PS

Thank you, Mr. Smith. I find the same result via Google. But somehow not via Yandex.

Yahoo Search gets the award for indexing Peak Stupidity the fastest this time, because the top result for "high-fructose corn-syrup" is this very entry, made this very day.

PS: Greetings, Mr. Hail!

(Happy New Year!)

Interestingly, my best yandex search also brings up only one hit for high fructose corn syrup on Peak Stupidity...

(Perhaps these words look a little familiar to you?)

“Professor Economicus whips out graphs to plot the benefits the native consumer of this model, as it saves him money. The native-White consumer wins as he is left with more funds to spend on high-fructose corn-syrup and the like, while the foreigner gets a steady income-stream; Everyone wins!”

“A not-so-Great Clips experience” (Peak Stupidity No.2574, April 11, 2023)
https://peakstupidity.com/index.php?post=2574

Pretty wild how the same search on the same search engine from different locations, operating systems, browsers (I tried two, in this case they were the same) and what not produces different results.

Try as I might, I cannot get yandex to return any other pages with the phrase "high fructose corn syrup" with or with out hyphens. Strange...

Cheers! ☮️

PS

-- The High-Fructose Corn-Syrup Question --

"Would the HFCS be this huge part of our diet were America still composed of small farms/farmers?"

My best Yandex search fails to come up with any Peak Stupidity entries involving "high-fructose corn syrup" (or HFCS), except one:

"Tampax marketing genius doubles the market" (Peak Stupidity No.1702, November 2020)

Even here, it is Messrs Blanc and A. Smith who thrust the matter to the fore. Allow me to re-post the relevant material:

Mr. Blanc wrote at the time:
"Mme B says that she read somewhere that the motive behind New Coke was to replace sugar with corn syrup in old Coke. Coke drinkers were so overjoyed to have old Coke back that they didn’t whine about, or perhaps even notice, the corn syrup. "

Mr. Smith linked to this document:

https://www.motherjones.com/food/2019/07/the-secret-history-of-why-soda-companies-switched-from-sugar-to-high-fructose-corn-syrup/

The honorable Moderator, p.b.u.h., wrote at the time: "Mr. Blanc, I paid for a bottled Mexican brand cane sugar Coca-Cola a couple of years ago to see if I could tell the difference from the HFCS stuff. Honestly, I couldn't tell, though I was hoping for it to taste better and remind me of the old days."

PS: Good afternoon, Messrs. Hail & Moderator,

“Let's just say in America, obesity has been "trending" for half a century...”

https://i.ibb.co/0nXtryM/Cheeseburger-Farm.jpg
https://i.ibb.co/4fq9dNk/Fatmericans-Love-Cheeseburgers.jpg

Cheers! ☮️

PS: I meant to write: There should be a meme of "People of Trader Joe's" vs "People of Wal-Mart", with some slim real hottie on the former panel.

Then again, the Target near me has lots of cuties, but it's near the college - certain times of year - moving in weeks are when the place is flooded with them.

PS: "...because the same broad gene-pool in Europe is much less fat."

Right, and also just look at this very country in the 1970s in books, video (even in movie extras) vs now. However, genetic tendencies are probably a factor making some people fatter much more easily than others, but diet, lifestyle and such must be a reason for the general average weight or BMI increase.

"I think the idea that food in the USA is often crammed with artificial and harmful substances (the much-attacked "high-fructose corn-syrup" being one) is one place where a "a Leftist critique of capitalism" would work well. Am I wrong?" +
"That Right-populist critique seems weaker than the Leftist-style critique of capitalism per se --- in which big companies harm people for profit and don't care about the little guy. That view is probably also too simplistic, but it cannot be dismissed."

Before I read your last paragraph , I was about to point out that this is all Big Business capitalism, not always the real thing, with Big Gov involved too. Would the HFCS be this huge part of our diet were America still composed of small farms/farmers? I guess, but I don't know. The market is there, and the corn is there. Maybe my comment would be called the "no true Scotsman" fallacy - "it's never been done right!", but this Big Biz/Big Gov partnership is Crony Capitalism. (Haha, I just corrected my typo "Corny Capitalism, which would apply here too...)

I figure you'd get a little more responsibility and concern for the consumers from small business, and there's also that consumers would have more of a choice. OTOH organic this or that does sell pretty well, and I respect people for trying to obtain the less harmful stuff. (Those Trader Joe's customers are normally not the obese ones.)

