OIL! Not just for Breakfast Anymore!

Ok, even a blind squirrel finds a nut once in awhile. But there's a bigger problem.

So my daughter comes to me all upset that they're banning Skittles.

I go, “Why?”

She exasperatedly claims, “Because RFK is an idiot. Because of food dyes. It’s called the Skittles ban!”

“The Skittles ban?” I say.

“Yes!” she replies, showing me an article.

Sure enough, RFK Jr.—(former) heroin addict, guy who drinks methylene blue for breakfast, sounds like he cleans his throat with a wire brush, never went to medical school but is now running the nation’s health care department—is suddenly an expert on food dyes.

I say, “I thought food dyes came from, like, crushed bug butts and stuff?”

My daughter goes, “Well, apparently we make Skittles from oil. And now it’s banned.”

“Wait—so we’re eating petroleum?” I say. “How’s that even a thing?”

So, being who I am, after dinner, I started researching petroleum food dyes. I’m not a food scientist, but I had three questions:

• One: Is Kennedy being stupid, or did a blind squirrel find a nut?

• Two: Why the hell are we eating oil in the first place?

• Three: Is banning petroleum dyes a good idea?

What I found is that, while Kennedy is as nutty as a guy who drinks methylene blue—or mercury, for that matter—the reality is that petroleum wound up in our diet for the same reason Hershey bars are sold in America but not in Europe:

Shelf stability, mass market capitalism, and regulators who long ago decided "safe enough" was good enough.

And banning petroleum-based dyes?

Might not be the worst idea in the world after all.

But the real kicker is this: America is now so broken, we have no idea what to believe anymore—and that’s not good.

Why We Eat Petroleum

So first, yeah, we’re eating petroleum-based dyes. The simple question was, “OK, why?” I mean, when you see crude oil, you don’t go, “Mmmmm… lemme get a straw!”

Now, I’m not going to get into the science about whether or not it is safe. The quick and dirty scan of the literature I found suggests it seems reasonably safe in small quantities, unless you’re eating gobs and gobs of the stuff. And I have to imagine if you’re eating gobs and gobs of food dyes, you probably have other problems. That said, there also seems to be some reasonable evidence that chronic exposure to these dyes has long-term health risks, which is why they are heavily regulated in some countries. Since I’m not an expert in this area, and I didn’t feel like spending a month reading journal articles before writing this, I decided, meh, efficacy and safety are largely irrelevant. What’s the real reason we use the dyes in the first place is the actual question here.

Once I started looking into it, the answer was obvious.

We’re eating petroleum-based dyes for the same reason America does just about everything else wrong: because it’s cheaper, faster, and easier to sell.

For the record, natural dyes aren’t all that appetizing either. Take red dyes. Natural red dyes, particularly carminic acid, are made from crushing Cochineal insects. Now, if that sounds appetizing, guess what, really expensive lipstick? Bingo, crushed bug butts.

How’s that sound? Bug butts on your lips anyone?

But here’s the thing: Food, especially processed food, takes weeks in a supply chain. It’s baked, dried, shipped around, and refrigerated. It’s warehoused, put on trucks, and shown up in staging areas before it goes out to retail stores.

Natural dyes — the kind that come from crushed plants or bug butts — fade. They rot. They can’t survive six months in a warehouse or three months under fluorescent lights at a 7-Eleven.

Petroleum-based dyes don’t have that problem. If you watched the “Fallout” series, and they joke about the “Cram” that’s 200 years old? That’s not all that far off base. Processed foods will likely survive under the right conditions, especially canned. Maybe not 200 years, but they’re going to survive 30-60-90 days. The dyes, chemicals, and preservatives make that food look, taste, and smell perfect. That’s the nature of the food system that capitalism in the U.S. has created.

That’s why the dyes are petroleum-based. They’re cheap to produce, make colors more vivid, and keep food looking "fresh" even after sitting around long enough to qualify for Medicare.

It’s not like anyone stood up at a food science conference and said, "Hey, you know what would be great? Let's feed Americans bright, stable, petrochemical rainbows."

It was capitalism, pure and simple.

• Make the candy look perfect.

• Make the shelf life endless.

• Make the costs invisible.

And because regulators were more interested in partnering with “Big Food” than protecting consumers, the system just rolled forward.

