When Robert F. Kennedy Jr. makes salad, there’s a certain ritual involved. First, he has to buy some organic vegetables. So the secretary of health and human services walks his staff, his security guards, a gaggle of camerapeople, and Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins down the National Mall, past a golden tractor, over to a farmers market booth run by Foot of the Mountain Farm, specially picked by the Agriculture Department for its “regenerative agriculture” practices. As he glides under the tent, his guards and staffers form a circle and stand with their arms out wide so other marketgoers can’t snap up his produce first.
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Next, he has to listen to Rollins tell the family that runs the farm how beautiful they are and how they are the “model” for the future of agriculture in America. How can the USDA help them? Rollins asks. The father, Lorenzo Varisano, says he hopes the department will help a new generation of small farmers to care for the land the way he, his wife Jennifer, and their children do at their place in Concord, Pennsylvania. He’s a “free-market farmer,” he says, and for him, that means small operations such as theirs should get the chance to compete on a fair playing field instead of fighting against a system of subsidies that favors giant conglomerates’ monocrops over their array of nutrient-packed fruits and vegetables — what the USDA calls “specialty crops.”
Kennedy smiles. He has heard this kind of thing before. Rollins hands him a bag the family has packed to overflowing with perfectly red cherry tomatoes and crisp basil. He taps his card and proceeds to the stage set up on the side of the Mall for him to toss his salad. Finally, Rollins and two women from a nutrition education nonprofit organization named Common Threads show him how to make vinaigrette, filling him in on the health benefits of each ingredient. He adds the walnuts himself, and his afternoon snack is served.
This was Monday at the inaugural Great American Farmers Market, a weeklong event that ran from Aug. 3 through Aug. 8 with the objective to “Make Agriculture Great Again.” As the country gears up for America’s 250th birthday next summer, Rollins aims to present agriculture as a bipartisan issue that can “Make America Healthy Again.” That means the market is also a referendum on MAHA: The speeches, performances, and products on display at this World’s Fair of American agriculture will determine whether MAHA is a viable program for improving the country’s food system or a flash in the pan.
The theme of the day, in fact, was “MAHA Monday.” This market, on the National Mall across from the USDA headquarters, was only “one of 800 farmers markets all over this country,” Kennedy said as he welcomed marketgoers from the stage. “It’s absolutely critical for our health. We support local farmers, short supply chains, local farm economies, rural economies, and our national food security.” Encouraging people to eat healthy, for Kennedy, “begins with farmers markets.”
“Healthy” in this context means largely “junk-free.” Rollins announced that six more states have signed waivers banning the use of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program funds to buy candy, sodas, and other ultraprocessed foods, bringing the number of states that have taken such executive actions to 12, and more states will join in the coming days. The states are the “laboratories of innovation” and can move faster on enacting MAHA goals than the federal government can, but these initiatives are connected, she said. They’re part of the Trump administration’s efforts to restore health to a nation beset by poor-quality food and the chronic diseases — obesity, cancer, heart disease, and more — that spread as a result of it.
The market, as Rollins and Kennedy presented it, was a cross-section of America’s food culture. It boasted over 50 vendors from 30 states selected from more than 1,500 applications. They flanked three sides of the Mall, waiting to showcase a new era of clean, locally sourced food grown by small farms. But many people are far more familiar with the recently banned SNAP items than their local farmers market, if there is one in their community. (As a member of American Farmland Trust later tells me, the USDA generally doesn’t grant funding to individual markets — most depend on local municipalities and the availability of food, producers, and consumers capable of sustaining one). Gov. Patrick Morrissey (R-WV) alluded to this reality as he offered his support for MAHA from the state with the nation’s highest obesity rates: “West Virginia is focusing on getting healthy again, taking on all the tough challenges, reversing, moving the needle on obesity and diabetes.” He credited President Donald Trump’s endorsement of the MAHA movement as “the reason we’re all here.”
The event’s schedule promised appearances from many of the more outspoken members of the Trump administration, paying homage to MAHA: Housing and Urban Development Secretary Scott Turner, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, chief of protocol Monica Crowley, and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. And aside from a few sign-touting protesters, the audience — a very D.C. mix of J. Press suits and tennis shoes, tank-topped tourists, and sweaty joggers — was eating it up. They cheered when Rollins introduced each speaker as if the bureaucrats onstage were minor celebrities. And they swarmed the vendor booths after Rollins announced that the market is open by ringing — what else? — a cowbell.
Despite its claims to diversity, a quick tour reveals MAHA agriculture to be largely based on the old staples: meat and corn. Smokers are sizzling with baby-back ribs, a Wyoming rancher is offering to ship grass-fed beef to the denizens of Washington, and every third marketgoer is munching from a bag of kettle corn from one of at least three popcorn stands. A man in an entirely star-spangled outfit is giving out samples of “Freedom Pickles.” The Roma tomatoes at the one other produce stand, though, have been battered by the trip from Maryland inside the Beltway.
