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Mermaid
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why corn is evil
« on: 2003-11-15 17:26:22 » |
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I read this fascinating article on fast food and subsidised agriculture in the united states
i didnt find a link...hence the long cut and paste
an equally fascinating interview with author michael pollan here:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/meat/interviews/pollan.html
i found this bit interesting:
<i>By the time a modern American beef cow is six months old, it has seen its last blade of grass for the rest of its life. As soon as they wean, they spend the first six months out on the pasture with their moms, nursing, nibbling grass. The mom is converting the grass's protein that's turning into milk for the animal, doing the way they've done it for millions of years. We take them off grass. We put them in pens, called backgrounding pens, and we teach them how to eat something that they are not evolved to eat, which is grain, and mostly corn.</i>
something to think about there...please proceed to the cut and paste article here:
<i>
The (Agri)Cultural Contradictions of Obesity
Sometimes even complicated social problems turn out to be simpler than they look. Take America's "obesity epidemic," arguably the most serious public-health problem facing the country. Three of every five Americans are now overweight, and some researchers predict that today's children will be the first generation of Americans whose life expectancy will actually be shorter than that of their parents. The culprit, they say, is the health problems associated with obesity.
You hear several explanations. Big food companies are pushing supersize portions of unhealthful foods on us and our children. We have devolved into a torpid nation of couch potatoes. The family dinner has succumbed to the fast-food outlet. All these explanations are true, as far as they go. But it pays to go a little further, to look for the cause behind the causes. Which, very simply, is this: when food is abundant and cheap, people will eat more of it and get fat. Since 1977, an American's average daily intake of calories has jumped by more than 10 percent. Those 200 or so extra calories have to go somewhere. But the interesting question is, Where, exactly, did all those extra calories come from in the first place? And the answer takes us back to the source of all calories: the farm.
It turns out that we have been here before, sort of, though the last great American binge involved not food, but alcohol. It came during the first decades of the 19th century, when Americans suddenly began drinking more than they ever had before or have since, going on a collective bender that confronted the young republic with its first major public-health crisis—the obesity epidemic of its day. Corn whiskey, suddenly superabundant and cheap, was the drink of choice, and in the 1820's the typical American man was putting away half a pint of the stuff every day. That works out to more than five gallons of spirits a year for every American. The figure today is less than a gallon.
As W.J. Rorabaugh tells the story in "The Alcoholic Republic," we drank the hard stuff at breakfast, lunch and dinner, before work and after and very often during. Employers were expected to supply spirits over the course of the workday; in fact, the modern coffee break began as a late-morning whiskey break called "the elevenses." (Just to pronounce it makes you sound tipsy.) Except for a brief respite Sunday mornings in church, Americans simply did not gather—whether for a barn raising or quilting bee, corn husking or political campaign—without passing the jug. Visitors from Europe—hardly models of sobriety themselves—marveled at the free flow of American spirits. "Come on then, if you love toping," the journalist William Cobbett wrote his fellow Englishmen in a dispatch from America. "For here you may drink yourself blind at the price of sixpence."
The results of all this toping were entirely predictable: a rising tide of public drunkenness, violence and family abandonment and a spike in alcohol-related diseases. Several of the founding fathers—including George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams—denounced the excesses of the "alcoholic republic," inaugurating the American quarrel over drinking that would culminate a century later in Prohibition.
But the outcome of our national drinking binge is not nearly as relevant to our present predicament as its underlying cause. Which, put simply, was this: American farmers were producing way too much corn, especially in the newly settled areas west of the Appalachians, where fertile soil yielded one bumper crop after another. Much as it has today, the astounding productivity of American farmers proved to be their own worst enemy, as well as a threat to the public health. For when yields rise, the market is flooded with grain, and its price collapses. As a result, there is a surfeit of cheap calories that clever marketers sooner or later will figure out a way to induce us to consume.
