THE SET-UP: The inspiration for today’s TRIFECTA came from a new deep dive into “Big Potato” by The Lever.
Yup, “big potato” is exactly what it sounds like … yet another sector of the economy has evolved into a cartel with the power to manipulate “the market.” Somehow, Milton Friedman’s dream of magical market-based competition that forces producers to efficiently deliver more for less … repeatedly turns into a nightmare of hoarding, consolidation, monopolization and market manipulation.
And that’s what The Lever’s Katya Schwenk found in the potato business, where “decades of consolidation” means:
…just four firms now control at least 97 percent of the $68 billion frozen potato market. These four companies participate in the same trade associations and use a third-party data analytics platform — PotatoTrac — to share confidential business information. [L]awsuits allege the firms’ collusion has driven french fries and hash browns to record-high prices.
Friedmanites are convinced that sort of price gouging is not a thing. Meanwhile, back on Planet Earth…
Between July 2022 and July 2024, the price of frozen potato products increased by 47 percent across the board, according to court documents. This rise was initially tied to a jump in operating costs among the companies that peaked in 2022 — but even as these expenses have declined over the last two years, product prices have remained high.
In fact, Schwenk points out that three big frozen potato companies ‘‘…have never ever seen margins this high in the history of the potato industry.” Ka-ching!
Definitely follow the hyperlink and read it through because it’s an apt intro to something even bigger than cartel-like manipulation of frozen potatoes. Now we’re talking about the manipulation of our appetites and the tantalizing risk/reward proposition that is RFK Jr.
Yeah, we could end up with RFK Jr. mismanaging an Avian Flu pandemic or measles outbreaks. Or we could see the first real disruption of a poison and petrochemical-based food system that seems to be making everybody sick. Or it could be both. Or neither. Whatever the outcome, he is going to inject some long-ignored truths about food into mainstream. Vaccines? Not so much. But food? Let’s see. - jp
TITLE: Could Cory Booker and RFK Jr. form an unlikely alliance to reform the U.S. food system?
https://www.inquirer.com/politics/nation/rfk-jr-hhs-food-system-policies-cory-booker-20250102.html
EXCERPTS: [New Jersey Senator Cory] Booker’s office highlighted six of the senator’s legislative priorities on food and agriculture, including the Protecting America’s Children from Toxic Pesticides Act in 2023. In September, Booker introduced the Safe School Meals Act of 2024, which would “ban foods with contaminants above safe levels in or on final products served in school meals, and for other purposes.”
[R.F. K. Jr.] has taken frequent aim at these issues, often blaming toxins and food system practices for spurring chronic illness in the U.S. He has said food in the U.S. is “just poison” and told Fox News that “we have a generation of kids who are swimming around in a toxic soup right now” with regard to school lunches.
Booker is not alone when it comes to overlapping priorities with Kennedy; other Democrats have expressed similar positions, but many see Kennedy’s anti-vaccine sentiments as a deal-breaker.
Booker has expressed mixed feelings about Kennedy’s fitness as HHS secretary, NOTUS reported. He acknowledged his agreements with Kennedy on certain issues, but expressed his strong concerns about “… other issues that could undermine the safety of children,” like Kennedy’s position on vaccines.
“But again, I feel a big sense of urgency,” Booker said. “The number one killer of Americans is diet-related diseases, and we need people that are going to begin to tell the truth about our agriculture policy.”
Nutrition experts and stakeholders are “encouraged” by Kennedy’s intention to disrupt a food system that “doesn’t seem to be working,” said David Sarwer, director of the Center for Obesity Research and Education at Temple University’s College of Public Health.
“There have been many people on the policy side of the street and the academic side of the street who’ve been advocating for these changes for decades without success, and maybe it is time for a disrupter at a national level to really try to shake things loose and affect change,” Sarwer said.
But some of Kennedy’s priorities may be more difficult to achieve than others. Removing specific additives is a “painstaking” process at the FDA, said Peter Lurie, president and executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest. The organization opposes Kennedy’s nomination because of his lack of managerial and scientific experience.
