You Are What You Eat
How fake food masks inflation
Bill Cosby lied to me. And it’s a big deal.
If you’re under the age of 40, you didn’t know him like I did, Cosby.
In 1985 he had the hottest situational comedy on broadcast television. It was the second year of the hit show, and nothing else came close in overall popularity. Sure, The A-Team and Knight Rider were cool, but The Cosby Show was a mainstream hit.
And television was our only source of entertainment in rural eastern North Carolina. We took his NBC show by over-the-air broadcast from Raleigh, fifty miles west. If it rained, the show ran fuzzy.
Cosby’s character was the brilliant and lovable Dr. Heathcliff Huxtable. He went by “Cliff” around the house. For a while, he was America’s funny dad.
That’s why when he told me it was a great idea to fall in love with New Coke, I believed him.
We drank a lot of soda in the rural south. Also, sweet iced tea, which no human intent on living past the age of 40 should knowingly consume.
And the soda drinkers divided into two distinct camps. Coke people, and Pepsi people. You didn’t leave your tribe. I’m not sure I ever saw a Pepsi product in our home growing up. But it really didn’t matter. Both products will kill you at about the same pace.
We didn’t know much about sugar, or its relationship to overall health when consumed daily, in large quantities. And we certainly didn’t know what was in Cosby’s New Coke.
Cosby’s “New Coke” was the company’s switch from sugar, to high fructose corn syrup. Clever marketing and a celebrity endorsement satisfied the masses.
It took ~40 years for people to realize and accept there might be longer-term physiological effects from consistently ingesting large quantities of synthesized corn sweetener.
The Consequences of Fake Food
It may be hard to imagine taking a beverage recommendation from Bill Cosby.
Released early from prison in June 2021, Cosby is no doctor, and certainly not a dietitian. He didn’t bother to warn soda drinkers of the amorphous shape we’d take on as a society in the coming four decades.
Or that the lean era of the early 1980s, where there was no such thing as being too thin or too rich, would end. Leading to today’s plus-sized manikins in the clothing section at Target.
Monday night while discussing this issue, my friend Peter pointed out, “the body sensitivity movement went way too far.” He’s right. As a society, we’re gross. And it doesn’t take a high level of cognitive function to figure out why.
Something’s wrong with our food. Even slow people realize there’s something unusual. While they’re unwilling to make lifestyle or budget decisions to do much about it, they know it can’t be good.
And what’s wild is, until a few years ago, asking too many questions about food earned you a conspiracy theorist label.
For most health nuts, it’s one chronic ailment cured by a diet change that sets off the journey to feeling better. And those people never go back.
They realize cheap is a red flag when it comes to food. For instance, low-cost and plentiful seed oils like canola or rapeseed replace more expensive ingredients like olive oil or butter. Consuming these ultra-cheap lubricants causes all types of issues from skin disorders to joint pain, it’s terrible, and avoidable.
Just like Cosby telling us we’d love the liquid corn sweetener in Coke, heartthrob Fabio told us two years later in 1987 we’d love a new butter substitute. Cheaper, and delicious, we wouldn’t believe it wasn’t butter.
Notice the product touts a “buttermilk flavor” additive. Perplexity AI tells me the main ingredients in this butter replacement for the masses were:
Soybean oil
Palm oil
Palm kernel oil
Mono and diglycerides
Beta carotene (for color)
Seed oils are cheap. Mono and diglycerides produce an oily texture tricking your taste buds into thinking it’s butter, like Fabio promised.
That toxic quintuplet of ingredients is no match for actual butter. And while TTL has no medical credentials, we’ll take the real thing, the salted raw cow butter, any day over Fabio’s recommendation.
In fact, we own shares of an outstanding producer of small farm butter in the Trustee Portfolio. We’ll get into an update on that a little later…
Same Story Today
The trend of masking food inflation by replacing real ingredients with cheap fakes and fillers didn’t stop in the 1980s. It’s alive and well today.
Fast food chain Chick-fil-A recently changed its iconic waffle fries. The company added pea starch to what customers incorrectly assumed was “just plain fried potato” cut into waffle shapes. The change triggered a mutiny in its customer base.
The Chick-fil-A faithful, who wait ~10 minutes in a long line of minivans and oversized Fords, know with certainty, something’s different. Just like “New Coke” bothered but didn’t stop habitual Coke drinkers, the waffle fry eaters complain but stay in line.
