Is Your Diet a Little Bit Fascist?
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Society
/ March 19, 2026
Is Your Diet a Little Bit Fascist?
The right is summoning its armies via their stomachs. When we dismiss food politics, risk missing what’s being stirred when a group coheres itself around the table.
Amber Husain
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Robert F. Kennedy Jr., US secretary of Health and Human Services, left, and Brooke Rollins, US agriculture secretary, stand during an in Washington, DC, on February 11, 2026.
(Stefani Reynolds / Bloomberg via Getty Images(
You may have heard that organic vegetables are right-wing now. That raw milk is the gateway to MAGA. That supplements are for fascists.
You may be unsure just how this happened. It seems like only yesterday that vegetables were for hippies; that eco-communists—not MAHA momfluencers—were spreading the good word of pesticide-free potatoes. That baking bread was ideologically neutral. Now we speak of pipelines that run from granola-filled stomachs to white-supremacist hearts: the “crunchy-to-alt-right pipeline,” the “wellness-to-fascism pipeline,” the “woo to Q pipeline.”
There is very little time, it seems, to understand the plumbing, so quickly are recruits getting sucked down the drain. It might seem wise to beware unpasteurized milk, then, not just because of E. coli, but in case it turns you ideologically toxic. Or, at the very least, leaves you ideologically tainted, part of a club you have been at pains to avoid. Perhaps you fear what Foucault called “the fascism in us all…that causes us to…desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.” And what if that thing is raw milk?
Current Issue
April 2026 Issue
The mapping of foods to fascist perspectives makes a certain kind of sense. In the frenzy for rawness—raw milk, raw eggs, raw meat—we can identify a posture of bodily invincibility, a stylized aspiration to a jacked-up, mythically self-immunizing super-race. Raw Farm Founder and CEO Mark McAfee frames his love of raw milk as a matter of superior strength. “Fearing viruses is ridiculous,” the whole-food advocate claims. (We can assume he feels the same about bacteria.)
In the aversion to any kind of process, whether malignant (chemical poisoning) or benign (pasteurization, fluoridation), we might sense a bid for the deregulation of our machineries of nourishment, rather than their holding-to-account. In the general fetishization of “nature,” we witness a blood-and-soil gesture at racial and national purity, as well as a nostalgia for a simpler, more neatly gender-hierarchical past. Hence the “Raw Egg Nationalist,” the “Liver King,” every tradwife her own personal cheesemonger.
Then there is also simple pragmatism: Fascism is vague, …
Who's accountable for the results?
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Current Issue
Society
/ March 19, 2026
Is Your Diet a Little Bit Fascist?
The right is summoning its armies via their stomachs. When we dismiss food politics, risk missing what’s being stirred when a group coheres itself around the table.
Amber Husain
Share
Copy Link
X (Twitter)
Bluesky Pocket
Ad Policy
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., US secretary of Health and Human Services, left, and Brooke Rollins, US agriculture secretary, stand during an in Washington, DC, on February 11, 2026.
(Stefani Reynolds / Bloomberg via Getty Images(
You may have heard that organic vegetables are right-wing now. That raw milk is the gateway to MAGA. That supplements are for fascists.
You may be unsure just how this happened. It seems like only yesterday that vegetables were for hippies; that eco-communists—not MAHA momfluencers—were spreading the good word of pesticide-free potatoes. That baking bread was ideologically neutral. Now we speak of pipelines that run from granola-filled stomachs to white-supremacist hearts: the “crunchy-to-alt-right pipeline,” the “wellness-to-fascism pipeline,” the “woo to Q pipeline.”
There is very little time, it seems, to understand the plumbing, so quickly are recruits getting sucked down the drain. It might seem wise to beware unpasteurized milk, then, not just because of E. coli, but in case it turns you ideologically toxic. Or, at the very least, leaves you ideologically tainted, part of a club you have been at pains to avoid. Perhaps you fear what Foucault called “the fascism in us all…that causes us to…desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.” And what if that thing is raw milk?
