CatherineRhodes.com

I love high fructose corn syrup!

Reading Omnivore’s Dilemma, which is a disturbing account of the prevalence of corn in the food supply. Corn is now a “welfare queen” because it is heavily subsidized by the government. Farmers have financial incentive to grow corn, which gets fed to cattle whose stomachs are designed for grass. When the bovines get sick because they cannot tolerate their corn diet, they are shot full of antibiotics. This follows being doped up with hormones to make them bulk up faster or produce more milk. The problem is complex, but what author Michael Pollan concludes is that a McDonald’s hamburger is only cheap because the true cost of growing that pound of beef is not accounted for.

The ninety-nine-cent price of a fast-food hamburger simply doesn’t take account of that meal’s true cost — to soil, oil, public health, the public purse, etc., costs which are never charged directly to the consumer but, indirectly and invisibly, to the taxpayer (in the form of subsidies), the health care system (in the form of food-borne ilnesses and obesity), and the environment (in the form of pollution) …. If not for this sort of blind-man’s accounting, grass would make a lot more sense than it now does.