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When a friend pulled out her vape at a playoff-baseball watch party earlier this month, it immediately caught my eye. I had grown accustomed to marveling at the different disposable vapes she’d purchase each time her last one ran out of nicotine—the strange flavors, the seemingly endless number of brands—but this product was different. It had a screen. While she vaped, the device played a silly little animation that reminded me of a rudimentary version of Pac-Man.

In the name of journalism, I went to my local smoke shop this week, and sure enough, vapes with screens were ubiquitous. One product on the shelves, a Geek Bar Pulse X, featured a screen that wraps around the device, displaying a constellation of stars when you inhale. Another, the Watermelon Ice Raz vape, displayed a basic animation of moving flames. Vapes with screens first began to hit the market late last year, and only recently have become widely accessible. Online retailers sell vapes with screens that display what appear to be planets, rockets, and cars driving in outer space. The screens are small—just a few inches wide at most—and they are cheap: These products run as little as $25, and can last for several months.

The Watermelon Ice Raz vape that I spotted in the store reminded me of the loading screens on an old Game Boy Color. I could see how adults like me might be enticed by the nostalgia of it all. The problem is that these vapes might also appeal to kids. It’s illegal for anyone under 21 to buy a vape, but the gadgets have been popular among teens since they were first popularized by Juul. Although youth vaping rates have dropped in recent years thanks in part to public-service campaigns that have warned kids about the dangers of vaping and nicotine addiction, the inclusion of a screen risks backtracking the progress that has been made. A screen full of animations sends the message that an e-cigarette is “something for fun and games and recreation,” Robert Jackler, an expert on tobacco marketing at Stanford University, told me. Just imagine you’re in eighth grade and the cool kid in your class has a vape with a screen of moving flames. You’re going to want one.

These gadgets are new enough that it’s unclear to what degree kids are using them, but they have all the warning signs. Vape companies are notorious for selling products in kid-friendly flavors such as Banana Taffy Freeze and Cherry Bomb, and screen vapes may be the next ploy to hook kids. The vaping industry “will do anything that it takes to bring in novel features to attract new users, and this is just another example of that,” Laura Struik, an assistant professor at the University of British Columbia at Okanagan who has studied youth use of e-cigarettes, told me. One of the most popular vape brands among teens, Mr. Fog, has already launched a screen vape.

Screen vapes run the risk of becoming a fad, and fads spread among kids because someone they look up to uses them, Emily Moorlock, a senior lecturer in marketing at Sheffield Hallam University who has written about youth vaping, told me. That was certainly my experience as a kid. I remember begging my parents for a Game Boy because other kids in my elementary school had them. Vaping is similar: When the government asks kids to explain the reason they tried vaping, the top explanation is that a friend does it.

Screens might also make vapes more addictive. Even the simplest visuals, such as retro video games, have been shown to cause the brain to release dopamine, a neurotransmitter responsible for feelings of pleasure and reward. Even the more rudimentary vapes I encountered—those that just play little animations on a loop—could spike dopamine, and thus increase users’ desire for these products, three experts told me.

Tony Abboud, the head of the Vapor Technology Association, a lobbying group, described them to me as a technological advancement. Besides the animations, many of these screens tend to display how much battery and vapable nicotine juice is left in the device. Abboud said that public-health groups are trying to brand screen vapes as “the next bad example” of how the industry is marketing to kids, despite youth vaping rates dropping. “Just because a new technology has a new feature doesn’t mean that feature was designed to allow the product to be marketed to kids,” he said.

Abboud and other vaping defenders have a point that e-cigarettes aren’t just an enticement for kids to get addicted to nicotine, but are also a tool to help smokers quit smoking. Vapes can benefit public health because they are safer than cigarettes and as effective, or more effective, than other anti-smoking products on the market. Even flavored vapes—which do attract kids—also can help entice adults to switch out their cigarettes for a vape.

But a screen serves no purpose except for some cheap entertainment. If adult vapers want a signal that their product is low on battery, that could be solved by a little power light, like on a smoke detector. The flames and constellations simply aren’t necessary. After years of panic over youth vaping rates, it seems like kids are finally understanding that they shouldn’t vape. Why risk messing that up because of a tiny screen?

The World Series is the most important thing that can happen to a baseball player, and it is happening now to a bunch of them. You may have noticed that many have been conspicuously chewing things the entire time, including Yankees left fielder Alex Verdugo, who was blowing a bubble while misplaying a ball in the very first inning of Game 1.

The constant chewing is one of the weird things about baseball. Casual viewers respond to it by saying, “That’s weird.” Baseball fans respond to it by saying, “That’s just how it is in baseball.” And both statements are true. The chewing isn’t happening only during downtime in the dugout. Players with pizzazz blow bubbles while catching fly balls or hitting home runs. Outfielders are the most frequent chompers, but even players in the much-busier infield will sometimes spit out a shell in the middle of the action, or gnaw on a toothpick. Once in a while a player will even be tempted by the ballpark snacks that fans are eating in the stands. My question is, Why?

I’ll be honest: I care about this question because I love baseball, but also because I have a lot of dental problems and can’t personally imagine putting Dubble Bubble in my mouth ever again. I became fixated on the issue following a game this June between the New York Mets and the Texas Rangers, during which pitcher Max “Mad Max” Scherzer was shown in the dugout laughing maniacally and heckling his former teammates, while also munching on sunflower seeds so aggressively that it looked as though he were munching off bits of his own teeth. I can’t tell you how distressing this was.

The chewing habit is unique to baseball, America’s best sport. You don’t chew anything while playing football because you’re probably wearing a mouth guard so that you don’t accidentally bite off your own tongue. You wouldn’t want to run around on a basketball court with something in your mouth, because you could choke on it. Even golfers and soccer players, who sometimes chew gum, do not commonly have pockets full of loose seeds, or barter with children for bags of Nerds Gummy Clusters.

Baseball isn’t merely amenable to snacking; the game is arranged around it. Other sports have locker rooms and clubhouses full of snacks, but baseball has a dugout where players sit during the game and have continuous access to those snacks. A baseball player can even keep snacks in his pockets on the field, Brian Purvis, the head of the Chattanooga branch of the Society of American Baseball Research, told me. Then he added: “I would be curious why baseball uniforms even have pockets?”

One question at a time!

As for why all of this chewing is happening, I solicited input from dozens of baseball enthusiasts including historians, journalists, former players, sports nutritionists, and miscellaneous other interested parties, such as the publicists for various candy companies. Some of them acknowledged that it’s weird. Others told me, “That’s just how it is in baseball.” And more than a few had theories to explain the practice—somehow, only one mentioned Freud.

Obviously, in the old days, baseball players chewed a lot of tobacco. This was partly on account of players’ societally average addictions to nicotine, partly on account of its stimulating and supposedly performance-enhancing effects, and partly on account of their habit of slobbering tobacco juice onto the baseball so that it would be darker and harder for the opposing team to see and hit. The slobbering (but not the chewing) was disallowed in 1920 by a rule change against “ball defacing.”

For many decades after, children watched as players smoked cigarettes in dugouts and visibly chewed dip while batting. They watched as players would, occasionally, choke on their tobacco wads and delay gameplay. The wads themselves grew even bigger and more visible in the ’80s, when players realized they could wrap their chewing tobacco in bubble gum to hold the leaves together. Tobacco was not denounced by Major League Baseball until the ’90s, when it was banned first from minor-league stadiums and then from the annual All-Star Game.

But the habit was a sticky one, and hard to get rid of entirely. If tobacco was going out of fashion, it would have to be replaced, in the words of the internet’s favorite baseball movie, by re-creating it in the aggregate. Gum could replace the chewing; seeds could replace the spitting. Hence, a 1997 headline in the Sarasota Herald-Tribune: “Chew Tobacco’s Out, but Ballplayers Young and Old Agree That, Whether It’s Bubble Gum or Sunflower Seeds, You Need to Jaw on Something.”

[Read: Goodbye, Coliseum]

Tobacco is now banned from many Major League stadiums, and it was mostly banned from the sport of baseball itself in 2016, not long after Hall of Famer Tony Gwynn died from oral cancer. Bubble gum and sunflower seeds remain as popular as ever. Dodgers first baseman Freddie Freeman, who has been in the Major Leagues since 2010, doesn’t chew tobacco, yet he will dump an entire bag of seeds into his mouth at one time. Yankees pitcher Nestor Cortes, who made his debut two years after the tobacco ban, has said that he chews “at least 30” pieces of gum per game.

If they aren’t chewing for the high, what’s the point? Other claimed effects came up here and there during my interviews. Some people mentioned that baseball is a game that involves sliding in dirt, and that chewing gum can help you keep the taste of the field out of your mouth. Ken Clawson, a former minor-league baseball player, said he’d read somewhere that the habit gets more blood flowing to the head and can therefore help with focus. SABR’s Purvis thought chewing had to do with timing: “Something about the rhythmic moving of the mouth allows them to set their internal metronome.” Sure!

