And guess who owns Coca Cola? Berkshire Hathaway aka Warren Buffet. I wonder if whoever got campaign donations from them voted yes on the spending bill?

There should be a website that traces these connections. Too bad GAW is just a rapid feed only and doesn’t have categories so we could do something productive with this research instead of letting it vanish into the memory hole every 24 hours. Maybe it’s by design?

Yeah, it's a bit more complicated than that. What you said is true, but consider this (as I understand it from living in northern Iowa and Illinois corn country for several decades of my life).

In the 1970s, the Green Revolution in fertilizers, pesticides, and later, genetically modified/selectively bred corn created highly efficient corn cultivars that were able to produce ~10x more yield than previous varieties. As a result, we've been able to cheaply feed the world. We fed the Soviets back in the cold war. We've fed Africa for several generations now, and we eat cheap here in the US. All because of massive advances in crop science that have made all of that possible. We produce a HUGE amount of corn and other staple crops.

Of course, in order to do that, we had to adapt farming technology as well, including moving to factory farming to take advantage of economy of scale when owning and maintaining the necessary heavy equipment, land, facilities, labor, etc. When I was 14 I detassled corn in the summer. That's not really done now. It's automated. Machines do it. And as a result, quality reflects the handling that a machine gives to the corn. A certain amount of the harvest will be high quality and fit for human consumption. A certain amount won't quite meet that standard, but it's excellent for livestock feed. And the left overs that aren't fit for use as livestock feed ends up being processed into secondary products, most notably high fructose corn syrup which is the "demon" we find in so many food products today as a sugar substitute. Finally, lets not forget that something like 30% of the yield ends up as corn ethanol you're required by law to put in your car's fuel tank.

On paper, this is all smart business. Capitalism and the free market have minimized waste, driven incredible innovation, and allowed us to provide enormous amounts of food at rock bottom prices even to the world's poorest people. It's an incredible success story, frankly, when you think about it.

Now, of course, people aren't perfect. And government often provides perverse incentives to encourage bad behavior. We've since found that HFCS isn't great for the body's digestion in large quantities. It's ultra-high octane fuel that many bodies with low metabolic needs (ie sedentary lifestyle with low calorie needs, or people who are already overweight) don't need. But, because it's the cheap food and the tasty food, people disproportionately choose it over healthier options. Some of that is the individual's fault. Some of it isn't. If you can't afford better, you take what you can get or go hungry, and if you have kids in the picture, the latter's not an option.

Ultimately, government plays a role. Options it could do:

1. Regulate the amount of HCFS that can go into food - this would drive prices higher, reducing sales, but what is available presumably would be debateably healthier.
2. Regulate what can be purchased with EBT/SNAP - this would limit how much junk food those who need help are getting and encourage healthier eating choices, and frankly should've been done a long time ago. It's just an administrative nightmare, so they haven't done it.
3. Create labeling requirements for HFCS - this is probably the easiest solution. The idea here is to just require that products made with HFCS put a special icon on the front of the package like they require for GMO to identify it. It won't stop people from buying it, but education can move the needle.

I know there's the suggestion from time to time that we get rid of farm bill and crop insurance. This would be disastrous for family and small-size farms. The industrial farms could absorb the risk if they had a bad harvest, floods, droughts, whatever, but the small operators couldn't. Such a change would only help the Bill Gates' of the world, and I'm not the least bit interested in that outcome.