Jack

Gay, the short answer is no. The longer answer is that one part of the farm bill concerns soil conservation and clean water. There is one component of the farm bill that includes health-related protections. However, if you get subsidies for your wheat there is not a requirement that it be GMO-free, pesticide-free, and organically raised. So, there’s no connection between that section of the farm bill around land and water use, and the use of subsidies. It’s fascinating that the farm bill is one bill. Several of the videos I recommended concern how this could be one bill when it contains so many different things.

Bill G

Even the crop list is sort of a misdirection, isn’t it? For instance, we can look at one of the big three—this being corn. A lot of the corn goes into animal feed—but also into high fructose corn syrup. We talk about healthy cherries, but when you really look at where the money’s going in the bill, an awful lot of it goes to crops that are overproduced and subsidized to the detriment of the consumer—particularly from a health perspective. I’m sure RFK is one of those who has raised questions about the health of food we consume. We’re all going to be in a dilemma about whether to support his perspective, while considering him to be a crazy individual.

Bill B

Jack, are some of the products that are getting the greatest support—such as wheat, corn, soybeans—getting this support because in and of themselves they don’t really taste very good—as compared with cherries, avocados, whatever. Do we need to add stuff to make them taste better? Is it like in manufacturing where some things that are not very comfortable are easiest to mass production not very comfortable or stable–so we have to heavily market them. We have to do things to make them palatable. Is that the case here about the processing of food?

Jack

Bill, I don’t think taste is much of an issue here. I would venture to say that variation in the amount of work needed to produce a specific food product has changed dramatically during the last 75 years. This is really the major factor. The amount of corn that could be produced on an acre of land in 1940 is about 20% compared to what an acre of corn can produce today. Whereas the production of a cherry tree has probably only gone up by 20, 30 or 40% with regard to the number of cherries on a particular tree. You can’t go up by a factor of 5 or 10 on a cherry tree or with many other truck farm crops. The production of those is limited more by the way they’re produced than is the case for corn, wheat, soybeans, rice, and cotton—which can now be produced in such large quantities that they far exceed the ability of humans to ingest them.

Bill B

I was thinking of the matter of processing. Perhaps, some food products that need the heaviest processing to be popular with Americans are those that do not inherently have a lot of taste themselves. Is some of the processing a matter of making an ingredient somehow more flavorful and more favorable for human consumption?