Michael,

You said, “These goals are anything but controversial.” In who’s eyes does that apply? Look at some of the replies to your story. Food is a controversial topic when it is considered among the complexity of all the issues society is facing.

One reply says, “Every American has access to safe and healthy food.” How can that be true if one out of three children in America live in poverty? One in three are also overweight. When the government tried to enact legislation to improve diets in American schools, Congress voted to reclassified pizza as a vegetable, so that it could still be served in schools. This is insanity.

I was one of the founders of the first all medical high school in the country. The students tried to get the food staff to provide safe diets. The staff said Florida state laws didn’t give them the flexibility to do it. That school, incidentally, had one restaurant right across the street — McDonalds. How is that “access to healthy food”? The students also got involved in a study of obesity in poor neighborhoods. The primary factor determined by the study was ‘inadequate transportation access to healthy food’.

One of the replies claimed your article was aimed just at agribusiness. This is representative of a major psychology flaw in humans that is destroying democracy. People typically brush this off as narrow mindedness. But it’s way more than that. Life has become so complex, with such high time pressures, that people can’t take the time to thoroughly research issues. They also typically don’t have the knowledge background to do it well. At the same time, they are flooded by media adds for junk food. Led by emotion, they believe the models that the industry driven media propaganda machine creates. This behavior is what has thrown our political system into chaos. If your 9 point list was just reviewed carefully, they would see that only ONE item is directly aimed at farm policy.

I expand on this psychological problem in a series I am posting about the collapse of global civilization, which will primarily be led by a world wide food crash.