How the GOP made America into a nation of fat asses

In the 1970s, farmers managed to churn out more and more corn -- and prices fell. This effect benefited large traders like Archer Daniels Midland, because it meant lower input prices.

But ADM could only squeeze a profit from bargain-priced farm goods if it could find a market for those goods. With grain production outstripping demand, the company began to actively seek ways to profitably move the nation's grain surpluses from farms into food-processing factories.

In the mid-1970s, ADM had begun tinkering with a method developed in Japan for making a concentrated liquid sweetener out of corn -- high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS)-- that might appeal to the booming soft-drink industry. The process involved what's known as "wet milling" corn -- the same process ADM uses to this day for making ethanol.

The problem was that even with corn trading at rock-bottom prices, ADM could not make high-fructose corn syrup cheaply enough to compete with sugar. To overcome this obstacle, ADM succeeded not in the lab but rather in the political arena.

Like a Midwestern Machiavelli, Andreas came up with an ingenious plan: finance lobbying efforts by Florida sugarcane growers to convince Congress to impose a quota on foreign-produced sugar, which had been flooding the U.S. market and keeping prices down.

In 1972, Richard Nixon said he could to reduce food costs as part of his “war on poverty.” He partnered with the USDA to do whatever means necessary to bring imported sugar costs down. Nixon put a tariff of foreign sugar imports which made HFCS a more lucrative staple.

Soon after sometime free-trade champion President Reagan (another significant beneficiary of ADM largesse) gained office in 1981, he enacted a strict quota on foreign sugar. The price of sugar skyrocketed -- and suddenly ADM syrup became the cheaper option. Soft-drink makers now scrambled to switch. High-fructose corn syrup has since come to dominate the U.S. sweetener market. The controversial sugar quota, meanwhile, remains in place.

But ADM's triumph in the soft-drink market created another problem, one the company had already anticipated: Demand for Coca-Cola and other chilled, sweetened beverages rises in the summer and drops in the winter. Having invested heavily in wet-milling facilities, ADM could ill afford to let them idle in down months. What it needed was another profitable wet-milled corn product to pick up the slack in the winter.

That product, of course, was ethanol more commonly known as corn alcohol.

Watch the video for some of the medical issues with HFCs.

sources: http://www.hypnothoughts.com/profiles/blog/show?id=716892%3ABlogPost%3A426939&commentId=716892%3AComment%3A427152&xg_source=activity and http://www.grist.org/article/ADM1/

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