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World War II forced transformative market changes when supplies from Europe and elsewhere were cut off. Many companies expanded and moved across the Hudson to set up new factories

In nature, flavor comes as a sophisticated mix of hundreds, sometimes thousands, of chemicals, each with its own unique taste and smell. Using early-20th-century chemistry tools, scientists could hope to identify perhaps a handful of these in any given plant

Coupled with mass spectrometers, which identify what’s been isolated, this technology opened up a vast world of possibilities, allowing for a much more thorough (though still incomplete) map of nature’s aromas. The number of flavor chemicals known in orange peels, for instance, has gone from nine in 1948 to 207 today. In spearmint leaves, it’s leapt from 6 to 100, and in black peppercorns, from seven to 273.

One of the newer breakthroughs to come along in the science of flavor is called taste modulation. About a decade ago, a biologist at the University of California at San Diego named Charles Zuker isolated, for the first time, the receptors on the tongue that are responsible for our perception of taste. He did this using tastebud cells from laboratory mice. What he found was that each cell was incredibly specific, containing receptors for just one taste — either sweet, sour, salty, bitter or savory (also called umami

Some of the demand for flavoring is related to how plants and animals are grown and raised. Wright urged me to try a taste test at home if I was so inclined. Take three different whole chickens, she said — an average, low-priced frozen one from the supermarket; a mass-produced organic version like Bell and Evans; and what she termed a “happy chicken.” This was a bird that had spent its life outside running around and eating an evolutionary diet of grass, seeds, bugs and worms. Roast them in your kitchen and note the taste. The cheap chicken, she said, will have minimal flavor, thanks to its short life span, lack of sunlight and monotonous diet of corn and soy. The Bell and Evans will have a few “roast notes and fatty notes,” and the happy chicken will be “incomparable,” with a deep, succulent, nutty taste. Wright, as you might imagine, prefers consuming chickens of the happy variety, which her husband, who is also a flavorist (he works from home as a consultant), is generally the one to cook.

preferences can change quickly. The New York Times reported in January anecdotal accounts of teenagers ditching Juul devices and moving en masse to disposable devices packed with e-liquids in flavors such as banana ice, sour gummy and cool mint. The question is whether federal regulators will keep up with changing preferences.

The FDA should not have allowed disposable, candy-flavored e-cigarettes to continue to be sold. Regulators should not wait until there is enough youth survey data telling them what should have been obvious in the first place: Easy-to-use, easy-to-conceal products such as disposable vapes in candy flavorings will attract children — and create new addicts.

Waiting for more evidence that these products are hooking children would imply that it is acceptable for public health officials to sit back and watch while new addictions multiply.

Even the surgeon general’s landmark warning in the late 1960s that linked smoking to cancer couldn’t get Americans to quit. Instead, they gave it up at a glacial pace — by 2016 just 15.5 percent of adults smoked, according to the most recent CDC data, and it was largely thanks to a culture shift that cast the small circles of smokers who’d gather to puff outside of office buildings and bars as deeply uncool. They were addicts.

And Juul kept the nicotine and chucked out all the rest — the thin casing of paper that always seemed to fall apart in the bottom of our purses, the flakes of tobacco, the tar, the carbon dioxide, the smell, the very form of the cigarette.

.

To Allan M. Brandt, a historian and author of "The Cigarette Century," Juul is anything but new and different. "It represents the cultural norms and notions of the cigarette, which was very much youth-oriented," he said. "It was kind of forbidden; it was extremely cool."

Could it be that with Juul, it’s just a different generation simply doing what young people have always done — testing boundaries, sneaking independence? Teen pregnancy is down, and marijuana is practically normalized. Perhaps Juul is just the new boogeyman to replace all the old ones.

“It spread like wildfire, for two reasons,” he said. “The first reason is the flashy flavors like creme brulee. The flavors are responsible for bringing the kids in, the nicotine keeps them.”

“I think the history of this tells me, don’t trust these industries,” said Brandt, the smoking historian. “Juul can say, ‘We’re not interested in kids; we’re going to fight the use of this in kids.’ But with flavors like mango, and cool cucumber. . . .” Cigarette makers have always said they didn’t want kids to smoke, he continued. But bad news about children lighting up on the schoolyard, he said, “was always great news for the tobacco companies.

Dr. Monteiro and his colleagues developed a food classification system called Nova, named after the Portuguese and Latin words for “new.” It has since been adopted by researchers across the world.

Unprocessed or minimally processed foods, like fresh or frozen fruits and vegetables, beans, lentils, meat, poultry, fish, eggs, milk, plain yogurt, rice, pasta, corn meal, flour, coffee, tea and herbs and spices.

