The Hidden Menus of Power – How Politics Shapes Our Plates and Our Minds – You are what you eat
Mon 5:45 pm +00:00, 1 Jun 2026
Source: https://moneycircus.substack.com/p/the-hidden-menus-of-power
In the quiet corridors of bureaucratic offices and boardrooms, decisions are made that determine not only what we eat but our bodies’ resilience, how our minds process information and what actions follow.
The intersection of politics and food is about more than tariffs and trade routes, subsidies and hand-outs — not only for recipients of food stamps but also the rich and powerful agricultural combines and commodity traders.
Politicians protect profiteers through such seemingly pedestrian public promotions as the “food pyramid”, shaping public perceptions about what is healthy or not.
It turns out that the food pyramid, first created in Sweden in the 1970s and rolled out across the West in the 1990s, is wrong.
Had it been accurate, we should not have the obesity crisis that has risen hugely in the past 50 years.
“When my uncle was president, three per cent of Americans were obese, and today, 74 per cent of Americans are obese or overweight,” said health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
The Atlantic accused him of “fat shaming.”
Soup to nuts
Campbell Soup VP Martin Bally was secretly recorded saying “who buys our shit?… poor people!” He was talking about bioengineered ingredients in those tin cans propagandised to the public as quality by something as simple as a fancy-looking logo.
Spotted and amplified by the artist Andy Warhol.
Bally incorrectly alleged that Campbell’s uses bioengineered meat and poultry — it uses genetically modified canola, corn and soy.
But his comments resonated with a public aware of the false promise of processed foods. Six months later Campbell’s is facing a law suit and its stock hit its lowest closing price in a quarter century.
Sadly, people complain about the declining quality of supermarket food yet, locked into Stockholm syndrome, they continue to buy it.
We see videos posted online of grim “ready meals” that look like prison slop and fruit or vegetables that seem to rot before they ripen.
See Headless Chickens & Labelling Enemies (Apr 16, 2026)
Mind & body
You can try to purify information but one reason you cannot reach people is that you need first to purify mind and body.
That goes for those of us seeking to spread knowledge, as much as the food combines seeking to extract every last cent in the name of “shareholder value.”
This article explores how food policies sculpt our physiology, why an unhealthy populace struggles with misinformation, and the urgent need to align politics, biology, and mental wellness.
Corporate welfare
The U.S. farm bill is mammoth legislation, traditionally renewed every five years (only partial extensions since 2023). It allocates billions in subsidies which benefit the mass production of corn, soy, and wheat, high commodity crops that have formed the backbone of processed foods.
This makes engineered eating cheaper than whole foods like fruits and vegetables, which remain expensive due to lack of support for sustainable or organic farming.
It began in the 1930s when the pump and dump banking crisis led to the forcing of farmers off their land, to the profit of industrialised agricultural combines. Misrepresented as the Great Depression, it was quite possibly a calculated heist.
See 3 Crises – Voting Banned, War & Austerity Looms – European directorate manages popular opinion (Apr 02, 2025)
The biggest consequence was for diet. Within a couple of decades mass produced commodities were processed into foods, sold to the public as more pure, healthy and nutritious when they were nothing but cheaper to make.
In parallel the petro-pharmaceutical industry was growing, using legislation to replace holistic medicine and finding uses for chemical byproducts of the production of oil.
Alchemy, chemistry
How did this transition influence global health outcomes over time? Were there any key figures or institutions that played a role in pushing these changes forward?
Germany during the Renaissance became a significant hub for alchemical thought and practice. The illuminists failed to turn base metals into gold but the spirit of Faust’s cohabitants became Europe’s leading chemists.
It happens that the Rockefeller family, perhaps because of their German extraction, took advantage of Germany’s lead in the chemicals industry.
A few years after they had dominated the oil industry, the Rockefellers also controlled chemical cracking and petro-pharmaceuticals. They would use their wealth to take over the medical schools, and use the American Medical Association to marginalize homeopathy. [1]
Perhaps it was a response to the dubious “botanic” cancer cures peddled by William Avery “Devil Bill” Rockefeller, the father of John D, whose ventures provided their early capital.
When veteran journalist Charlie Rose interviewed David Rockefeller, he let him wax on about “grandfather” without a mention of snake oil.
Control of medicine would open the doors to politics as biology and eugenics. The Warburgs and Rockefellers would finance the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Medical Research, since renamed Max Plank, which employed Joseph Mengele — and afterwards imported those scientists into the U.S. whence we got the postwar vaccine industry.
KWI was based on Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island, which had been financed by the Carnegie Institution for the purposes of eugenics since 1904. [2]
Ersatz alternatives
Visiting East Berlin in 1983 I bought coffee and chocolate cake that contained neither coffee nor cacao — the ersatz alternatives were likely made respectively from roasted barley, acorns and chicory, and beechnuts, cereal extracts and lupin flour.
German chemists invented hydrogenated vegetable oil (1902) which led to margarine and extended the shelf life of packaged foods.
