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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.

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.

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?

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, demanding proxies—dietary preferences, say—to help us see it clearly. Rather than carrying any simple definition, the word “fascism” denotes a cluster of overlapping tendencies and ideas, often non-coincident, and operative by stealth: nationalism, racism, sexism, a militaristic vibe, a penchant for authority, aversion to reason or reasonable debate. Perhaps it is no wonder so many rely on loud and visible cues, writ large across T-shirts and hats: “Got Raw Milk?” (sold by MAGA youth-voter organization Turning Point USA), “Make Frying Oil Tallow Again” (official MAHA campaign merch). The leftist’s sense of the enemy becomes a matter of headgear.

It makes sense until it doesn’t. Until the right people eat the wrong things. Or until the people with whom you might broadly disagree, but certainly don’t deserve the label fascist do. When it isn’t just RFK Jr. and his followers with a thing for unpasteurized milk but liberal writer Michael Pollan and scattergun business opportunist Gwyneth Paltrow. Or until, with the right’s colonization of health, there is nothing really left for the left to eat. When it isn’t just beef-tallow lip gloss and candy-cane bone-broth protein that starts to look a little bit fascist, but your bohemian auntie’s tote bag of organic carrots. When leftist women start ironically, coyly referring to any use of their own oven as “tradwifing.” What to do when every whistle sounds like a dog whistle—and all the foods are whistling?

One response is to insist........

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