Processed culinary ingredients, such as cooking oils, butter, sugar, honey, vinegar and salt.

If you look at the ingredient list and you see things that you wouldn’t use in home cooking, then that’s probably an ultraprocessed food,”

his group includes freshly baked bread, most cheeses and canned vegetables, beans and fish. These foods may contain preservatives that extend shelf life.

Ultraprocessed foods made using industrial methods and ingredients you wouldn’t typically find in grocery stores — like high-fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated oils and concentrated proteins like soy isolate.

They often contain additives like flavorings, colorings or emulsifiers to make them appear more attractive and palatable.

Think sodas and energy drinks, chips, candies, flavored yogurts, margarine, chicken nuggets, hot dogs, sausages, lunch meats, boxed macaroni and cheese, infant formulas and most packaged breads, plant milks, meat substitutes and breakfast cereals.

Processed foods made by combining foods from Category 1 with the ingredients of Category 2 and preserving or modifying them with relatively simple methods like canning, bottling, fermentation and baking

That has led to debate among nutrition experts about whether it’s useful for describing the healthfulness of a food, partly since many UPFs — like whole grain breads, flavored yogurts and infant formulas — can provide valuable nutrients

Most research linking UPFs to poor health is based on observational studies, in which researchers ask people about their diets and then track their health over many years.

Why might UPFs be harmful?

In a large review of studies that was published in 2024, scientists reported that consuming UPFs was associated with 32 health problems, with the most convincing evidence for heart disease-related deaths, Type 2 diabetes and common mental health issues like anxiety and depression.

Such studies are valuable, because they can look at large groups of people — the 2024 review included results from nearly 10 million — over the many years it can take for chronic health conditions to develop

She added that the consistency of the link between UPFs and health issues increased her confidence that there was a real problem with the foods.

But the observational studies also have limitations,

It’s true that there is a correlation between these foods and chronic diseases, she said, but that doesn’t mean that UPFs directly cause poor health.

Dr. O’Connor questioned whether it’s helpful to group such “starkly different” foods — like Twinkies and breakfast cereals — into one category. Certain types of ultraprocessed foods, like sodas and processed meats, are more clearly harmful than others

UPFs like flavored yogurts and whole grain breads, on the other hand, have been associated with a reduced risk of developing Type 2 diabetes.

Clinical trials are needed to test if UPFs directly cause health problems, Dr. O’Connor said. Only one such study, which was small and had some limitations, has been done, s

In that study, published in 2019, 20 adults with a range of body sizes lived in a research hospital at the National Institutes of Health for four weeks. For two weeks, they ate mainly unprocessed or minimally processed foods, and for another two weeks, they ate mainly UPFs. The diets had similar amounts of calories and nutrients, and the participants could eat as much as they wanted at each meal.

During their two weeks on the ultraprocessed diet, participants gained an average of two pounds and consumed about 500 calories more per day than they did on the unprocessed diet

During their time on the unprocessed diet, they lost about two pounds.

That finding might help explain the link between UPFs, obesity and other metabolic conditions

The Nova system notably doesn’t classify foods based on nutrients like fat, fiber, vitamins or minerals. It’s “agnostic to nutrition,”

There are many “strong opinions” about why ultraprocessed foods are unhealthy, Dr. Hall said. “But there’s actually not a lot of rigorous science” on what those mechanisms are

Because UPFs are often cheap, convenient and accessible, they’re probably displacing healthier foods from our diets

the foods could be having more direct effects on health. They can be easy to overeat — maybe because they contain hard-to-resist combinations of carbohydrates, sugars, fats and salt, are high-calorie and easy to chew

It’s also possible that resulting blood sugar spikes may damage arteries or ramp up inflammation, or that certain food additives or chemicals may interfere with hormones, cause a “leaky” intestine or disrupt the gut microbiome.

Researchers, including Dr. Hall and Dr. Davy, are beginning to conduct small clinical trials that will test some of these theories.

most researchers think there are various ways the foods are causing harm. “Rarely in nutrition is there a single factor that fully explains the relationship between foods and some health outcome,”

In 2014, Dr. Monteiro helped write new dietary guidelines for Brazil that advised people to avoid ultraprocessed foods.

Other countries like Mexico, Israel and Canada have also explicitly recommended avoiding or limiting UPFs or “highly processed foods.”

The U.S. dietary guidelines contain no such advice, but an advisory committee is currently looking into the evidence on how UPFs may affect weight gain, which could influence the 2025 guidelines.

