Chart of the Day: Our Upside-Down Food Policy

Nutrition pyramids exist to give us a sense of how much we're supposed to eat from each food group. The federal government's food subsidy policy exists to manage supply and protect prices for farmers with excellent lobbying groups. These two things share as much in common as the fast food industry and PETA. So when turn them into pictures and put them side-by-side, we get this:

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I'm sympathetic to the argument that taxing "bad" food is too blunt an instrument to use in the war against obesity (food isn't like cigarettes, because we don't need tobacco to live, etc...). But let's be clear: the federal government already has a tax policy affecting what we eat, and it dramatically distorts the price of our food ... and the size of our waists.

[via Economix]