i wonder what you guys will find next to blame the government for.
This is not about blaming the government. It's a health issue and a science issue to which the government was party.
If the government offers price supports to this or that, then we eat more this or that.
I mis-stated that. Sorry. Shouldn't have posted. Too tired. I realized I wasn't making sense and noted that but I should have have skipped the note in favor of the delete key. Not going to try to fix it right now.
Here's a clip, though, for part of it from the first source that came up:
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The beginning of corn subsidies
In the 1960s, rising food prices became a national political issue. President Nixon told Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz to do whatever it took to bring down prices.
Butz told farmers to “get big or get out,” and to plant commodity crops like corn “from fencerow to fencerow.” This wasn’t merely a suggestion. He also reversed farm policy to make it happen.
After the dust bowl in the beginning of the 20th Century, policies had been put in place to suppress overproduction.
The program that Butz inherited worked like this: When farmers began to produce too much and prices began to fall, the government would pay farmers to leave some land fallow, with the goal of pushing prices up the following season. When prices threatened to go too high, the payments would end and the land would go back into cultivation.
The government would also buy excess grain from farmers and store it. In lean years — say, when drought struck — the government would release some of that stored grain, mitigating sudden price hikes. The overall goal was to stop prices from falling too low (hurting farmers) or jumping too high (squeezing consumers).
Butz reversed this policy, instead seeking to maximize productivity at all costs.
Rather than keep a floor under prices for farm goods, the USDA would now lavish farmers with direct payments. That meant that if the market price for a good fell under farmers’ production costs, a government check to the farmer would make up the difference. This policy switch marks the birth of the subsidy system that remains controversial today.
That means every bushel of corn and soybeans sold in the U.S. is federally subsidized. The more of it farmers grow, the more they make. Laws of supply and demand have been suspended.
What that means is there’s so much of the stuff on the market, they needed to find new ways to use it. First they invented corn syrup. And got congress to pass a tariff on foreign sugar, making corn syrup the cheaper choice. (That’s why Mexican Coca Cola is still made with cane sugar, and people smuggle it into the U.S.)
Then they figured out how to get cattle to tolerate it long enough to get to slaughter. (Cows and other ruminants are designed to live on grass.) It involves turning the corn into flakes, then frosting those flakes with tons of antibiotics:
Every year in the United States 25 million pounds of valuable antibiotics — roughly 70 percent of total US antibiotic production — are fed to chickens, pigs, and cows for nontherapeutic purposes like growth promotion, according to a new report from the Union of Concerned Scientists.
That led to CAFOs — Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations. It’s interesting to note that the government entity that defines “CAFO” is the EPA. (Check that last link again.) And that when you search Google for government sites that answer the question what is a CAFO the first two links are CDC and EPA (Center for Disease Control and Environmental Protection Agency).
But this wasn’t supposed to be about beef, I was talking about frying chips.
The point is, most restaurants and processed food manufacturers have switched to vegetable oils. They’re responding to consumer demand (based on bad science pushed by vegetable oil manufacturers), and to lower prices (based on federal subsidies). When you are cooking for yourself, you can ignore the bogus health claims; and you’ll end up spending less than buying the prepared foods anyway, so you might as well spend a little more for a better oil.
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