It’s difficult to know what to do about UPFs in the United States, where so much food is already ultraprocessed and people with lower incomes can be especially dependent on them,

“At the end of the day, they are an important source of food, and food is food,” Dr. Mattei added. “We really cannot vilify them,”

While research continues, expert opinions differ on how people should approach UPFs.

the safest course is to avoid them altogether

to swap flavored yogurt for plain yogurt with fruit, for example, or to buy a fresh loaf from a local bakery instead of packaged bread, if you can afford to do so

Dr. Vadiveloo suggested a more moderate strategy, focusing on limiting UPFs that don’t provide valuable nutrients, like soda and cookies

She also recommended eating more fruits, vegetables, whole grains (ultraprocessed or not), legumes, nuts and seeds.

Cook at home as much as you can, using minimally processed foods

Last month, Trump also signed a bill into law that raised the legal age for buying tobacco products to 21 from 18.

Climate change isn’t the only problem. Cocoa crops in Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana, where 60 percent of the world’s cocoa come from, may already be in “structural decline,” Debenham said, citing disease, aging cocoa trees, and illegal gold mining on farmland.

ore important, the farmers who tend to the crops can’t afford to invest in their farms to increase their yields and bolster resilience against climate change. The bleak outlook for cocoa farmers threatens to doom cocoa-growing in the region altogether. In Ghana, the average cocoa farmer is close to 50 years old. A new generation of farmers is needed to maintain the cocoa supply, but young people may just walk away from the industry.

Newer chocolate alternatives may provide more satisfying counterfeits. Win-Win isn’t the only start-up producing cocoa-free chocolate, which is similar in concept to animal-free meat. The company uses plant ingredients to emulate the flavor and texture of chocolate—as do its competitors Foreverland and Voyage Foods. Another firm, California Cultured, grows actual cacao cells in giant steel tanks.

Cocoa shortages will affect all kinds of chocolate, but mass-produced sweets may change beyond just the prices. The erratic temperatures brought about by climate change could change the flavor of beans, depending on where they are grown

Variability is a concern for commercial chocolate makers, who need to maintain consistent flavors across their products. They may counteract discrepancies among different batches of beans by combining them, then roasting them at a higher temperature,

Commercial chocolate makers may also tweak their recipes to amp up or mimic chocolate flavors without using more cocoa. These candies contain relatively little cacao to begin with; only 10 percent of a product’s weight must be cocoa in order to qualify as chocolate in the eyes of the FDA.

No matter how you look at it, the future of cocoa doesn’t look good. With less cocoa available all around, chocolate may become more expensive. For high-end chocolate brands, whose products use lots of cocoa, the recent price hikes are reportedly an existential threat.

So much of the appeal of cheap chocolate is that it’s always been there—whether in the form of a Hershey’s Kiss, Oreo cookies, a bowl of Cocoa Puffs, or the shell of a fondant-filled egg. “You grow up with those tastes. It’s hard to fathom how pervasive it has been,” Carodenuto said. Chocolate lovers have weathered minor tweaks to these candies over the years, but the shifts happening today may be less tolerable—or at the very least more noticeable. The change that has been hardest to ignore is that cheap chocolate is no longer that cheap.

Mr. Trump has also been under an intense lobbying campaign over the past seven weeks, waged by tobacco and vaping companies, along with conservative organizations, like Americans for Tax Reform, which are opposed to regulatory limits that would affect retailers, small businesses and adult consumers of e-cigarettes.

the flavor ban has also become a proxy issue for how his advisers see Mr. Trump’s path to re-election. In one camp are those who believe he should try to win back suburban women, including mothers of teenagers who would presumably worry about their children becoming addicted to nicotine. In the other are those who advise him to assume that voting bloc would not favor him anyway and to focus only on energizing his base.

E-cigarette users have held protests outside the White House and outside Trump rallies that they may have attended under other circumstances. Protesters have also raised concerns about the potential closing of thousands of vape shops, which they said would hurt the economy and cost jobs across the country.

While some advice to Mr. Trump was grounded in polling, some was based on a gut-level understanding of Trump voters: Taking away the right to smoke or vape would be something akin to taking away firearms.

Mr. Azar, have been pushing the administration to address the issue, as parents and schools as well as public health experts have grown increasingly concerned about the rise in teenage vaping. Mr. Azar had told the president that about more than one-fourth of high school students reported vaping e-cigarettes within the previous 30 days, according to this year’s survey of tobacco use among youths

Parents need to know that when children go online, they are entering a world of influencers, many of whom are hoping to make money by pushing dangerous products. It’s a world that’s invisible to us

when we log on to our social media, we don’t see what they see. Thanks to algorithms and ad targeting, I see videos about the best lawn fertilizer and wrinkle laser masks, while Ian is being fed reviews of flavored vape pens and beautiful women livestreaming themselves gambling crypto and urging him to gamble, too.

