You got your corn syrup in my peanut butter! You got your peanut butter on my subsidies!*

Oh look! It's my favorite hobbyhorse, the overproduction of corn. Subsidies make it so cheap that there's an enormous incentive to use it in all kinds of unsavory ways, filling processed foods with corn syrup and stuffing cows with corn silage.

Of course cows weren't built to subsist on grain, which means that feeding them corn makes them much more suceptible to a variety of diseases, which process is largely responsible for the routine dosing of beef and dairy cows with antibiotics. (The overuse of antibiotics is another one of my pet hobbyhorses, conveniently enough. So tidy and intersecting my indignities can sometimes be.)

And humans aren't built to have the super-digestible and otherwise valueless calories of fructose in their every food. Our good friend high-fructose corn syrup pops up all over the place: in breakfast cereal, salad dressing, "fitness drinks," hamburger buns, peanut butter, cough syrup, tomato sauce, pretzels, "nutrition bars," soups, blah blah blah blah blah.

And so, anyway, as the Times article argues,

Cheap corn, the dubious legacy of Earl Butz, is truly the building block of the ''fast-food nation.'' Cheap corn, transformed into high-fructose corn syrup, is what allowed Coca-Cola to move from the svelte 8-ounce bottle of soda ubiquitous in the 70's to the chubby 20-ounce bottle of today. Cheap corn, transformed into cheap beef, is what allowed McDonald's to supersize its burgers and still sell many of them for no more than a dollar. Cheap corn gave us a whole raft of new highly processed foods, including the world-beating chicken nugget, which, if you study its ingredients, you discover is really a most ingenious transubstantiation of corn, from the cornfed chicken it contains to the bulking and binding agents that hold it together.

You would have thought that lower commodity prices would represent a boon to consumers, but it doesn't work out that way, not unless you believe a 32-ounce Big Gulp is a great deal. When the raw materials for food become so abundant and cheap, the clever strategy for a food company is not necessarily to lower prices -- to do that would only lower its revenues. It makes much more sense to compete for the consumer's dollar by increasing portion sizes -- and as Greg Critser points out in his recent book ''Fat Land,'' the bigger the portion, the more food people will eat. So McDonald's tempts us by taking a 600-calorie meal and jacking it up to 1,550 calories. Compared with that of the marketing, packaging and labor, the cost of the added ingredients is trivial.

An intersecting problem is the US tariff on imported sugar, which not only encourages people to use corn syrup where you'd expect sugar,** but also deforms a cascading series of markets in some nasty ways. The idea is that US sugar producers deserve a break -- you don't want all that fat sugar-money going overseas, do you? (No no! Let's keep it at home on the plantations! I have some historically-founded prejudices against the entire sugar industry, my apologies.) But the result is that it's cheaper for Brach's to move its entire production overseas and import the resulting candy than it is to continue running its giant Chicago facility and use either tariffed foreign sugars or expensive domestic varieties. Nicely done.

I like actual corn as much as anyone. Want some succotash? Corn farmers too. And ethanol, okay, why not? (Although there again, actually, subsidies warp behavior in ways that aren't entirely desirable for the rest of us -- ethanol's not nearly as efficient or non-polluting as a number of alternatives, but it certainly is costly in the amount of money spent subsidizing it, and allows politicians to give lip service to the notion that they're interested in supporting environmentally superior fuels while doing pretty much nothing of the kind. But I digress.)

The law of unintended consequences has sharp teeth, and we have cavities.

*Clearly the category for this entry should be not "essays," but "rants."

**Though I still think the most astonishing and annoying thing is not the substitution of corn syrup for sugar, but the substitution of corn for nothing -- cheap, easy bulking out where none was necessary.

Posted by redfox at October 11, 2003 01:33 PM (essays) | Comments (4)

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