In those days, the easiest thing to do with all that grain was to distill it. The Appalachian range made it difficult and expensive to transport surplus corn from the lightly settled Ohio River Valley to the more populous markets of the East, so farmers turned their corn into whiskey—a more compact and portable "value-added commodity." In time, the price of whiskey plummeted, to the point that people could afford to drink it by the pint, which is precisely what they did.
Nowadays, for somewhat different reasons, corn (along with most other agricultural commodities) is again abundant and cheap, and once again the easiest thing to do with the surplus is to turn it into more compact and portable value-added commodities: corn sweeteners, cornfed meat and chicken and highly processed foods of every description. The Alcoholic Republic has given way to the Republic of Fat, but in both cases, before the clever marketing, before the change in lifestyle, stands a veritable mountain of cheap grain. Until we somehow deal with this surfeit of calories coming off the farm, it is unlikely that even the most well-intentioned food companies or public-health campaigns will have much success changing the way we eat.
The underlying problem is agricultural overproduction, and that problem (while it understandably never receives quite as much attention as underproduction) is almost as old as agriculture itself. Even in the Old Testament, there's talk about how to deal not only with the lean times but also with the fat: the Bible advises creation of a grain reserve to smooth out the swings of the market in food. The nature of farming has always made it difficult to synchronize supply and demand. For one thing, there are the vagaries of nature: farmers may decide how many acres they will plant, but precisely how much food they produce in any year is beyond their control.
The rules of classical economics just don't seem to operate very well on the farm. When prices fall, for example, it would make sense for farmers to cut back on production, shrinking the supply of food to drive up its price. But in reality, farmers do precisely the opposite, planting and harvesting more food to keep their total income from falling, a practice that of course depresses prices even further. What's rational for the individual farmer is disastrous for farmers as a group. Add to this logic the constant stream of improvements in agricultural technology (mechanization, hybrid seed, agrochemicals and now genetically modified crops—innovations all eagerly seized on by farmers hoping to stay one step ahead of falling prices by boosting yield), and you have a sure-fire recipe for overproduction—another word for way too much food.
All this would be bad enough if the government weren't doing its best to make matters even worse, by recklessly encouraging farmers to produce even more unneeded food. Absurdly, while one hand of the federal government is campaigning against the epidemic of obesity, the other hand is actually subsidizing it, by writing farmers a check for every bushel of corn they can grow. We have been hearing a lot lately about how our agricultural policy is undermining our foreign-policy goals, forcing third-world farmers to compete against a flood tide of cheap American grain. Well, those same policies are also undermining our public-health goals by loosing a tide of cheap calories at home.
hile it is true that our farm policies are making a bad situation worse, adding mightily to the great mountain of grain, this hasn't always been the case with government support of farmers, and needn't be the case even now. For not all support programs are created equal, a fact that has been conveniently overlooked in the new free-market campaign to eliminate them.
In fact, farm programs in America were originally created as a way to shrink the great mountain of grain, and for many years they helped to do just that. The Roosevelt administration established the nation's first program of farm support during the Depression, though not, as many people seem to think, to feed a hungry nation. Then, as now, the problem was too much food, not too little; New Deal farm policy was designed to help farmers reeling from a farm depression caused by what usually causes a farm depression: collapsing prices due to overproduction. In Churdan, Iowa, recently, a corn farmer named George Naylor told me about the winter day in 1933 his father brought a load of corn to the grain elevator, where "the price had been 10 cents a bushel the day before," and was told that suddenly, "the elevator wasn't buying at any price." The price of corn had fallen to zero.
New Deal farm policy, quite unlike our own, set out to solve the problem of overproduction. It established a system of price supports, backed by a grain reserve, that worked to keep surplus grain off the market, thereby breaking the vicious cycle in which farmers have to produce more every year to stay even.