Current Issue
April 2026 Issue
The mapping of foods to fascist perspectives makes a certain kind of sense. In the frenzy for rawness—raw milk, raw eggs, raw meat—we can identify a posture of bodily invincibility, a stylized aspiration to a jacked-up, mythically self-immunizing super-race. Raw Farm Founder and CEO Mark McAfee frames his love of raw milk as a matter of superior strength. “Fearing viruses is ridiculous,” the whole-food advocate claims. (We can assume he feels the same about bacteria.)
In the aversion to any kind of process, whether malignant (chemical poisoning) or benign (pasteurization, fluoridation), we might sense a bid for the deregulation of our machineries of nourishment, rather than their holding-to-account. In the general fetishization of “nature,” we witness a blood-and-soil gesture at racial and national purity, as well as a nostalgia for a simpler, more neatly gender-hierarchical past. Hence the “Raw Egg Nationalist,” the “Liver King,” every tradwife her own personal cheesemonger.
Then there is also simple pragmatism: Fascism is vague, …
Is Your Diet a Little Bit Fascist?
Who's accountable for the results?
Log In
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Password *
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Forgot Your Password?
Log In
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Is Your Diet a Little Bit Fascist?
Magazine
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Subscribe
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Magazine
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Politics
World
Economy
Culture
Books & the Arts
The Nation
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Current Issue
Society
/ March 19, 2026
Is Your Diet a Little Bit Fascist?
The right is summoning its armies via their stomachs. When we dismiss food politics, risk missing what’s being stirred when a group coheres itself around the table.
Amber Husain
Share
Copy Link
Facebook
X (Twitter)
Bluesky Pocket
Email
Ad Policy
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., US secretary of Health and Human Services, left, and Brooke Rollins, US agriculture secretary, stand during an in Washington, DC, on February 11, 2026.
(Stefani Reynolds / Bloomberg via Getty Images(
You may have heard that organic vegetables are right-wing now. That raw milk is the gateway to MAGA. That supplements are for fascists.
You may be unsure just how this happened. It seems like only yesterday that vegetables were for hippies; that eco-communists—not MAHA momfluencers—were spreading the good word of pesticide-free potatoes. That baking bread was ideologically neutral. Now we speak of pipelines that run from granola-filled stomachs to white-supremacist hearts: the “crunchy-to-alt-right pipeline,” the “wellness-to-fascism pipeline,” the “woo to Q pipeline.”
There is very little time, it seems, to understand the plumbing, so quickly are recruits getting sucked down the drain. It might seem wise to beware unpasteurized milk, then, not just because of E. coli, but in case it turns you ideologically toxic. Or, at the very least, leaves you ideologically tainted, part of a club you have been at pains to avoid. Perhaps you fear what Foucault called “the fascism in us all…that causes us to…desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.” And what if that thing is raw milk?
Current Issue
April 2026 Issue
The mapping of foods to fascist perspectives makes a certain kind of sense. In the frenzy for rawness—raw milk, raw eggs, raw meat—we can identify a posture of bodily invincibility, a stylized aspiration to a jacked-up, mythically self-immunizing super-race. Raw Farm Founder and CEO Mark McAfee frames his love of raw milk as a matter of superior strength. “Fearing viruses is ridiculous,” the whole-food advocate claims. (We can assume he feels the same about bacteria.)
In the aversion to any kind of process, whether malignant (chemical poisoning) or benign (pasteurization, fluoridation), we might sense a bid for the deregulation of our machineries of nourishment, rather than their holding-to-account. In the general fetishization of “nature,” we witness a blood-and-soil gesture at racial and national purity, as well as a nostalgia for a simpler, more neatly gender-hierarchical past. Hence the “Raw Egg Nationalist,” the “Liver King,” every tradwife her own personal cheesemonger.
Then there is also simple pragmatism: Fascism is vague, …
