Article begins Editor’s Note: This piece is the second in SAFN’s 2026  Anthropology News  series on Temporality in Food Anthropology. If you haven’t already, read  the first installment of this series by Janita Van Dyk here .  We’ve been using phrases such as “unprecedented times,” “unusual times,” or “challenging times” to capture the profound and destabilizing changes wrought by political actions over the last year, during the second Trump administration. Science research has been attacked and defunded, medical and public health funding reduced and programs eliminated, and individual scientists targeted because their studies revealed uncomfortable truths for an ideologically driven agenda. What we are experiencing are not normal time shifts or evolutions in cultural processes, but targeted attacks meant to eliminate our ability to teach critical thinking, especially about inequality.…