The evidence is mounting that Americans have been the victims of a massive unannounced socio-medical experiment that started with food subsidies, turned into maltodextrin and polysorbate-80, and ended with the death of cheap health insurance and a nation full of sick people. It all started when corn subsidies were reformed under Nixon.
Essentially, the changes that the Nixon Administration made to America’s corn subsidies drove the price of corn so low that it cost more to grow than it did to sell — and that’s still true today. The only reason corn is grown anywhere at all, given its low price, is that the government subsidizes its growth — but because of the food subsidies, corn is the most profitable crop [for the mega-corps that rule the corn-growing farms] that it’s possible to grow.
So, the food subsidies threw the normal economics of supply and demand out the window, and made corn the number one crop in the nation by a huge margin despite the complete economical (and environmental — but that’s another story) stupidity of devoting more than a quarter of the nation’s entire arable land to a single cheap grain. The obvious the result was a massive glut of corn.
The equally obvious consequence of billions of bushels of corn sitting around unused was that a bunch of scientists started dreaming up uses for it. It was already going to feed cows and other animals that aren’t biologically designed to eat it, as well as being shipped en masse to other countries (where it destroyed their economies by being cheaper to buy from the US than it was to grow in their own backyards). But there was still more if it, and the companies had no incentive to grow anything else, so there would only be MORE ‘more of it’ down the line.
Thus, we as a nation replaced sugar with corn syrup. Then high fructose corn syrup. Then, the food scientists went completely cracker-whonking insane, and started literally disassembling corn on the molecular level and rearranging it into other “useful” material like maltodexterin, propylene glycol, monosodium glutamate, xylitol, and a thousand other unpronounceable food additives. Why? Because corn is so cheap that it actually saves money to buy it, disassemble it down to its component molecules, and rearrange those molecules for your own purposes than it is to just buy the alternatives…like sugar.
So, corn syrup and its ilk became not just commonplace in the American diet, but nearly unavoidable. And by correlating numbers between the Center for Disease Control and the American Obesity Association, you can map the percentage of the American population that is obese onto the amount of corn syrup that Americans produce and see that they rise at almost exactly the same rate. It’s simple: when you eat what the food scientists build instead of just eating food, your body loses.
The American corn subsidy is directly responsible for the American obesity epidemic. And with that epidemic comes a host of side effects: allergies, asthma, sleeping disorders, mental disorders, and chronic pain, fatigue, and listlessness. The American medical establishment treats every one of those symptoms as though it were its own disease (a whole other ‘another story’), and generates treatments, drugs — many of which come in corn-based encapsulating materials — and prescriptions for each. The average American finds themselves saddled with hundreds of dollars of prescription medications for all of their symptoms, and health insurance companies can’t afford to pay for all of that medication without grossly raising premiums across the board.
Cheap health insurance dies an ugly death, and its murder can be traced directly back to America’s epically stupid decision to use food subsidies to make corn cheaper to sell than it is to produce.
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Right on!
I trained as a physician in the 1980s, and now I’m learning “food science.” Don’t even get me started about how physicians aren’t taught about “nutrition” and “diet.”
UCTV (satelite access channel) has been running a series of lectures entitled, “Food and Addiction,” which I highly recommend to people who want to learn about how much of an impact the food industry has on our obesity epidemic. But, of course, we keep making the obesity epidemic into a “personal responsibility” problem, so we don’t have to tangle with corporate “foodism” and their big bucks!
So with food, as with so many other things in this American life, “the personal IS the political.” To fight the corporate interests, one becomes mired in the politics.
So, Mr. Danielson, how do we solve this problem?
Really, it’s a huge socioeconomic issue, because the corn lobby that supports the food subsidies has enough money to ruin any politican that stands up to them. It’s going to have to start with addressing the entire way in which business and the government sleep together.
Step one is a law that clearly and cleanly severs business and government by stating outright that if you have EVER worked in a given industry, you cannot be any part of a governmental organiation that oversees that industry. That will pretty much decimate the entirety of the FDA’s upper management, but it has to be done.
Step two is to utterly prevent any corporate entity, including individuals that work in the upper management of a corporation, from giving money to politicans, PACs, lobbyist groups, or any other entity which has as it’s mission the manipulation of Congresspeople.
Once we’ve severed business and government as completely as we’ve severed church and state, we can tackle the problems of the food subsidies on a more sane level. Take away the corn subsidy, and suddenly we’ll have worldwide famine for a few years as the price of corn restabilizes at an actual free-market value.
It will suck, but it has to be done, and the long-term benefits far outweigh the short-term costs, both for Americans who will stop being force-fed ‘edible foodlike substance’ and for the third-worlders who will be able to grow and sell their own products in their own backyard wihtout getting undercut by American corn that’s cheaper than local corn despite the cost of storing it and transporting it across oceans.
That’s the only solution that I can see working in the long term. Like you said, my ability to feed my son real, honest food starts with massive political change on the highest levels. It sounds intimidating, and I have no idea how to actually start the process, but that’s what needs to happen. :)