When I got in touch with John Thorn, the longtime official historian of Major League Baseball, he was unimpressed by the batch of theories that I’d gathered to that point. He said that eating is just a way of dispelling nervous energy. “The calming effect of chewing tobacco was largely in the chewing, not in the messy weed,” he told me. “The charm of sunflower seeds may be entirely attributed to Freud.”

In other words: The oral fixations relax the players, who are like so many giant, strong, and handsome babies sucking their thumbs.

Anxiety and dirt in the mouth aren’t the whole story, though. When looking to explain anything in American life, one should always look at the commercial interests involved—Big Chewing, in this case.

John Thorn walked me through the history of baseball’s relationship to the great oral-fixation industries. Lou Gehrig, Ted Williams, Joe DiMaggio, and other baseball greats appeared in ads for cigarettes, which sometimes implied that their elite athletic performance was enabled by their choice of smokes. Chewing gum came in later: Beginning in the 1920s, William Wrigley Jr., the founder of the Wrigley Company and the owner of the Chicago Cubs, allowed numerous radio stations to carry Cubs games, because this would also serve to advertise his gum. His son and successor, Philip Wrigley, provided gum to players in the clubhouse (and, incidentally, referred to his product as “an adult pacifier”). Other entrepreneurs spread gum throughout the league. Sy Berger, of the Topps trading-card company, wooed players to license out their likeness by giving them free stuff, including Topps’s hit product, Bazooka bubble gum.

Gum and baseball cards were such a natural pairing that, eventually, kids could buy a pack of gum with a baseball card in it, or a pack of baseball cards with a stick of gum in it. In 1975, the TV broadcaster and former Major League catcher Joe Garagiola hosted a bubble-blowing championship. The contest was sponsored by Bazooka, and the winner, the Milwaukee Brewers’ Kurt Bevacqua, was honored with a special baseball card. Soon after, the debut of Big League Chew gave kids an opportunity to emulate professional baseball players by chewing gum that was shredded to look like tobacco—the idea being that money could be made in preventing kids (and adults) from taking up a truly disgusting habit while continuing to channel their dreams to baseball. (They could mail in wrappers to receive a World Series–inspired ring.)

[Read: Moneyball broke baseball]

Candy companies have found ample opportunities in baseball ever since. Turk Wendell, a former relief pitcher for the Mets who is best remembered by the baseball-viewing public as the guy who wore a necklace draped with claws and teeth, was known to chew black licorice on the mound. He also received free candy all the time. “Brach’s candy in Chicago would FedEx me whatever I wanted,” he told me. “Any kind of candy—they would FedEx it to me on dry ice so it was fresh.” Today’s young players get excited about candy collaborations. The Yankees’ baby-faced shortstop, Anthony Volpe, used a Dubble Bubble–themed baseball bat in a game this year. The Mets’ baby-faced third baseman, Mark Vientos, wore cleats made by Adidas in partnership with Haribo, the German candy company whose gummy bears often appear in modern baseball dugouts.

Chewing seeds, which also goes back decades, is a somewhat less commercial custom. Reggie Jackson, who made it cool to chew packaged sunflower seeds in the 1970s, suggested that the nutrients provided by his habit could help prevent pulled muscles. “Mr. October may have been on to something,” Corey Tremble, the director of minor-league medical operations for the Texas Rangers, told me. The seeds are salty, and sodium is one of the main electrolytes lost through sweat. Chewing them during a game may work “to keep our muscles healthy and firing properly.”

Of course, there are a lot of other ways for players to accomplish the nutritional task of “consuming salt.” Many foods and drinks are salty, including—as Tremble noted—the cups of Gatorade that those guys are always swilling in the dugout. And a 1996 Wall Street Journal story about in-game sunflower seeds said that chewers were showing off their “tooth-tongue coordination” and that they stood in awe of Jackson not because his muscles weren’t cramping but, as one pitcher told the newspaper, because he “could eat ’em and spit the shells like a machine gun.”

In the process of reporting this story, I emailed 66 members of the Society for American Baseball Research, some of whom forwarded my question about chewing to still more members of the Society for American Baseball Research. The total number is unknown to me, though I received more responses than I could possibly manage.

Warren Simpson, of the West Texas chapter of SABR, got in touch to share his theory. Simpson is part of the Vintage Base Ball Association, an intriguing body that plays baseball in antique uniforms, and according to the rules of the late 1800s. In this league, it is still legal to throw spitballs, which is why Simpson himself started chewing tobacco in 2001. (He has since stopped.) He thinks chewing persists in baseball purely as tradition. Younger players chew because they think that’s what they’re supposed to do. “It’s part of what you believe is the culture,” he said.

[Read: Americans don’t really like to chew]

It’s true that baseball people are obsessed with tradition, and that kids will try to imitate their heroes. The retired center fielder Lenny Dykstra said he chewed tobacco because he’d grown up watching Rod Carew chew tobacco. Simpson told me that when he was a kid, everyone wanted to make basket catches like Willie Mays, or to be a switch-hitter like Mickey Mantle. In Simpson’s case, he wanted to get hit by a lot of pitches like his favorite player, Ron Hunt, who had set the Major League record for doing so in 1971 and famously said, “Some people give their bodies to science; I give mine to baseball.” They are not always valuable life lessons that you are learning from these idols, Simpson acknowledged. “It might have been better if he was blowing bubble gum.”

Baseball’s chewing tradition may also intersect with its long history of strategic rule-breaking. Baseball fans still gossip about which players might be flouting the tobacco ban. One of my favorite baseball players, Jesse Winker, is constantly eating Tootsie Rolls, even while running the bases—even while engaging in arguments with opposing players. I think Winker is chewing Tootsie Rolls just because he likes them, but it’s certainly true that having Tootsie Rolls or any other brown and waddish foods available in baseball dugouts gives cover to anybody else who might still be chewing tobacco. Tootsie Roll Industries, which once promised to award 1 million Tootsie Rolls to whoever scored the millionth run in the history of Major League Baseball, did not respond to my questions. Neither did the league.

That said, baseball is also a baffling sport played by fastidious people with numerous eccentricities and superstitions. Turk Wendell told me that he started chewing black licorice on the mound while he was in college. When his young teammates spat tobacco juice on his shoes, he needed a way to spit back without picking up a tobacco habit himself. “I thought, Well, I like black licorice and it looks like tobacco so it looks like I’m pretty cool,” he said. (He was chewing not-tobacco to cover up the fact that he wasn’t really chewing tobacco. This inverts the Tootsie Roll theory laid out above and also proves its feasibility.) Whatever his original motivation, Wendell got into chewing licorice, and then he never stopped. Wendell also liked to brush his teeth between innings. He did that for the first time because he had a bad taste in his mouth. (Was it dirt? I forgot to ask.) Right after, he struck out three batters. “Once you do something and you’re successful, you keep doing it,” he said.

If this is true for Wendell, perhaps it’s true for baseball on the whole. Once you’ve started chewing, how do you kick the habit?

I bet you’re still waiting for me to give the most obvious explanation for baseball’s chewing: The game is boring. Putting something in your mouth is something you do when you’re bored.

Fine. I’m a baseball fan, and I was inclined to dispute the premise, but even baseball players are partial to this theory. Wendell told me that he chewed in part because the games were so monotonous. So did Trevor May, a former pitcher and current media personality; he said that chewing sunflower seeds and gum is “the equivalent of watching a bad Netflix movie while you fold laundry.” Joe Nelson, another former pitcher, said that baseball is “incredibly boring.” Relief pitchers, in particular, spend much of the game out in the bullpen, separated from the action, he told me, and that “can get exhausting, mentally.” To chomp or spit is to stay awake and stay ready.

This makes sense to me. Agatha Christie used to eat apples in the bathtub whenever she was having a hard time working out her elaborate murder-mystery plots. You do whatever it takes to put your brain in your body.

Here I think it’s important to note that Major League Baseball prohibits the use of smartphones during games. Players in the dugout will sometimes watch footage of their at-bats on a shared iPad, leading fans to joke that they’ve been “rewarded with screen time.” But, generally, the players are more bored than you’ve been in years! You don’t remember what it’s like to be that bored. Maybe that’s why you—and I—might think all the chewing that baseball players do is weird, whereas the fans of prior generations might have understood it to be normal.

Time expands during a baseball game, and players have only what’s in their skulls to keep them occupied. “Baseball is a ponderous game with plenty of room for pastimes within a pastime,” Clayton Trutor, of the Vermont SABR chapter, told me. The snacks are raw materials. You will see players build little towers out of gum or use it to adhere a paper cup to an unsuspecting teammate’s hat. Baseball fans were tickled this year when Seattle Mariners pitcher Luis Castillo placed his sunflower seeds in the dirt in an ornate arrangement that possibly represented some kind of message to extraterrestrials.

“Baseball is a stop-action sport, and in that regard it permits not only such activities as bubble-blowing but also reflection,” Thorn told me, “and this is why baseball is the game of literature.” It was a little bit of a non sequitur, but I knew what he meant. Baseball is the subject of a good deal of classic American writing. And baseball players—though it may not always seem this way—are living the life of the mind. This is why they chew.