Kennedy would be better off focusing on individual chemicals that the FDA could soon rule on — like the food dye Red 3, titanium dioxide, or aspartame — or reforming the overall marketplace approval process for additives, known as Generally Recognized as Safe (GRAS), said Lurie, who was also a former associate commissioner for public health strategy and analysis at the FDA.
Kennedy’s other goals, like promoting raw milk — which can carry dangerous bacteria, according to the FDA — or dismantling the FDA’s nutrition department in charge of nutrition labels, are harmful, Lurie said.
Kennedy may have to perform a balancing act because his “best ideas are not consistent with the seeming anti-regulatory ideology of the incoming administration,” Lurie added. Kennedy wants to regulate ultra-processed foods, food dyes, and pesticides on farms, but some of these priorities could instead fall under the purview of the Environmental Protection Agency or the Department of Agriculture.
“He’s gonna have to buck the ideology of the Republican Party as well as opposition from the food industry to be able to pull these things off,” he said. “Whether he can, or will, remains to be seen.”
TITLE: The American Food System’s Very Bad Legacy
https://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2025/01/the-american-food-systems-very-bad-legacy/
EXCERPT: [T]he only way the dietary trends that have been ascendant for the better part of a century will reverse is if the public perception of food undergoes a truly radical shift. Swapping one emulsifier for another, mono- for diglycerides, powdered beet extract for Red 40 will not move the needle. Neither will prominently displaying the sodium content on the front of every can of soup. Only if the public at large comes to view processed food as poison, to view McDonald’s as more akin to cigarettes than a healthy dinner, will dietary patterns have a chance of shifting dramatically enough to reverse the trends of obesity and related diseases. The government cannot legislate such a change, but public health officials could at least be clear in their messaging.
The other path, which we are far more likely to race down, is drugs. As much as I would love a social response, one in which without coercion or chemical support we collectively undertake the hard work of rediscovering how to make and share and eat real food, I am not holding my breath. I am aware of no country in the world that has brought about such a shift, no matter the government or cultural particularities. But there are early signs that novel weight loss drugs have succeeded at reducing rates of obesity, and I would bet the evidence will become incontrovertible in years to come.
I’m not alone in finding the prospect a food system so unhealthy that a large percentage of the populace requires lifelong prescription drugs simply to avoid a litany of metabolic disorders pretty grim. As [FDA Commissioner Robert Califf, MD] says, “I’ve had this nightmare that I was the head of this agency that my great-grandkids read about called the FDA, where a society allowed people to gain essentially a pound of weight every year, and then to fix it they invented a drug at $20,000 per year to try to deal with it. That would be a very bad legacy to leave behind.”
A tragedy for certain, but it would also be a crystalline example of the perils of a society in which technology increasingly shapes each of us, body and soul. The only response we can conceivably muster to an environment designed to manipulate us into ill health comes in the form of drugs designed to manipulate us into resisting it. No one likes this, and perhaps our collective discontent will lead to a ban on a chemical or two and maybe to ominous labels on the front of some foods. But I think everyone knows the real solution, when it arrives, will be injections and pills that allow us to walk through an orchard of poisoned fruits without reaching out our soft hands. There’s little appetite for a response that begins with taking up our axes to clear the land for something better.
TITLE: Ozempic could destroy modern civilisation (But would that be such a bad thing?)
https://unherd.com/2025/01/ozempic-could-destroy-modern-civilisation/
EXCERPTS: What if it turned out that the next generation of Ozempic-like drugs was an antidote not just for overeating but all compulsive behaviours? What would happen to the world we’ve created?
Here’s my theory: very quickly, everything would fall apart. Whole industries would collapse. The economy would hit rock bottom. Individually and collectively, we’d have to figure out how to rehabilitate ourselves.
That’s because we live in a world of what the historian David Courtwright calls “limbic capitalism”: an economic system that drives profit by capturing the part of our brains responsible for emotions, rewards and behaviour — regardless of the havoc it wreaks on our bodies and minds. Notice this is the exact opposite of the way we’re taught capitalism is supposed to work: via a free market of rational individuals making informed decisions.
For a beautiful example of limbic capitalism, take a recent promotion from Pizza Hut, which offered online customers free bets at gambling websites. In other words: as a reward for buying an addictive food via an addictive device, you were able to indulge in a notoriously addictive behaviour on a platform optimised for addiction.
