Corn Commentary

Abundant Food is Good

America has the safest, most abundant, and most affordable food supply in the entire world. That would be a good thing, right? For some people, however, this is somehow a bad thing.

While in Illinois over the weekend for a wedding, an issue of the Illinois Times caught my eye in a restaurant. The cover story was “The High Price of Cheap Food: Counting hidden costs shows Illinois farmers a better way.” It was free, so I picked it up.

Basically, it was an endorsement of the movie “Food, Inc.” with its own glaring fact errors and one-sided “reporting.”

Let’s just start with the most obvious. According to the IT, “Only the tiniest fraction (less than a bushel per person) of the 1 billion bushels of corn grown annually comes to consumers as corn — on the cob or as chips, tortillas, cornmeal, etc.” Actually, our corn production in this country last year was 12 billion bushels. And that’s only corn for grain, some of which may be counted as food grade for chips, tortillas, corn meal, etc. Sweet corn production is not measured in bushels, although this article attempts to clump it together with field corn as if it were the same thing.

But, that’s just being picky. I’m sure that was an innocent typo and really has nothing to do with the reporter’s main point, which is that somehow having affordable, abundant and safe food year round is bad. She points out, (correctly) “In 1960, the average family spent 18 percent of its income on food; today that figure has plummeted to nine percent. That’s less than was ever spent on food throughout history, and less than is spent currently anywhere else worldwide.” We have a “staggering array of choices” and produce available year round even when it’s not in season.

However, the reporter says, “If that sounds almost too good to be true, in many ways it is.” Actually, it is not only true, but it is good as well.

She then goes on to blame the federal government for subsidizing “lazy” farmers who are addicted to government payments “like cocaine.” She also says that the fact that 95 percent of U.S. farms are family owned is true, but misleading, because really it’s companies like ADM, Cargill, Tyson and Monsanto who control agriculture in the country, not the family farmers.

And we use too much fertilizer and fossil fuel and slave labor, etc. So, what we need to do as a nation is switch “from conventional to sustainable farming, defined as farm practices that don’t deplete the land and natural resources and that provide living wages to farmers and farm workers.” And she tries to convince us that somehow this is not going to result in a less abundant or more expensive food supply:

Many remain convinced that industrial agriculture is the only way enough food can be grown to feed a hungry world. They’re skeptical — even disbelieving — when told that sustainable farming, using methods both old and new, can actually produce more food per acre than conventional farming. But numbers provide the proof. An acre of conventionally raised corn at today’s prices would fetch $602, although by the end of the year, it’s projected to cost $716.55 — and takes 50-plus gallons of fossil fuel to produce. In contrast, a local Springfield produce farmer using sustainable practices says he earns as much as $16,000 per acre.

Note that this is literally like comparing apples to oranges – or probably in this case, corn to strawberries. Growing an acre of produce to sell at a local farmers market is not in any way comparable to growing 4,000 acres of corn.

The article begins with a scene at a local farmers market where an old man is asking the price of strawberries. They are $3.50 at the farmers market, compared to $1.99 at the grocery store, where the reporter tells him they are “shipped in from California and grown with toxic chemicals. They don’t have much flavor ’cause they’re picked before they’re ripe — probably by illegal immigrants who’re paid slave wages.” The old man replies, “They taste fine to me.”

It is great and wonderful for us to have strawberries from California before they are in season in Illinois – and it is equally great and wonderful that we can have fresh, locally grown produce in the summertime. What is really great and wonderful in this nation is that we have that choice. Not having the choice will lead to a less abundant, less affordable and less safe food supply.

And that would definitely be a bad thing.