Letters to the Editor
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@Poco
wrote:My dad grew up very poor on a farm in Kentucky. Wanna gues what they ate? Biscuits made with lard. Most everything else fried in lard. Fried Fat Back (from whence comes lard).
No Poco, I am not talking about your father. Think about it: if your father had cheap animal fat available what does that say about the state of farming and live stock industry? Biscuits, lard and lots of sugar makes you fat if you eat your fill of it. If you do not have much, you stay thin and not very healthy.
Go back a few more generations and look at farming over much of the country. Sugar for canning the fruit harvest had to be purchased, and it was a significant expense. If you raised your own animals for food, you did not have that much.
Modern agricultural techniques provide food at very low relative costs. But the food industry does not maximize profits by aggressively selling good nutrition.
Junk food is more available than it was 60 years ago. Partly because it took a couple of generations for people's food habits to change. And partly because it is just easier to find now. There was no junk food for sale in my primary and secondary schools. The administration would have been horrified at the the prospect of Coke and Pepsi competing to install their vending machines and advertise on the scoreboard.