Fans are also in their heads. Thorn suggested that baseball’s open, airy nature is the reason that I, as a viewer, would even notice that players are chewing all the time. Arguably, watching baseball is making me a more observant and curious person.

My next questions are “Why do baseball uniforms have pockets?” and, relatedly, “Why do baseball players wear belts?”

Americans are anxious about the election. The American Psychological Association’s annual Stress in America survey found that, as of August, politics was the leading cause of stress for seven out of 10 adults across party lines. In a poll from a mental-health-care company the same month, 79 percent of respondents reported that the presidential election made them feel anxious this year, and more than half thought about the election every day. Now that the election is imminent, one can only assume that Americans’ anxiety is even higher.

Many U.S. media outlets have responded by offering their readers advice on how to calm down. Type election anxiety into Google, and you’ll find dozens of articles instructing you to focus on aspects of life outside of politics, to spend less time watching the news, or to use relaxation techniques such as breathing exercises to subdue the negative feelings

But there’s another way to think about election stress: A big event should prompt big feelings. The stakes of this election go far beyond anyone’s preferred party winning or losing. “Voters on both sides of the aisle are being given a message that if the other side wins, this will be the end of American democracy as they know it,” Andrew Civettini, a political scientist at Knox College, told me. Why wouldn’t you feel anxious?

In Western philosophy and psychology, emotions have long been cast as the opposite of reason. In Stoicism, emotions are considered “non-reasoning movements,” wild inner beasts that a person has to keep in check in order to live well. During the Enlightenment, reason was widely considered a better guiding force than the senses or the emotions. This notion occasionally rears its head in cognitive-behavioral therapy, which teaches patients that feelings aren’t facts, so that they can act despite their anxiety or insecurity. This week, Arianna Huffington argued in Time magazine that Americans shouldn’t be stressed out by polls. “The way to best affect outcomes is to find the eye of the hurricane, and act from that place of inner strength and wisdom,” she wrote.

But political emotions motivate action all the time. “When we experience anxiety about politics, it causes us to pay more attention, and that could have positive learning effects,” Civettini said. Steven Webster, a political scientist at Indiana University, has found that political anger can push people to vote and donate to campaigns. People can, Webster told me, get too emotional about politics: Too much anger, anxiety, or fear might motivate people to support political violence, or isolate themselves from any person or news source that doesn’t confirm their beliefs. But overall, he said, “it’s not obvious to me that we should want to reduce political emotions.”

Although emotions, with their heat and urgency, can overtake and weaken people, the philosopher Martha Nussbaum has argued that they reflect inner judgments and evaluations—in other words, that they are reasonable and intelligent responses to real-world events. For example, to have fear, as Nussbaum wrote in her book Upheavals of Thought, “I must believe that bad events are impending; that they are not trivially, but seriously bad; and that I am not entirely in control of warding them off.” In this way, Nussbaum noted, emotions—not some mythic, unemotional source of rationality—reveal what we require to live well and flourish.

Throughout history, major political shifts have been met with equally big feelings, says Kerstin Maria Pahl, a historian of political emotion at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development and a co-editor of the 2022 book Feeling Political. Apathy, a longstanding Christian concept, became part of Western political language at the end of the 18th century. “Not being affected by something made you a bad person, because you didn’t take any interest in the common good of mankind, or welfare of humanity,” Pahl told me.

Allowing so much emotional interest to go unchecked might sound counterintuitive in 21st-century America, where cultural forces and psychological experts teach that emotions must be regulated for optimal well-being. But election anxiety highlights what emotions are for: to reveal what we care about, and what our moral values are. Thomas Szanto, a political philosopher at the University of Flensburg, in Germany, told me that many Americans’ political emotions are fitting responses to the election cycle. “There is something at stake for people,” Szanto said. Earlier this year, Szanto and his colleague Ruth Rebecca Tietjen argued in a paper that a political emotion is appropriate if it is functional—for example, if it pushes people to vote or seek out information about candidates—and if it has a moral component that mirrors a person’s concerns about their world, and their sense of right and wrong. Anxiety is an appropriate response from a voter who believes that Donald Trump is a threat to reproductive rights, which would violate their moral belief in bodily autonomy. Similarly, a voter who believes that abortion is murder would have a fitting emotional reaction to the idea that a Kamala Harris presidency would lead to more access to abortions.

In Philip K. Dick’s 1968 dystopian novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, people can conjure any emotion they want through the use of a machine called the “mood organ.” When Iran Deckard, the wife of bounty hunter Rick Deckard, programs for herself a six-hour “self-accusatory depression,” Rick asks why she would subject herself to that when she could feel anything else. She replies that it feels wrong to not respond emotionally to the ongoing calamities in their world. “That used to be considered a sign of mental illness; they called it ‘absence of appropriate affect,’” she tells Rick.

Americans in 2024 don’t need a mood organ to feel any variety of negative emotion in response to this election. They are feeling anxiety, sadness, and dread, all on their own. Surviving the remaining days until November 5 requires not simply turning off those emotions, but paying attention to what they are telling us.

The promise of the American food supply is that you can eat anything and not get sick. You can usually assume that whatever you buy from a grocery store or fast-food joint won’t land you in a hospital.

But lately, foodborne-illness outbreaks seem to be distressingly regular. On Tuesday, the CDC reported 49 cases and one death linked to McDonald’s Quarter Pounders tainted with E. coli. In the past week, hundreds of waffle and pancake products were voluntarily recalled due to potential Listeria contamination. Listeria in particular has been a problem of late: Earlier in October, more than 11 million pounds of ready-to-eat meat and poultry products were recalled. And an especially bad Listeria outbreak involving Boar’s Head deli-meat products has led to 59 hospitalizations across 10 states and 10 deaths.

Many of this year’s outbreaks have occurred in foods that are preprepared—those that can be eaten as-is, without further cooking. Foods such as Quarter Pounders and waffles, yes, but also cold cuts, prepackaged salads, and jarred salsa are popular because they are convenient. That convenience comes at a cost. A rule of thumb in food safety is that “the more a food is handled prior to consumption, the higher the chances it can be contaminated,” Lawrence Goodridge, the director of the Canadian Research Institute for Food Safety, told me. Americans are left with a difficult choice: save time or risk getting sick.

Many bacteria that cause foodborne illness live among us. Listeria can be found in soil and water, and E. coli and Salmonella are normally found in human and animal digestive tracts. They become a problem when they get into food. Preprepared foods are particularly prone to contamination because they are usually processed in large, sometimes even multiple, facilities where microbes have lots of opportunities to spread. “Somebody, somewhere, or a company, has produced the food so that we don’t have to do it at home,” Goodridge said. A factory worker with mud on his shoe, or an employee who didn’t wash her hands after using the bathroom, can be all it takes to start an outbreak. Food-safety practices—such as regular cleaning, temperature control, and strict hygiene standards—are supposed to keep these factories pristine. But occasionally, they fail.

Refrigerated facilities keep most bacteria at bay—microbes grow more slowly at lower temperatures—but not Listeria, which thrives in cool conditions. Given enough time to grow, a Listeria colony forms a protective gel over itself, called a biofilm, which makes it especially difficult to get rid of. Meanwhile, E. coli typically gets into produce through water soiled with feces. Usually, contamination occurs at the farm level, but microbes can spread as fresh foods are processed into products such as precut fruit, bags of chopped lettuce, and even prewashed whole greens. When clean produce is washed together with a contaminated batch or sliced with the same equipment, bacteria can spread. Many foods are produced in a central location and then shipped cross-country, which is how a contamination event at a single farm can lead to illnesses nationwide.

This may be the reason for the ongoing Quarter Pounder debacle. According to McDonald’s, the E. coli outbreak may be linked to slivered onions, which were sourced from a single supplier that served certain McDonald’s locations in 10 states, as well as some Taco Bell, KFC, and Pizza Hut stores. Centralizing the slivering of onions no doubt increases efficiency at fast-food chains. But it also raises the risk of contamination.

In food safety, cooking is known as a “kill step,” because high heat kills most dangerous pathogens. Precut salads and fruit are usually eaten raw. Nobody cooks cold cuts, even though the CDC recommends heating them until they are steaming (who knew?). Even convenience products that are meant to be heated, such as frozen waffles and vegetables, aren’t always prepared properly at home. A toaster may not get a waffle hot enough—Listeria is killed at an internal temperature of 165 degrees Fahrenheit—and thawed frozen vegetables may be eaten without being boiled first, Barbara Kowalcyk, a food-safety expert at George Washington University, told me.

To be clear, there’s no need for Listeria hysteria. “On the surface, it looks like there are many more outbreaks,” but there are no data to prove that yet, Goodridge said. Still, some recent outbreaks demonstrate that precautions are working as they should. Listeria was identified in a regular sweep of the waffle factory and products were voluntarily recalled; no cases of illness have been reported. Tools for detecting outbreaks are becoming more sophisticated, Darin Detwiler, a food-safety expert at Northeastern University, told me. A technique called whole-genome sequencing can identify instances in which people have been sickened by the same bacteria, pinpointing the source of an outbreak. Earlier this year, it was used to investigate a Listeria outbreak in Canada that killed three people and hospitalized 15.

