If there was a mascot to represent everything that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. sees wrong with food, it would be Big Daddy’s Primo Pizza. A staple of school cafeterias, Big Daddy’s pizza bills itself as an “over-the-top exceptional slice to entice students” that’s made with whole-wheat flour. It’s mass-produced in a factory with industrial additives so that it just needs to be reheated right before serving. That makes the pizza an ultra-processed food, which Kennedy is set on removing from school lunches. Except he can’t. The Department of Agriculture, which sets the rules for school nutrition, isn’t under his jurisdiction as secretary of Health and Human Services.
RFK Jr. sometimes talks as though he has the power to unilaterally fix America’s food problems. But his attempts to do so will go only so far, at least in part by virtue of the absurdity of how food is regulated. The job is split between the FDA and the USDA,…