December 16, 2024

How wellness culture with legitimate concerns (and some conspiratorial beliefs) became a movement poised to take Washington.

Photo-Illustration: Eddie Guy

In May 2016, in the middle of Donald Trump’s first run for president, the salad chain Sweetgreen announced a cheerful clean-eating campaign called “Make America Healthy Again” centered on the removal of bacon and Sriracha from its menus. The slogan went into disuse — it was briefly resurrected by a radiologist and Fox News contributor who released a book in 2020 by that name — until it resurfaced in grand fashion on August 23 of this year, when Robert F. Kennedy Jr. suspended his presidential campaign and threw his support behind Trump. At a joint rally that night in Glendale, Arizona, Kennedy told the audience that, despite their differences on other issues, he and Trump had bonded over a shared commitment to restoring the nation’s health and fitness. “Don’t you want a safe environment for your children?” Kennedy asked. “Don’t you want to know that the food that you’re feeding them is not filled with chemicals that are going to give them cancer and chronic disease? And don’t you want a president who is going to make America healthy again?”

Required Reading for Political Compulsives

ADVERTISER CONTENT

ADVERTISER CONTENT

A week-in-review newsletter from the people who make New York Magazine. Sign up to get it every Saturday.