Food Matters

You must have all three or society collapses. This continues my recent posts on health matters. I disagree strongly with Bittman's implication that profits are bad. They are not. In fact, people are profits. I know this will annoy people, but so be it. If we as individuals do not produce more than we consume we die. This is not to say that there is not a place for insurance, personal charity, and societal charity. The problem is when special interests can seize control of the government and direct government expenditures to private pockets. During the 19th century it was Big Rail and Big Manufacturing. Today it is Big Ag, Big Pharma, and the Military Industrial Complex President Eisenhower warned us against.

This chart tells you what you need to know about Ag subsidies. But Bittman does point out an important point about our lack of a market system. With the distortions in the food pricing system, nothing is priced correctly. If things are under-priced, too much of them are used. Through agricultural subsidies the price of corn and soy is reduced to below market levels, yet at the same time the price of corn is raised artificially through ethanol subsidies. The energy used to produce the corn and the ethanol is actually less than the energy we get from burning it in our cars. What is the correct price? Just as in real estate I mentioned earlier this week, no one knows.

Bittman is spot on in his prediction that we need to do what our mother told us and eat our vegetables.

I do not agree with much of what is presented, but I still feel that watching it will be beneficial.