No doubt it’s harder to truck tomatoes across the country than kernels or canned goods. But the messages about what constitutes a return to healthy American food are certainly mixed. The four vendors that dominate the market space, John Deere, Tractor Supply, Visa, and Chobani, are neither small nor local. But they make it possible for the other vendors to sell their wares at the market, Rollins argues: “We couldn’t pay for it with taxpayer dollars,” so these four footed the bill.
One of the country’s biggest dairy companies can be part of MAHA, too, Chobani chief impact officer Nishant Roy says. His first claim to this effect, though, comes across like a disclaimer: “When Chobani was founded just 20 years ago, the average amount of sugar in the yogurt category was around 43 grams of sugar. Today, it’s around 16 grams.” His company started a “natural food movement” that is growing rapidly: “By 2031, we will be purchasing 11 billion pounds of milk, all from American farmers,” he predicts. Chobani is a big business that benefits small dairy operations, he argues.
Whatever the case, Chobani’s booth is at the center of the market’s action. From a food truck under a tent near the stage, a team of volunteers in green Chobani hats and aprons unloads pallets of yogurt cups — blueberry, strawberry, vanilla, and s’mores — along with bottled yogurt drinks, La Colombe canned lattes, and Daily Harvest smoothie popsicles. It all amounts to 51,000 units of dairy and dairy-adjacent products, Chobani’s vice president of government affairs, Max Finberg, tells me: $75,000 worth of inventory. And while marketgoers aren’t offered a taste, they’re asked to take note of the company’s new “supermilk,” enshrined on coolers flanking the booth. Designed to be shelf-stable for emergencies such as natural disasters and famine, it is featured here to send the message that good food can also be a force for good.
But at a government-scripted event such as this one, the contest between appearance and reality is unavoidable. As marketgoers, spoons in hand, take photos with a man in a Chobani cow suit, a mother with a stroller asks a USDA volunteer where she can find the real cow. The promotional materials said there would be a cow for her son to pet, she says. The volunteer apologizes: The cow is off duty today, but he’s expected tomorrow. “Oh,” she says, and looks down into the stroller, disappointed.
And the question of what is real, healthy dairy — real food — goes deeper than photo ops. The 2025–30 Dietary Guidelines for Americans, jointly produced by USDA and the Department of Health and Human Services, are expected by the end of the year and possibly as soon as this month. Kennedy has said he plans to cut a document that is now more than 160 pages down to about four, focused on plant-based and low-saturated-fat protein sources. One wonders which of these vendors will fit the bill.
A few booths down from the Chobani extravaganza, a family is doing brisk business in chocolate-flavored whole milk. Whole milk has more fat and more sugar than the bottled yogurt drinks across the way, so why is it healthier? I ask. “It’s good for your digestion!” a bonneted woman responds, gesturing to a pile of cards labeled 97milk.com: “Drink whole milk!” “Nature’s nutrition powerhouse” is “virtually 97% fat-free!” And next door is ice cream from a creamery in Pennsylvania that presumably made the MAHA cut because it uses real cream, an improvement over McDonald’s soft-serve, at least.
And it’s not just dairy. Across the way at a burger stand, it emerges that it is indeed possible to buy Coca-Cola at the Great American Farmers Market, despite its current disfavor among its hosts. I buy two and skip the “quality corn-fed American beef.”
MAHA has pitched a wide tent in its definition of healthy agriculture. On “Faith and Fellowship Tuesday,” the spiritual elements of the movement stretched even wider. Farming “was the first job: Work and keep the garden,” Turner announces from the stage as he and Rollins ring in the day with their cowbell. “A lot of other jobs in our country would not be had it not been for farmers.” Veterans Affairs Secretary Doug Collins one-ups Turner with some old-time civil religion: “We’re celebrating here 250 years of God’s blessing upon us.”
Collins isn’t the only one reading the intentions of the divine on American agriculture. Jenny Korn, the director of the White House Faith Office, leads a panel with a priest, a rabbi, and an evangelical pastor about “Honoring God’s Bounty.” Jentezen Franklin, the pastor of the Free Chapel in Gainesville, Georgia, says Rollins “is lifting the fog and bringing the blessing of God back on this nation, and even back on our crops.” Rabbi Levi Shemtov, the Chabad representative to Washington, says the three major Jewish festivals, centered on the stages of the harvest, reveal God’s intentions for American agriculture: “As society has begun to go to all kinds of foods that are not from the earth but from the lab, we have to remind ourselves that everything we need to live with or live from is right here given to us from Almighty God.” And Father Charles Trullols, the director of the Catholic Information Center in Washington, says that “we need to be careful about what we sow because as St. Paul says in one of his letters, what we sow is what we will reap.”