Smartphones are taking our kids to a different world

Greyson Imm, an 18-year-old high school student in Prairie Village, Kan., said he was 17 when Zyn videos started appearing on his TikTok feed. The videos multiplied through the spring, when they were appearing almost daily. “Nobody had heard about Zyn until very early 2023,” he said. Now, a “lot of high schoolers have been using Zyn. It’s really taken off, at least in our community.”

all of this is, unfortunately, only part of what makes social media dangerous.

The tobacco conglomerate Philip Morris International acquired the Zyn maker Swedish Match in 2022 as part of a strategic push into smokeless products, a category it projects could help drive an expected $2 billion in U.S. revenue in 2024.

P.M.I. is also a company that has long denied it markets tobacco products to minors despite decades of research accusing it of just that. One 2022 study alone found its brands advertising near schools and playgrounds around the globe.

the ’90s, when magazines ran full-page Absolut Vodka ads in different colors, which my friends and I collected and taped up on our walls next to pictures of a young Leonardo DiCaprio — until our parents tore them down. This was advertising that appealed to me as a teenager but was also visible to my parents, and — crucially — to regulators, who could point to billboards near schools or flavored vodka ads in fashion magazines and say, this is wrong.

Even the most committed parent today doesn’t have the same visibility into what her children are seeing online, so it is worth explaining how products like Zyn end up in social feeds

influencers. They aren’t traditional pitch people. Think of them more like the coolest kids on the block. They establish a following thanks to their personality, experience or expertise. They share how they’re feeling, they share what they’re thinking about, they share stuff they l

With ruthless efficiency, social media can deliver unlimited amounts of the content that influencers create or inspire. That makes the combination of influencers and social-media algorithms perhaps the most powerful form of advertising ever invented.

Videos like his operate like a meme: It’s unintelligible to the uninitiated, it’s a hilarious inside joke to those who know, and it encourages the audience to spread the message

Enter Tucker Carlson. Mr. Carlson, the former Fox News megastar who recently started his own subscription streaming service, has become a big Zyn influencer. He’s mentioned his love of Zyn in enough podcasts and interviews to earn the nickname Tucker CarlZyn.

was Max VanderAarde. You can glimpse him in a video from the event wearing a Santa hat and toasting Mr. Carlson as they each pop Zyns in their mouths. “You can call me king of Zynbabwe, or Tucker CarlZyn’s cousin,” he says in a recent TikTok. “Probably, what, moved 30 mil cans last year?”

Freezer Tarps, Mr. VanderAarde’s TikTok account, appears to have been removed after I asked the company about it. Left up are the large number of TikToks by the likes of @lifeofaZyn, @Zynfluencer1 and @Zyntakeover; those hashtagged to #Zynbabwe, one of Freezer Tarps’s favorite terms, have amassed more than 67 million views. So it’s worth breaking down Mr. VanderAarde’s videos.

All of these videos would just be jokes (in poor taste) if they were seen by adults only. They aren’t. But we can’t know for sure how many children follow the Nelk Boys or Freezer Tarps — social-media companies generally don’t release granular age-related data to the public. Mr. VanderAarde, who responded to a few of my questions via LinkedIn, said that nearly 95 percent of his followers are over the age of 18.

They’re incentivized to increase their following and, in turn, often their bank accounts. Young people are particularly susceptible to this kind of promotion because their relationship with influencers is akin to the intimacy of a close friend.

The helicopter video has already been viewed more than one million times on YouTube, and iterations of it have circulated widely on TikTok.

YouTube said it eventually determined that four versions of the Carlson Zyn videos were not appropriate for viewers under age 18 under its community guidelines and restricted access to them by age

Mr. Carlson declined to comment on the record beyond his two-word statement. The Nelk Boys didn’t respond to requests for comment. Meta declined to comment on the record. TikTok said it does not allow content that promotes tobacco or its alternatives. The company said that it has over 40,000 trust and safety experts who work to keep the platform safe and that it prevented teenagers’ accounts from viewing over two million videos globally that show the consumption of tobacco products by adults. TikTok added that in the third quarter of 2023 it proactively removed 97 percent of videos that violated its alcohol, tobacco and drugs policy.

Greyson Imm, the high school student in Prairie Village, Kan., points to Mr. VanderAarde as having brought Zyn “more into the mainstream.” Mr. Imm believes his interest in independent comedy on TikTok perhaps made him a target for Mr. VanderAarde’s videos. “He would create all these funny phrases or things that would make it funny and joke about it and make it relevant to us.”

It wasn’t long before Mr. Imm noticed Zyn blowing up among his classmates — so much so that the student, now a senior at Shawnee Mission East High School, decided to write a piece in his school newspaper about it. He conducted an Instagram poll from the newspaper’s account and found that 23 percent of the students who responded used oral nicotine pouches during school.

