Michael Pollan

Our agriculture was a lot more diversified before really the 70s.

During the Nixon administration, there was a real spike in the price of food.

There had been a grain deal with the Russians that was kept secret, and when the word came out, grain prices went crazy.

And food inflation became very high, much higher than it is now.

And President Nixon knew that if the price of food didn't come down, he wasn't going to get reelected.

So he brought in a brilliant agricultural economist.

named Earl Butts and said, your job is to drive down the price of food.

And Butts knew exactly how to do it.

And he basically encouraged farmers and changed the incentive structure so that they would plant one crop, a fence row to fence row is what he said,

and consolidate so that if your neighbor was a weaker player than you were, you would buy your neighbor out and the fields got bigger and the diversity declined and it worked.

We have such overproduction of corn and soy.

Our problem is not too little food, it's too much food.

What do you do with that?

Well, that's why we started making biofuels to get rid of this excess of corn.

And this is the basis of the food system.

So if you have cheap corn, you're going to have cheap meat and cheap milk and cheap butter.

Sure.

There is a system for refining that corn that essentially you can break it down into its component parts.

And if you look at all the ingredients on a package of ultra-processed food and you see maltodextrin and high-fructose corn syrup and soy lecithin, yeah, yeah, all these different manifestations of starch, most of those ingredients can be derived from corn once you've put it through this processing.

And in fact, that technology to figure out what you could do with that packet of starch was developed around the same period.