It is worth recalling how this system worked, since it suggests one possible path out of the current subsidy morass. Basically, the federal government set and supported a target price (based on the actual cost of production) for storable commodities like corn. When the market price dropped below the target, a farmer was given an option: rather than sell his harvest at the low price, he could take out what was called a "nonrecourse loan," using his corn as collateral, for the full value of his crop. The farmer then stored his corn until the market improved, at which point he sold it and used the proceeds to repay the loan. If the market failed to improve that year, the farmer could discharge his debt simply by handing his corn over to the government, which would add it to something called, rather quaintly, the "ever-normal granary." This was a grain reserve managed by the U.S.D.A., which would sell from it whenever prices spiked (during a bad harvest, say), thereby smoothing out the vicissitudes of the market and keeping the cost of food more or less steady—or "ever normal."
This wasn't a perfect system by any means, but it did keep cheap grain from flooding the market and by doing so supported the prices farmers received. And it did this at a remarkably small cost to the government, since most of the loans were repaid. Even when they weren't, and the government was left holding the bag (i.e., all those bushels of collateral grain), the U.S.D.A. was eventually able to unload it, and often did so at a profit. The program actually made money in good years. Compare that with the current subsidy regime, which costs American taxpayers about $19 billion a year and does virtually nothing to control production.
So why did we ever abandon this comparatively sane sort of farm policy? Politics, in a word. The shift from an agricultural-support system designed to discourage overproduction to one that encourages it dates to the early 1970's—to the last time food prices in America climbed high enough to generate significant political heat. That happened after news of Nixon's 1972 grain deal with the Soviet Union broke, a disclosure that coincided with a spell of bad weather in the farm belt. Commodity prices soared, and before long so did supermarket prices for meat, milk, bread and other staple foods tied to the cost of grain. Angry consumers took to the streets to protest food prices and staged a nationwide meat boycott to protest the high cost of hamburger, that American birthright. Recognizing the political peril, Nixon ordered his secretary of agriculture, Earl (Rusty) Butz, to do whatever was necessary to drive down the price of food.
Butz implored America's farmers to plant their fields "fence row to fence row" and set about dismantling 40 years of farm policy designed to prevent overproduction. He shuttered the ever-normal granary, dropped the target price for grain and inaugurated a new subsidy system, which eventually replaced nonrecourse loans with direct payments to farmers. The distinction may sound technical, but in effect it was revolutionary. For instead of lending farmers money so they could keep their grain off the market, the government offered to simply cut them a check, freeing them to dump their harvests on the market no matter what the price.
The new system achieved exactly what it was intended to: the price of food hasn't been a political problem for the government since the Nixon era. Commodity prices have steadily declined, and in the perverse logic of agricultural economics, production has increased, as farmers struggle to stay solvent. As you can imagine, the shift from supporting agricultural prices to subsidizing much lower prices has been a boon to agribusiness companies because it slashes the cost of their raw materials. That's why Big Food, working with the farm-state Congressional delegations it lavishly supports, consistently lobbies to maintain a farm policy geared to high production and cheap grain. (It doesn't hurt that those lightly populated farm states exert a disproportionate influence in Washington, since it takes far fewer votes to elect a senator in Kansas than in California. That means agribusiness can presumably "buy" a senator from one of these underpopulated states for a fraction of what a big-state senator costs.)
But as we're beginning to recognize, our cheap-food farm policy comes at a high price: first there's the $19 billion a year the government pays to keep the whole system afloat; then there's the economic misery that the dumping of cheap American grain inflicts on farmers in the developing world; and finally there's the obesity epidemic at home—which most researchers date to the mid-70's, just when we switched to a farm policy consecrated to the overproduction of grain. Since that time, farmers in the United States have managed to produce 500 additional calories per person every day; each of us is, heroically, managing to pack away about 200 of those extra calories per day. Presumably the other 300—most of them in the form of surplus corn—get dumped on overseas markets or turned into ethanol.
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.
