Sound Money
No conspiracy required. Once you understand how the money changed in 1971, the transformation of the American diet stops looking like a mystery and starts looking like arithmetic.
Here is the short version of an argument that usually gets buried in economics jargon: when the dollar stopped being tied to gold, the ceiling on government spending came off — and a half-century of cheap, abundant, manufactured calories was one of the results.
Step one: the ceiling comes off
Under a gold standard, a government can only spend what it can tax or borrow against real reserves. That’s a hard limit, and hard limits force priorities. When the United States closed the gold window in 1971, that limit dissolved. The government could now fund essentially any program at any scale, because the money supply was no longer tethered to a scarce asset. This is the single hinge the whole story turns on.
Step two: the subsidies flow
Agricultural policy was an early and enormous beneficiary. Washington chose to subsidize a narrow set of storable commodity crops — corn, soybeans, wheat — and to do so generously and continuously. The point isn’t that any single subsidy was sinister. The point is that when you make four crops permanently cheap, the entire food economy reorganizes itself around them.
Corn and soy don’t stay corn and soy. They become feedlot grain, high-fructose corn syrup, maltodextrin, soybean and other industrial seed oils, and the thousand shelf-stable products engineered from those inputs. The supermarket you shop in today is, in large part, a museum of subsidized commodity surplus, repackaged.
Step three: fat gets replaced
For most of human history, people cooked with animal fats — butter, lard, tallow. They are stable, nutrient-dense, and humans evolved eating them. But they can’t be manufactured cheaply from subsidized grain. Industrial seed oils can. So over a few decades, the fats on the American plate were quietly swapped: out went the animal fats, in came the cheap, industrially processed vegetable oils. The British scientist John Yudkin warned that the new dietary advice was pointed at the wrong villain; he was sidelined. The fiat-funded consensus held.
Cheap money makes cheap food — and cheap food is rarely real food.
Step four: the guidelines bless it
The official dietary guidelines that emerged didn’t fight this trend — they ratified it. A nation was told to cut animal fat, fear cholesterol, and build its meals on grains and vegetable oils: precisely the foods the subsidy structure was already overproducing. Saifedean Ammous traces the monetary mechanism in The Fiat Standard; Matthew Lysiak documents the food consequences in Fiat Food; Weston A. Price had photographed the before-and-after of industrial diets decades earlier. The evidence was never hidden. It was just inconvenient to a system optimized for cheap calories.
If you want the monetary half of this explained on its own terms, Modern Wealth Model and Halving House go deep on why fiat money behaves this way.
Why this matters more than a diet tip
Most food writing treats nutrition as a matter of personal willpower — eat less, move more, choose better. But if the supermarket itself is the downstream output of a distorted monetary system, then “just make better choices” is advice given inside a rigged building. The more useful move is to step outside the building: buy from people who never entered the commodity system in the first place.
That’s what regenerative ranchers and small farms are. They sell direct, raise food on pasture, and price it at what it actually costs to produce well — which only looks expensive because the industrial alternative is subsidized to look cheap. You’re not paying a premium for their food; you’re declining a subsidy on everyone else’s.
What This Means for SoCal
Southern California has one of the densest concentrations of grass-fed ranchers, regenerative farms, and direct-to-consumer producers in the country — most of them invisible to the average shopper. The fix isn’t to win a policy argument. It’s to route around the broken market. Browse producers in your county, find a market or pickup near you, and move one staple — your beef, your eggs, your cooking fat — off the industrial grid this month. Then read Time Preference and the Plate for why doing this consistently is the whole game.
Not financial advice. Not medical advice.
If the dollar is the thing that broke, the fix at the checkout is to stop using it as your unit of account. Here is how to price your food in hours instead of dollars.
Related: one small place cheap seed oils replaced the old way is the potato chip. See Beef Tallow Chips: What the Fat Changes.
Related: what happened to land prices while the money supply grew? See Is Farmland a Hard Asset? What 55 Years of USDA Data Say.