The agricultural metaphors are grounded in American soil. The Trump administration’s MAHA enthusiasm stems from the populist, patriotic values the individual farmer represents: Faith, family, and freedom start on the farm. But Rollins also has strategic reasons for attempting to baptize the agency’s efforts to align the government with individual farmers. Last month, she announced the decentralization of the USDA to five regional hubs across the country, and the idea that the move will bring the agency’s services closer to individual farmers is an important part of that initiative.
It may take more than a pastor, a priest, and a rabbi to convince people that the USDA can turn American agriculture into a new Garden of Eden with nutritional bounty for all. Regardless, I attempt to apply this ecumenism to my sampling of kettle corn flavors, but I soon leave behind the truffle and rosemary varieties and become a member of the church of Luscious Lavender, crunching my way home with the rest of the congregation.
Wednesday’s events were about “Forests and Firefighters: Protecting America’s Legacy.” After singing “Happy Birthday” to Smokey Bear, 81, Rollins asked her guests onstage to vouch for the policies that will determine the future of that legacy: “President Trump’s great vision, making America strong for the next 250 years.”
Lutnick responds with a word about tariffs: “What tariffs have done is they have brought the world’s countries to the table,” he claims. This could be a testy subject before a farmer-friendly crowd, but the audience, mostly in blue suits this afternoon, cheers. Lutnick describes a dinner with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer in which they were finally allowed to eat American lobster because of Trump’s tough trade deals. He prophesies an American agricultural revival thanks to Trump’s trade policy: “Now you’ve got row crops everywhere. Our farmers are going to light it up next year because the world is open to American farmers.” Rollins laughs. Lutnick, a New York–based real estate developer, “probably didn’t even know what the term row crop was until about six months ago, and now he is the champion for all agriculture around the world,” she says.
Next up is Education Secretary Linda McMahon, who says the Trump administration wants to “get farmers in the fields quicker” because “not everybody needs a four-year education.” And Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin touts deregulation as a way to “help deliver a healthy food supply to America’s families.”
Monica Crowley, lead representative for America 250, touts its overarching message and that of related celebrations such as the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles: “The president has said publicly that in retrospect 2020 had to happen that way so that he could be president now to preside over these extraordinary U.S.-hosted events.” The day’s programming wraps up with a concert from the band LoCash, its practiced country pep a sign of things to come for America’s 250th birthday celebration.
The visions of MAHA at the market vary, but all of them share one central view: They credit Trump for making it possible to “Make America Healthy Again.” Yet while the Great American Farmers Market is full of good intentions, it doesn’t show how the administration plans to make them a reality. For all the talk of unhealthy eating habits, the corn and soy subsidies in the Farm Bill that fuel the production of ultraprocessed foods are scarcely mentioned. The majority of dairies and hog farms have been replaced by massive stockyards called concentrated animal feeding operations. Tractors such as the John Deere parked behind the market’s stage have risen in price almost 300% over the past three decades, and a growing number of farmers rent or lease one of their most important pieces of equipment. Companies such as Bayer and Corteva keep many farmers dependent on their patented GMO seeds and the petrochemicals that treat them, and White House officials have said flatly that they have no intention of going after pesticides, no matter what the MAHA report may say.
So the typical American farm does not look like the Great American Farmers Market. Varisano, from Foot of the Mountain Farm, told me as the market opened that he hopes his role wasn’t as a “poster family” and the buzzwords he hears from the USDA and HHS aren’t just “greenwashing.” By the end of the week, the question remains: What does “regenerative agriculture” mean for MAHA’s leaders in Washington?
On Thursday, “America the Beautiful Day,” George Washington himself offered an answer, if an oblique one. Uncomfortable onstage as only a statesman farmer can be, he modestly recounted the apocryphal story of his honesty regarding the cherry tree. Then, in a Texas twang, he addressed with amazement the state of agriculture in 2025: The USDA’s Agricultural Research Service is engaged in a high-tech gene-editing project to create “space cherries,” engineered to grow at any time of year. This is a boon for American agriculture for two reasons: “Firstly, it will allow the countrymen traversing the oars of men’s stars to encounter directly the pleasures of fresh fruit while afar,” he says in ersatz 18th-century English. “Second, it would permit our citizens to enjoy cherries throughout the year without dependence upon foreign supplies.” And there’s another exciting project: “Through the art of gene editing, a form of apparent alchemy unknown in my day, researchers have begun to develop — can it be? — pitless cherries.”
American consumers love their seedless grapes, after all. Even Washington admits it: We’re suckers for convenience. And if gene-edited space produce helps to fight the trade war, too, it doesn’t require an almanac to predict that local, organic farming won’t be in season at the USDA for long.
Hannah Rowan is the managing editor at Modern Age and a fellow in the Robert Novak Journalism Program with The Fund for American Studies.