraghty correctly observes that some of the things Michelle Obama was saying about eating organically and avoiding artificial ingredients circa 2008 sound a lot like what Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and “Make America Healthy Again” types are saying now.

There were some on the right in the Obama years (and even before) who thought about food in this way; Rod Dreher called them “crunchycons” in an article for National Review that later became a book of the same name. But, as I wrote for an article in the current issue of the magazine, such people had a reputation as a minority among conservatives, and “preoccupation with health” was mostly understood as left-wing.

That began to change for many reasons. Probably the two biggest are “the rise of intersectionality on the left, a framework of victimology into which the overweight fit nicely” (with the approval and sometimes the promotion of food and beverage companies); and the overwhelmingly right-wing opposition to the Covid-19 response regime. The latter, especially, inspired a skepticism of the public health apparatus and certain of its pronouncements regarded as consensus, including on such matters as dietary fat, carbohydrates, and seed oils. That begins to explain how the partisan valence of healthy food has changed since 2008.