On 11/2/2010 4:15 PM, Ed Foote wrote: > just like those uninsured that get obese on food stamps spent on junk food, (getting back to that personal responsibility thing). Ed, point taken, but we do share a little group responsibility for that junk food. The government has subsidized it, both the corn and soybeans, and the feed lots which use some of the surplus. It means that the cheapest food is the least healthy. This is the opposite of the normal state of affairs, where grassfed meat should be cheaper than corn-fed. No costs of equipment for row crops, pesticides, herbicides, fuel, seed, synthetic fertilizers, or processing and shipping to the animals, or dealing with the "waste" which should be left all over pastures by the animals themselves, instead of leaching into rivers from huge lagoons next to feedlots. Good food is more expensive because it is not subsidized, and a lot of that is the government's fault, burying us in mounds of overproduced unneeded corn which then finds a zillion ways to get into people, among them high fructose corn syrup, invented solely to scrape some profit from the overage in corn. Which leads us back to the medical cost thing -- corn syrup in beverages is both addictive and very effective in making people (even young people) obese and diabetic. Then they must be treated, or they'll die. So the medical costs go sky-high .... from corn which the government paid farmers to grow too much of. It's idiotic. The farm bills just get cranked out unchanged year after year. We surely should do better than this! Susan -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/pianotech.php/attachments/20101102/5c688020/attachment.htm>
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