Such cheap raw materials also argue for devising more and more highly processed food, because the real money will never be in selling cheap corn (or soybeans or rice) but in "adding value" to that commodity. Which is one reason that in the years since the nation moved to a cheap-food farm policy, the number and variety of new snack foods in the supermarket have ballooned. The game is in figuring out how to transform a penny's worth of corn and additives into a $3 bag of ginkgo biloba-fortified brain-function-enhancing puffs, or a dime's worth of milk and sweeteners into Swerve, a sugary new "milk based" soft drink to be sold in schools. It's no coincidence that Big Food has suddenly "discovered" how to turn milk into junk food: the government recently made deep cuts in the dairy-farm program, and as a result milk is nearly as cheap a raw material as water.
As public concern over obesity mounts, the focus of political pressure has settled on the food industry and its marketing strategies—supersizing portions, selling junk food to children, lacing products with transfats and sugars. Certainly Big Food bears some measure of responsibility for our national eating disorder—a reality that a growing number of food companies have publicly accepted. In recent months, Kraft, McDonald's and Coca-Cola have vowed to change marketing strategies and even recipes in an effort to help combat obesity and, no doubt, ward off the coming tide of litigation.
There is an understandable reluctance to let Big Food off the hook. Yet by devising ever more ingenious ways to induce us to consume the surplus calories our farmers are producing, the food industry is only playing by a set of rules written by our government. (And maintained, it is true, with the industry's political muscle.) The political challenge now is to rewrite those rules, to develop a new set of agricultural policies that don't subsidize overproduction—and overeating. For unless we somehow deal with the mountain of cheap grain that makes the Happy Meal and the Double Stuf Oreo such "bargains," the calories are guaranteed to keep coming. </i>
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Blunderov
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RE: virus: why corn is evil
« Reply #1 on: 2003-11-16 05:23:11 » |
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Mermaid
> Sent: 16 November 2003 0026
> I read this fascinating article on fast food and subsidised
agriculture in
> the united states
>
[Blunderov]
Thanks for this post which will be vectored in many directions. Thought
this appropriate:
<q>
John Barleycorn Must Die!
There were three men came out of the west,
Their fortunes for to try.
And these three men made a solemn vow:
John Barleycorn must die.
They've plowed, they've sown, they've harrowed him in,
Threw clods upon his head.
And these three men made a solemn vow:
John Barleycorn was dead.
They've let him lie for a very long time,
Till the rains from heav'n did fall.
And little Sir John sprung up his head,
And so amazed them all.
They've let him stand 'till midsummer's day,
Till he looked both pale and wan.
And little Sir John's grown a long, long beard,
And so become a man.
They've hired men with scythes so sharp,
To cut him off at the knee.
They've rolled him and tied him by the waist,
Serving him most barb'rously.
They've hired men with the sharp pitchforks,
Who pricked him to the heart.
And the loader, he has served him worse than that,
For he's bound him to the cart.
They've wheeled him 'round and around the field,
'Till they came unto a barn,
And there they've made a solemn oath,
On poor John Barleycorn.
They've hired men with the crabtree sticks,
To cut him skin from bone,
And the Miller, he has served him worse than that,
For he's ground him between two stones.
And little Sir John in the nut-brown bowl,
And the brandy in the glass.
And little Sir John in the nut-brown bowl,
Proved the strongest man at last.
The Huntsman, he can't hunt the fox,
Nor so loudly blow his horn,
And the Tinker, he can't mend kettle nor pot,
Without a little Barleycorn.
</q>
Best Regards
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Ophis
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Re:why corn is evil
« Reply #2 on: 2003-11-17 13:16:10 » |
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A few years back I remember playing the character of John Barleycorn in an improvised play. Maybe this impersonification is making me sympathize with corn (and whisky :-) ), but even after reading the article, I can't understand how cheap food can be categorized as something "bad", let alone "evil".
I appreciate the author's complaint that the current state of the farming industry is only sustainable because of favorable government subsidies and legislation. I'll be the first one to agree that all of these should be dropped. However, replacing current policies with new policies is only going to give rise to a different set of perverse effects.
