Politics & Power Quote by Mark Bittman

Bittman’s line lands like a polite accusation: the coronation of soy, corn, cattle, and eventually chicken wasn’t a triumph of taste or nutrition, but of policy. The “throne” metaphor is doing quiet work here. It frames the American food system not as a natural marketplace but as a managed monarchy, where power flows from state support and legislative dealmaking. “Fine collaboration” drips with irony; it’s a phrase that sounds civic-minded while pointing to capture - Congress serving industry under the cover of economic pragmatism.

The specific intent is to reassign blame. Instead of scolding individual eaters for “bad choices,” Bittman targets the structural machinery that made cheap calories and cheap meat feel inevitable. Farm subsidies don’t just lower prices; they shape landscapes, research priorities, lobbying muscle, and the defaults of every grocery aisle. By listing soy and corn first, he hints at their role as invisible infrastructure: feed, oil, additives, sweeteners - the base code of processed food and industrial livestock.

The subtext is temporal and moral: “It was during this period” suggests a hinge moment, a decision point that got normalized into culture. “Dietary and planetary destruction” yokes personal health to climate and ecological damage, refusing to let either be treated as a separate issue. The kicker - “only realizing just now” - is a rebuke to a society that mistook abundance for innocence, and speed for progress, until the bill arrived in rising chronic disease and a warming planet.