dear amanda and scott:

I have been holding back for as long as I could, but I can no longer sit back and watch... I started to write this as a comment on Mike's blog, but it got a little lengthier than I originally planned, so I'm putting it here. fyi, people who don't read Scott's blog or Mike's blog, this is a response to this and later, this

a) Scott, let people comment on your blog so we don't have to bother poor Mike like this.

b) Amanda, that shit will kill you. Equal and 'dietary neutrality' do not belong in the same sentence together. Most artificial sweeteners are made from toxic and even carcinogenic compounds. But you knew I was going to say that. I won't bore you with the 'facts,' this is easy enough to read up on.

c) In reality, I see this as more of a political issue. Guess who owns Equal? Mon-fucking-santo. The same people who bring us radically persistent pesticides and GMOs and sue poor small farmers who have the misfortune to live downwind from them. They have revolutionized intellectual property rights in the worst possible way and represent everything that is wrong about agribusiness. Again, it would take too much space to go into all the reasons why Monsanto sucks, so I will leave it at that.

d) Splenda is owned by Johnson & Johnson, who some might consider to be slightly less evil than Monsanto. Either way, they recently bought up a bunch of negative domain names hoping to quiet the growing number of people who question the health effects of Splenda.

As far as what those health effects actually are, everyone knows I'm not much of a chemist so I won't pretend I'm an expert on this one. But I've read that sucralose is a cholorocarbon, which means that not only is it not as 'natural' as the 'made from sugar' tagline would imply, but also that it's, well, a dumb thing to put in your body. I welcome any corrections on all that.

e) Regarding wheat gluten... Obviously we do produce a lot of wheat here, and it's subsidized pretty heavily so we can get our greedy little hands into every developing economy that used to produce its own wheat, but now cannot due to signing up for some awesome "free" market trade agreement. So we are able to sell it for a low enough price that it ends up being cheaper for say, Uganda, to import U.S. wheat than to produce their own, resulting in food insecurity as well as over-dependence on the global commodity prices for wheat as well as whatever crap they decided to monocrop or manufacture instead. This is a whole other can of worms though.

As far as the competitive advantage is concerned, I can't think of a definitive answer, but maybe it has something to do with what the gluten is used for. A lot of times trade restrictions are meant to be prohibitive for political reasons (e.g. the notorious EU 'banana regime'... banana quality standards made it impossible for some African countries to sell their bananas to the EU, in order to protect prices/profits for corporate/evil plantations operating in Latin America and elsewhere).

Aaaaanyways, I think that this might be an issue of the return we get on food grade wheat gluten (as opposed to feed grade). We can make a better profit processing and exporting food grade wheat for certain purposes like bread and Oreos. Meanwhile, because China has industrialized so rapidly they haven't quite caught up with all the pesky social and environmental regulations that we subject our poor agribusinesses to, making their feed grade gluten pretty affordable (although of questionable healthiness). So to make a long story short, if I had to guess I'd say our food grade wheat is cheaper for them to buy, their feed grade wheat is cheaper for us to buy. The capital is flowing to where it gets the highest return, the agribusinesses win again, and there are a bunch of dead pets laying around.