In 1909 Fritz Haber synthesized ammonia from natural gas by extracting hydrogen and combining it with nitrogen. Carl Bosch industrialised it, enabling crop yields to quadruple in the past century.
It is estimated that about half the world’s population are alive today because of the Haber-Bosch process. The conflict in the Persian Gulf, the damage to liquefied natural gas production, and the restriction of vessels through the Strait of Hormuz directly threaten the availability of fertiliser.
Chemical experimentation would produce the herbicide and drying agent glyphosate (Roundup). The product has been linked to gut microbiome destruction, autoimmune diseases and cancer. Its current owner Bayer is seeking immunity from prosecution, like that granted to vaccine industry since 1988.
As for pharmaceuticals, Bayer’s chemists famously synthesised asprin (1899). Naturally salicylic acid comes from the willow tree but they replicated it using coal tar from petroleum.
Curds and whey
Processed food accounts for two-thirds of the American diet in which sweeteners and sugars, refined flours and synthetic flavours are linked to obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease.
As the obesity problem spread to Europe, the past couple of years have seen wall-to-wall newspaper coverage pushing weight-loss drugs.
At the same time healthy foods, such as raw milk, are outlawed in many states under spurious safety concerns. The whey protein is bio-active in raw milk but damaged by heat during pasteurisation.
Those weight loss drugs require higher protein intake so manufacturers started adding whey protein to all kinds of foods: chips, bars, waffles, lattes — until shortage hit. Whey prices have as much as doubled since 2024.
Producers are seeking alternatives like egg whites — eggs that from the 1968 until 2015 governments had told people to avoid due to cholesterol and heart disease, a claim that turned out to be false!
Consumers might have to return to food staples! Meat and potatoes, beans, garlic and tomatoes. Oh my goodness.
Modelling fudge
Agricultural practices like profiting from high-fructose corn syrup incentivise health policy, buy seats for bureaucrats on corporate boards and thus determine nutritional outcomes, and their consequence for dietary guidelines and people.
Just as farming practice, through public policy, affects our health, the politics of medicine shapes cultural attitudes.
Similar signs in Europe include the multi-pronged attack on farmers while they are exposed to competition from continents that are largely unregulated.
See EU & Mercosur, Betrayal Or Deal? – Cheap imports slap in face for besieged farmers (Jan 11, 2026)
Decisions made in the ivory towers of public health literacy, paid for by the food industry, exert their power and interest over and above quality of life and longevity. Often these studies are nothing but computer modelling which does not meet the test of science and is merely the lowest and most arbitrary rung of research.
Public awareness campaigns are a smoke screen to render invisible the connection of health policy and economic interests.
Dietary dictates
Finland has so far avoided toxic sweeteners relying primarily on beet sugar but American high fructose corn syrup has started creeping into food products under the name “glucose syrup” as a cheap sweetener used in processed snacks and sugary beverages.
A 2021 WHO report found that 1.5 billion adults globally are obese or overweight, largely due to diets shaped by government advice.
U.S. adults with the highest consumption of foods from subsidised commodities, which make up over half the average American’s diet, had 21 per cent higher likelihood of unhealthy blood sugar levels (dysglycemia) according to a 2016 study published in JAMA Internal Medicine.
Livestock are injected to overcome the infections caused by crowding them in barns. Prioritising cheap meat production has led to antibiotic-resistant bacteria in humans and disruptions in gut microbiomes.
Hell fire
Consumers note that chicken meat is stringy or spaghetti-like. This is because poultry is modified to grow quickly (six to 12 weeks instead of eight to 10 years) resulting in oxygen and muscle deficiency. To make it tender you’ll need to stew it for two or three hours like the cheapest beef in our own potted hellfire.
Even vegetables are less nutritious than decades ago because of genetic dilution: they are bred to increase yields, grow fast and resist pests. They have more carbohydrate and fewer vitamins and minerals. Another problem is that soil is over-used and depleted.
Public food advice is designed to enrich corporations, while governments hand them additional subsidies, and they monopolise production and distribution.
Wholey smokes
Food has been weaponised by chemical pesticides and addictive components (flavour enhancers). It is no surprise that the cigarette conglomerate Philip Morris moved into the food industry, buying General Foods in 1985 and Kraft Foods three years later. The nicotine king became the biggest food producer in North America.
Like cigarettes, these foods, produced by a handful of giant corporations, in turn generate profits for the medical and pharmaceutical industries.
Lip service
“Shareholder value” maximises returns from dividends and rising stock prices and since corporations now exceed the wealth and power of most nations, either individually or through the voting rights of asset managers, the process of extracting every last cent by outsourcing jobs and using cheaper ingredients will continue.
Like usury which extracts an unfair rate of interest that eventually becomes unpayable, the norm that a company’s primary goal is to maximise returns for investors becomes toxic when an economy is in a late stage of crisis.
Leave aside the technicality that investors are protected by limited liability laws from the consequences of their actions, shifting the economic burden onto workers and communities.