No food is totally safe from contamination. Practically everything sold in stores or restaurants is handled in some way. Milk is pooled from any number of cows, then pasteurized and packaged. Hamburger patties are usually made with meat from many butchered cows that is then ground, seasoned, and formed. People get lulled into the idea that “the U.S. has the safest food supply in the world,” Kowalcyk said, “but that doesn’t mean that it’s safe.” People can reduce their risk of contracting a foodborne illness by buying whole foods and cooking from scratch when possible, Goodbridge said; it’s probably safer to clean and chop your own head of lettuce. Yet even that is not a guarantee. Foodborne illness also spreads in home kitchens, where cross-contamination of raw meat with other foods, unsafe storage, and food spoilage often occurs. The risks are lower for healthy people, who can usually get through foodborne illness without excessive discomfort. But for vulnerable groups—very young, very old, and pregnant people—foodborne illness can lead to hospitalization, and even death.

The recent spate of outbreaks highlights the dilemma plaguing the state of American eating. People are simply too busy and exhausted to cook from scratch. In the daily scramble to get dinner on the table, ready-to-eat food is a lifeline. But with every additional stage of preparation comes an extra helping of risk.

There are two Michael Jordans, both widely regarded as the Greatest of All Time. One is an NBA legend. The other is a pumpkin. In 2023, the eponymous 2,749-pound goliath set the world record for heaviest pumpkin. Michael Jordan weighed as much as a small car and was even more massive—so broad that it would just barely fit in a parking space. Like all giant pumpkins, its flesh was warped by all that mass—sort of like Jabba the Hutt with a spray tan.

It is hard to imagine how a pumpkin could get any bigger. But you might have said the same thing about the previous world-record holder, a 2,702-pound beast grown in Italy in 2021, or the world-record holder before that, a Belgian 2,624-pounder in 2016. Each year around this time, giant pumpkins across the globe are forklifted into pickup trucks and transported to competitions where they break new records.

Michael Jordan set the record at California’s Half Moon Bay Safeway World Championship Pumpkin Weigh-Off, considered the Super Bowl of North American pumpkin-growing. The first winner of the competition, in 1974, weighed just 132 pounds. In 2004, the winner clocked in at 1,446 pounds. “At that time, we thought, Gee whiz, can we push these things any farther?” Wizzy Grande, the president of the Great Pumpkin Commonwealth, an organization that establishes global standards for competition, told me. Yet in just another decade, the record passed the 2,000-pound mark. “We’ve zoomed past that now,” Travis Gienger, the grower from Minnesota who cultivated Michael Jordan, told me. For champion growers, there’s only one thing to do next: try to break 3,000.

Giant pumpkins aren’t quite supersize versions of what you find in the grocery store. All competitive pumpkins are Curcubita maxima, the largest species of squash—which, in the wild, can grow to 200 pounds, about 10 times heavier than the common Halloween pumpkin. But decades of selective breeding—crossing only the largest plants—has created colossal varieties.

Virtually all of today’s champions trace their lineage to Dill’s Atlantic Giant, a variety bred in the 1970s by a Canadian grower named Howard Dill. Very competitive growers source their seeds from one another, through seed exchanges and auctions, where a single seed can be sold for thousands of dollars, Michael Estadt, an assistant professor at Ohio State University Extension who has cultivated giant pumpkins, told me. Seeds from Gienger’s champions are in high demand, yet even he is constantly aiming to improve the genetics of his line. “I’m looking for heavy,” he said.

Yet even a pumpkin with a prize-winning pedigree won’t reach its full size unless it’s managed well. Like babies, they require immense upkeep, even before they are born. Months before planting, at least 1,000 square feet of soil per pumpkin must be fertilized and weeded. Once seedlings are planted, they have to be watered daily for their entire growing period, roughly four months. No mere garden hose can do the trick; each plant needs at least one inch of water a week, which allows the pumpkin to gain up to 70 pounds in a single day. The fruit and leaves must also be inspected at least once daily for pests and disease—no small feat as their surface area balloons. Quickly spotting and excising the eggs of an insect called the squash-vine borer, then bandaging the wounded vine, is paramount. One day, you might have a great pumpkin, “then boom, the next day, all of the vine is completely dead,” says Julie Weisenhorn, a horticulture educator at the University of Minnesota who has grown giant pumpkins—named Seymour (744 pounds) and Audrey (592 pounds).

Growers can keep pushing the pumpkin weight limit by ensuring that a plant isn’t pollinated by a variety that has subpar genes. To do so, they hand-pollinate, painstakingly dusting pollen from a plant’s male flowers into the female ones. This usually leads the plant to bear three or four fruit, but only the most promising is allowed to survive. The rest are killed off in an attempt to direct all of the plant’s resources toward a single giant. In the same vein, wayward vines are nipped, and emerging roots thrust deep into the ground, in hopes of harnessing every last nutrient for the potential champion.

Still, some factors are beyond anyone’s control. The weather can literally make or break a pumpkin. Too much rain can cause a pumpkin to grow too quickly, cracking open its flesh, which would disqualify it from competition. Too much sunlight hardens the flesh, making it prone to fractures. It’s not uncommon for giant pumpkins to have custom-built personal sunshades. North America’s giant-pumpkin capitals—Half Moon Bay, Nova Scotia, and Minnesota—have nature on their side, with low humidity and nighttime temperatures. Cooler nights mean less respiration, which means less wasted energy.

Yet nature bests even the world’s champions. This year, Gienger couldn’t break the record he set with Michael Jordan; he blames cold and wet weather, which made it harder to feed micronutrients to his pumpkin, Rudy. (At 2,471 pounds, it still won the Half Moon Bay competition.) And no matter how big a pumpkin grows, it needs to pack a few extra pounds for the road: Once they’re cut from the vine, they rapidly lose their weight in water. A pumpkin can drop roughly 10 pounds in a single day.

All of the experts I spoke with believe that 3,000 pounds is within reach. “It’s still an upward trend,” said Grande, who noted that a 2,907-pounder has already been recorded, albeit a damaged one. Pumpkin genetics are continually improving; more 2,000-pounders have been grown in the past year than ever before, according to Grande. Growers are constantly developing new practices. Each year, the Great Pumpkin Conference holds an international summit for growers and scientists to trade techniques (last year’s was in Belgium, and this year’s will be in the Green Bay Packers’ Lambeau Field). Shifting goals have precipitated new (and expensive) methods: Carbon dioxide and gibberellic acid are being used as growth stimulants; some pumpkins are fully grown in greenhouses.

The reason that giant-pumpkin weights increased 20-fold in half a century is the same reason that runners keep running faster marathons, that skyscrapers keep clawing at the sky, and that people spend so much on anti-aging. To push nature’s limits is a reliably exhilarating endeavor; to be the one to succeed is a point of pride. Food companies, in particular, build their entire businesses on developing the biggest and best. Wild strawberries are the size of a nickel, but domesticated ones are as huge as Ping-Pong balls. Industrial breeding turned the scrawny, two-and-a-half-pound chickens of the 1920s into today’s six-pounders. There’s still room for them to grow: Strawberries can get as big as a saucer, and the heaviest chicken on record was a 22-pounder named Weirdo. But foods sold commercially are subject to other constraints on growth, such as transportation, storage, processing, and customer preference. Unusually big foods are associated with less flavor, and their size can be off-putting. When it comes to food, there is such a thing as too big.

Giant pumpkins, by contrast, have a singular purpose: to become as heavy as possible. They don’t have to be beautiful, taste good, or withstand transport, because they are not food. When companies develop boundary-pushing crops and animals, that tends to be an isolationist enterprise, shrouded in secrecy. But in the giant-pumpkin community, there is less incentive to guard seeds and techniques. Most competitions are low-stakes local affairs, and nobody ever became rich off giant pumpkins, not even Howard Dill.

Breaking records is largely seen as a communal effort. “The secret to our success is that we are a sharing community,” Grande said. In a few contests, the investment is worth it—the Half Moon Bay prize for world-record-breakers is $30,000—but “it’s not a get-rich-quick scheme,” Estadt told me. People do it, he said, “for the thrill of the win.”

All of the pumpkin experts I spoke with acknowledged that there must be a limit. But nobody has any idea what it is. Four thousand pounds, 5,000—as far as growers can tell, these are as feasible as any other goal. Every milestone they reach marks another human achievement, another triumph over nature. But even the most majestic of pumpkins inevitably meets the same fate: devoured by livestock, and returned to the earth.

In the fall of 2021, Tammi Kromenaker started looking for a new home for her North Dakota abortion clinic. For more than 20 years, Red River Women’s Clinic had provided abortion care to the Fargo area, most of that time as the state’s only provider. But now Kromenaker, the practice’s owner and director, was moving it just across the state line to Minnesota. “We had seen the writing on the wall,” she told me. A few months earlier, the Supreme Court had announced that it would take up Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, and North Dakota had a trigger law that would almost completely ban abortion if the justices ruled in favor of Dobbs.

