An Allegheny County state House member has assembled a bipartisan coalition around food health, one that focuses on concerns about highly-processed foods and the dangers of pesticides. And while Natalie Mihalek has proposed some of those ideas in the past, she says the “Make America Healthy Again” movement has put them in the spotlight.
“Two years ago, I felt like when I was talking about this stuff, people were looking at me like I had ten heads and I was a conspiracy theorist,” said Mihalek, whose district stretches across the South Hills suburbs and into Peters Township. “And now it's like it's on everybody's mind all of a sudden, which is great, and which is really why we felt emboldened to do a much broader, much bigger package of bills.”
Mihalek, of Upper St. Clair, has assembled a package of seven bills she’s calling “Healthy PA.” They include a bill to require companies to disclose the additives they put in processed foods, while other measures aim to ban the use of certain artificial dyes in school lunches as well as the use of a controversial pesticide, Paraquat.
“We cannot afford to sit around and wait for something to change. Our food is literally killing us,” Mihalek wrote in a memo circulated to her colleagues last month. “Cleaning up our food supply … demands that we begin to unravel from the tight grip of industrial ingredients.”
Such concerns have drawn new attention since President Donald Trump chose Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Mihalek’s bill package was formally introduced Tuesday, just hours before Kennedy announced that the federal Food and Drug Administration would phase out the use of petroleum-based, synthetic artificial food dyes. He said it was an early step toward replacing chemical additives with natural ingredients in the food supply by the end of next year.
A distrust of food additives has currency among some voters on both the left and right. But Kennedy has also been sharply criticized by health experts for positions that include amplifying discredited theories about the connection between vaccines and autism. (His statements this week, which linked some dyes to poor mental health in children, have been disputed by some researchers, who doubt that dyes cause such issues while acknowledging they could make preexisting conditions worse.)
Still, while Kennedy is a controversial figure, especially among Democrats, each of Mihalek's bills has attracted some bipartisan support.
So far she has a total of 15 co-sponsors for the various bills in the package legislation: 10 Republicans and five Democrats.
Among the proposals is a grant program for farmers to grow winter “cover crops,” which can improve soil health without relying on herbicides. On this bill, Mihalek found support from state House Democrat Jessica Benham of Pittsburgh.
“I have this enormous urban farm in my district, Hilltop Urban Farm, and so when we're talking about the farming industry in Pennsylvania, it's not just a rural issue. It impacts cities and suburbs, too,” said Benham, a member of the House Health committee.
Benham dismissed the idea that Kennedy’s role had any relevance to such causes.
“I view this not as a nationalized issue … but ultimately about practical changes that we can make to ensure that Pennsylvanians have access to healthy, high quality food,” she said.
Mihalek, meanwhile, says she’s yet to get pushback from other conservatives, even though they sometimes oppose government intervention in the free market.
“It doesn't matter if you're conservative and believe in almost no regulation, [or] someone from the opposite end of the spectrum,” Mihalek said. “I think people are finally waking up to the fact that we're eating the most contaminated food supply on planet Earth, here in the United States.”
Mihalek says the FDA “really dropped the ball” on protecting our food from certain additives and pesticides. If Pennsylvania takes a stand, she said, it could influence the federal government to make changes nationwide.
“The states, in this instance, have a duty to step up and say, we're not going to tolerate [these chemicals] in our state,” she said.