“Upper-decky lip cushions, ferda!” Mr. VanderAarde coos in what was one of his popular TikTok videos, which had been liked more than 40,000 times. The singsong audio sounds like gibberish to most people, but it’s actually a call to action. “Lip cushion” is a nickname for a nicotine pouch, and “ferda” is slang for “the guys.”

“I have fun posting silly content that makes fun of pop culture,” Mr. VanderAarde said to me in our LinkedIn exchange.

I turned to Influencity, a software program that estimates the ages of social media users by analyzing profile photos and selfies in recent posts. Influencity estimated that roughly 10 percent of the Nelk Boys’ followers on YouTube are ages 13 to 17. That’s more than 800,000 children.

I’ve spent the past three years studying media manipulation and memes, and what I see in Freezer Tarps’s silly content is strategy. The use of Zyn slang seems like a way to turn interest in Zyn into a meme that can be monetized through merchandise and other business opportunities.

Such as? Freezer Tarps sells his own pouch product, Upperdeckys, which delivers caffeine instead of nicotine and is available in flavors including cotton candy and orange creamsicle. In addition to jockeying for sponsorship, Mr. Carlson may also be trying to establish himself with a younger, more male, more online audience as his new media company begins building its subscriber base

This is the kind of viral word-of-mouth marketing that looks like entertainment, functions like culture and can increase sales

What’s particularly galling about all of this is that we as a society already agreed that peddling nicotine to kids is not OK. It is illegal to sell nicotine products to anyone under the age of 21 in all 50 states

numerous studies have shown that the younger people are when they try nicotine for the first time, the more likely they will become addicted to it. Nearly 90 percent of adults who smoke daily started smoking before they turned 18.

Decades later — even after Juul showed the power of influencers to help addict yet another generation of children — the courts, tech companies and regulators still haven’t adequately grappled with the complexities of the influencer economy.

Facebook, Instagram and TikTok all have guidelines that prohibit tobacco ads and sponsored, endorsed or partnership-based content that promotes tobacco products. Holding them accountable for maintaining those standards is a bigger question.

We need a new definition of advertising that takes into account how the internet actually works. I’d go so far as to propose that the courts broaden the definition of advertising to include all influencer promotion. For a product as dangerous as nicotine, I’d put the bar to be considered an influencer as low as 1,000 followers on a social-media account, and maybe if a video from someone with less of a following goes viral under certain legal definitions, it would become influencer promotion.

Laws should require tech companies to share data on what young people are seeing on social media and to prevent any content promoting age-gated products from reaching children’s feeds

hose efforts must go hand in hand with social media companies putting real teeth behind their efforts to verify the ages of their users. Government agencies should enforce the rules already on the books to protect children from exposure to addictive products,

I refuse to believe there aren’t ways to write laws and regulations that can address these difficult questions over tech company liability and free speech, that there aren’t ways to hold platforms more accountable for advertising that might endanger kids. Let’s stop treating the internet like a monster we can’t control. We built it. We foisted it upon our children. We had better try to protect them from its potential harms as best we can.

The problem is not that individual voters are clueless; in this story, they’re not. Even if each individual voter is rational and knows what he or she wants, the electorate as a whole can act as if it were clueless and can’t decide. Individually rational choices don’t necessarily add up to collectively rational choices.

The Marquis Condorcet, a French mathematician of the second half of the 18th century, showed how a majority-rule vote can lead to incoherent collective choices.

But Kenneth Arrow, the economics Nobel laureate, showed in his 1951 doctoral thesis that the problem runs far deeper than anyone had imagined. Mr. Arrow’s famous “impossibility theorem” says that there is no mechanism that can coherently speak for the will of the people.

Loosely speaking, this extraordinary result says that any mechanism that aims to speak for the will of the people — that is not a dictatorship — will be susceptible to at least one of three defects.

the will of the people is an incoherent concept

The second possible defect is that voters will make choices that suggest that the addition of irrelevant alternatives leads them to change their mind

The third possibility is that even when each voter individually prefers chocolate ice cream to vanilla, that somehow collectively the voters will choose vanilla instead.

Mr. Arrow’s impossibility theorem suggests that maybe the Republican primary results say less about the desires of Republican voters than they do about tensions inherent in groups of people collectively deciding what to do

Economic theorists have also pointed to a reason that the modern G.O.P. may be particularly susceptible to making strange choices. If disagreements between voters are simple enough — such as when some want more liberal policies and others more conservative policies — simple majority rule won’t suffer any of the defects that concerned Mr. Arrow

Republicans disagree both about the desirability of conservative versus moderate policies and on the need for an outsider or an establishment leader. This extra complexity is too much for democracy to bear, again raising the possibility of collective madness even in the face of individual rationality.

