Until the 1980s, the modern-day Malthus acolytes like Drs. Paul Ehrlich and John Holdren predicted Population Bombs and advocated for government-mandated sterilization and abortion to prevent it.(1)
Science didn’t buy into the doomsday narrative and the poor have benefited.
Rather than the world starvation social authoritarians claimed only they could prevent, food has become so plentiful and affordable that modern social authoritarians now demand poor people be banned from buying food that government panels segregate. For the first time in the history of planet earth, the poorest people can afford to be fat.(2)
That was not a problem for the poor even 50 years ago.(3)
It sounds ridiculous but obesity being a choice is not only a science win, it will be a cultural one. Not because progressive nannies will demand more products be banned, that will always be stupid, but because psychology can overcome our evolutionary mandate.
We can learn to overcome the ‘I don’t know where my next meal will come from’ biological foundation handed to us by nature, with cultural maturity. We have done it in lots of other areas.
Mating was once just biological. Then it became transactional because the goal was to have biological needs met, which meant economic security for both men and women. Marriage was not about love until the 20th century and two billion people refer to it as something different than the norm, “love marriage”, because it remains transactional in their cultures. With the Industrial Revolution, the wealth of poor people shot up, the gap between the richest and poorest narrowed by an order of magnitude, and a frustrated Karl Marx railed he’d been born in the wrong century as he watched the wages of the poor increase 300% compared to the cost of living during his life.
That meant the hierarchy of needs less of a concern and people could marry for personal qualities.
So it goes with food. We are only two generations into the poor being wealthy enough to be fat, the 320 generations since the advent of agriculture prior to the 1980s would consider everyone poor in western nations rich in their societies. And getting richer.
New USDA figures show that the Trump administration may need to ignore Secretary Kennedy on food the way they do on energy; or he’s going to send a lot of his voters into bankruptcy.
Just at the time Secretary Kennedy hopes to overturn chemistry and biology by declaring that corn syrup is processed differently in the body than the honey or cane sugar he endorses, corn farmers not only have a record crop, thanks to America being the most pro-science country in the world, corn yields have doubled since the Ehrlichs and Holdren wrote their doomsday prophecy.
Related on the SLP
Instead of running farmers out of business, the way Sec. Kennedy has tried to do for decades, the Trump administration may need to create a financial safety net. Vice-President Al Gore broke the tie in the Senate to mandate corn ethanol (to gain favor in Iowa for his presidential run) while President Obama handed over millions of acres of federal land to boost corn ethanol as part of this ‘anything except energy that works’ agenda, but now there is far too much corn to use. Unless the ethanol mandate goes way up.
Food is a strategic resource, we should not outsource that any more than we’d outsource energy or the military. Kennedy can engage in populism about organic food being viable, but it will just send us into the past. And a lot of farmers into selling their land to housing developers. That is not good for anyone, but eventually more science will mean a net win for the planet.
NOTES:
(1) They weren’t kidding. The argument from social authoritarian progressives is always that leaders lack the ‘political will’ when everyone knows they’re actually just terrible human beings.
(2) Since they cannot afford the healthcare that progressives forced them into, they now have to be forced to be thin.
(3) Sure, we will never get a Taj Mahal or Versailles again, that kind of opulent wealth was once common for many rulers but no one now has that level of riches, yet we have the average person living better than ever. If you care about people, that’s good. If you are a wealthy actor who moves to Hawaii and them demands farming be halted, I know how you vote.
Hank Campbell is the founder of Science 2.0 and the author of Science Left Behind. Follow Hank on X @HankCampbell
A version of this article was originally posted at Science 2.0 and is reposted here with permission. Any reposting should credit both the GLP and the original article. Find Science 2.0 on X @science2_0