“We closed on a new building at 3 p.m. the day before they overturned Roe,” Kromenaker recalled. Over the next 47 days, with the help of $1 million raised through GoFundMe, she oversaw a frantic move and remodel, sneaking around in a hat and sunglasses to keep the new location a secret; another planned clinic had just been set on fire in Wyoming. Meanwhile, Kromenaker’s clinic sued the state of North Dakota to block the trigger ban.

Last month, a North Dakota judge struck down the state’s abortion ban in response to Red River’s suit. Kromenaker could now return to providing abortions in Fargo, but she told me she has no plans to. That leaves the state with no dedicated abortion providers.

In the aftermath of the Dobbs decision, abortion access has been all but obliterated in 14 states. Perhaps the most obvious consequence is what has happened to brick-and-mortar abortion providers: Clinics have closed, while physicians have fled restrictive states or left medicine altogether. In communities across the country, abortion pills have also been heavily restricted. A push to expand the rights of a fetus has coincided with a rise in pregnancy-related prosecutions, most of which have nothing to do with abortion—210 women were criminally charged in 12 states in the year after Dobbs, the highest number of such cases in a single year since 1973, according to one report.

The backlash has been forceful. Since Dobbs, citizens in six states have voted for ballot measures protecting abortion access. Next month, abortion rights will again be on the ballot, in 10 states. In the first presidential election since Roe was overturned, abortion has become a defining issue. Many Republican politicians, including the party’s presidential nominee, Donald Trump, have attempted to court female voters by wavering on their previous anti-abortion positions. (Trump’s wife, Melania, released a memoir this month, in which she underscored her support for abortion rights.) Meanwhile, Democrats, especially the presidential nominee, Kamala Harris, have campaigned heavily on restoring national reproductive rights. But a Democratic woman in the White House or new federal abortion protections won’t turn back the clock to 2021. Call it the Dobbs legacy, or the Dobbs hangover—the effects of America’s eroded abortion access will linger for years, if not decades.

This summer, on the two-year anniversary of the Dobbs decision, a coalition of groups including Planned Parenthood and the American Civil Liberties Union announced that they were committing $100 million to Abortion Access Now, a campaign to pass federal legislation guaranteeing the right to abortion. Harris has floated one potential path: scrapping the filibuster to push reproductive protections through Congress. (That would probably require Democrats to control both chambers, which does not look likely.) If new federal protections were passed, “you would see overnight relief in a lot of places, depending on the nature of the legislation,” Kimberly Inez McGuire, a co-chair of Abortion Access Now and the executive director of Unite for Reproductive and Gender Equity, told me.

New federal protections, however, wouldn’t instantly undo the tangle of abortion restrictions that some states began enacting even before Dobbs was decided. Reproductive health in America is governed by a complex web of laws, regulations, and court decisions at the local, state, and federal levels. When the Supreme Court ended constitutional protections for abortion on June 24, 2022, trigger laws designed to ban abortion went into effect. By the end of the year, states had enacted 50 new abortion restrictions, many of them resulting in near-total bans. No federal law could immediately undo all of these restrictions at once. Around the country, clinics closed, moved, or quit providing abortions; as of March, the U.S. had 42 fewer clinics than in 2020, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive-health research and policy group.

With so many barriers in place, some medical providers have decided that living and working in states with restrictions isn’t worth the emotional and professional toll. In one recent study of ob-gyns in Texas, where abortion is banned with few exceptions, 13 percent of respondents said they plan to retire early, 21 percent said they either plan to or have thought about leaving to practice in another state, and 2 percent said they have already left. An analysis by the Association of American Medical Colleges found that applications for ob-gyn residency programs in Alabama, which has a total ban except in cases of “serious health risk” to a pregnant woman, dropped 21.2 percent in the first full cycle after the Dobbs decision.

None of these policies has reduced the number of abortions performed nationally since Dobbs—in fact, the number has increased—but their consequences have ricocheted far beyond abortion. As obstetricians have fled restrictive states, for example, access to other gynecological care has become strained, too. And this month, Louisiana reclassified the two drugs used in medication abortions as Schedule IV controlled substances, a category typically reserved for drugs with a potential for dependency, such as Xanax and Valium. Mifepristone and misoprostol, which can be prescribed by telehealth, have played a significant role in abortion access since Dobbs. In Louisiana’s bid to further restrict the drugs, the state has potentially limited their use in other routine applications, such as treating miscarriages, inducing labor, and stopping potentially fatal postpartum hemorrhaging.

Even if new federal abortion protections were passed into law tomorrow, restoring nationwide access would still likely take significant time. Clinics, for instance, need real estate and doctors and lots and lots of capital to open or move—that’s partly why, after a 2016 Supreme Court case struck down a Texas law designed to force clinics out of business, the number of providers in the state a year later remained a fraction of what it was before. After Alabama banned abortion in 2022, WAWC Healthcare, in Tuscaloosa, remained open to provide contraception and prenatal care but eventually lost its abortion provider, says Robin Marty, WAWC’s executive director. Such positions might be filled by recent graduates, but the pool of qualified providers in restrictive states will remain small for years thanks to plummeting residency enrollments—most doctors tend to stay in the state where they do their residency.

Recent legal fights in Ohio provide a glimpse of how even sweeping abortion protections don’t automatically undo the effects of restrictions, and could lead to new ones. Last year, Ohio voters approved a constitutional amendment enshrining the right to an abortion. But pro-abortion-rights advocates in the state are still fighting to throw out the state’s six-week ban and a law banning telemedicine in medication abortions, among other restrictions. Meanwhile, a state legislator has introduced a new bill that would withhold state funding from cities and counties that provide funding for local groups that provide abortion-support services such as gas money for patients. The immediate result of any national abortion protection would probably be a protracted legal battle. “Every state has a different assemblage of abortion restrictions,” Inez McGuire said. “A lot of that is going to be fought out through our judicial system. That is a daunting prospect.”

Roe’s downfall also opened up space for anti-abortion activists to renew their battle to recognize the rights of the fetus as a person. In February, when the Alabama Supreme Court found that IVF embryos are legally children, anti-abortion activists widely celebrated the decision as a sign that the country was ready to engage in this debate. As support for fetal rights has grown, pregnant people have found their bodily autonomy curtailed even when they’re not deciding whether to continue a pregnancy: According to the nonprofit group Pregnancy Justice, of the 210 cases of pregnant people who faced criminal charges, just five mentioned abortion. The majority alleged only substance abuse. In one, police charged an overdosing pregnant woman with child neglect after administering Narcan.

Abortion advocates, too, are adjusting to the new reality. Abortion access had been whittled away for decades before Dobbs was decided. But now the constitutional right to an abortion in America is no longer being infringed upon; it just doesn’t exist. Several clinic directors told me that it’s clear to them now that no new law will ever provide unassailable protection. When North Dakota’s ban was struck down by a district court last month, it wasn’t the first time; the same judge blocked a nearly identical abortion ban in 2022, eventually prompting the state legislature to repeal it and pass a new one with minor changes. Just this month, Georgia’s Supreme Court restored a six-week abortion ban that a lower court had overturned while it considers an appeal. “There is no finish line here,” says Katie Quinonez-Alonzo, the executive director of Women’s Health Center, which opened a branch of its West Virginia clinic three and a half hours away in Maryland after Dobbs. “This is work that needs to be done forever.” Kristi Hamrick, the vice president of media and policy for Students for Life of America, told me that the group already has a “Roe 2.0 Rollback plan” in place, ready to deploy at the state and federal levels after the election. “We are prepared legislatively and legally to address the human rights issue of the day, no matter which way the election turns out,” she told me.

Some clinics are tired of fighting. “If you had asked me a few weeks ago, I would have said we were completely ready to go should abortion somehow return to Alabama,” Robin Marty told me. Now she’s not so sure. “We worked in extraordinarily hostile conditions” before Dobbs, Marty said. Clinic staff faced daily protesters, in the parking lot and sometimes even at the back door. Anti-abortion activists filed malpractice complaints against them, reported them to the fire department for allegedly having too many people in the clinic, and alleged health-privacy violations after digging through the clinic’s dumpster and finding a piece of paper from a patient’s file. “Having abortion become illegal and then having it return would be even more dangerous right now. If it comes back, they’re going to be even angrier,” Marty said.

When Red River first opened, in 1998, the threat of extinction was already in the air. The previous director had chosen to name the clinic after a body of water that runs between North Dakota and Minnesota, so that the reference would still make sense on the other side of the state border. When Kromenaker finally made the move, her life became easier virtually overnight, because Minnesota was among the states that had passed abortion protections after Dobbs. “We ended up in a state where providing this care is more straightforward, more patient-centered and with less stigmatizing restrictions,” Kromenaker said. “We would never take a step back and re-inflict those restrictions on ourselves.”

The United States cannot easily go back to the pre-Dobbs status quo. In the past two years, too much has changed—more than 100 new legal provisions, dozens of clinics closed, and a cultural gulf that has grown ever wider. For both abortion-rights supporters and opponents, only one possibility remains: to inhabit the reality we all live in now.

