Good farmers of the Midwest, today is your day of reckoning. For what I have to tell you will change the comfortable perception of your livelihood. It will weigh heavy on your conscience. It will implicate you and sully you.

Americans have grown fat and it is your fault.

Of course, there are co-conspirators. The federal government, fast food companies and the makers of sweet junk food stand with you in hoisting pounds on the population. You and your co-conspirators are guilty of becoming too proficient in your trades. You’ve legislated too secure of a food supply. You’ve become too skilled at growing food. You’ve sharpened the power of marketing into too fine a point. And, without even a nod toward mercy, you’ve offered consumers what they want. The result is a helpless population, cramming their maws to capacity, a horde of jowl-flapping over-consumers waddling toward purchase of a super-sweetened, double-cheeseburger, bon-bon bargain ticket to the early promised land of burnt out pancreases and failed hearts.

You, dear farmers, are killers.

At least that’s what I got from a recent editorial that dissected America’s growing “obesity epidemic.” The article, The (Agri)Cultural Contradictions of Obesity, was written by Michael Pollan in the Oct. 12 edition of the New York Times Magazine.

We’re fat, Pollan reports, because an overabundance of food forces sellers of food to tempt us with larger servings and food soaked with a cheap and these days ubiquitous byproduct of corn—high fructose corn syrup. It’s the perverse side of “value added,” where more equals better and we’ve come to expect bonus calories for our expenditure.

Pollan tracks the expanding waistband of the United States to farm policy, over production and the subsequent glut of corn-derived sweeteners.

He says that today’s subsidy format buries us in excess corn, suggesting that the change from a grain-bank, non-recourse loan program in the 70s to current decoupled farm policy is folly.

Of course, you know it isn’t as simple as all of that. Farm programs neither develop nor operate in a vacuum. Take a nick at U.S. corn production and the elsewhere-world crop will swell. Try to tie farm payments to production and the bean counters, if you’ll pardon the pun, at the World Trade Organization get exercised. We can tinker with domestic production, but consumers will get the same amount of starch, fat and sugar they demand. It’ll just come from the fields and pastures of another country.

Then, of course, there are the realities of markets and infrastructure. We can produce healthier foods. Growing broccoli is possible in the Midwest, but given the sheer productive power of our millions of acres, it isn’t profitable. Nobody wants it. And it’s hell to keep in the bin.

Finally, Pollan too neatly links today’s tendency to overeat with the propensity we had for too much drink in the days leading to prohibition of alcohol. He pins our nation’s collective binge and failed ban on alcohol to an overabundance of corn in those times. Added value back then was whiskey, and what an awful bunch of drunks we became.

Regardless of whether you are prepared to accept the correlation that fatties these days are just a corn-fed version of yesterday’s drunks, Pollan keeps coming back to cheap corn as a root cause for our dietary indiscretion. Absent from the article was the notion of self control; that what seeps past our jaws is self-determined. Welcome to modern food politics: Hard livers from whiskey? Soft bellies from milk shakes? It’s not the consumer’s fault. It’s yours.