Seeds of Abundance

Americans’ diets are making them sick. Over 80 million adults are treated annually for serious diet-related conditions such as diabetes and as much as one-third of teenagers are pre-diabetic. RFK Jr., Casey Means, and other leaders of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement have rightfully diagnosed this as a pressing issue.

But for all their talk of transforming American diets, MAHA leaders have proposed little to actually make healthy food more accessible. Rather, their prescription for curing America’s dietary problems has been to restrict seemingly unhealthy foods, pushing to phase out food dyes, declare ultra-processed foods as hazardous, and prevent people from using government food assistance for soda or candy. They have taken the same restriction-based approach to agriculture, proposing to ban common pesticides, encouraging a shift toward organic farming that would cut out fertilizers too, and advising people to avoid conventionally grown food. These agricultural reforms may be intended to make America healthier, but instead they would make many healthy foods scarcer and more expensive.

What’s needed instead is an agenda for making fruits, vegetables, and other healthy food cheap. Grocery prices across the U.S. have increased nearly 30% since the beginning of 2020, outpacing general inflation and putting a healthy diet further and further out of reach for more people. While most Americans say they want to eat a healthier diet, over half say that cost is one of the biggest barriers to doing so and that rising costs make it more difficult to eat healthy. Yet America is not stepping up to produce fruits and vegetables, a core piece of a healthy diet, less expensively or even to produce more of them. The US has increasingly outsourced production to other countries and now imports nearly 60 percent of the fruit and more than a third of the vegetables Americans eat.

The goal of making fruits, vegetables and other healthy food cheap may not be new, but it has seemingly fallen out of favor with MAHA’s rise. Far-left progressives who have long railed against Big Food and Big Agriculture now find themselves in an uneasy alignment with the MAHA flank of MAGA. This has left open a middle ground that political Moderates could fill by developing a vision to make healthy food more abundant through innovation, regulatory reform, and other tools. Democrats seeking to develop a politically viable alternative to MAHA and Republicans concerned with letting MAHA’s anti-technology stance dictate their party’s agriculture agenda are well positioned to build a new kind of coalition: one focused not only on supporting farmers, but also on policies that enable an abundant, healthy food supply in service of consumers.

Advocates for making healthy food cheap could find common cause with members of the nascent Abundance movement—the loose coalition of writers, policy entrepreneurs, and reformers who argue that prosperity comes from making essential goods like housing, energy, and healthcare more plentiful and affordable. Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s book Abundance is perhaps the most high-profile articulation of this agenda. They call for a supply-side progressivism that clears away bottlenecks and unleashes building. But there is a wide range of ideological groups pushing various forms of Abundance including more socialist, libertarian, and conservative organizations.

Most groups affiliated with Abundance have had little to say on food or agriculture, prioritizing instead topics like housing, permitting reform, nuclear power, AI, and science policy. Yet the movement’s bipartisan coalitions and foundation in evidence-based and pragmatic policymaking would, if applied to food, provide a robust counterpoint to the MAHA movement. Making healthy food abundant would also more effectively improve the American diet.

The Supply-Side Gap in Healthy Food

At first glance, America looks food-abundant. The country produces nearly 3,900 calories per person per day. Food takes up just over 11 percent of disposable income, down from much higher shares in the mid-20th century. Supermarket shelves are stocked, and obesity affects more than 40 percent of adults. By these measures, scarcity doesn’t seem to be the problem.

But this abundance of calories co-exists with a shortage. The Dietary Guidelines for America recommend most adults to consume 1.5 to 2 cups of fruits and 2 to 3 cups of vegetables daily. However, nine in ten Americans eat fewer fruits and vegetables than recommended, and fruit intake has declined for two decades. There are many factors shaping diets: habits, convenience, and the food environment all play a role. But food prices are a major factor—produce remains expensive enough to discourage consumption, especially for lower-income families. A large body of research shows that reducing prices increases sales and consumption of fruits, vegetables, and other healthful foods. In fact, American consumers increase purchases of fruits and vegetables when prices fall more than they do for any other food category, except sugars and sweets.