The point isn’t that democracy is bad; merely that it’s imperfect. And so even if this theorem points to the impossibility of a truly rational democracy, it doesn’t mean that the alternatives are any better. As Winston Churchill once said, “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.”

in fact, that the birds eventually went extinct; the last known passenger pigeon died in 1914.

The Compleat Housewife would likely have been found in any well-to-do household in the late colonial era, when the mid-day “dinner” could consist of three courses, with multiple dishes per course.

Though regional, seasonal and other differences make it difficult to generalize about a typical colonial diet, the following seven foods and beverages are a small sample of what might have been found on many colonial tables.

Pickles

umble cookies—sometimes spelled “jumbal”—can be considered the ancestors of modern sugar cookies, though far less sweet. Recipes appeared in cookbooks in England as early as 1585, and the cookies became a popular staple in the colonies. “You will find recipes for jumble cookies by the thousands,” says Nahon; even Martha Washington was said to have her own.

Black pepper’s antibacterial properties make it a good preservative, and this imported spice took center stage in the pepper cake, a gingerbread-like loaf flavored with black pepper and molasses and studded with candied fruits.

Colonial Americans drank a lot of alcohol, and this popular drink-dessert dating to the 18th century combined sweetened whipped cream with wine or hard cider. The resulting frothy concoction was often served on special occasions. Amelia Simmons’ American Cookery, which in 1796 became the first cookbook by an American to be published in the United States, included a recipe for syllabub that called for the cook to flavor cider with sugar, grate nutmeg into it—and milk a cow directly into the liquor. 

“There used to be Pat Buchanan’s people, the populist revolt-types and the establishment of the anti-establishment, who’d get a third of the vote in the primaries and we’d beat them back,” said Mike Murphy, a veteran Republican consultant who led a super PAC that supported former Florida governor Jeb Bush’s presidential campaign. “Now they’ve hijacked the Republican Party.”

And Breitbart, which has been a sponsor of CPAC for years, has more visibility than ever. As Bannon has pointed out to associates, a site that once organized panels titled “The Uninvited” for guests too controversial for CPAC is now shaping the movement’s agenda.

Meanwhile, the libertarian flavor of the conference during the Obama years has faded. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who won the conference’s presidential straw poll three years running, is not coming to CPAC.

Former House speaker Newt Gingrich, a Trump ally who has given a series of speeches recently on “Trumpism,” said he is “impressed that CPAC has very intelligently anticipated the direction that Trump is going to take the country and understood that he’ll be the dominant voice on the right for the foreseeable future.”

Sam Nunberg, a former Trump adviser who worked on the businessman’s CPAC arrangements in the years before the 2016 campaign, said the conferences were “pivotal” for Trump because they gave him a tangible sense of how his celebrity could be translated to a career in conservative Republican politics.

“It’s definitely a show,” said Jimmy LaSalvia, a co-founder of GOProud who left the Republican Party in 2015. “It’s a show that is now designed to perpetuate a fight. Donald Trump lives for the fight. He feeds off the fighting. So does, frankly, the Breitbart organization. It’s all about us versus them. It’s not about ideas.”

“Much of the new growth in the segment is coming from younger consumers who seek foods that fit an overall lifestyle, be it for health reasons or personal ethics,” Mr. Loucks wrote. “They are not just seeking foods that mimic meat. Instead they specifically want vegetarian foods with distinctive flavors and visible, recognizable ingredients.”

“Not that long ago, electrical cars were considered nonperformers, and when Prius came out, a lot of people didn’t think there was a market for it,” said Yves Potvin, founder and chief executive of Gardein Protein International, which makes the Gardein line of meatless products. “Now people are willing to pay $70,000 for a Tesla, and more than one million Prius cars are sold each year.”

Mr. Brown is most proud of Beyond Meat’s “chicken breast” products, which are sold in strips that look like real chicken and can be pulled into shreds for chicken salad. “That was kind of the holy grail,” he said.

“It has to be just as good as, just as convenient as and maybe even cheaper than ground beef or chicken,” Mr. Brown said. “Our business is to create something better than meat; otherwise we are not going to move the needle.”

Second, you’ve got a large group of people who are bone-deep suspicious of globalization, what it does to their jobs and their communities.

You get the rise of the anti-science folks, who distrust the realm of far-off studies and prefer anecdotes from friends to data about populations.

So you get the rise of the anti-vaccine parents

Third, you’ve got the culture of instant news. It’s a weird phenomenon of the media age that, except in extreme circumstances, it is a lot scarier to follow an event on TV than it is to actually be there covering it.

Fourth, you’ve got our culture’s tendency to distance itself from death.