Which brings me to my main point: How dare this author pass judgement on million of other people's lifestyle, alcohol, and food consumption decisions? Who is this all-knowing writer that assumes moral authority over what people should eat?
I don't think I would qualify as a member of the community described by the author as "couch potatoes" yet my chosen lifestyle includes a lot of microwave dinners and Mc-Donald's burgers. In fact, I eat a lot of cheap junk food precisely because I have a very active and, I dare say, productive life style.
If the author wants to exert influence over what millions of people eat and drink, he or she should focus on non-coercive means, like education and advertising campaigns, to provide dietary information about the various food products available on the market. By calling for new government policies, the author presumes to be in the capacity to dictate what you and I should be allowed to eat.
Let each individual make their own mind -and face the consequences of their decisions- about what they want to eat and drink. Better education and better access to consumer information is the only way to foster sustainable change in the food industry, while respecting an individual's personnal decision about his or her dietary preferences.
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Mermaid
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Re:why corn is evil
« Reply #3 on: 2003-11-18 10:39:13 » |
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Thank you, Blunderov! I have never heard of John Barleycorn before..
[Ophis]I'll be the first one to agree that all of these should be dropped. However, replacing current policies with new policies is only going to give rise to a different set of perverse effects.
[Mermaid]How? Current policies is acutally a replacement for the more sensible policy before nixon's time. did you read the full article and the link?
[Ophis]How dare this author pass judgement on million of other people's lifestyle, alcohol, and food consumption decisions?
[Mermaid]Anyone can dare to pass judgement on anyone.. Unless he is using force, law or violence to stop an individual from pursuing his desired lifestyle, what is wrong with judgements? Are you *gasp* suggesting censorship?
[Ophis]Who is this all-knowing writer that assumes moral authority over what people should eat?
[Mermaid]See..you didnt read the linked article
(cut)
Pollan, a former editor at Harper's Magazine, is the author of The Botany of Desire and several other books that examine the intersections between science and culture. Here, he talks about his experience as a small-scale rancher and his decision to buy a cow and track its journey through the cattle system for The New York Times Magazine. He also discusses the widespread use of antibiotics in the meat industry, and why he thinks the system is fragile and susceptible to microbes and pathogens.(end paste)
[Ophis]I don't think I would qualify as a member of the community described by the author as "couch potatoes" yet my chosen lifestyle includes a lot of microwave dinners and Mc-Donald's burgers. In fact, I eat a lot of cheap junk food precisely because I have a very active and, I dare say, productive life style.
[Mermaid]Ok. Now you are just taking it personally to create an argument and take the contrary position without considering the merits of his argument. Why?
[Ophis]If the author wants to exert influence over what millions of people eat and drink, he or she should focus on non-coercive means, like education and advertising campaigns, to provide dietary information about the various food products available on the market.
[Mermaid]Writing to an audience to reach them and to make them read is a form of education. Which part of the afore mentioned articles did you find 'coercive'?
[Ophis]By calling for new government policies, the author presumes to be in the capacity to dictate what you and I should be allowed to eat.
[Mermaid]That doesnt make any sense at all.
[Ophis]Let each individual make their own mind -and face the consequences of their decisions- about what they want to eat and drink.
[Mermaid]Agree.
[Ophis]Better education and better access to consumer information is the only way to foster sustainable change in the food industry, while respecting an individual's personnal decision about his or her dietary preferences.
[Mermaid]You seem to be under the impression that the article is a gun to your head as you dream of hamburgers. It is not about dictating what people should eat. Its about the really stupid practice of farm subsidies and what it is doing to the economy. It is about the domino effect of the said policy that affects the prices of commodities and the effect it has on people's health..which directly affects the cost that ALL of us bear in the form of insurance, taxes etc. Who do you think is really paying for all those farm subsidies while enjoying cheap burger from McD? Obesity is a blight on the entire society..i could go on..but I am going to let you read it again to gain perspective.
