Two things that used to be distinctive to the left side of the aisle are becoming native to the Trump GOP: heavy-handed government intervention and a distrust of processed, mass-produced food.
Lifelong Democrat Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whom President-elect Donald Trump plans to appoint as secretary of health and human services, has repeatedly demanded that the government ban or curb foods he finds unhealthy. His supporters, such as Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL), responded to Trump’s pick of Kennedy by calling for a ban on all sorts of additives, plus high-fructose corn syrup.
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), one of the first loud voices for economic nationalism and an aggressive federal role, called for antitrust action to break up the meatpacking oligopoly. “The domination of a select few companies in the American meatpacking industry is cause for serious concern,” Hawley said in a joint statement in 2020.
Hawley is right to hate consolidation in the food industry — and not only in meatpacking. Luna is not alone in lamenting the ubiquity of high-fructose corn syrup in food.
But where they’re both wrong, and where Kennedy’s instincts are wrong, is in believing that the best solution is aggressive government intervention. In fact, if we want healthier food and healthier competition in the food sector, we likely need less government or maybe smarter government rather than more government. In fact, meatpacker consolidation and high-fructose corn syrup are two perfect examples of the unhealthy results of big government.
Corn syrup comes from Washington
High-fructose corn syrup is a heavily processed sweetener that gets a lot of bad press. Many argue that it’s more unhealthy than sugar — witness Luna putting it on her list of ingredients for Trump and Kennedy to ban.
Others simply say corn syrup tastes worse than cane sugar, which is why folks prefer “Mexican Coke” to its American counterpart. Since Coca-Cola has sugar in Mexico, why does it have corn syrup in the United States? Mostly, it’s because of the bad corporate welfare policies of the federal government.
The federal sugar program is a web of protectionist measures and government-backed loans designed to keep high the price of cane sugar and beet sugar. It succeeds in keeping sugar prices high and thus forces American food manufacturers to turn to corn syrup, which is also indirectly subsidized through crop subsidies.
A pound of refined sugar on the world market costs 25.86 cents, while in the U.S., the price was more than double, at 56.20 cents. The high price is a result of an artificially suppressed supply.
The Department of Agriculture allows in only a small quota of foreign sugar, mostly from the Dominican Republic, before punitive tariffs kick in. The point of these tariffs is not to raise revenue but to keep out foreign sugar, thus inflating the price of sugar within U.S. borders.
If somehow the price of sugar falls too low, the USDA has a second backstop: forgivable loans. A sugar grower can borrow against his sugar at 19.75 cents per pound of cane sugar or 25.38 cents per pound of beet sugar and then forfeit that sugar and keep the “loan” if he wants. In effect, the U.S. government buys up sugar if the price ever falls “too low.”
This guarantees a high demand for corn syrup as a sugar substitute. Sugar ain’t healthy, but if “Making America Healthy Again” means getting people off of high-fructose corn syrup, then Congress doesn’t have to curb HFC but instead can do this by abolishing the sugar program — which would also make the Everglades healthier again.
Regulation means unhealthy consolidation
Big government also makes America less healthy by driving consolidation in the food sector.
Consider the recent recall of organic carrots. One person died and at least 15 were hospitalized because of E. coli on carrots. This triggered a recall of organic carrots sold at Costco, Kroger, Target, Trader Joe’s, Walmart, Wegmans, Whole Foods, and other grocers in the U.S., including Puerto Rico, and Canada.
How did E. coli get into the carrots of all these different stores?
Well, they all came from the same carrot grower, Grimmway Farms. Two industrial producers, Grimmway and Bolthouse, combine to account for about 80% of the carrot harvest in the U.S., according to CNBC. As a result, any problem in the carrot processing of either of these behemoths is apt to become a nationwide problem.
After a salmonella outbreak a few years back, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention noted, “An increasingly centralized food supply means that a food contaminated in production can be rapidly shipped to many states, causing a widespread outbreak.”
Industry consolidation, then, makes America less healthy. The bad news is that carrots aren’t the only consolidated part of the food sector. Meatpackers are famously consolidated. Tyson Foods, Cargill, JBS, and Smithfield Foods control more than 80% of the market.
This is one reason that the likes of Kennedy and Hawley want to sic federal antitrust regulators on the big guys.
Why do we have so much consolidation? The prime culprit is regulation. In fact, the history of food regulation is a history of big business lobbying for stricter regulation to crowd out smaller competitors and big government intentionally seeking more consolidation.
You may recall from your lessons on the Progressive Era how muckraker Upton Sinclair exposed the depravities of the large meatpackers, spurring the rampaging reformer Teddy Roosevelt to rein in the packers. That story is totally false, it seems.
“We are now and always have been in favor of the extension of the inspection,” Thomas E. Wilson of the American Meat Institute testified in 1906. Specifically, the big meatpackers supported “the adoption of the sanitary regulations that will ensure the very best possible conditions.”
Historian Gabriel Kolko tells the story of Progressive food regulation as a tale of big business and big government teaming up to crush the little guy. That’s also how Sinclair tells it: “The Federal inspection of meat was, historically, established at the packers’ request … for the benefit of the packers.”
Then-Sen. George Perkins described the regulations as giving the big packers a “government certificate on their goods.”
When then-President Barack Obama passed the Food Safety Modernization Act, Kellogg and the Grocery Manufacturers of America supported it.
Author Joel Salatin wrote a book titled Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal, and it wasn’t that he wanted to chug Four Loko or drink Big Gulps. What he wanted was to grow and eat the very local and very organic.
Tale after tale trickles in from small farmers getting punished by regulators who serve to protect industrial-scale farming.
Government is bad for your health
Stricter regulation causes centralization in all sorts of ways. Most basically, regulatory costs add to overhead, and bigger firms are more able to absorb overhead costs.
Also, federal regulations tend to be one-size-fits-all rules. These necessarily crimp those who might do things differently to serve niche markets.
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The big guys are also able to hire the lawmakers and regulators to be their lobbyists and lawyers. The end result is a food system that is less local and more processed.
The “Make America Healthy Again” crowd isn’t wrong to suspect that there’s something unhealthy about our attachment to processed foods and industrial food processing. Hopefully, they can realize that the culprit here is big government.