How can you make book sales expand endlessly, like the American waistline?
Michael Pollan explains in The Omnivore’s Dilemma how you do it with corn. When you’ve grown enough corn to fill every reasonable demand, you create unreasonable demands—artificial needs. So, having induced the government to declare corn-fed beef to be the standard, you feed corn to cattle, who cannot digest corn, tormenting and poisoning them in the process. And you use the fats and sweets of corn by-products to make an endless array of soft drinks and fast foods, addicting people to a fattening yet inadequate diet in the process. And you can’t stop these processes, because if you did profits might become listless, even flat.