Michael Pollan called the #2 corn created by the nations farmers a biomass. It seems that farm policy created by Earl Butz (secretary of agriculture under Nixon), encourages a glut in the more generic version of corn often used by the industrial food complex. This glut becomes the fodder for the brightest food chemists industry has to offer. The result....foods our Grandma would not recognize. Pollan says if Grandma wouldn't recognize it, we shouldn't eat it.

From the economist point of view. The government takes the view that externalities, (things that have either positive or negative effect that goes beyond the price paid for them), must be either taxed or subsidized. If corn is subsidized (ostensibly because it is somehow undervalued), more corn will be produced than consumers really want. As David Friedman's delightful Intermediate Micro-Economic Text reminds us, through a potato metaphor (ironically enough), consumer welfare is ultimately worse off because of the subsidy altered equilibrium. Pollan would tell us that the #2 corn glut has an opportunity cost of less processed foods.

Net result......Consumers Nutrition suffers.

Tom

Today I am fascinated with a book I am currently reading and its implications on America's nutritional history. I am reading Michael Pollan's "The Omnivore's Dilemma", which speaks of food chains, the history of corn and our disenfranchisement from a sense of authority concerning the feeding our own bodies. This is not a conspiracy, but a result of the post war industrial infrastructure and a search for agricultural efficiency.

I'll let you know as I finish the book.

Tom