Yesterday I named the 30 organizations that work the acute side of food safety: the eleven that asked Congress last month to rescind the traceability rider; the groups that fight over chemicals and antibiotics; and the scientists, state regulators and educators who are not consumer groups but do the work anyway. Today, the other half of the problem, and what all forty could do together.
The chronic-disease groups have been in a different room, and they should not be
For 30 years the people who work on pathogens and the people who work on diet have filed on separate dockets, testified at separate hearings and competed for the same appropriations and the same attention. This year made the split visible: the administration's food agenda is built on chronic disease, and the cuts to outbreak surveillance came in the same year. That is a mistake on both sides. A parent does not sort the harm by mechanism. In October 2025, 32 organizations signed a comment asking FDA to define ultra processed food (UPF) for regulation, and five of them – The Center for Science in the Public Interest, Consumer Reports, the Center for Food Safety, Food & Water Watch and the Center for Environmental Health – are pathogen groups from yesterday's list. The overlap already exists. These are the rest, plus three newer names that were not on it.
American Heart Association. The largest organization in this column by an order of magnitude, with more than a billion dollars a year and Nancy Brown as CEO since 2008. Its Washington advocacy office works sodium, sugar and now ultra-processed food at every level of government and published a fact sheet in February on regulating UPF; its Health Care by Food initiative is funding the trials that show medically tailored meals keep people out of the hospital. It is the one signature a member of Congress cannot wave off as a consumer group. It has backed sugary drink taxes and sodium limits in chain restaurants, and its annual statistics report is the source for most of what is said about diet-related death in this country.
Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics. The registered dietitians, more than 100,000 of them, founded in 1917 and led by Wylecia Wiggs Harris. It signed the ultra processed food comment. Its authority is professional rather than adversarial, which makes it the right voice on the Dietary Guidelines and school meals and a quieter one in a fight. Its members write the school meal patterns, run the hospital kitchens and staff WIC, which is where any federal nutrition standard actually meets a plate.
UConn Rudd Center for Food Policy and Health. The research center, formerly at Yale, that Marlene Schwartz has directed since 2013. When an advocacy group cites a study on food marketing to children, sugary drink taxes or school nutrition, it is usually Rudd's. It signed the comment. An academic ally, and the evidence base for half of what the others ask for. Its Fast Food FACTS and Sugary Drink FACTS reports are the running record of how much marketing children see, and its work on menu labeling and food bank nutrition shaped both.
Partnership for a Healthier America. Founded in 2010 alongside Michelle Obama's Let's Move campaign, now run by Noreen Springstead, who came from WhyHunger. It works with manufacturers, retailers and food banks to move more produce and less junk through the supply, and it signed the comment. Industry-facing on purpose, which is the same reason the Alliance to Stop Foodborne Illness is on this list. Its convenience store partners operate more than 2,500 locations in 39 states, three quarters of them in neighborhoods with no grocery store.
Healthy Food America. Seattle nonprofit founded and run by Jim Krieger, the former chief of chronic disease prevention at Public Health Seattle and King County. It is the sugary drink tax group, Seattle's included, and it worked menu labeling before that. It signed the comment, and it is on my side of the water. Krieger also helped write the country's second menu labeling regulation, in King County, before the federal one existed.
Global Health Advocacy Incubator. The advocacy arm of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, which takes the tobacco playbook of taxes, warning labels and marketing limits and applies it to sugary drinks and ultra-processed food, mostly abroad and increasingly here. It signed the comment through Nadia Flexner, its research director. The tobacco analogy is its whole argument, and it is a good one. Its staff worked the Latin American warning label campaigns that put black octagons on the front of packages, which is the model the front-of-package labeling fight here is drawing on.
Public Health Law Center. The lawyers, at Mitchell Hamline School of Law in Saint Paul and led by Joelle Lester, who draft and defend the state and local ordinances behind sugary drink taxes, healthy checkout aisles and marketing limits. It signed the comment. The chronic side's version of the Center for Food Safety: a drafting and litigation shop rather than a campaign. It also defended Philadelphia's and Seattle's sugary drink taxes against industry challenge.
FoodFight USA. Todd Wagner, Mark Cuban's partner in Magnolia Pictures, and the producer Lori McCreary launched it in 2023, before MAHA was a phrase, and it runs as a program of a 501(c)(3) called Cause Reports. Its method is celebrity and legislation: Morgan Freeman, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Helen Mirren as "warriors," and a push behind California's 2023 ban on four food additives and its 2024 ban on synthetic dyes in schools, bills that, by its count, more than half the states have since copied or introduced. Wagner has said he is talking with state attorneys general about suing food companies the way the states sued tobacco, and this spring the group lobbied against the FRESH Act, the Cammack bill that would preempt state food chemical laws, alongside EWG and CSPI. It did not sign the October comment. A billionaire's Rolodex is not a mailing list, and it reaches rooms the mailing lists do not.
