Editor’s Desk: How Forked is SNAP?

By Theodore Ross

We released the newest episode of Forked, our podcast on food politics and policy, earlier this week. It tries to reckon with what the One Big Beautiful Act — heretofore known as OBBA — will mean for the neediest people in the American food system. Talking to Helena Bottemiller Evich, my cohost on Forked and the editor of Food Fix, the short answer is: It’s not good. It cuts $186 billion from the program over ten years, making it, as Helena put it, “a genuine precedent shatterer of a bill.” 

We spent a lot of the show working out the ways in which the cuts are structured, which boils down to more paperwork, more administrative costs, and more work requirements for low income households that need food assistance from the government. That’s a lot of more, with a little bit of less: less time over the course of a needy person’s life to access those benefits.

How this is all taking place is worth noting. The federal government is pushing a significant amount of the cost of SNAP down to the states, many of which don’t have the fiscal and bureaucratic wherewithal to keep the program functioning properly. That kinda/sorta anti-federalism is a core tenet of conventional Republican thought: less government, and letting states cut their own path. But as with so much that has happened during the Trump administration, it doesn’t exactly mesh with traditional GOP values.  

One of the other things Helena and I talked about is regulation of food products— specifically, synthetic dyes, those coloring agents often found in ultraprocessed foods that makes your Froot Loops loopier and your red M&M’s gleam. To date, there’s been a lot of talk and public pressure by RFK Jr., the secretary of Health and Human Services, about getting these dyes out of food, but little national-level regulation. It’s not that he’s doing nothing. His pressure has caused major food companies to agree to get rid of these products over time. “We don’t have an agreement, we have an understanding,” is how he has put it. 

Again, that makes sense for Republicans, I guess. If you are, as a party and a significant portion of the electorate, wary of regulation, then it’s kinda hard to regulate. But there is actual regulation of dyes, and other ultraprocessed products, happening — at the state level. Helena and I talked a lot about West Virginia’s newly passed ban on most synthetic dyes, which will go into effect in 2028. 

Why does it matter? Helena explains it pretty well:

“You cannot just make Jello and M&M’s special for West Virginia. You’ve got to do it for the whole country So a lot of these companies are scrambling to get this out by 2027. Of course, RFK Jr. is praising these companies for doing this and … trying to take a victory lap. But RFK Jr. and the Trump administration had actually asked these companies to take dyes out by the end of 2026.”

We get into this and more. If you wanna know about Alaska senator Lisa Murkowski’s pivotal flop on passing OBBA and why that’s good for Alaska and bad for everywhere else, Forked has got you covered. 

Forked comes out every two weeks and is a big undertaking for a small news organization, on top of all the other great reporting we do. I hope you share my belief that this work is an important part of improving the nation’s food system. If you do, please consider making a donation to help us keep digging.