Ezra Klein on Michael Pollan and meat subsidies: “We spend billions to subsidize ever cheaper meat. And billions more to treat the ill health that results from our meat-heavy diets. And we will pay billions, even trillions, more, to handle the environmental damage that eventually results from these policies. It’s an incredibly odd state of affairs, like paying someone to touch up your house with lead paint. But we continue doing it because people like meat and because the various industries arrayed around meat — from acutal producers of livestock to the pharmaceutical companies that create the antibiotics to the corn industry which supplies the grain — wield enormous political power.”