By encouraging the consumption of more meat…, of refined carbohydrates, and of trans fats and chemically extracted oils…, the government-endorsed dietary model may have led to more deaths than it claims to have prevented.

Mark Bittman, Food Matters (2009). p57.

I was rereading Food Matters — good book, though Michael Pollan’s roughly contemporaneous Food Rules is wittier over similar terrain — and ran across the above quote.

Writing in the midst of ongoing pandemic,

in Texas,

where city and county collective measures to promote public health were first sneered-at and then reversed by the state government in favor of business (-mostly-as-usual),

and where infection has been exponentially climbing ever since (not hyperbole: I still remember my 6th grade math group’s exploration of those graphs),

I grimly recognized again what I keep having to know:

The political/governmental system we have does what it’s designed to do. What it did in food matters up to 2009 — promote business interests, ignore human (citizen!) costs — it is doing even now.

I weary with saying: oh no. Not again.