The loaf in my fridge is the furthest thing from Wonder Bread. Each slice is made of organic whole-wheat flour and has four grams of fiber and just two measly grams of added sugar. It’s studded with so many seeds that I’m always worried about them getting stuck in my teeth. The only service this bread can provide is as a hummus sandwich; it tastes too healthy for a grilled cheese, an egg sandwich, or any other handheld creation.

But here’s the thing about my whole-grain, seed-coated loaf of bread: Apparently it counts as an ultra-processed food, just like Twinkies, Coke, and sugary cereals. I was faced with this bread conundrum earlier this month, when I attempted to cut down on ultra-processed foods after hearing so much about their harms. Almost every food is processed in some way—milk is conventionally pasteurized, tomatoes are canned—but ultra-processed foods, or UPFs, are typically made in factories with industrial ingredients, such as emulsifiers and artificial flavors. And they seem to be making us sick. A recent review found “convincing evidence” that ultra-processed food consumption is tied to type 2 diabetes and fatal heart disease.

According to the rubric created by Carlos Monteiro, the Brazilian epidemiologist who coined ultra-processed foods, my loaf of bread was to be avoided: It was mass produced, laced with an industrial additive, and sliced. In an email, Monteiro confirmed to me that the bread was a UPF primarily because of the industrial additive: wheat gluten. It’s often used to strengthen dough before it is baked. If you got bread from the grocery store like I did, it’s almost certainly also a UPF. But perhaps that says more about the perplexing, arbitrary criteria for ultra-processed foods than anything about bread itself.

Exactly what qualifies as an ultra-processed food is not always clear. Monteiro’s rubric, called NOVA, separates foods into four categories. “Unprocessed foods” include raw vegetables and fruits. “Processed culinary ingredients” are things like cooking oils and honey. “Processed foods” are things like canned vegetables. And “ultra-processed foods” include Skittles, fish sticks, and other junk food, as well as flavored yogurts, and infant formula. Drawing the line between ultra-processed and processed foods is especially tricky. NOVA doesn’t lay out specific criteria for, say, bread versus soda, but it does have detailed descriptions of how to spot an ultra-processed food, such as foods that include ingredients “never or rarely used in kitchens,” such as high-fructose corn syrup and hydrolysed proteins.

But even when you read Monteiro’s countless papers outlining the NOVA classification, categorizing food isn’t as simple as you might think. NOVA has called out “pre-sliced bread” as an example of an ultra-processed product, but I couldn’t tell whether slicing meant automatically that a food was ultra-processed, or it was just a signal that a food might be ultra-processed. (With my bread, Monteiro told me that the presence of wheat gluten was “the only marker” of ultra-processing.) But added gluten is hardly the same as hydrolysed proteins or industrial sweeteners. The fact that a single ingredient—and one as benign as wheat gluten—could lump my bread together with Twinkies made me question the credibility of the entire system.

The attributes to look for in bread, like slicing, felt so arbitrary that I started to wonder if I was applying the criteria incorrectly. Nutritionists I contacted struggled too. Marion Nestle, an emeritus professor of nutrition at New York University who has defended the NOVA system, told me she wasn’t sure whether the bread I was eating qualifies as an ultra-processed food, because, despite having an industrial additive mixed in, it was made mostly from actual whole foods. Even Monteiro seemed confused at first. When I sent him the ingredient list, he first told me that my loaf was just processed (not ultra-processed), until I asked him specifically about the wheat gluten. He then argued that the bread “is much better than the average ultra-processed bread.” But the idea of UPFs is to try to avoid the category entirely.

The Monteiro’s team appears to have long struggled with the bread quandary as well. Nearly every paper they write on the system classifies bread as ultra-processed, but they’ve argued that “bread, even in typically cheapened degraded forms, is relatively innocuous.” In 2015, the team classified “french bread” as “processed,” but “sliced bread” as “ultraprocessed.”

Even if I accepted that my bread was ultra-processed, I still couldn’t understand why it was so bad. Much of the research into the health effects of bread has focused on the nutrients—or lack thereof—in certain products, especially white bread. Mostly, researchers fear that particular additives in bread have not been extensively studied, and that processed bread is easier to chew and swallow, thus prompting people to eat more.

I wasn’t even a week into my attempt to cut out UPFs, and I was already feeling exasperated. The situation was made even worse when I went back to the grocery store in hopes of finding a replacement. At first glance, no bread seemed to fit the bill. Although the Real Bread Campaign, an advocacy group focused on reducing consumption of ultra-processed bread, recommends buying natural sourdough from a local baker, or making it yourself, that’s hardly useful advice for the many Americans who don’t even have easy access to a grocery store, let alone a boulangerie. The NOVA system seems, at first glance, like the world’s simplest diet: All you have to do is avoid certain foods. But when that list gets so broad that you can’t eat a slice of whole-grain bread, it becomes unworkable. The same goes for yogurts and cereals—the majority of which are banned too.

The bread debacle can seem like a straw man designed to make the whole system look pointless and unworkable. Some food scientists have criticized NOVA for being overly broad and unfairly maligning some healthy foods, but those arguments are also made in bad faith by big food companies to defend an industry that has made billions off making people sick. Monteiro told me that zeroing in on a single food “focuses on the trees and loses the forest.” But the entire exercise—the confusing guidelines, and the lack of clear articulation for why certain attributes of foods are worth avoiding—was weighing on me.

This isn’t all NOVA’s fault. The clumsy classifications underscore an even deeper problem with our knowledge—or lack thereof—of UPFs. In short, we don’t know why ultra-processed foods are so bad for us. A recent clinical trial, in which participants ate either ultra-processed or unprocessed diets that were matched for certain key nutrients, found that something beyond the nutrient facts in UPFs makes people eat more and gain weight. What that is remains unclear. Until we understand it, advice on which foods to eat, and which to avoid, will always seem arbitrary and, in the case of bread, a bit silly.

I did eventually find some bread in the supermarket that definitely wasn’t ultra-processed. The loaf, if you could call it that, had been imported from Germany. It had just four ingredients, and it smelled like dead grass. There were no air pockets or delectably crunchy crust. When toasted, it didn’t get crispy; it just got hotter and more pungent. For now, I’m going to stick to my regular old healthy bread.

Ibogaine, a psychedelic compound found in plants native to central Africa, is notorious for the intensity of the trips it induces. Those who consume it are plunged into vivid hallucinations, often preceded by a loud buzzing noise, that last between 24 and 48 hours. In one case report, a 29-year-old woman from Gabon met her dead relatives, and later looked into a mirror and saw a woman crying and holding a baby. A middle-aged American man experienced himself from the perspective of a “Mexican little boy and I’m praying on the side of a road.” When he opened his eyes, one of the people in the room appeared to resemble “a big praying mantis.”

Late last year, Arthur Juliani, a 32-year-old research scientist at the Institute for Advanced Consciousness Studies, was decidedly not taking ibogaine, but was ingesting something similar. He had obtained tabernanthalog, a research molecule designed to mimic ibogaine’s chemical structure and potential effects on neuroplasticity, but not cause any hallucinations. About 45 minutes after he swallowed his dose, Juliani started to feel a kind of “spacious attention,” he told me. On a walk outside, he found that anywhere he looked appeared like a “perfectly framed photograph, distinct and standing on its own.” When he went home for lunch, he ate a bell pepper “in the slowest and most intentional manner I had ever eaten a vegetable in my life.”

Tabernanthalog is part of a wave of drug development that draws inspiration from psychedelics while attempting to remove or refine their trips. Many of the compounds involved are targeted toward some medical purpose; tabernanthalog, for example, is being researched as a treatment for substance-use disorder. Such work has led to debates among psychedelic therapists and researchers about how important a drug experience is for mental-health outcomes. But Juliani’s encounter with tabernanthalog provokes a more complex question: If novel psychedelics and “pseudo-delics” tickle brain receptors in a way that changes people’s subjective experience—perhaps in a manner less intense than traditional psychedelics, and more on par with prescription or over-the-counter drugs—can one confidently say that the people who take them aren’t tripping? As the pursuit of non-hallucinogenic psychedelics advances, the definition of a trip as something induced by a discrete set of substances is set to evolve alongside them.

These days, the hottest new psychedelic drugs might be the ones that feel as close to nothing as possible. In 2022, scientists made a trip-free analogue of LSD to research as an antidepressant. Another is being investigated as a treatment for cluster headaches. This month, the biotech company Bright Minds Biosciences announced that its new compound, which interacts with the same serotonin receptors as psilocybin and LSD but doesn’t cause hallucinations, had a “similar efficacy” to morphine at reducing pain. The federal Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is developing novel compounds for chronic depression and post-traumatic stress that are not hallucinogenic but are inspired by psychedelic compounds.

These compounds are mostly being tested in research labs and administered in clinical trials, but curious psychonauts have said online that they’ve purchased their own samples to see just how non-hallucinogenic they are. Josh Hardman, the founder of the publication Psychedelic Alpha, collected online reports from a dozen people who claimed to have tried tabernanthalog. Many of the resulting experiences sound trip-like or trip-adjacent. One person said it was “basically the body high of psychedelics without the visuals.” Another said, “Everything had a deeper layer of thinking, almost like I had unlocked a childish part of my mind that I had long forgotten.” (David E. Olson, a biochemist at UC Davis and the co-founder of Delix Therapeutics, the company developing tabernanthalog, said that he considers it dangerous to order drugs made by “clandestine chemists” on the internet because “there is no way to guarantee the identity, purity, or dose of the drug,” and that anecdotal reports can be untrustworthy.)