Fed UP!. The newest name here, launched June 3 alongside a special ultra-processed food section of the American Journal of Public Health. It is less an organization than a roster: 15 scientific contributors, among them Ashley Gearhardt of Michigan, who wrote the Yale Food Addiction Scale, Carlos Monteiro of São Paulo, who invented the Nova classification the whole debate runs on, Kelly Brownell, Marion Nestle, Laura Schmidt of UCSF and Jim Krieger, with EWG, FoodFight USA and Healthy Food America among its partners. It takes no money from ultra-processed food or beverage companies, and its site turns the journal's 17 papers into plain language, including one on how state attorneys general could use the tobacco playbook. It is the evidence base with a public face.
Eat Real. Founded by the pediatric endocrinologist Robert Lustig and the physician Jordan Shlain, and run since 2019 by co-founder Nora LaTorre, it certifies K-12 school food programs against 10 standards on added sugar, whole grains, sourcing and ultra-processed ingredients, and by its count now reaches more than a million students. It is a Fed UP! partner, and this spring it lobbied against the FRESH Act alongside EWG, CSPI and FoodFight USA. Public schools serve more meals a year than the largest restaurant chains combined, which makes the cafeteria the biggest lever in this column that nobody in Washington controls.
Ten things all forty – 30 I named.yesterday with today's 10 – could work on together
1. Get Section 780 rescinded and the traceability rule funded, enforced on its schedule, and with lot codes intact. Eleven have already signed. Nineteen more names on the next letter, including the scientists, the state regulators and the technologists who say the rule is buildable, would be noticed in a way that 11 consumer groups alone are not.
2. Restore the surveillance that counts the sick. FoodNet and state epidemiology were cut in the middle of an outbreak that no federal number has yet caught up with. Every group on this list depends on the count, whether it argues about chemicals, antibiotics or lettuce, and none of them can make a case with numbers nobody collected.
3. Name the companies. An outbreak advisory that says "Restaurant Chain A" protects no one, and the practice has never been justified by anything but industry comfort. A coalition of 40 asking CDC and FDA to name names during an active outbreak would be harder to ignore than one lawyer asking, which is what it has mostly been.
4. Finish the Salmonella rule for poultry and honor the petitions that produced it. In January 2020 my firm petitioned FSIS on behalf of three families, Food & Water Watch, CFA and Consumer Reports to declare 31 outbreak serotypes adulterants in meat and poultry; Stop Foodborne Illness, CSPI and the Center for Foodborne Illness endorsed it. A year later CSPI, CFA, Consumer Reports and STOP filed their own petition, asking for enforceable standards reaching back to the farm. The framework FSIS proposed in August 2024 grew out of both, and it was withdrawn on April 25, 2025. CDC puts Salmonella at 1.35 million illnesses, 26,200 hospitalizations and 420 deaths a year, and FSIS itself attributes more than 167,000 of those illnesses to chicken and turkey. The agency held a public meeting in January to start over. Consumer Reports has the test data, the families have the cases, the union has the plant floor, and the science societies can say whether the standard was sound. Every piece of the argument is already in the room.
5. Fund FDA's foods program to match the job it was just reorganized to do. This is the one item the Alliance for a Stronger FDA can carry to members who agree on nothing else, and the one item where the produce industry, the technologists and the consumer groups have already signed the same page.
6. Close the self-affirmed GRAS loophole and set enforceable limits for lead and arsenic in children's food. That is the chemical groups' fight, and the pathogen groups should sign it, because a parent does not care which kind of contamination it was.
7. Pass H.R. 7867 and put botulism in the infant formula rule. Fifty-two babies have been sickened by C. botulinum in powdered formula across two brands, and the regulation that governs formula testing still names only Salmonella and Cronobacter. FDA has written the industry three letters about it and no rule. I asked the House committee to move the bill in June and never heard back; 535 t-shirts go to Congress the second week of this month, one per member. Seven of the eleven coalition groups, and two more from yesterday's list, are already on the distribution list for those letters. Thirty signatures on the next one would be better than one.
8. Finish front-of-package nutrition labeling and write a definition of ultra-processed food that reaches the food, not just the dyes. FDA has a proposed labeling rule and an open definition process; both stall without pressure from outside. The pathogen groups should sign these letters the way the chronic groups signed the traceability ones, because a label that tells a parent what is in the box and a record that tells FDA where the box came from are the same idea.
9. Get marketing to children, sugary drinks and school meals into the same room as Salmonella and Cyclospora. The Rudd Center has the research, the heart association has the reach, the dietitians have the credibility, and the tobacco veterans have the playbook. Nothing about that coalition requires anyone to stop working outbreaks. It requires one letter a year that carries both problems.
10. Sit down with the people who got sick. Every official and every executive in this system should spend an hour with a family. Stop Foodborne Illness can arrange it. It is not a policy, and it changes what people are willing to accept.
I have said for 30 years that the goal of my work is to put myself out of business. The people named above are the ones actually trying to do it. If Food Safety Education Month is for anything, it is for saying so, with their names spelled out.
