When the FDA Sounds Like RFK Jr.: How a Fruit Recall Became a Narrative Landmine
On July 23, 2025, the FDA issued a legitimate and necessary recall: certain batches of frozen fruit—peaches, nectarines and mixed blends — were found to contain unsafe levels of chlorpyrifos, a neurotoxic pesticide banned from food use in the U.S. since 2021.
That should have been the story.
Instead, headlines from outlets like the Daily Mail turned a food safety action into something else entirely:
"FDA issues urgent recall of fruit contaminated with toxin linked to autism, cancer."
And just like that, a scientifically sound recall was repackaged as a victory lap for the same conspiracy thinking that got Robert F. Kennedy Jr. into the Secretary of Health and Human Services seat in the first place.
Make no mistake: chlorpyrifos is dangerous. Its links to neurodevelopmental harm are real enough to have prompted years of regulatory action. But when media coverage leads with "linked to autism," it isn’t just sharing information.
It’s resurrecting a narrative we know all too well: that autism is a man-made disaster. That autistic children are chemical collateral. That neurodivergence is what happens when public health fails.
That is not science. That is eugenic storytelling in a lab coat.
The RFK Jr. Fingerprint
Even without naming him, this story bears all the marks of RFK Jr.’s decades-long campaign to pathologize autism and link it to environmental toxins, vaccines and maternal exposure. His rise to HHS only legitimizes that narrative further. And now, the FDA — which he technically oversees — has handed him a perfect talking point.
Even if the FDA's action was apolitical, the media framing was not. And the damage is already done.
This is what narrative laundering looks like:
- A real toxin becomes a Trojan horse for anti-autism fear
- Autism is equated with injury, not identity
- Regulation gets mistaken for vindication
And for those of us who are autistic, the implication is clear:
"You are what went wrong."
This Isn’t About One Article
It’s about the accumulated weight of headlines that always pair autism with tragedy, contamination or crisis. It’s about a public that’s been trained to see autism as evidence of institutional failure, not natural variation. It’s about how easily fear slips into policy.
Today, it’s frozen fruit. Tomorrow, it’s funding cuts, coercive prenatal testing or research grants framed around prevention, not support.
What We Refuse
We refuse to let autism be the go-to shorthand for damage. We refuse the logic that says our lives are proof of what needs erasing. We refuse a system that uses autistic people as rhetorical evidence while excluding us from the table.
Because this isn’t just a story about fruit. It’s a story about whose humanity gets preserved when public health protects us—and whose gets erased when it doesn’t.
Kennedy may not have written the headline. But he made it possible. And The Daily Mail ran with it—because fear always sells. Autism is not the warning. Erasure is.
And we’re not going anywhere.