Meanwhile, places like the European Union were slapping warning labels on the same dyes, limiting their use, or banning them outright. In the U.S., we just kept cranking out neon blue candies and radioactive orange cheese and calling it progress.

I immediately knew why.

Capitalism. Our diet, food supply, and grocery system are essentially a product of what’s profitable on the gross margin.

It’s hardly an original story.

How Hershey Got Rich

One of the greatest icons of America is because of this process.

Europeans HATE American chocolate. They say it tastes sour.

And you know what? It does. Because you know what?

It is.

Hershey's chocolate tastes like crap because it was engineered to taste like crap.

It wasn't always like that.

When Milton Hershey started selling chocolate in the early 1900s, American chocolate tried to imitate the rich, creamy, decadent European chocolate.

But there was a problem:

• Real milk chocolate spoils

• It needs refrigeration

• It didn't survive long shipments or warehouse storage.

Milton Hershey figured out a workaround: sour the milk on purpose.

Not in a gross, moldy way, but a controlled way that broke down the milk fats.
The chemical byproducts of that controlled spoilage (like butyric acid — the stuff that makes vomit smell) gave Hershey's chocolate its distinctive "tang,” which most Europeans find disgusting.

But here's the real genius:

• Soured milk made the chocolate shelf-stable.

• Shelf-stable meant it could survive long transport and storage without refrigeration.

• That made it perfect for mass production, marketing, and military supply chains.

By World War I, Hershey bars were shoved into rations for U.S. soldiers.

• Cheap.

• Durable.

• Good enough if you were cold, tired, and a thousand miles from a bakery in France.

And after the war? Americans came home nostalgic for Hershey’s — the taste of ration bars in the trenches.

A generation was trained to love chocolate engineered to last forever, not taste better.

Capitalism didn't ruin chocolate because it had to.

It ruined chocolate because shelf stability and logistics beat taste and tradition.

Ain’t that America?

McDonald’s cheeseburgers are cheap, fast, and easy to cook.

Velveeta cheese is cheap, fast, and easy to manufacture.

Hot Dogs? My goodness. They were created to allow butchers to make something from the chicken, pork, and beef trimmings. The old joke about hot dogs being made from “lips and assholes,” isn’t true, but it’s not all that far off.

Chicken Nuggets? Again, manufactured to allow chicken trimmings to be turned into a product that could be packaged and sold? What part of a chicken looks like a “nugget,” I ask you?

Much of our food supply is organized around what’s cheap, simple, and easy to market.

Food dyes are no exception.

The FDA Was Broken Before RFK Showed Up

It’s easy to blame RFK Jr. for what’s happening now. And to be clear: the man is a walking lawsuit against common sense.

But the truth is, the FDA wasn’t exactly a pristine institution before Kennedy stumbled into the building, dripping methylene blue and mumbling about bear meat.

The FDA wasn’t dead.

It was fragile.

It still did important work.

It could still slap a recall sticker on contaminated spinach.

It could still catch a batch of rancid peanut butter or tainted baby formula before it killed hundreds of people.

But when it came to the bigger picture:

• preventing systemic rot in the food supply

• updating ingredient safety standards,

• resisting corporate capture

I’d argue that the FDA was already significantly compromised. It was doing just enough to maintain public trust, not enough to protect public health meaningfully. I’m not blaming the FDA or the people who worked there. It was a joint effort between Congress and the President, and multiple Secretaries of HHS and Directors of the FDA over decades that undermined it. We (America) took for granted that we had a system where farmers, food producers, and drug producers largely policed themselves.

The real function became theater:

• Certify enough studies to keep politicians covered.

• Stamp enough approvals to keep shelves stocked.

• Pretend the system was more resilient than it actually was.

Then Kennedy showed up.

And here’s the thing about a crazy man:

• He doesn’t know where the unspoken boundaries are.

• He’s not worried about preserving the appearance of competence.

• He doesn’t respect the fragile fictions that keep crumbling institutions glued together.

And when you put a man like that in charge of a captured, unstable, politically radioactive regulatory agency?

It doesn’t just erode quietly.

It explodes.

The FDA wasn’t a collapsed building.

It was a room filled with leaking gas.

Kennedy just lit the match.

So, in walks Kennedy, driving the bus like a lunatic, railing against food dyes, and so we all assume, “Well there’s the nutjob. I assume the dyes are fine and he’s just a moron as always.”