Just as building more homes would help reduce the cost of housing, producing more fruits and vegetables—and doing so more efficiently—would help bring prices down. Farm labor, pesticides, fertilizer, land, and other farm costs account for a large share of the retail price of most fresh fruits (over ⅓) and vegetables (over ⅕). This is in contrast to many processed foods where farming costs account for a small portion of the price, for example 5% for bread.

Yet while American farmers have dramatically cut the cost of producing corn, soy, and other field crops, fruits and vegetables have been left behind. Lettuce, cauliflower, and broccoli yields have changed little in the past 20 years, and yields have even fallen for some crops such as spinach and oranges. It’s not just yields either. Overall productivity for fruits and vegetables has grown slowly, even declining from 2007–2017 by one estimate. Fruits and vegetables remain labor-intensive; vulnerable to pests, disease, and water stress; and ultimately costly. Without the sustained innovation that major field crops enjoyed, production of many fruits and vegetables has flatlined or even declined.

One potential cause of this stagnation in fruits and vegetables is the relatively small size of the farms. Fruit and vegetable producers typically benefit from economies of scale. Larger farms have lower labor and capital costs per acre than smaller farms, being able to spread their equipment costs over more land and often use workers more efficiently. Though the average farm size has been increasing for nearly all fruits and vegetables for decades—reaching over 1,000 acres for lettuce and carrots—for some crops it remains relatively low and has stagnated or even fallen. Continued consolidation offers one pathway to renewing fruit and vegetables productivity, particularly as capital-intensive precision farming and autonomous equipment developers further.

This is not to say that grains, oil crops, and livestock products are unimportant. Staple crops and livestock have generally seen remarkable yield gains, and further increasing their productivity remains critical for global food security. The U.S. is one of the world’s largest exporters of grain and animal feed. About half of its soybeans and more than 10% of its corn are shipped abroad, much of it crushed into high-protein meal that underpins the production of affordable dairy, chicken, and pork outside the U.S. Likewise, the U.S. is one of the top exporters of chicken, beef, and dairy products. These exports help meet growing global demand for animal-source foods, which remain among the most reliable sources of protein, calcium, vitamin B12, and other micronutrients. But as demand continues to rise, farmers will need to produce more crops and livestock. As it stands, global food prices have been elevated since 2020, over 25% higher than the pre-pandemic average. Boosting productivity across all feed crops and livestock, including in the U.S., is essential for making animal-source foods affordable around the world, at least without turning vast areas of forest into farmland.

Beyond any dietary benefits, reducing food prices would provide much-needed financial relief as the rising cost of living continues to burden Americans. Grocery costs are among the biggest financial stressors for most people. A July 2025 poll, for example, found that the cost of groceries was the largest financial source of stress, even more than housing or healthcare. While Americans spend a far smaller share of their income on food than they used to, it remains a sizable expense for most households. People in the lowest and second-lowest income brackets spend 33% and 17% of their disposable income on food, respectively. Price increases, such as the dramatic rise in eggs (+146%) and beef (+53%) since 2020, are a significant strain for them.

Cheaper Inputs, Cheaper Food

There are several policy levers that could immediately stem the rise in food prices.

Bringing tariff levels on food imports back down is a commonsense starting point. Food prices have risen even more quickly than usual after President Trump levied tariffs on a wide range of countries and goods. Many of these are products that can’t be grown or produced well in the U.S., such as coffee and tropical fruit. Trump’s tariffs are not necessarily all bad for food; they may help the White House negotiate better international deals for American farmers who have been blocked from many markets by protectionist and unscientific policies. But for the 99% of Americans who don’t farm, the faster tariffs on food are cut, the better.

Cutting tariffs could also bring down farmers’ costs. Lower tariffs on food imports has historically spurred domestic farmers to grow more productive as well as to scale back acreage. In addition, cutting tariffs on fertilizer, pesticide, machinery and other farm inputs would directly reduce farmers’ costs. The average effective tariff rate across all farm inputs surged from 1% when Trump assumed office in January to 12%, with pesticides seeing a tariff hike to over 20%. Though nearly all nitrogen fertilizers and many pesticides are produced domestically, farmers are reliant on imports of potash (potassium fertilizer), phosphorous fertilizers, and some pesticide ingredients and generics. Prices for most of these farm inputs have risen while imports of products affected by tariffs have also fallen, prompting farmers to consider cutting back next year. Exempting these products from tariffs (as the U.S. has done for most Canadian potash) or otherwise reducing them would help corn, soy and wheat producers, for whom fertilizer and pesticide costs are often the biggest operating expenses.

