Opinion | R.F.K. Jr. Is a Threat to My Junk Food Time Machine

It feels like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has declared war on tastiness. In his May 22 “Make America Healthy Again” report targeting ultraprocessed foods, he had an amnesic disregard for the toxic pleasures he grew up with. He’s come up just shy of telling Americans that anything delicious will leave us glued to insulin pumps.

Anyway, that’s how a United States cabinet secretary inspired my sudden craving for Wonder Bread. The Trump administration’s whitewashing of American history from our libraries is bad enough. Whitewashing white bread from my digestive history? Unspeakable.

Riding the bread aisle of an aging medium-brow Los Angeles grocery store that appeared bravely oblivious to the iffy Whole Foods-inspired religion of organic everything, I noticed the word “grain” was everywhere. Just as I realized I didn’t really know what a grain was if not followed by “of salt,” I saw bags of Wonder Bread huddled in shame on a bottom shelf.

The future turned present: The lusciously larded foods of my youth were already beside me on the endangered species list.

Within minutes, my cart held an old-school reunion while it still could: Wonder Bread, Kraft macaroni and cheese, Kellogg’s Corn Pops (nee Sugar Pops), Entenmann’s doughnuts (with the dark brown waxy coating they don’t even pretend to call chocolate on the box), Hungry Man (nee Swanson’s) fried chicken — OMG: frozen White Castle burgers! — Nestlé’s Quik, now Nesquik (“Same tooth decay, one fewer syllable!”), whole milk, the once un-P.C. Uncle Ben’s rice and grossly un-P.C. Aunt Jemima’s syrup (both revamped), Oscar Mayer bologna and, just to keep current, maximum strength Pepcid. I paid the nonjudgmental self-checkout machine and walked off to find my America in a caloric time warp.

This would be my own Marcel Proust madeleine quest — childhood morsels as time machine. (Not to say that if Proust lived today he’d be writing about Froot Loops, but he’d surely mourn our dietary penal colony.)