Well, believe it or not, even a blind squirrel, this one in particular, finds a nut.

These food dyes should have been removed from the market decades ago. They’re not inherently dangerous, but they're not great for us.

So, believe it or not, RFK, Jr., gets this one right.

I know, right? Tough to believe. Almost stunning.

I’m sure some of you are rushing out to your front lawns to look for a star in the sky, or to your lawn thermometers to see if Hell has frozen over.

I assure you, none of those events have happened.

But here’s where the real problem lies, and where my research and thinking took a turn. My daughter’s outrage began with the idea of RFK did this, he’s a moron, thus, everything he does must be moronic.

I started with, “well wait, why are we eating oil? Should we be eating oil? Kennedy might be a moron, but maybe we need to separate the message from the messenger here.”

Now granted, I’m 54, and my daughter is 23. I’m a former policy analyst; she’s not. But still, most people are going to react the way she did. There’s an expectation that people should be able to rely on the institutions of government and the people who lead them. And people are now like, “I have no idea what to believe from anyone about anything and anybody.”

And that—not Skittles, Kennedy, food dyes—is the real problem.

The Collapse Won’t Start With Tanks

The real collapse isn’t going to start with tanks rolling down Main Street.

It’s going to start when nobody trusts anything anymore.

It will start when there’s an E. coli outbreak in lettuce, and no one believes the FDA when they issue the recall.

Or, when nobody trusts the food supply because the FDA is so damaged, when there’s been such an erosion of trust, commerce breaks down.

It’s going to start when baby formula is contaminated, and half the country thinks it’s a deep state hoax.

It’s going to start when the food supply fails in small, stupid ways — and nobody trusts the people trying to fix it.

It won't be some grand, cinematic moment.

It’ll be small. It’ll be stupid. It’ll be preventable.

And it’ll be too late.

When institutions rot slowly for decades, credibility is squandered year after year, and leaders are so ridiculous that even their rare moments of being right are dismissed as lunacy, that's when a society collapses from the inside out.

The fact that we all, out of hand, dismiss this and just presume that eating petroleum dyes must be ok is not a good thing.

Yes, Kennedy is a complete fool. Completely unqualified. The Director of the FDA, Martin Makary, is at least a medical doctor. Still, obviously, there are serious concerns about his positions relating to his commitments to science, especially on reproductive health, vaccines, and mental health.

So now, when these guys talk, we assume it’s all garbage. Every word from the FDA, HHS, whatever — just more blathering nonsense.

This is an erosion of confidence and trust that is going to outlast far beyond the Trump years.

One E. coli outbreak in lettuce? You’ll see that product decimated because it will be obvious that we can’t trust the entirety of the supply chain, thanks to how the FDA and the USDA are controlling testing and monitoring.

The same will be true for poultry, I might add.

The same will be true for many foods.

The same loss of trust is spreading beyond food. It's hitting taxes, aviation, healthcare, everything.

Compared to last year, about five million taxpayers hadn’t filed their taxes on time because, according to a poll, many were like, “Well, why bother? Trump’s fired about 80% of the IRS.” That amounted to a drop in revenue of about half a trillion dollars.

The FAA took a major reputational hit because China, not the FAA, came down on Boeing first when the 737-MAX started having instrumentation failures that led to loss of life. The FAA was, prior to that event, seen as the worldwide gold standard, in terms of regulatory scrutiny. Aviation regulatory authorities around the world looked to the FAA. Flight departments around the world considered themselves at the top of the game if they complied with FAA standards.

No more.

That’s what this is all coming to.

This is what collapse looks like.

Yes, it would be better if the head of HHS wasn’t a methylene blue-drinking whackjob who thinks vaccines cause autism and wants to make polio great again.

Yes, it would be better if the guy leading the FDA believed in science, reproductive rights, and had a different view on drug regulatory development.

But on this particular issue, we probably should eat less crude oil in our food.

I know that seems odd to say, but more bug butts, less crude oil.

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If this hit you in the gut, don’t keep it to yourself.

Share it. Please.
On Reddit.
In group chats.
To your friend who just ate that bag of Skittles and you’ve realized he has consumed a portion of the Permian Basin.

Because you’re not crazy.

You’re just awake.

And the more people who wake up now, the fewer get crushed when it all finally breaks.

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