I don't get why people act like we're talking about saffron when it comes to sugar. It's dirt cheap and costs cents per pound.

Corn syrup could disappear overnight and nothing would change about how much junk food we eat, how much we produce, nor how sweet it is.

So you think producers are putting corn syrup in food just for kicks?

No. They're doing it because it's marginally cheaper and more convenient in the aggregate, but if they didn't and stuck to cane sugar, the practical difference on the consumer side in terms of consumption and price per product would be essentially nil or close enough not to matter.

It's not about displacing other sugars. It's a cheap substitute for things not sugar. The argument about corn syrup is misplaced, it should be about sugars in general in US processed food. But corn syrup just happened to be that sugar.

No, ostensibly it's cheaper at scale. But from a consumer's perspective, it doesn't matter that they're using that instead of sugar. There's a much larger conversation to be had about the misinformation surrounding sugar and carbohydrates, but anyways..

If the actual total sugar (or sugarlike) content decreased along with the corn syrup, there definitely would be differences.

Ask anyone who's visited the US about how the food tastes. It's not just that serving portions are much bigger, but everything just tastes sweeter too. I've had people tell me they visited the states and even the plain white bread was sweet in comparison to everywhere else.

This. Mainstream food in the US is unbearably sweet and sugary if you come from anywhere else in the world. Drinks are sweet. Chips are sweet. The deep fried onions at Olive Garden are sweet. The gravy for the prime rib is sweet. The goddamn bagels are sweet. They put marshmallows on top of baked sweet potatoes for thanksgiving.

Those would be sweet anywhere. Except General Tso which doesn’t exist outside the US because it’s an overly sweet abomination.

They arent adding sugar and increasing the product size, they're displacing more expensive ingredients (fruits? dairy?) for cheaper sugars.

This brings the unit cost down.

Hmm. Coca-Cola may be a standout here, where sweetness is required for the phosphoric acid balance, because of the tingle that sells their "original" flavor

If you're putting more of one ingredient in, you're either giving a larger product or putting in less of another ingredient. If that other ingredient was more expensive, you have decreased costs.

> Cheap corn syrup does not incentivize more sweetening. No one is rewarded more for putting more of an ingredient that costs money in a product.

Um, sure they are. As sugar gets cheaper and cheaper, the incentives are to substitute sugar for other ingredients that are more expensive.

Look at the "fat free" foods--they've got whopping amounts more sugar than their normal counterparts, for example.

Re: your last paragraph, isn’t that to do with taste, not cost?

I thought the reason they put sugar in “fat-free” products is because they taste like inedible garbage without it. Because they’re garbage.