The Scourge of Soybean Oil

Southern Maryland, where I live, used to be a premier tobacco-growing region. Then in the 1980s, as the risks of tobacco smoking became clear, the state of Maryland instituted a tobacco buy-out program. Tobacco farmers received a large payment for ten years in a row to never plant tobacco again. The problem is that what replaced the tobacco was mostly soybeans—a crop that is far more carcinogenic and dangerous than tobacco. Fields-of-lung-cancer became fields-of-every-kind-of-cancer.