I had hoped to bring about world peace as I promised last month, but this can't wait.
The inflicting of a famine on one's people for a political purpose is always painful, but sometimes necessary, as the Soviet, Chinese and US governments all found in the 20th century. The Great American Famine has been by far the most successful and long-running. But its costs now outweigh its benefits and it should be ended.
The background to the Great American Famine is often misunderstood. At the height of the cold war, it was clear that America's leadership class needed the best of food—and extra vitamins, minerals and enzymes—to keep ahead of the Russians. Leadership is exceptionally draining. Feeding king and peasant the same cheese and bread was a typically inefficient old world practice. Why, it was practically communism.
And so food, like the old-fashioned mortgage, was sliced and diced into tranches. During the 1950s and 1960s, this worked merely at the level of the animal. The meat ended up on restaurant tables in Manhattan and Washington DC. The fat, eyeballs and hooves were minced into the burgers of the poor. But American ingenuity soon worked its way down to the level of the molecule. The high-value vitamins and minerals now ended up in organic power bars in Upper East Side delis. What's left was the all-American "empty calorie": white flour, white sugar, corn syrup.
But empty calories aren't just empty; they are negative. Meals that contain zero nutrients still require processing by your body, which requires you to use up vitamins, minerals and enzymes that are not being replaced by the meal. Eating more starves you faster. Now, normally you eat until you've got all the stuff your body needs. Then, sated, you stop. But if you haven't eaten all the stuff you need to function, then your body orders you to keep eating.
This insight was the breakthrough the US needed to solve two pressing problems. First, poor people, whose existence in America has always been problematic (and possibly unconstitutional).
Second, way too much corn. US corn production had been held artificially high since the 1950s, to ensure food sufficiency in a nuclear war—as it still is. (You can't be too careful.) But massively subsidised, forced over-production created a peacetime glut. America found a solution; use the poor to dispose of the corn. This had the added benefit of making them pay the disposal costs. A splendid chance for America's poor to prove their patriotism.
But this only works if there is no real food available; otherwise the poor might accidentally eat it, be sated and stop eating.
And so, with a few simple, impossible-to-meet hygiene regulations, the government made unprocessed food (or "food" as it used to be known) illegal. Thus you can be prosecuted in the US for selling unpasteurised milk. Rightly so; nature is irretrievably contaminated. Local butchers and dairies were replaced with processing plants. Processing became mandatory across the food chain, without having to say so officially and tipping off the Russians.
It took an astonishing engineering effort but eventually the Parmesan and wholewheat crackers eaten by a president and the Cheese Whiz blasted onto Pringles from an aerosol by someone on welfare in Detroit didn't have a single chemical in common.
The stuff the poor now eat is derived from food, but it isn't food. The ruling class now eat rich, capital food. The poor are eating derivatives, or—as Warren Buffett unkindly called their financial equivalent—"toxic waste." (True, high fructose corn syrup and trans fats are waste products, never previously eaten by humans. But "toxic" seems a little harsh.)
Thus America has created the first postmodern famine, a high-tech affair of balanced nutrients that could run indefinitely. Obesity is to America what beriberi is to Africa: a bloating which is a sign of starvation. If you eat standard American food, you never get what you need, you are never sated and you never stop eating. You very, very slowly starve while getting fatter. Thus, every year, the unneeded corn is disposed of. The system has been perfected.
But, as is typical of the feckless poor, they have overdone it. Americans are getting shorter, dying younger and their teeth, thyroids and hearts have gone to hell. The cost of keeping alive 100m chronically ill, famine-ravaged Americans with no health insurance risks damaging the US economy. The Medicare trust fund is set to run out by 2017.
Meanwhile, the Russians have been defeated, taken to drink and are dying even faster than Americans. And so the time has come for the leaders of the US food industry to make the ultimate sacrifice. My suggestion is that management and shareholders be required to eat their own products. Not as 100 per cent of their diet—I am not a monster—50 per cent will do, to ensure they swiftly rebalance American food. Such light-touch regulation will allow the free market—which so successfully started the Great American Patriotic Famine— to end it.