“In every calm and reasonable person there is a hidden second person scared witless about death.” In cultures where death is more present, or at least dealt with more commonly, people are more familiar with that second person, and people can think a bit more clearly about risks of death in any given moment.

The Ebola crisis has aroused its own flavor of fear.

It’s a sour, existential fear. It’s a fear you feel when the whole environment seems hostile, when the things that are supposed to keep you safe, like national borders and national authorities, seem porous and ineffective, when some menace is hard to understand.

In these circumstances, skepticism about authority turns into corrosive cynicism. People seek to build walls, to pull in the circle of trust. They become afraid. Fear, of course, breeds fear.

Trump represents the spread of something brutal. He takes economic anxiety and turns it into sexual hostility. He effectively tells men: You may be struggling, but at least you’re better than women, Mexicans and Muslims.

I’ve grappled with determining how much to blame Trump’s supporters for his rise. Many of them are victims of economic dislocation and it is hard to fault them for seeking a change, of course, even if it is simplistic and ignorant.

But in the realm of cultural politics, Trump voters do need to be held to account. They are participating in a descent into darkness. They are supporting a degrading wrong. This is the world your daughters are going to grow up in.

The staff was never unanimous about anything. The many flavors of conservatism were hashed out in its pages. If it stood for anything, I would say it stood for this: that the good life consists of being an active citizen and caring passionately about politics; that it also consists of knowing something about Latin American fiction, ancient Greek culture and social impact of modern genetics; that it also consists of delighting in the latest good movies and TV shows, the best new cocktails and the casual pleasures of life.

I spoke mainly to Leavers, since they were the disrupters. I heard many true stories and many strong opinions, but as the years went by I began to attend more and more to the hints of dreaming between the lines, in what was not said as well as what was said. I noticed three things.

One was a strong sense of oppression, of being censored, and an attendant resentment. There were several occasions when Leavers I spoke to left pregnant gaps that could only have been filled with anti-immigrant sentiments that they weren’t “allowed” to say.

for many, casual racism is regarded as a lost patrimony; that as much as Leavers might oppose immigration, they are no less resentful of the “elites” rendering it awkward to categorize people along racial lines

I used to be skeptical of the idea that Britain hadn’t come to terms with the loss of its empire.

for the freedom to roam the North Sea without engaging with other littoral countries

Australian universities instead.

The third thing was the preoccupation with the state as defender of its people.

that it was the British government’s job to defend native Britons against immigrants; foreign competition; greedy capitalists; and, through the National Health Service, illness.

Another thing I noticed was the internationalism of Leavers — internationalism with a particular flavor: the nostalgia for Ian Smith’s Rhodesi

not a single one of the many Leavers I’ve had hours of conversations with over the years has explicitly expressed wanting it back. How could you? It would be ridiculous.

I believe now that a subliminal empire does persist in the dreaming of a large number of Britons, hinted at in a longing for the return of guilt-free racial categorization, in the idea that my country can be both globally open and privileged in an international trading system where it can somehow turn the rules to its advantage, in the idea of a safe white core protected from the dark hordes beyond by a mighty armed force

the matchless political skills of Margaret Thatcher. She achieved the extraordinary feat of turning into political orthodoxy a plainly contradictory credo, that nationalism and borderless capitalism could easily coexist.

The reality of the new Britain has been a shrunken welfare state, a country ruthlessly exposed to global free-market competition. The blindness of Thatcherism’s supporters has been to accept it as the patriotic solution to the globalism it enabled.

The bizarre and already disproved notion that the global free market might work as an avatar of Britain’s imperial power lies at the heart of the die-hard Brexit psyche. Propagating it was Mrs. Thatcher’s personal success, and that success, as we can now see, was her great failure.

What can happen to a nation whose citizens do not forget? Renan would not have been surprised by the fate of the former Yugoslavia.

it may be time to pause and ask: What is a nation?

A provocative and useful answer once came from the 19th-century French scholar Ernest Renan: “The essence of a nation is that all of its individuals have many things in common, and also that everyone has forgotten many things.”

What must citizens forget before a nation becomes a nation?

Ethnic differences, for one thing: “No French citizen knows whether he is a Burgund, an Alain, a Taifala, or a Visigoth,”

Ancient differences as to sect or creed must be left in the past.

the recent National Conservative Conference outlined a “new American and British nationalism” that featured balanced budgets, strong national borders and a return to Anglo-American national traditions: “constitutionalism, the common law, the English language, and Christian scripture.”

the Serbs, fearing they would become a second-class minority, began to massacre their Muslim neighbors.