See Canada’s Unelected PM Takes Power – Globalism as a front for corporate might, Pt 1 (Mar 14, 2025)
Corporations are controlled by supra-national asset managers. If they speak, at all, of the community it is in generic terms of diversity, equity and inclusion — and even DEI is being rolled back. Environmental and social governance pays lip service to the Earth, and is also being replaced “long-term value”, which may or may not include humans.
Green transition
This is also called transition investing — transition to Net Zero or the replacement of workers by artificial intelligence and robotics.
In a perfect world governments would have an explicit plan, debated, shared and communicated, to ease the population into lower energy and resource use, the end of the mass consumption society, and corporations would explain how they’ll share the dividend from eliminating all those jobs.
As we have argued, there is no such transition plan.
Conventional energy sources are being demolished before there is a steady, reliable replacement.
See Mad World Of Climate, Green De-Growth & War – Decentralised energy and power is the answer (Nov 02, 2024)
Planned emergency
Those of us outside of the “consensus” on climate realised that, first, there are not enough minerals to build renewable energy capacity on the scale urged by said consensus and, second, there is no serious plan to “transition” to Green energy on a global basis.
Rather there is an active choice to lead the Anglosphere, or Western countries, into an emergency: what president Joe Biden called “cascading crises,” or the hyperbolic language of UN chief António Guterres who in 2024 hailed, demonically, the era of “global boiling.”
Meanwhile China has added more energy capacity in the past five years than the U.S. has built in its history.
The West’s Green energy plans as stated are unworkable — which begs the question: are they joking or is the Green agenda a cover for something else?
See Not Enough Minerals For Green Energy – Putting the D in population (Sep 08, 2022)
Strict machine
The Western media is afire with the contest to build data centres to power AI. Despite the power grids creaking with old infrastructure, the U.S. proposes to build thousands of data centres, compared to China which has hundreds.
As of early 2026, more than 1,500 new data centres are in various stages of development across the U.S. There are already an estimated 3,000 to 5,000 smaller centres in operation. This compares with about 400 total in China.
This article is about food. For AI refer to the following.
See Slim Pickings From US-China Talks – Civilisation vs decline (May 16, 2026)
Scarcity vector
Solar “farms” are brazenly, however, built on agricultural land rather than over the capacious car parks of supermarkets. Data centres in the U.S. are gravitating to areas of water scarcity where they compete with households, farmers and established industries. The reason, we are told, is that states like Texas have more lax regulation on water use. The failure of legislators to respond speaks to their corruption.
Food is energy repurposed according to Newtonian laws, from hydrocarbons to leafy greens and meat, to our gullets. There is no mystery, no room for political quibbling, nor for spurious “consensus” according to any ideology. If the transfer of energy is interrupted, from the Strait of Hormuz to the bellies of hungry people, that act is anticipated and thus deliberate.
There is no oopsie nor room for doubt. It is the use of crisis to transform society in nefarious ways. It is a variant of what author Naomi Klein called The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.
Nefarious transformation
We saw such during the Covid response five years ago, we see it in the destruction of the UK’s National Health Service for its replacement by telemedicine, and it is evident in the assault in the name of Greens on farmland covered by solar panels, eagles cut down by windmills, the spraying of skies, the meddling with insects vital to pollination and the scourge of electromagnetic frequency and 6G.
Despite early hopes, president Donald Trump is reasserting the privilege of the banking and corporate behemoths, which exert their power through the stock market, and through stock options enrich their own executives.
They are not investing in the production, either in industry or agriculture, of what we might call honest goods. This is the fundamental failure of our fiat money system: it could be excused if money creation was used for production rather than speculation and asset inflation.
What to do?
Kenyan farmers are addressing the shortage of nitrogen fertiliser by substituting with bokashi — a nutrient-rich fertilizer made by fermenting food waste.
While conventional composting uses oxygen to decompose waste, Bokashi pickles food waste in an airtight container using inoculated bran. It creates a nutrient-dense pre-compost that must be buried in soil to finish breaking down.
If you can grow on your own land or secure an allotment, that is a major contribution to breaking the stranglehold of corporate consumption.
Many people are not yet inclined to admit that food systems have been manipulated to suppress health and enforce dependency.
Likewise the welfare systems that have been in a state of chronic collapse for longer than the their heyday of calm and cooperation from the 1940s to the 1970s. [3]
The economy faces a crises of welfare commitments that under government strategies cannot be met. Governments must either change their priorities or reduce the population.
Once they pull the rug people will find a way out of this orchestrated dependency.
[1] Dana Ullman, NLM, 2005 – Rockefeller, the Flexner Report, and the American Medical Association: The Contentious Relationship Between Conventional Medicine and Homeopathy in America [2] Edwin Black, 2003 – The Horrifying American Roots of Nazi Eugenics [3] Farnsworth, Irving, 2024, Wiley – Crises of the welfare state, resilience, and pessimism of the intellect