Defining a psychedelic experience was difficult even before the introduction of these novel compounds. The word comes from the psychiatrist Humphry Osmond, who argued in a 1957 letter to Aldous Huxley that similar effects could arise from drug use, epilepsy, schizophrenia, starvation, vitamin deficiency, yoga practices, and dervish dancing. “It is all one to me,” Osmond wrote. Aidan Lyon, a philosopher at Leiden University in the Netherlands and the author of Psychedelic Experience: Revealing the Mind, has argued that breath work, meditation, and even engaging with a piece of art could count as psychedelic experiences. (In “museum dosing,” people do both: look at art while tripping.)

Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes, a philosopher of mind and metaphysics at the University of Exeter, in the U.K., agrees with Osmond that a trip should be defined by phenomenology, not pharmacology. For example, he told me, “A number of people have tried to define psychedelic as operating on the serotonin receptors, but that immediately can’t be true because it would exclude salvia divinorum”—a hallucinogenic plant in the mint family. Mike Jay, a historian and the author of Psychonauts: Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind, told me that the effects of a psychedelic analogue may be construed as either trips or side effects, depending on when and how people experience them.

These debates are more than academic. Earlier this year, the FDA rejected an application for a psychedelic drug, MDMA, to be used to assist psychotherapy for PTSD. The biotechnology company Compass Pathways is poised to seek approval for psilocybin as a medication for treatment-resistant depression as soon as 2025. Medical interest in hallucinogenic drugs is currently higher than it’s been in decades, and in order to understand how psychedelic-assisted therapy might help or harm people, researchers are eager to tease apart psychedelic experience from any underlying biological effects. Perhaps certain aspects of a trip could improve or reduce a drug’s efficacy against, say, depression or PTSD; if so, researchers need to be able to measure and define those effects to design successful treatment protocols. The company Mindstate Design Labs even hopes to isolate and enhance the parts of a psychedelic trip that are therapeutically useful. If they’re successful, you could perhaps one day take a pill just for the psychedelic-induced sensation of limitless unity, without the ego loss that sometimes accompanies it.

In a recent Nature Reviews Psychology paper, Johns Hopkins researchers argued that the field needs a new, rigorously validated scale of psychedelic experiences to accurately capture what people go through when they’re tripping. There’s too much variation among the existing measures, David B. Yaden, one of the study’s authors and a co-writer of The Varieties of Spiritual Experience, told me. The 5-Dimensional Altered States of Consciousness Questionnaire scale, for example, includes the measure of “oceanic boundlessness,” but it’s not mentioned in the Inventory of Nonordinary Experiences, which includes visions of ghosts in its rubric.

Non-hallucinogenic, consciousness-altering experiences, like those reported to result from tabernanthalog use, sound far away from such mystical experiences, and more akin to how some people might feel after drinking a glass of wine or a strong cup of coffee. “Many of us are just filling our bodies with substances that cause acute alterations in consciousness of various degrees,” says Chuck Raison, a psychiatry professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Millions of Americans take prescription drugs that affect their psychology, and their numbers are only growing. Psychedelic-inspired drugs might end up resembling many other FDA-approved psychoactive pharmaceuticals, or the wide variety of other things with which humans regularly modify our consciousness, such as supplements, caffeine, alcohol, meditation, exercise, sex, and sleep (or lack thereof).

I told Raison that I’m sensitive to caffeine, and if I drank three cups of coffee, I would likely have an intense physical and mental experience—would that be a trip? The real marker of a trip, he told me, is that it “is different from one’s typical waking awareness in such a way that it produces longer-term changes in perspective or behavior.” After my coffee, I might feel high, he said. “A day later, other than thinking about how odd it was that the coffee hit you so hard, would your life change? The experience would come and go. But psychedelics tend not to do that.” A trip, whatever it is, stays with people. Juliani’s time under the (alleged) influence of tabernanthalog certainly seems to have stayed with him. “I entered into what was clearly an altered state of consciousness, and I stayed there for some number of hours, and I came out of it,” he told me. It was, he added, “a reminder that there isn’t just one kind of consciousness,” but many to inhabit.

In his 1902 book The Varieties of Religious Experience, the psychologist William James wrote that one quality of a truly transformative experience is that it’s ineffable. Sjöstedt-Hughes told me something similar. “One thing that certainly distinguishes psychedelic experience from ordinary states of consciousness is the fact that you can have experiences for which there exist no words,” he said. Researchers will continue trying to break down that ineffability, but in the meantime, Yaden said, identifying a trip might ultimately come down to what he’s called the “orgasm test”: If you have to ask if you had one, you probably didn’t.

Taken on its own, the number is astonishing. According to the CDC, as of August 2023, 40.3 percent of U.S. adults—some 100 million people—met the clinical definition for obesity. But this same estimate, which is based on National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey numbers gathered between 2021 and 2023, also seems remarkably low compared with prior readouts. For the first time in more than a decade, NHANES data hint that our obesity epidemic is no longer growing.

The new estimate is almost two percentage points lower than the government’s previous one, which covered the period from 2017 to 2020 and suggested that 41.9 percent of Americans had obesity. The apparent drop has set off a wave of optimism: A recent editorial in The Washington Post, for instance, celebrated the fact that “the obesity crisis might have plateaued or begun to ease,” and in the Financial Times, the data journalist John Burn-Murdoch used his own analysis of the NHANES data to argue that America is already several years beyond its point of peak obesity. Both outlets suggest that this apparent change in public fortune has resulted from the spread of powerful new drugs for treating diabetes and obesity: Ozempic, Mounjaro, and the rest.

The past few years have certainly brought dramatic changes—historic breakthroughs, even—to the treatment of weight-related chronic illness. GLP-1s seem to be effective at improving people’s health, and they’re clearly capable of causing major weight loss. According to a survey conducted by KFF at the end of April, 6 percent of all American adults are currently on these medications, and as supply shortages ease and drug prices come down, that proportion is likely to increase—by a lot. It only stands to reason that, at some point before too long, their effects will be apparent in our public-health statistics. But are they now, already? For all the expectations that are attached to the present age of GLP-1s, the past should be a source of caution. This is not the first time that obesity’s relentless spread has seemed to be abating, and it’s not the first time that such news has fit into a tidy narrative of progress in public health. And so far, at least, claims of peak obesity, like predictions of “peak oil,” have been prone to falling flat.

Not so long ago, the NHANES data appeared consistent with a different source of hope. Starting back in 2008, analyses began to show, first in children and then in adults, that obesity rates were leveling off. “Americans, at least as a group, may have reached their peak of obesity,” The New York Times asserted in 2010; two years later, NPR reported that “the nation’s obesity epidemic appears to have hit a plateau.”

Then, as now, experts had a convenient story to explain the numbers. Barack Obama’s administration was working to realize his campaign promise that the nation’s excess weight could be reduced, if not erased, by targeting what was by then described as America’s “toxic food environment.” Revised nutrition labels put a spotlight on “added sugars,” new rules for food assistance promoted eating fruits and vegetables, insurers were encouraged to set up wellness programs, and chain restaurants were required to post the caloric content of their meals.

For a time, this new approach—based less on treating individuals than fixing social policy—appeared to be effective. Food manufacturers committed to improving the formulations of their products. Americans stopped drinking so much soda and consuming so much sugar overall. And, sure enough, NHANES data were showing that the number of people with obesity had stabilized. This seemed connected, at the time. “We’ve halted the progress of the obesity epidemic,” William Dietz, an obesity physician-researcher who was then a CDC official, told the Times. Dietz, who had played a central role in creating the idea that obesity was an “epidemic” in the first place, chalked up that achievement to increased awareness of the problem and improvements to school-lunch programs.

Yet this progress turned out to be short-lived. In retrospect, the obesity-rate “plateaus” during those years now appear to be a trend-line blip, if not a statistical mirage. That’s not to say the CDC’s analyses were mistaken. The survey’s error bars were wide, and in those years, any increase in the numbers was not statistically significant. But over time a clear and upward drift became unmistakable. As of 2004, NHANES data showed that about one-third of American adults qualified as having obesity. By 2018, the proportion had moved past 40 percent.

Now Cynthia Ogden, the CDC’s branch chief for NHANES analysis, and her colleagues are reporting another flattening, set against a decades-long increase. Once again the error bars are wide, which is why the CDC’s data brief asserts that the apparent drop in the obesity rate, from 41.9 percent to 40.3 percent, is better understood as a new plateau. “We’re not going up at the same level as we did,” Susan Yanovski, a co-director of the NIH Office of Obesity Research, told me, “but I don’t think we can necessarily say that it’s a real decrease.” In the meantime, the new data clearly show that the rate of severe obesity among U.S. adults has continued to increase.

