By now, it's no secret that the corporatized government food system cares neither for human health nor the health of the environment. So today I thought I'd talk about fiat food both as a concept and a reality. This entry is inspired by a great YouTube presentation by Crypto Graphics that weaves together this history, pulling from various sources, to create a cohesive and comprehensive take on the very roots of fiat food. At a little over an hour, it is one of the most thorough pieces I’ve seen on the subject and on the general state of health in our country.

This piece was created well before Matthew Lysiac's outstanding book Fiat Food. The term itself was coined by OG Bitcoiner, @bitstein, back in 2017 in this Twitter post:

FIAT FOOD

"People are fed by the food industry, which pays no attention to health, and are treated by the health industry, which pays no attention to food." –Wendell Berry

It’s difficult to talk about fiat food without first exploring inflation, a word on the lips of many today. Despite constant claims that cash is king and the dollar is still the world reserve currency, the actual purchasing power of the USD has plummeted since Nixon took it off the gold standard in 1971. That makes the money we save, less and less valuable over time which is why the majority of the millennial generation will probably never be able to buy a home.

This fact is covered up by pointing us to the Consumer Price Index (CPI) number which is conveniently jiggered over time by including less of the things people spend most of their money on, like real estate, health care and education. With current official inflation around an artificially low 3%–8 to 15% if you add that big stuff back in and correct for regional asset inflation and the aggressive price rise of nutrient dense foods like meat, eggs and fish–it is a trick that is increasingly difficult for the government and the Federal Reserve to pull off.

Along with big agriculture, the same US government that sets dietary guidelines and devalues the purchasing power of its currency by printing more and more of it, also does the following:

• Manipulates the CPI to conceal inflation.
• Extracts wealth from the population via inflation
• Manipulates markets with farm policy and subsidies
• Manipulates science, universities and diet guidelines

BUTZ IN

In addition to the removal of the gold standard, where the dollar was decoupled from the value of the precious metal, something else big happened in 1971. Earl Butz was appointed US Secretary of Agriculture and changed the fundamental landscape of farming by paying farmers to produce less by awarding them government subsidies to control the inflation of food prices. Earl Butz told farmers it was time to get big or get out.

Prior to Butz, the goal of Federal farm management was careful control of supply and demand. No more. Butz’s policy was geared toward maximizing profit at all cost and that meant greater farm consolidation, the integration of agriculture and the type of food production system that we have today. It has led to a farm subsidy program that favors the largest commodities producers at the expense of everyone else and a food system that isn’t healthy for Americans.

That is why now, the entire food system is geared toward producing a crap-load of food that is making us sick. Yes, until recently the prices of “food” have gone steadily down over the last 30 or so years as a percentage of personal income and Butz can point that chart and say what he did worked BUT it should be no coincidence then, that the trajectory of health care expenses has gone up in the exact opposite direction if you plotted it on the same chart, forming a very telling “X”.

What we are doing as a society is taking the money we used to put toward quality food and spending it on healthcare to treat the consequences of this cheap food system that was created by Butz and “Tricky Dick”. In reality, their cost saving “triumph” in agriculture ends up being extremely expensive, costly, damaging and physically hurtful to human beings.

By 2012 the US paid $11 billion in farm subsidies to produce commodity crops, largely corn and soy, and a paltry $1.6 billion to subsidize “specialty crops” like fruit and vegetables!

Forgetting the question of why subsidies are necessary at all, this fact starkly outlines the prioritization of profit over health in the food system. Corn and soy producers have received over $100 BILLION in subsidies over the past two decades and is the reason why we see it virtually everywhere in our food system in its obvious and not-so-obvious forms. Of course, this isn’t the same corn our ancestors ate and in its current form is devoid of nutrients and routinely genetically modified to withstand mass spraying of chemical pesticides, further maximizing yield and profit.

As for healthy meats, the proliferation of animal feed lots that render their quality unhealthful due to overcrowding, disease, antibiotic use and the fact that the animals are themselves eating cheap processed foods inconsistent with their natural diet, occurred as a direct result of farm subsidies. These subsidies are paid for with our tax dollars that we spend, essentially, to make ourselves sicker over time. People, in this case those in the government, big agriculture and the farmers captured by them, will continue to behave the way they are incentivized to.

“Unfortunately, you cannot subsidize irresponsibility and expect people to become more responsible.” –Vijay Boyapati

70% of US cropland grows ONLY corn, soy and hay.

99% of that crop goes to factory animal feedlots.

It is these feedlots that contribute to greenhouse gas emissions, not the dwindling number of small family farms that pasture animals eating their natural diets.

Even in our gasoline, the US mandates that a certain amount of ethanol, derived from corn, must be included in the supply. Still, outcries from the public to reform the farm bill are met with a strong lobby from big agriculture and the politicians, on both sides of the aisle, who are on their payroll in the form of campaign contributions and millions upon millions in farm subsidies to their jurisdictions. For instance, Representative Marion Berry, a Democrat from Arkansas, saw $389,000 of his $1.2 BILLION in crop subsidies from 2003-2005 go directly into his own pocket. Voices for reform are consistently marginalized as a result.

WHAT IS FIAT FOOD?

