The rise in calorie surplus sufficient to explain the obesity epidemic was less a change in food quantity than in food quality, with an explosion in cheap, high-calorie, low-quality convenience foods. The federal government very much played a role in making this happen. U.S. taxpayers unwittingly give billions in subsidies to prop up the likes of the sugar industry, the corn industry and its high-fructose syrup, and the soybean industry, which processes about half of its crop into vegetable oil and the other half into cheap animal feed to help make Dollar Menu meat.
