You said that the gov't "told generations of kids to eat a pound of bread every day." That seemed clearly a reference to the food pyramid and similar guidelines which recommended relative proportions of carbohydrates, proteins, and fats. Those recommendations were largely reflective of the medical consensus, such as it was--i.e. too much group think and too much reliance on epidemiological methodologies rather than investigatory science.

Yes, the USDA is responsive to the agricultural lobby. So what? At the end of the day it doesn't matter how or why they make their recommendations, but the substance and effect of those recommendations. And my point is that in the long-term the general guidance of the USDA has reflected, more than anything else, the medical consensus. Obviously it doesn't only reflect that, but everything is effected by lobbying, even the medical consensus.

And my larger argument is that if you examine its long-term track record, on the whole it has been positive, at least in the context of nutritional policy. Yes, the USDA's fortification program was largely voluntary. So were its more modern recommendations. Sometimes their recommendations weren't voluntary, like guidelines for federally funded school lunch programs. But the same applies to their fortification programs--those school lunch guidelines also mandate fortified foodstuffs. Also, the fortification programs involved direct and indirect subsidies, which is why most basic foodstuffs (grains, salt) at retail were fortified, at least until the organic craze.

I respond because I'm tired of the narrative that when government does something stupid the answer should just be to remove government from the equation. That's not rational. In every context we should endeavor to make informed and well-reasoned judgments based on a) context, b) facts, and c) some rough assessment of our priorities. Unfortunately we've forgotten how to incorporate those three things into our discourse. We don't understand context because we reframe every issue as some ideological battle about government. We don't understand facts because we're too lazy to root them out, and too lazy to assess their relevance and strength. And we suck at agreeing on priorities because, similar to context, we confuse the means with the end--that is, we seem to think our ultimate goal is to refashion government to fit some conceptual model, rather than to refashion particular laws and agencies to best meet some quantifiable goal, like a lower incidence of diabetes.

This retreat and resort to ideology and abstract modeling is not only a political pathology, but arguably it has been the problem with nutritional science. For example, when I mention "epidemiological methodologies" above I'm implying, among other things, that we committed a category error: too much salt might be "causative" of high blood pressure on a population wide scale, but on an individual scale it doesn't cause anything in most people, and the particular issue in the subset of the population responsive to high salt intake wasn't something you'd expect given the large population studies. The population-wide mechanism was empirically sound (lower average salt consumption, improve average outcomes) but not reflective of the underlying pathologies at the micro-scale and ultimately suboptimal.

IOW, yes, if _everybody_ reduced salt consumption to some common recommended level then population-wide health could improve. But there's a better equilibrium to be found by understanding the details and taking a more nuanced approach, allowing us to improve health even more. Likewise, maybe we might all be better off on average if the USDA disappeared overnight. But perhaps there's a better equilibrium where the USDA still has a role. We can't know without making a careful assessment, and continually re-making that assessment.

Let's stop being lazy. Let's dig into the details. It's difficult and frustrating but there's really no better way. At the end of the day, government will never go away. Somebody will always rebuild the bureaucracy. The only sane long-term strategy is to stay engaged.