If we are indeed at a new plateau for Americans generally, then its cause is not yet clear. David Ludwig, an endocrinologist at Boston Children’s Hospital who has been skeptical of earlier “peak obesity” claims, told me that new drugs such as Ozempic certainly should be having some effect by now. “Even if a notable minority is taking the drugs and losing weight, that’s going to alter the shape of the curve, the prevalence rates, and related statistics,” he said. “So it would be surprising, and very depressing, for us not to see any impact of these extremely costly drugs by this point.” Burn-Murdoch, who seems to be working from the same assumption, points out that the recent improvement in obesity numbers looks better among people with college degrees than anyone else. This is just what you might expect, he argues, because the uptake of GLP-1 drugs is generally associated with education.

Yet if the Ozempic effect really were showing up in NHANES data, you’d also expect it to appear first in women, who are much more likely than men to be taking GLP-1s for obesity. This is not borne out in the data: America’s obesity rates appear to have come down (or leveled off) more quickly for men in the past few years. We also don’t know how many Americans were actually taking the drugs at the time of the latest surveys. I asked Ogden when she might expect the drugs to start moving the needle: What proportion of Americans would have to be taking GLP-1s for the national obesity rate to change? “That’s a good question,” she said. “All we can say is what these estimates show us right now, and that we really do need more data to see what’s really happening.”

Yanovski was similarly wary of ascribing any recent changes in the trend to GLP-1s. She suggested that other factors might be at play: fewer people eating out; reduced sugar consumption; shrinkflation in the food industry, which results in smaller average portion sizes. (In principle, COVID might have been a factor too, because the disease is much more deadly for those with severe obesity. In that case, though, you’d expect the number of Americans in that category to have dropped, when in fact it has gone up.) And both Yanovski and Ludwig have long been floating the possibility that, even if the food environment remains as toxic as ever, the effects could start to wane as a function of biology. Almost half the variability in body weight is genetic, Yanovski told me, and that fact in itself could put a ceiling on the long-term trend. “You reach a level in which the population, everybody who is at risk for developing obesity, has already done so,” Ludwig said.

The final possibility is that this new “plateau” will soon reveal itself to be yet another narrow step on a staircase that is always going up—just another artifact of noise, or else a temporary aberration. Having covered these reports for 15 years, I feel safe in saying that some degree of pessimism should be the default setting.

Then again, having covered these reports for 15 years, I’ve never seen an intervention as dramatic as Ozempic, in terms of its power and popularity. Earlier this year, I profiled Barb Herrera, a woman who has had obesity throughout her life, and has tried almost every intervention to reverse it: diets, fen-phen, bariatric surgery. In 2022, her body mass index was measured at 75; after many months of taking GLP-1 drugs, she has lost 255 pounds. If Herrera were included in the next NHANES survey, she’d be recorded with a BMI of less than 28—below the diagnostic threshold for obesity—and classified as “overweight.”

How many other Americans have crossed that line? We’ll soon find out. The next NHANES data surveys are slated to begin in January, Ogden told me, with the first results due back in early 2027, including, this time, information on people’s use of prescription drugs. If the nation has really passed the point of peak obesity—and if the GLP-1 drugs really are responsible—then we’ll know soon enough.

For all the upheaval that followed the overturn of Roe v. Wade, it did not dramatically change the most basic fact about abortions in America: the number. Since 2022, abortions in the United States have held steady—even increased slightly, based on the best of limited data. One major reason? The rise of abortion pills, which are now used in the majority of abortions in America. Every month, thousands of women in states where abortion is banned have been able to discreetly order the pills by mail and take them at home. Even with abortion bans in place, the availability of these pills makes these rules less absolute than the anti-abortion movement would like.

“Abortion pills pose the single greatest threat to unborn children in a post-Roe world,” according to Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s conservative policy playbook. They are “death by mail,” according to Students for Life; Kristan Hawkins, the organization’s president, told me that “it’s a travesty what has unfolded under the Biden-Harris FDA.” And the anti-abortion movement is formulating plans to target the pills through a number of legal and political avenues—some of which could apply regardless of who is elected president next month.

Abortion pills had accounted for a steadily growing share of abortions in the U.S. for years, but in 2021, the FDA made them significantly easier to obtain: The pills are actually two different drugs, mifepristone and misoprostol, and the agency nixed a long-standing requirement to prescribe mifepristone only in person. With that, abortion pills became available by mail. The FDA cited COVID-related risks in its 2021 decision, but anti-abortion advocates immediately decried the move—and the policy has remained in place beyond the pandemic. After the overturning of Roe in 2022, 21 states passed new abortion bans or restrictions, but more than a dozen states, including New York and California, took steps to keep abortion pills available by mail, even in restricted states, by passing “shield laws.” These laws explicitly protect doctors, midwives, and nurse practitioners who use telehealth to prescribe the pills by mail across state lines.

Since then, an average of 6,000 to 7,000 people a month living in states with complete or six-week bans have been able to get abortion pills via telehealth, according to data from the Society for Family Planning, which surveys abortion providers in the United States. This number does not include people who had an abortion outside the formal health-care system, for instance by using pills ordered from overseas. And in states where abortion remains legal, the number of abortions—and the proportion involving abortion pills—also rose from 2020 to 2023, according to Guttmacher Institute data. (The number of women traveling to other states for abortions also doubled in this time, which is another reason abortions have not significantly fallen post-Roe.)

“The anti-abortion movement hasn’t quite figured out what to do with this,” says Greer Donley, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh, who helped draft the nation’s first shield law. The shield laws have not yet been directly challenged in court. And when anti-abortion groups tried to go after the FDA’s original approval of mifepristone via a lawsuit, the Supreme Court dismissed the case this year for lack of standing.

Still, last week, three states—Missouri, Kansas, and Idaho—sought to revive that case, asking courts to reinstate certain restrictions on mifepristone. And although a President Kamala Harris would be likely to stick to the current FDA policy for abortion pills, a Trump administration could change those policies directly. It could, as my colleague Rose Horowitch has reported, curtail access to mifepristone simply by reinstating the in-person requirement for dispensing the drug—or just pull the FDA’s approval of mifepristone altogether. (In August, Donald Trump expressed openness to cracking down on abortion pills; his running mate, J. D. Vance, walked that position back a few days later.) Anti-abortion activists are hoping that Trump will enforce the long-dormant Comstock Act, a 150-year-old anti-obscenity law that bans the mailing of material “intended for producing abortion, or for any indecent or immoral use.” This could criminalize the mailing of abortion pills, even without the passage of a federal abortion ban, though anti-abortion activists have also suggested that Trump keep quiet about Comstock until he wins. (Trump, for his part, refused to share his views on the Comstock Act for months, before finally saying that he would not enforce it.)

Regardless of who becomes president, the anti-abortion movement is devising ways to restrict abortion pills through state governments too. Shield laws, for example, could be directly challenged if a red-state prosecutor goes after a doctor prescribing the pills from a shield-law state. Linda Prine, a doctor with the nonprofit Aid Access, which sends pills to states with abortion bans, told me she no longer leaves her home state of New York. Providers working under shield laws, she said, are all being “super careful.”

Anti-abortion groups could also test the limits of shield laws in more indirect ways. In Texas, says John Seago, the president of Texas Right to Life, pro-abortion groups have put up billboards advertising abortion pills: “You can go to people putting up the billboard. That’s aiding and abetting.” His group has also encouraged Texas lawmakers to introduce new laws that create liability for internet-service providers or credit-card-processing companies involved in abortion-pill transactions.

In Louisiana, where abortion is already banned, a law went into effect this month further restricting both mifepristone and misoprostol as “controlled dangerous substances.” The law is named after a Louisiana woman whose husband secretly slipped misoprostol into her drinks, and anti-abortion activists have used cases like hers to argue that the pills need more regulation. “A faceless, doctorless process to obtain abortion drugs enables abusers to poison or coerce women and girls,” Emily Davis, the vice president of communications for Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, said in a statement. But the law is also affecting routine medical care unrelated to abortion: The two drugs are commonly used in miscarriage and postpartum management, and hospitals in Louisiana have been doing timed drills to make sure staff can quickly access the locked closets where the medications now need to be kept.

Anti-abortion groups are also trying creative approaches to regulating abortion pills—such as through environmental regulations. Hawkins told me that Students for Life will be working with state legislatures next year on laws such as those requiring the disposal of fetal tissue from abortions as medical waste. These laws are designed to put the onus on the provider of abortion pills—presumably a doctor operating under a shield law—and states could then go after the provider for environmental-cleanup fees or fines, Kristi Hamrick, the organization’s vice president of media and policy, told me.

The new prevalence of abortion pills has opened up a new frontier, and the political and legal fights ahead may look quite different from those in the past. “We innovate, and we keep coming back. Our work is definitely just beginning,” Hawkins said. Seago, in Texas, told me he does not expect every attempt to restrict abortion pills to work. In the decades before Roe was overturned, he said, states introduced a number of different restrictions to limit access to abortion. Some worked. Some didn’t. With abortion pills, he told me, “we’re not expecting a silver bullet.” But activists like him are demanding that lawmakers try to stop their use nonetheless.