That populist conspiratorial point of view is becoming more and more popular on the right because we know our governments better AND they've gotten much more evil. 50 years ago, I figured they just thought they know what's good for us.

PS: Hello, Mr. Hail. I was taught long ago - could be completely wrong - that going back some centuries in Europe, being on the hefty side was a status marker that showed one had more than enough to eat, hence plenty of money. That was to account for the usually on the hefty side women in paintings for example I would think being rotund like the succession of Ills in N. Korea, Confucius or Mao or Xi went along the same lines. (However, by the time Xi was President, not all, but a big majority of Chinamen were finally getting more than enough to eat. However, start out with 6 bowls of rice a day as a kid, as per someone I know of, and you can't lose that "status marker gut" so easily.)

Perhaps it was never this way in America because we didn't have any real serious starvation periods. (Things got pretty bad for some during Great Depression 1.0 though ...)

It was only my naivety that had me thinking long ago that Oriental people must be thin due to genetics. On a personal basis, I'd never seen otherwise for a long time.

PS

RE: Poor quality of mass-market U.S. food and "Leftist critique of capitalism"

I think the idea that food in the USA is often crammed with artificial and harmful substances (the much-attacked "high-fructose corn-syrup" being one) is one place where a "a Leftist critique of capitalism" would work well. Am I wrong?

Rightists who are willing to "go there" will often frame it as a hostile ideological regime keeping its people doped-up on such substances and fast-food as part of some kind of ideological program to control them. It is a "populist"-conspiratorial view that is never really coherent (though I think it is not wrong in spirit).

That Right-populist critique seems weaker than the Leftist-style critique of capitalism per se --- in which big companies harm people for profit and don't care about the little guy. That view is probably also too simplistic, but it cannot be dismissed.

PS

RE: Genetics

The cause of fatness in White-America in the late-20th and early 21st-century also cannot be said to be "genetic" with the book closed on the matter at that (as John Derbyshire says he is wont to do with any matter), because the same broad gene-pool in Europe is much less fat.

PS

"If there were any reason to think the Chinese and other Oriental peoples are slim just due to genetics, as I had thought, these observations were a counter to that. Same people, bigger meals in the cafeterias, and there you go..."

"(In China,) city people average more slim than people in the smaller 'villages'."

Mao Tse-tung (or Zedong, if you must) was fat and had poor lifestyle habits, but the personality-cult that his people created treated him like a grandfatherly, Santa-Claus type. There are likely many easy examples of this. So easy as to to be found without any looking: The inheritor of Mao's government today in power, Xi Jinping, is outright fat by Chinese / East-Asian-physique standards.

The Kim dynasty of North Korea definitely cultivates images of rotund jolliness by its head-men, all three generations so far. The idea that the personality-cult of North Korea embraced a fat-boy in his twenties, back there ca. 2010 (and full-on, in early 2012, when the "fat boy" fan of 1990s-NBA-basketball took power after his father's death), is ridiculous to our eyes, but it "works" to the East Asian mind, I think.

Who is the fattest U.S. president, or other Western leader we can remember? There was the definitely-obese Taft, now more than one century gone. I think accidental-president Chester A. Arthur was also quite heavy. But these are minor presidents and only "history buffs" even know much of who they are. And Arthur only got in through an assassination.

Now take the pro-Lincoln image in U.S. culture. Just take it as it is, the personality-cult of Lincoln as a great figure, for analysis' sake. Imagine "that" Lincoln not as a stringbean-like tall, lanky, even-awkward man with his tophat and his fiery determination for the goals of the day, imagine him rather as a "grinning fat Maoist" holding court, but hold all else the same about his views and achievements or whatever it is the pro-Lincoln view admires. The fatness would, I think, cause that pro-Lincoln image to fall apart!

Then there is Confucius. There is a "fat" figure for you who is revered and, I would say, literally worshipped in China and elsewhere by many. Worship is a broad term in the East; of course "Confucianism" is said to be "not a religion." But the traditional religions of the East are also not doctrinaire "sola scriptura" types of religion, anyway; they can and do adapt to accommodate new waves of things and fold them all in, like those Hindus who worship Jesus as an incarnation of Vishnu. I am pretty sure any likenesses of Confucius that you see out there all show him fat.

My point is that the image of "fatness" (at least for males) is one of these strangely-ever-present East vs. West differences, not to be neglected fully.