Lone Candle
Champion of Truth
Arizona and the Trump administration made it harder for people to get food stamps, so half a million people lost their food. The Times interviews people who are skipping meals and suffering from food insecurity thanks to this policy. These people technically qualify, but Arizona and the Trump administration made it too hard for some people to get the food they qualify for.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0u2geObUoWg
Picky Princess Tries Asian Snacks and Drinks!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plMdU0UzraQ&t=30s
The US has the highest inflation of the G7.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVpb3IAZs6U
Food delivery apps make it so hard to know upfront what the final cost of the food and delivery will be…that it disrupts market competition because it’s too hard for customers to compare based on price. They do this on purpose, and they forbid anyone aggregating their data to compare prices for consumers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Eq5jzsu1xU
Finance guys made money while making Chipotle a worse restaurant.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vibT_eZdD4
McDonald’s is a real estate and big data tech company. It is selling convenience, not cheap food or good food. Its goal is to manipulate the customer to come in and buy profitable items.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIOW2HKgzPk
“It’s not corporate greed that’s driving up the price of beef at the grocery store; it’s the fact that it’s now much more expensive for meat-packers to buy beef from farms. This isn’t due to cattle farmers colluding to raise prices. There are simply fewer cows.
…
This decrease is attributable to a combination of weather, disease, and reduced imports. Some factors include persistent drought on American pasture lands and the U.S. halting Mexican cattle imports in July 2025 to stave off the New World screwworm”
https://reason.com/2026/01/28/the-real-reason-beef-costs-more-fewer-cows-not-corporate-greed/
The new government food pyramid matters because it affects major government food programs and student lunches. Otherwise, not many people dutifully follow the government dietary recommendations. There have been several changes over time and in 2011 they got rid of the pyramid and replaced it with a plate, which makes sense because we more often eat food on a plate than in pyramid measurements.
Butter and cheese in the highest tier doesn’t make sense. They are okay in moderation, but are not good in high amounts, and the highest tier implies you should eat a lot of it. Not only is eating too much of them bad, they are easy to eat a whole lot of all at once, and are high in calories.
Whole grains are good! They shouldn’t be relegated below butter and cheese. Whole grains are hard to overeat, are associated with better health, and are per-calorie better for you than butter and cheese. Butter and cheese being in a higher tier than whole grains is backwards.
The new pyramid promoting: protein, vegetables, minimally processed food, and healthy fats is good.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7TwGXK9g1A
“some scientists in Iowa figured out how to extract sugar from corn, and high-fructose corn syrup was born.
But there was a problem. The high-fructose corn syrup that American corn farmers were producing was more expensive than sugar. To get food and beverage companies to buy what Andreas was selling, Andreas needed to make his sweet stuff more attractive in the market.
And one way to do that is to make your competitors’ products more expensive.
That’s exactly what the federal government has been doing for decades. In 1976, President Gerald Ford tripled the import tax on sugar. If you tax something, you’ll get less of it. Or, well, you get a more expensive version of it. That’s exactly what happened with imported sugar.
By 1988, sugar came to sell at 22 cents a pound in the United States despite the world price being just 10.5 cents per pound, with each cent increase adding $250 to $300 million to Americans’ collective food bills.
Faced with the rising price of sugar in the mid-1980s, candy and soda companies did the thing that made economic sense: They stopped using sugar and switched to high fructose corn syrup.”
https://reason.com/2025/11/26/how-special-interests-twisted-federal-sugar-policy-to-cost-consumers-2-5-billion-every-year/
Societies that primarily grow rice rather than wheat tend to be more collectivist due to rice requiring more of a group effort.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THGJxJcM8IE