Henry Adams once called politics “the systematic organization of hatreds,” certainly the case in the former Yugoslavia

In sketching a model of nationhood, Renan adds to the forgetting of difference a kind of negative definition of national identity, carefully enumerating all the things that people might take to be a nation’s essence and dismissing each in turn: It isn’t to be found in religious belief, language, race, “ethnographic politics,” economics or even geography

Renan leaves us with little but the first part of his “essence of a nation,” that its citizens have many things “in common,” meaning, to my mind, the kind of nondivisive secular ideals found in the United States Constitution

Can there be a new nationalism that squares with such ideals? Maybe, but the National Conservatism Conference, organized by the Edmund Burke Foundation, showed how difficult it can be.

he organizers of that meeting set out to “reconsolidate the rich tradition of national conservative thought,” at the same time insisting that their project stood “in stark opposition to political theories grounded in race,” an opposition articulated in part by appealing to a supposedly more benign political theory grounded in “culture.”

When they got into details, however, it was hard to separate that ground from race and religion. “Culture,” one speaker declared, always emerges from a specific time and place

The new nationalism seems to be driven by a hunger for identity, for a solid sense of one’s presence in the world, joined to a style of self-knowing that operates by opposition: I’m British, not French; I’m American, not Mexican; I’m Christian, not Muslim; I’m white, not black. Given that point of departure, nationalism becomes a shorthand for the memory of all such oppositions.

we would do well the remember that when it comes to divisions of race, ethnicity and religious belief, the unforgotten is the destroyer of nations.

as with climate change, the powers that be in this country are doing very little to head off the potentially disastrous results of expanding obesity, obesity specialists say.

Well-intentioned efforts like limiting access to huge portions of sugar-sweetened soda, the scientists note, are effectively thwarted by well-heeled industrie

With rare exceptions, the sugar and beverage industries have blocked nearly every attempt to add an excise tax to sugar-sweetened beverages.

Claims that such a tax is regressive and unfairly targets low-income people is shortsighted

“What people would save in health care costs would dwarf the extra money paid as taxes on sugar-sweetened beverages,” he said in an interview.

in a city like Philadelphia, where a soda tax of 1.5 cents an ounce took effect three years ago, total purchases declined by 38 percent even after accounting for beverages people bought outside the city

piecemeal changes like this are not enough to make a significant difference in the obesity forecast for the country

nationwide changes are needed in the ubiquitous food environment that has fostered a steady climb toward a weight-and-health disaster.

Americans weren’t always this fat; since 1990, the prevalence of obesity in this country has doubled.

Our genetics haven’t changed in the last 30 years. Rather, what has changed is the environment in which our genes now function.

“Food is very cheap in the United States, and super easy to access,”

We eat out more, consuming more foods that are high in fat, sugar and salt, and our portion sizes are bigger.

“You don’t even have to leave home to eat restaurant-prepared food — just call and it will be delivered.

As a society, we also snack more, a habit that starts as soon as toddlers can feed themselves.

“People are snacking throughout the day,” Mr. Ward said. “Snacking is the normal thing to do in the United States. In France, you never see anyone eating on a bus.”

We also eat more highly processed foods, which have been shown to foster weight gain, thanks to their usually high levels of calories, sugar and fat.

even when controlling for weight, consuming lots of processed foods raises the risk of developing Type 2 diabetes.

“Through marketing, we’re constantly being sold on foods we didn’t even know we wanted. We’re all about immediate rewards. We’re not thinking about the future, which is why we’re going to see more than half the population obese in 10 years.”

Unless something is done to reverse this trend, Mr. Ward said, “Obesity will be the new normal in this country. We’re living in an obesogenic environment.”

“if I could wave a magic wand, I’d make a tax on beverages a federal mandate because they’re the largest source of added sugar in the diet and are strongly linked to weight gain and health problems.

the link between beverage consumption and greater intake of calories may also apply to drinks flavored with no-calorie or low-calorie sweeteners.

prompting restaurants to gradually, surreptitiously reduce the amount of fat, sugar and calories in the meals they serve could help put the brakes on societal weight gain. “Menus could make healthier, lower-calorie meals the default option,

Controlling portion sizes is another critically important step. “Big portions are especially motivating for low-income people who reasonably want to get more calories for their dollar,”

Another policy-based approach that could reverse rising obesity projections might be to partner with climate control advocates, Dr. Bleich suggested. “If we pull more meat out of the American diet, it would help both the environment and weight loss,

“prevention is the way to go. Children aren’t born obese, but we can already see excessive weight gain as early as age 2. Changes in the food environment are needed at every level — local, state and federal. It’s hard for individuals to voluntarily change their behavior.”

health-promoting changes in the food packages provided to low-income women, infants and children since 2009 have helped to reverse or stabilize obesity in the preschool children who receive them.