Thursday, October 30, 2008

Heavy

If you want some kind of a rebuttal to all the pro–corn syrup propaganda that's been slowly oozing around recently, here's a "scientists say" kind of rundown from the New York Times. It's glib, but it's a step up from know-nothing.

I tried to look up something about U.S. sugar tariffs, which I'd thought were big pro-corn barriers against cheap Latin American can sugar, but this New Yorker bit from a couple of years ago suggests they're more of a U.S. sugar industry thing. But then there's the whole ethanol lobby etc. etc. and you need to go lie down for a while. It's worth remembering now and then, just as a counter-ideology thing, that we don't actually run anything like a pure market economy in this country.

1 Comments:

Blogger nate said...

I'm smack in the middle of reading Michael Pollan's "The Omnivore's Dilemma" and it very much has me thinking corn, corn, terrible, go lie down. Kyle's reading his more recent follow-up, which is called "For Christ's Sake Don't Eat That" or something, which sounds like a similar depression-maker about food and industry.

Pollan calls out sugar tariffs as a tool of the corn industry too; interesting that Big Sugar is in on the deal.

10/31/2008 8:44 PM  

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