The logical suggestion for these fried chicken sandwich super fans is consider reducing potato consumption altogether. But you can’t say it. People are too sensitive. They generally feel as bad as they look, and don’t take advice well.
Worst of all, like my friend Peter pointed out, we’ve made the entire subject of how we nourish and care for our bodies off limits for discussion. The topics of shape, size, or physical ability are ultra-sensitive. Asking someone at the office if they can touch their toes will get you fired. It’s tantamount to a hate crime.
And the answer is obviously, no, the average American hasn’t looked down with a clear unobstructed view of their toes in years. So, we avoid anything remotely close to what might give the appearance of an insult.
The result is, people get slower, move less, and have unchallenged reasons for it. They end up in a doom loop protected from objective feedback, which might hurt their feelings. But could extend their life.
It’s all a choice. The whole, “people don’t know better” excuse is bunk. There’s no reason an office worker can’t take the stairs to a 5th floor cubical instead of waiting for the elevator. Or, park far away from the building forcing themselves to walk to the entrance.
More importantly, there’s no reason they can’t take the time to pack a lunch made with quality real ingredients supporting the lifestyle they want instead of consuming the fastest, cheapest, most chemically tantalizing product advertised to them.
Or here’s another option, skip lunch altogether opting for an extended fast. No chance of that…
Chapter 14 of Not For Sale talks about this topic, essentially offering those with gumption a way out of the American physical malaise. Specifically, how to program your mind for what you want, instead of the easiest way to the safest outcome, which is what most people do.
Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is
Sadly, the masses don’t stand a chance. For two reasons...
First, food is addictive. Ingredion Inc (INGR) is an ~$8.3 billion firm producing low-cost starches and sweeteners designed to trick the human brain into wanting more of a product. Just like the surging glycemic reaction after guzzling a can of Cosby’s corn goop, today’s pea starch waffle fries make sedentary customers come back for more.
INGR workers in lab coats experiment with formulations, alterations, and amalgamations designed to enhance the consumption experience. They have focus group studies to gauge your palate’s reaction to crunch, texture, and overall pleasure while eating.
The company touts its growth potential across the world market. Pointing out the average American consume 6-times as much modified starch as the other 95% of humans on the planet.
But the company’s assumptions might be wrong…
Anyone who spends time in other countries can attest to the difference in shape, size, and activity level between Americans and the rest of the world’s residents.
We assume they’ll dive into the pea starch, lookalike foods, and other lab-induced crunch found inside sleek packaging…and be hooked. But maybe not.
The key issue with American eating choices, and the second reason we find ourselves finally needing to use those sharp object receptacles in public bathrooms after injecting appetite suppressant drugs, is the illusion of low food inflation.
It’s as if the powers that be, operators of the game, realized fifty years ago we had a big problem. It was right about the time Nixon stepped off the plane and onto that red carpet to shake hands with Mao in February 1971.
All these people eating all this food, steaks, butter, eggs, actual crops, began to cost more and more. The primary cause had nothing to do with the food, it was rampant American post-war government waste coming home to roost.
Oil is the easy example in the 1970s, but grains, ingredients of all types had the same profile. More dollars needed to produce the same physical product. The solution, make it cheaper.
A New Trend in Health Thinking
Decades of masking food inflation by replacing real ingredients with cheap fillers makes eating real food feel like a rip off.
About ten years ago, I did an experiment while editor of a huge financial newsletter. I bought and prepared lunch for four people at Whole Foods (before the Amazon takeover) and did the same with low-cost ingredients from Walmart (WMT).
The key to the experiment was to feed essentially the same meal to both groups, with one group getting heavily processed, low-cost food, and the other getting real food.
The real food cost quadrupled the cheap lookalike. Most people would never quadruple their grocery bill. They’d argue it’s too snobby to waste money on that stuff…any sandwich will do, use the savings as weekend beer money.
My argument was, advances in synthetic food technology masked real inflation…and ten years later, people finally noticed.
For instance, the chart of Ingredion (INGR), the company with teams of scientists working out complex formulations to trick your taste buds into loving low-cost filler foods, itself looks malnourished.
We don’t own INGR, and we won’t.
Subscribers know we have several stocks in the Trustee Portfolio related to this real food revolution. One is up ~350% since summer 2023.
If you missed the initial recommendations, it’s a good time to get serious about full access to TTL. Plus, we lock in your rate the day you join, eating future inflation for you, as long as you’re a subscriber. Lock it in now, it may look like a smart move in the future...
Let’s get up to speed now on our surging food stocks along with the rest of the portfolio…