For that matter, what is fiat?

• Fiat money is a type of currency that is declared legal tender by a government but has no intrinsic or fixed value and is not backed by any tangible asset, such as gold or silver.
• Fiat foods, as defined by the Urban Dictionary, are low quality processed food-like products consumed by the masses. Usually, high carbohydrate/high fat refined foods, mixed with cheap vegetable oils and fillers.

Saifedean Ammous, economist and author of several books including The Bitcoin Standard, The Fiat Standard, and The History of Economics, breaks down fiat foods into these major categories:

1. Refined flour
2. Sugar
3. Industrial seed and vegetable oils
4. High fructose corn syrup
5. Soy protein
6. Low fat foods
7. Breakfast cereal

He points out how the corn farm lobby has become enormously powerful in United States politics and have managed to milk this connection they have with the government for endless subsidies, endless mandates to use their crop in every single thing imaginable. Saifedean has even joked that the US is a platform run on corn, that, basically, it is place for people to rearrange corn and their entire lives revolve around it in every single way. If you ask him, he’ll tell you that everything you eat is largely high fructose corn syrup with flavoring and even the cows are fed it. Is he really wrong? He goes on to reinforce the point that even our cars are running on it through ethanol mandates. What seems, on its face, an exaggeration, isn’t all that far from the truth.

Saifedean was interviewed by financial commentator Natalie Brunell on the subject. She pointed out that as a child in Poland she grew up in a family that ate healthy because they lived in a food economy made up of small, local family farms. Access to fresh, quality food was a given and people regularly cooked it for their families. Once she moved here, however, she saw her friends consuming frozen, microwavable meals, a diet generally geared toward quick-to-prepare, convenient, processed foods, high in preservatives and has seen the population in the states become more and more obese with a tendency toward chronic health problems.

He followed her comments with the two-fold thesis he makes on food in The Fiat Standard. Inflation is causing the prices of food to go up and foods are the most important goods that everyone needs to consume. This makes it the most politically sensitive issue. Governments, therefore, are always trying to make sure that people aren’t too angry about the rise in their food prices. So, on the one hand we have governments trying to do everything they can to make food prices look more palatable and on the flip side of this, the government itself is causing the inflation by financing whatever it wants by printing more fiat money. He goes on to clarify, that on the one hand, the government has the incentive of trying to stop you from noticing that the price of food has gone up, and on the other hand, because it is destroying your currency and making the food more expensive, it has a lot of economic power and resources to use in order to distort the realities of markets.

Consequently, the government has the incentive to promote the cheapest foods that don’t rise a lot in price. This is shilled through the official “dietary guidelines” that basically endorse all of the things that have low price elasticity, that involve a lot of industry. So, when inflation happens those things don’t rise in price.

Those are:

• Corn
• Soy
• Sugar
• Flour
• Seed/Vegetable oils

He finds seed oils, in particular, as do many in natural health circles, particularly pernicious and devastating to health. He laments,that they have been completely normalized by guidelines adhered to all over the world by doctors and nutritionists constantly pushing low fat and demonizing animal fat. He raises the point that, from his own nutritional research largely from non-main stream sources that are extremely coherent and powerful but not generally taught in universities, he’s come to understand that all cultures, everywhere in the world, base their diets on animal fats. It is the one dietary constant everywhere and no culture has existed that does not eat animal fats. Yet, we are told this is bad and that the alternative, which is highly processed industrial poison, essentially industrial waste, like canola oil, which they have managed to make slightly less poisonous so they don’t kill you straight away when you eat it. It kills you slowly, allowing you to generate a lot of profits for the medical industrial complex, an entirely different fiat industry.

As a FDN practitioner, his message, particularly about nutritional education, resonates because it wasn’t until I searched and found a coherent, science-based approach that reached back to ancestral eating habits and used them to achieve real-life health transformations, that the truly useful, powerful information about nutrition was revealed to me. The groundbreaking, almost shocking research done by Weston Price, when he studied the diets and habits of indigenous cultures around the globe, still unadulterated by the modern world, offered incredible insights on the keys to optimal health yet are conspicuously missing from mainstream nutrition and health literature.

Saifedean sums up his remarks by reiterating that governments are telling people to eat the cheap stuff while heavily subsidizing its producers and forcing people to consume all of this industrial junk. When you combine all of these tactics, we get the current health catastrophe where...

Roughly 90% of Americans are metabolically unhealthy, which is completely insane.

This is depressing to be sure BUT...

The good news is, there's a way to completely opt-out of this outcome for yourself.

You can absolutely avoid becoming part of that statistic by taking agency over your health and learning how to optimize your body’s natural ability to heal itself using functional lab data and effective lifestyle hacks. Going by the growing clientele of FDN practitioners year-over-year, that startling statistic may well be rising past 90%. Fortunately, in most cases, we are armed with the knowledge necessary to make it our client’s final stop before resolving ongoing health complaints.

I am happy to speak with you about how to opt-out of our current fiat food and health care system in a free call.

Just reply to this email to schedule a time convenient to discuss your concerns. I am here, as always, when you are ready to end the cycle of trial and error you may be caught in with your current state of wellness.