"Corn is an efficient way to get energy calories off the land and soybeans are an efficient way of getting protein off the land, so we've designed a food system that produces a lot of cheap corn and soybeans resulting in a lot of cheap fast food"
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Efficiency is the villain Pollan can’t stop circling, because it wears the halo of “progress.” By praising corn for calories and soybeans for protein, he borrows the language of agronomy and economics, then flips it into an indictment: when a system is optimized for output per acre, it will obediently churn out mountains of inputs, not meals. The line’s quiet trick is that it makes “designed” sound both technocratic and accusatory. This isn’t a natural drift in taste; it’s a blueprint with winners, losers, and very predictable side effects.
The subtext is that cheapness is not a neutral virtue. Corn and soy aren’t just foods here; they’re industrial raw materials that become sweeteners, refined oils, feed for livestock, and the structural scaffolding of processed eating. Pollan compresses a whole political economy into a clean causal chain: land-use metrics -> monocultures -> subsidized abundance -> ultra-processed affordability. “Fast food” arrives not as a cultural preference but as a downstream product of policy, logistics, and corporate formulation.
Context matters because Pollan is writing in the long shadow of postwar American farm policy: yield maximization, commodity subsidies, and a marketplace where price signals reward shelf-stable calories over nutritional complexity. His intent isn’t to shame individual consumers; it’s to relocate responsibility upstream, to the incentives that make the cheapest choices the most engineered. The punch lands because it reframes the food debate from morality to architecture: change the design, and the menu changes with it.
The subtext is that cheapness is not a neutral virtue. Corn and soy aren’t just foods here; they’re industrial raw materials that become sweeteners, refined oils, feed for livestock, and the structural scaffolding of processed eating. Pollan compresses a whole political economy into a clean causal chain: land-use metrics -> monocultures -> subsidized abundance -> ultra-processed affordability. “Fast food” arrives not as a cultural preference but as a downstream product of policy, logistics, and corporate formulation.
Context matters because Pollan is writing in the long shadow of postwar American farm policy: yield maximization, commodity subsidies, and a marketplace where price signals reward shelf-stable calories over nutritional complexity. His intent isn’t to shame individual consumers; it’s to relocate responsibility upstream, to the incentives that make the cheapest choices the most engineered. The punch lands because it reframes the food debate from morality to architecture: change the design, and the menu changes with it.
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| Topic | Food |
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