This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, May 14th, 2012. I'm Caleb Brown.

Our right to pursue exotic and often unhealthful delicacies has been under attack for some time,

but should some government authority protect us from our bad decisions,

Baylon Linnekin is head of Keep Food Legal,

a group dedicated to ensuring that we keep our rights when it comes to food. keep food

when it comes to food.

In as broad a brush as possible,

what is the problem with our ability to,

in an open market, go and buy the kinds of foods that we want.

Half of that is probably seen that is these public bans on various products, certain ingredients, but there's got to be another half that is also unseen

that just results in us not seeing things on shelves that we might like to see.

What are the biggest problems from your perspective?

Sure, subsidies have been, agricultural subsidies have been one of the big problems.

The USDA has been, essentially it picks winners, you know, it picks things like corn and soy that should be over produced by

subsidies and obviously that comes at the expense of other things like

leafy greens that might suffer.

And so there are environmental problems that come out of that.

Monocultures, which people like Michael Pollan

have written about, and Mark Bitman and others in the New York Times,

although their solution is to subsidize other things

rather than just to sort of wipe away the subsidy slate,

which seemingly subsidies are under the gun and have largely been

...