The 1% You Shouldn’t Care About

Posted on May 16, 2016 by Hank Campbell

The 1 percent is something we hear a lot about these days. To young people who have time to camp out in the streets, they are evil capitalists who must be brought down — before those marchers loot a small business nearby. To economists like Paul Krugman, the 1 percent should be happy to pay more so that the minimum wage can be $15 an hour (or order from a robot for the same price, as Wendy’s is about to demonstrate in 6,000 stores) while to politicians they are an easy source of ‘us versus them’ cultural grandstanding, until they need money from a SuperPAC.

Everyone seems to have an opinion on the economic 1 percent and we certainly spend a lot of time hearing and reading about them in media.

Yet there is another 1 percent that also gets an irrational amount of media attention also, but we shouldn’t spend any time at all thinking about them. They are the food 1%.

In agriculture, including the scientific media areas, there is a lot of talk about yields. That’s fine, things like modern pesticides and biological technology have made food a true commodity, so plentiful that for the first time in world history poor people can afford to be fat. And in culture, food activists and environmentalists spend a lot of time talking about toxic organic pesticides being healthier to drink than toxic synthetic pesticides, or that mutagenesis can be labeled organic while a genetically modified organism is not.

A whole lot of organic marketing is devoted to labels. Yet in reality most consumers only care about one thing on the label: Price......To Read More.....