Growing up in San Diego during the 90s and early aughts was a dream. I got to wander through the Arcadian hills above Escondido as a kid, eating from pomegranate trees and chewing on the wild wood sorrel around our home, just a short drive from some of the nicest beaches anywhere. I had my 21st in Leucadia (named after Lefkada, which some say was another source of inspiration for Homeric Ithaca) with a kickboxer and a Marine who asked if I wanted to swim around the Oceanside Pier with him to celebrate after I had swum through a few drinks.
Health and a healthy conscientiousness regarding the environment were pretty standard parts of life. Enjoying avocado toast wasn’t “liberal.” It was just good and good for you. It only became a “thing” for me to even think about as I got into conservative commentary.
Does refusing to litter and getting angry at those who do make you Greta Thunberg? Does a preference for clean, organic food make you a “liberal”? Does wanting to regulate into oblivion chemicals that wreak havoc on healthy hormonal functions and contribute to diseases like cancer or dementia make you a statist? Oh well.
It was strange to me that these things were controversial at all from where I sat. And it was stranger still to see a reversal of the poles: as concern over things like endocrine disruptors became right-coded, elements of the left—not all of the left, but some of it—dismissed such concerns as largely conspiratorial. Conservatives suddenly sounded like hippies, and the other side, which had long been associated with hippiedom, ended up awkwardly running defense for corporate conglomerates and pharmaceutical giants.
But as hyperpolitics dies out, that’s changing, too, I think (and hope).
A recent study featured in The Washington Post found that the concentration of microplastics in brains analyzed by researchers had increased by about 50 percent from 2016 to 2024. When looking at the brains of a dozen patients diagnosed with dementia, they found three to five times as much of these plastics as normal brains. Microplastics burrow into everything from your liver to coronary arteries and testicles. Is it a really political position to not want this stuff in your genitals?
I spoke to Van Man (his name’s Jeremy, but I went with that), chief executive of The Van Man Company, about all this and more. We might have unwittingly crossed paths at one point: I moved from San Diego to the Midwest, and he moved from the Midwest to San Diego. Today, he no longer lives in a van and runs a successful business selling a variety of products ranging from organic tallow creams to beeswax lip balm.
More importantly, his business emerged as part of a movement of Americans, wary of both parties, for whom health and opposition to corporate malfeasance are their main issues. His wares were even featured for a time on the presidential campaign website of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose bid attracted an army of suburban moms.
The most remarkable part of the Van Man story is that it boils down to curiosity. I hope you will enjoy our conversation.
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