Reducing federal mandates and subsidies for crop-based biofuels, made from corn starch and soybean oil, would also modestly reduce food prices. EPA expects its proposed biofuel mandates for 2026 and 2027 will raise corn prices by 3 cents per bushel and soybean oil prices by 33 cents per pound. A new tax credit for some fuels is expected to further increase use of soybean oil for biofuel, diverting it from the food supply and pushing retail prices higher. Scaling back these policies to limit support for crop-based biofuels would ease pressure on corn and soy prices, thus reducing food prices while also reducing the high greenhouse gas emissions associated with biofuel use.

However, efforts to cut pesticide or fertilizer prices or reform biofuel policies would have little effect on fruits and vegetables. Many of these are labor-intensive to produce and harvest or require specialized materials (e.g., plastic mulch for strawberry beds). With growers increasingly struggling to find enough labor, reforms to immigration policy and the H-2A farmworker program may have the largest impact on costs.

Innovation Policy for Healthy Food Abundance

Reducing input costs can bring modest relief to farmers and consumers alike. But the bigger challenge—and opportunity—lies in producing healthy food more efficiently and thus more affordably. Innovation has made grains, meat, and dairy cheap and plentiful; it could do the same for fruits and vegetables. To do so, policymakers will need to accelerate not only the development of new technologies, but also regulatory approval and diffusion of them.

Consider seeds. Plant breeders are working on disease-resistant tomatoes that farmers can spray with fungicide less often, lettuce that stays crisp during warmer summers, orange trees resistant to citrus greening disease, and improvements to photosynthesis that could dramatically improve yields for many crops. Yet moving a trait from a lab to farmers’ fields can take years of regulatory back-and-forth. USDA has shortened their review timeline in recent years, especially for gene edited crops, but uncertainty and lack of alignment across USDA, FDA, and EPA still raises costs and slows adoption. Only a handful of fruits and vegetables developed with genetic modification (and none with gene editing) are available to buy. A predictable, risk-proportionate system would encourage and enable more R&D and bring the fruits of scientists’ labor to grocery bins quicker.

Animal health is perhaps just as pressing. Since 2022, highly pathogenic avian influenza has wiped out over 150 million chickens and other birds in commercial operations across the US. A recent Iowa State analysis put the cost of porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome (PRRS) in hogs at roughly $1.2 billion a year. Dairy farmers lose billions more to mastitis. Vaccines, better diagnostics, and gene-edited resistance could blunt these losses, but approval for treatments and gene-edited animals remains prohibitively slow and expensive. Streamlined, science-based licensing would help protect animal welfare and farmers’ bottom lines, while also lowering costs for shoppers at the checkout line.

Even the way the U.S. regulates agricultural machinery is due for reform. In countries like Japan and Brazil, farmers pilot drones across long distances to monitor crops and spray pesticides, cutting costs. But in the U.S., routine flights beyond visual line of sight still require case-by-case FAA waivers, which are often delayed. That keeps labor costs unnecessarily high and prevents farmers from using the best tools available to protect their crops. Outdated regulations also stymie the use of autonomous machinery. California law, for instance, prohibits driverless tomato harvesters. A clear, risk-proportionate framework for agricultural drones and autonomous machinery would let farmers detect problems earlier, apply inputs more efficiently, and bring down per-unit costs especially for specialty crops like lettuce or almonds.

Whether in fields of vegetables or barns of livestock, there’s a robust pipeline of scientific innovations that can help cut costs and prices, but regulations have lagged behind. Closing that gap would reduce on-farm losses, lower input costs, and raise yields.

To be sure, technological and regulatory changes can only go so far. Nutrition programs, wage growth, and other demand-side measures play a large role in determining what Americans can afford and choose to eat. Still, there should be broad bipartisan agreement that cutting production costs, modernizing regulations, and speeding adoption of better technologies are necessary steps toward abundance.

Making healthy foods cheaper to produce may not be sufficient to ensure everyone eats them, but it is essential to make it possible.