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Kharin
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Re:why corn is evil
« Reply #4 on: 2003-11-18 11:22:44 » |
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Quote:| "Let each individual make their own mind -and face the consequences of their decisions- about what they want to eat and drink. Better education and better access to consumer information is the only way to foster sustainable change in the food industry, while respecting an individual's personnal decision about his or her dietary preferences." |
As ever in such matters, I think demand has a greater role than supply in explaning such issues as obesity. However, I do have to quibble with the idea that education or consumer information is the solution. Changing cigarette adverts here so that they all had 'warning this product will consign you to a painful death' style notice only dented demand as I recall. In practice, both left and right have insisted on this platitude for differing reasons, but consumer are rarely won't to change their purchasing habits on the grounds of such information. Calls for greater transparency are usually symptomatic of an absence of trust and should certainly not be mistaken for the cure.
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Ophis
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Re:why corn is evil
« Reply #5 on: 2003-11-18 14:26:58 » |
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Quote:| Mermaid: Current policies is acutally a replacement for the more sensible policy before nixon's time. did you read the full article and the link? |
My comments did not apply to the linked article, only to the full article that you sent to the list/board. As far as that article is concerned, yes I read it all, pondered on it and I don't think I need to "read it again to gain perspective".
Quote:| Mermaid: Anyone can dare to pass judgement on anyone.. Unless he is using force, law or violence to stop an individual from pursuing his desired lifestyle, what is wrong with judgements? Are you *gasp* suggesting censorship? |
I don't suggest censorship, and I agree that anyone can to judge whoever, however one wants. Just to be clear on this: I don't find the author or the article to be coercive agents, but the article does call for coercive action by the government to alter a situation that the author judges to be inappropriate. The author recommends imposing a new set of policies on the farming industry, policies that would ultimately force his "solution" (higher food prices) to what he perceives to be a "problem" (too much food).
My reply is not a form of coercion either, it is simply part of a debate of ideas.
Quote:| Mermaid: Ok. Now you are just taking it personally to create an argument and take the contrary position without considering the merits of his argument. Why? |
I am taking the author's "solution" (higher food prices) personally because it would impact my personal life AND I am considering -and disagreeing with- the merits of the author's argument (that too much food availability is the root cause of obesity); the two aren't mutually exclusive!
Consider this quote from the article, which goes to the core of the issue:
Quote:| Article: We have devolved into a torpid nation of couch potatoes. The family dinner has succumbed to the fast-food outlet. All these explanations are true, as far as they go. But it pays to go a little further, to look for the cause behind the causes. Which, very simply, is this: when food is abundant and cheap, people will eat more of it and get fat. |
That's the author's root cause for "the most serious public-health problem facing the country". The fact is that food will remain, and indeed will be even more abundant and cheap as long as our society remains prosperous. The author justifies his wanting to change govenment policies on the basis that too much food is bad because people can't control themselves.
As a consumer who benefits from fast and low-cost food, I can only take it personally when someone suggests that I can't make the right choices for myself and that the government should adopt new policies in order to remove my products of choice from the market.
What makes all this even more interesting is that I agree with much of the author's other arguments. When discussing the problem with current government policies, the author mentions:
Quote:| Article: first there's the $19 billion a year the government pays to keep the whole system afloat; then there's the economic misery that the dumping of cheap American grain inflicts on farmers in the developing world |
I'll even agree that the "New Deal" policies (seemingly favored by the author) would result in less government intervention in the farming industry. I also agree that adopting less interventionistic policies would likely raise corn prices temporarely.
What I don't agree with is that higher corn prices and less food is "good" for me and you. If that is truly the author's "solution", then the author is working against progress. Next year, some scientist somewhere will develop a new technology that will make food even cheaper and more available than it is today. And the year after that, another guy will come up with some other technology, and on, and on.
So what is the government to do then? What should the government do in year 2010, when corn costs (without government subsidies) 10% of what it costs today? Is the author going to suggest that we should tax corn because too much cheap corn is bad for "the country"?
