Cornutopia

After my article about the study of whole foods and processed foods, many people mentioned the difference in cost between the two, pointing out that lower-income families have to depend on processed foods because they are so much cheaper than whole foods. While I think this is an abhorrent practice in the US, I had to wonder how I would reconcile this distaste with my predominantly Libertarian beliefs—isn’t this just the free market economy working its magic? Isn’t it the same as lower-income families having to buy WalMart brand shoes instead of Nikes?

Only, as it turns out, if the federal government paid WalMart the difference between the cost of their shoes and the cost of Nike’s. You see, the lavish corn subsidies the government doles out (to the tune of $41.8 BILLION between 1995 and 2004) is what is mainly responsible for the fact that a McDonald’s extra value meal is cheaper than a box of lettuce. But what, you ask, does corn have to do with your Big Mac, 64 oz Coke and large fry?

It is first important to know that the huge corn subsidies encourage overproduction. A bushel of corn—about 56 pounds—costs $2. The same bushel costs a farmer over $3 to produce. Now, anyone with any kind of business sense—or any kind of sense at all—knows this is not going to end well for the farmer. So does the federal government; but instead of encouraging farmers to produce less to increase the price so they can make a profit (a little idea we like to call “supply and demand”), the feds pay out subsidies, ensuring farmers make up the difference not only to break even, but to turn a profit. Afterall, why continue doing something if you were going to perpetually break even? Now farmers are guaranteed to make a profit on whatever they produce—so why not produce as much as they possibly can?

This leads to an overabundance of cheap corn—so what do we do with it? First, about 50 percent goes to feeding animals that will eventually by processed into the burger or chicken nuggets in your extra value meal—whether it’s good for the animal or not. Much like humans, cows get fatter faster when fed a corn-based diet, giving Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation (CAFO) operators more cost-efficiency and a higher profit margin with a greater and faster turn-around for less. Unfortunately, the “grain fed” mystique applied to cows is just that—smoke and mirrors. Their meat is higher in saturated fat than that of a pastured cow, and the cow is pumped with antibiotics to combat the diseases brought on by feeding them corn (one of which is e. Coli)[1]. The meat going into your burger has now become infinitely cheaper—and infinitely more dangerous.

Another five percent of corn is turned into the mother of all sweeteners—High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS). Coupled with the USDA’s sugar tariffs, HFCS is ridiculously cheaper than cane sugar, which allows soft drink companies (and the plethora of other companies that use HFCS to sweeten their foods) to slash costs. But instead of just lowering the prices of their items, they’ve done what any true American would do: they’ve kept the prices the same, but increased portion size. Which is why you can now get six liters of Coke for the same price as a single jug of all natural apple juice.

The cheapness and abundance of corn and its by-products has not only skewed the cost of processed foods vs. whole foods, it’s also kicked off a virtual dietary holocaust. Between 1975 and 1997, per capital consumption of HFCS jumped from almost nothing to 60.4 pounds per year, which equals about 200 extra calories per person per day. In the past 25 years, thanks to the cheapening of processed food, caloric intake has risen a total of 300 calories per person, per day. The obesity rate went from 15% in 1960 to 31% in 1980, and since 1980 has increased an additional 42%—which means two thirds of Americans are now overweight or obese; that’s 66 percent! In almost the same amount of time, from 1980 to 2004, the percentage of disposable income Americans spent on food fell from 15.4% to 10.8%.

All in all, we’re spending less money on food (less, even, than any other industrialized nation) and getting fatter because of it. Fatter and unhealthier. From 1997-2004, the rate of type II diabetes climbed 41 percent.

Before I get too off-track and begin to rant on the veritable environmental disaster that is corn[2], I will try to wrap things up with my original point: the government needs to stop subsidizing the over-production of corn. This would make soft drinks, candy, overly processed beef, chicken, and a host of other things reflect their true market value. We would see, then, that these foods aren’t really cheaper than whole foods—the government has just forced them to be that way.

Note: A great deal of the information presented herein has been gleaned from three main sources. One is Michael Pollan, specifically in his article “When a Crop Becomes King.” Another is Kate Hopkins’ article “Tariffs and Subsidies – The Literal Cost of High Fructose Corn Syrup,” and finally, Tom Philpott’s “How the feds make bad-for-you food cheaper than healthful fare.”

[1] Cows have rumens, which have a neutral pH and allow them to digest grass. Any diseases in the cows stomach will not be able to survive in our acidy stomachs. The corn causes the acid level in the rumen to rise, causing painful acidosis for the cows, but also allowing the germs inside to develop a resistance to the acid in our stomachs.

2 Quickly: corn requires more nitrogen fertilizer and pesticide than any other crop, the runoff of which flows from the Midwest to the Mississippi River and into the Gulf of Mexico, where it has created a 12,000 square mile “dead zone” that fish cannot survive in.