The notion that the gambling industry relies on addiction isn’t just a hunch: a report from the Gambling Commission shows that, without “problem gamblers”, betting companies literally couldn’t turn a profit. Everybody knows the slogan “Please gamble responsibly” is a sick joke: if customers were actually able to adhere to it, the industry would vanish into thin air. They might as well sell heroin in packages bearing the same disclaimer.
But, in terms of both market value and the social harm it causes, gambling is just a street-corner dealer compared with the Mexican cartel of the modern food industry. As the author Johann Hari points out in his recent book Magic Pill, Ozempic and similar drugs are an artificial solution to an artificial problem: a health crisis created by western countries’ transition, since the Seventies, from a diet based on fresh food to one based on industrially manufactured food that confuses your body’s sense of satiety and keeps you eating when you’re full — that turns you, in other words, into an addict. The results can be measured in our expanded waistlines: nearly a third of UK adults are obese (up threefold among women and fivefold among men since 1980) and nearly two thirds are overweight, dramatically increasing their risk of everything from heart attacks and strokes to diabetes and cancer. The corporations responsible for this state of affairs are, quite literally, making a killing.
Still, it wasn’t until each of us started carrying a miniature Dopamine Store around with us at all times that limbic capitalism finally took over the world. The flashing, buzzing little Pavlovian machines in our pockets were designed by people who studied how slot machines overstimulate our brains’ reward centres to keep us hooked.
For every fundamental human need, limbic capitalism provides a dopamine-fuelled answer. Love? Online dating. Sex? Online porn. Play? Online gaming. Intellectual curiosity? Twitter/X. Aesthetic joy? Instagram. (I’m afraid if you want to know what fundamental human need TikTok is supposed to serve, you’ll have to find a member of Gen Z and see if they understand the meaning of the words “fundamental human need”.)
But, for me, the most insidious aspect of limbic capitalism is the way it can turn even health products into new addictions. This category includes not only a plethora of bogus “diet” foods made of chemicals you could use to clean a drain pipe. There’s also the array of meditation, therapy and sleep apps that promise to help reduce the stress that’s exacerbated by the very device you’re using to access them. You could always try turning off your phone instead, of course – but who the hell would ever do that?
Perhaps you’re thinking: sure, it sucks to be an addict in the modern world — but I’m not an addict, and neither are most people. But if you think you’re immune to the effects of limbic capitalism, think again. Modern neuroscience and cognitive psychology teach us that we’re all much less free than we think. As Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman has shown, most of our actions are automatic, triggered by environmental stimuli or past experiences and propelled by unconscious motivations. The behavioural engineers who designed your smartphone and the platforms they carry have no time for metaphysical distinctions between “addicts” and “non-addicts”. To them, we are all walking limbic systems, waiting to be exploited.
Although they’re hardly its most pernicious manifestation, for me the evil genius of limbic capitalism is best symbolised by my recent nemesis: the nicotine vape. Vapes show how even what appears to be a genuine miracle cure for addiction can be hacked to create a new cohort of addicted consumers. When I first tried them 10 years ago, I was amazed to find I could quit cigarettes at a stroke. But before long manufacturers started making single-use vapes full of candy-like flavours in colourful packaging (irresistible to teenagers and, unfortunately, 40-year-old men like me). Now vapes create blood nicotine concentrations at much higher levels than the cigarettes they were meant to replace; I wasn’t joking when I said I have tried taking up Marlboro Lights again to help me quit vaping.
If Ozempic 2.0 does come along, cure all addictions and thereby abolish modern capitalism, will that be such a bad thing? On the one hand, it will presumably cause untold economic destruction. On the upside, it might help solve the teen mental health crisis, raise our IQs, force us to rediscover authentic sources of meaning and connection, and compel us to build a society based on something other than short-term gratification.
Until then, if the Marlboro Lights method doesn’t stop me from scurrying into the Dopamine Store for yet more candyfloss flavoured Elf Bar vapes in 2025 – well, I suppose I could always try taking up heroin again.
Thanks JP. Yours is one of the few substacks that I let into my email.