Tyler May

The year is 1950. Your doctor lights a cigarette and tells you smoking is fine. He read it in a study. He is telling the truth about having read it. He does not know, or is not saying, that the study was funded by the tobacco industry. The year is 1958. Your doctor tells you to eat less fat. The evidence is contested. The contestation is not in the public messaging. The food industry has been helpful in clarifying which findings deserve attention. Some researchers who published contradictory data have been quietly defunded. Ancel Keys is on the cover of Time magazine. The year is 1962. Your doctor prescribes thalidomide to your pregnant wife for morning sickness. It has been approved. The FDA gave it the green light in Europe. Twelve thousand children will be born with severe limb malformations before anyone in an official capacity acknowledges the problem. The families are told the drug was safe. The drug was approved. Both of these things remain true. The year is 1972. Your doctor prescribes Valium. Britain is in the grip of a benzodiazepine wave that will last two decades. The dependency risk is known internally. It is not shared. Your doctor is not lying to you. He was not told either. The year is 1999. Your doctor prescribes Vioxx for your arthritis. It is newer than ibuprofen, well-tolerated, and Merck has a study showing it works. Merck also has internal data suggesting it roughly doubles the risk of heart attack. This data will not reach your doctor for four more years. Fifty thousand people are estimated to have died in the interim. Merck eventually settles for 4.85 billion dollars. No criminal charges are brought. The year is 2002. Your doctor prescribes OxyContin. Purdue Pharma trained its sales representatives to tell doctors the addiction risk was less than one percent. That figure came from a letter, not a study. The letter was about patients with terminal cancer on short-term doses in hospital settings. Your doctor is a GP with a patient who has a bad back. Nobody draws a distinction. Nobody is required to. The year is 2008. Your doctor checks your cholesterol. Your LDL is elevated. You are prescribed a statin. Nobody mentions that the number needed to treat for primary prevention is approximately 250. Nobody mentions that the muscle deterioration you'll notice over the next two years is listed as a rare side effect rather than a documented pattern affecting a meaningful percentage of patients. The trial that informed the prescription was funded by the manufacturer. Now it is today. Your doctor has new guidelines. New studies. New consensus. He is confident. He has always been confident. The confidence has never been the problem. The confidence is, in fact, precisely the problem. Source: COVID19 VACCINE VICTIMS AND FAMILIES

There used to be a man on horseback at five in the morning, in a pasture he owned, raising cattle his neighbors ate, on land his father had run before him. He is, in 2026, an endangered species. The American family farm, by the numbers: - Farms in 1935: 6.8 million - Farms in 2026: 1.9 million - Decline: 72% - Average farm size in 1935: 155 acres - Average farm size in 2026: 463 acres - Americans living on farms in 1900: 41% - In 2026: 1.1% - US dairy farms in 1970: 648,000 - In 2026: 24,000 - Decline: 96% - US beef processed by the four largest meatpackers in 1977: 25% - In 2026: 85% - Average age of an American farmer in 1992: 53 - In 2026: 58 - Farmers under 35 in 2026: under 9% - Cents per food dollar retained by the farmer in 1950: 41 - In 2026: 7.4 A nation that fed itself from millions of small family operations has consolidated, in two generations, into a food system controlled by a handful of corporations headquartered in Bentonville, Cincinnati, Chicago, and São Paulo. The land is still being farmed. It is being farmed on contract to processors who set the prices. The farmer is an underpaid contractor in a logistics chain that does not reward him for the quality of what he produces. The food, predictably, has gotten worse. Nobody voted on this. The grandfather who farmed the same eighty acres for fifty years would not recognize what is now happening on his land. The farm has been transferred. To the corporation. Without anyone particularly noticing.

Yup

Beef packers getting all time squeezed. Have to pay up huge for Cattle to get feeders to cut loose so they can run next week while at the same time lowering prices trying to clear this week's production. House of pain....

Incredible Fauci: “We’re going to pressure the unvaccinated” Biden: “Get a shot, get free beer” Cuomo: “Win $5M for getting vaccinated” DeBlasio: “Free fries if you get the shot” Newsom: “Win $1M” Get free donuts, prostitutes, cars, weed, comics, happy meals, casino trips…

What radicalized you?   For me, it happened back in my freshman year of high school in the early 2000s. The head coach of our hockey team believed in getting the team home to our own beds after road games no matter what instead of staying in hotels. Hotels were a distraction. With no hotel costs, he wanted to use the money to upgrade our road meals. Nothing fancy, just basic meat and potatoes type places like Cracker Barrel or Perkins instead of cold Little Caesars on a dark January bus ride home across rural North Dakota. The athletic director and superintendent shut the idea down and basically just absorbed the savings from his no hotel policy into the athletics budget. So after that our coach, the other assistants, the parents, and us players started fundraising in the off‑season in hopes to get better meals on the road. The first year went great. We raised a ton and were easily able to have nicer sit down meals on every single trip. We all sat together at big tables, had actual food choices, ate healthier and built even more camaraderie. It was fantastic all around. But then other sports teams and parents caught wind. It was seen as unfair. The AD, principal, and superintendent demanded we stop, in order to keep things “equal” across all sports at our public school. They even tried to force our coach to hand over the privately raised money so it could be redistributed. Thankfully, our coach was an old‑school Canadian ex‑pro hockey player who didn’t take shit from anyone, and told them to F off, and we continued with our meatloaf road meals as planned. The principal and AD eventually backed off, but the superintendent had a vendetta against our team and probably mostly just our coach so he never stopped. He even went as low as instructing bus drivers not to take us to the restaurants we’d planned for on the road. Our coach always overrode it, once even driving the bus himself since he had the license from coaching cross‑country. Over the next few years we continued the fundraising for better meals. Some of the other teams, and other parents continued to badger the supt., our coach and even sometime us players about it instead of just joining us in fundraising. Watching peers and especially some of our own “leaders” work so hard to sabotage a positive thing for us was eye opening and really stuck with us. It gave us an early look at how petty and nefarious and systems and people can be, even at the local level. And honestly, in the end, all it did was radicalize about 30 teenage hockey players for the rest of their lives who walked away believing “equality” was the dirtiest word in the English language. 😂

This week on The Food Professor Podcast: → Live from SIAL: what’s new in food innovation → Iran update and the impact on food prices → The latest decision from the Bank of Canada → Surveillance pricing: does it exist in Canada? → Carney’s wealth fund and what it means → Michael’s restaurant adventures continue in Montreal → Pet food trends with special guest Dylan Munro, Canadian-born COO and co-founder of Spot & Tango → The latest from the Canadian Food Sentiment Index (Spring 2026): what Canadians are really feeling about food right now Click on link below...