Quote:| Kharin: As ever in such matters, I think demand has a greater role than supply in explaning such issues as obesity. However, I do have to quibble with the idea that education or consumer information is the solution. Changing cigarette adverts here so that they all had 'warning this product will consign you to a painful death' style notice only dented demand as I recall. In practice, both left and right have insisted on this platitude for differing reasons, but consumer are rarely won't to change their purchasing habits on the grounds of such information. Calls for greater transparency are usually symptomatic of an absence of trust and should certainly not be mistaken for the cure. |
When I suggest that a sustainable solution needs to be based on better education, I don't mean to support the silly warnings on cigarette packs (you should see the sorry state of cigarette packs in Canada). Much of the education that I have in mind relates to basic concepts like personal responsibility, accountability, and such.
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michelle
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RE: virus: why corn is evil
« Reply #6 on: 2003-11-18 16:33:12 » |
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This was a great set of articles, Mermaid! I heartily enjoy anything
regarding the evils of grains... arguably we are about as evolved as
the calf mentioned below to eat grains... evil! evil! evil!
-Michelle
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-virus@lucifer.com [mailto:owner-virus@lucifer.com] On Behalf
Of Mermaid
Sent: Saturday, November 15, 2003 2:26 PM
To: virus@lucifer.com
Subject: virus: why corn is evil
<i>By the time a modern American beef cow is six months old, it has seen
its last blade of grass for the rest of its life. As soon as they wean,
they spend the first six months out on the pasture with their moms,
nursing, nibbling grass. The mom is converting the grass's protein
that's turning into milk for the animal, doing the way they've done it
for millions of years. We take them off grass. We put them in pens,
called backgrounding pens, and we teach them how to eat something that
they are not evolved to eat, which is grain, and mostly corn.</i>
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Kharin
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Re:why corn is evil
« Reply #7 on: 2003-11-18 16:50:12 » |
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Quote:| "When I suggest that a sustainable solution needs to be based on better education, I don't mean to support the silly warnings on cigarette packs (you should see the sorry state of cigarette packs in Canada). Much of the education that I have in mind relates to basic concepts like personal responsibility, accountability, and such." |
Interesting. For myself one of the reasons to be sceptical about governments is their ability to successfully engage in social engineering. To what extent do you see such values as personal responsibility and accountability as being amenable to being engineered on a collective basis?
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Ophis
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Re:why corn is evil
« Reply #9 on: 2003-11-18 19:46:54 » |
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Quote:| Kharin: Interesting. For myself one of the reasons to be sceptical about governments is their ability to successfully engage in social engineering. To what extent do you see such values as personal responsibility and accountability as being amenable to being engineered on a collective basis |
I must not be expressing all this very clearly because I certainly don't want to suggest that collective agreement on personal responsibility and accountability can be "engineered". Even less so if the government is in charge of such an endeavor.
I think my mistake was in using the word "education"; I certainly meant it in its broadest possible sense. That said, let me try to clarify my point-of-view.
The government's ability to intervene in all aspects of social life creates a new "common resource" (as in the "tragedy of the commons") whereby it becomes in everyone's best interest to try to shift as much favorable government intervention towards one's personal interests. This has profound implications on all sorts of social matters, including farming subsidies and "public health" issues. One of these implications is that government intervention removes incentives for individuals to accept responsibility for their decisions.
If I eat too much of those cheap corn-based food products from Mc-Donald's on a daily basis, I'll likely get fat. Now, who should be held accountable for my state of being at that point? Am I going to think "Jeez, I should cut on my consumption of Big-Macs, that's how I got so fat"? Or will I think "It's not my fault I'm fat, I didn't realize that this food was bad for me; someone should have told me"? In the one situation I accept the responsibility for my actions, in the other I victimize myself and look for someone else to blame.
By acknowledging and even legislating on "public health" issues like obesity, the government is sending a clear message to people who got fat by having unhealthy diets. That message is: "You are a victim of a public health problem. It's not your fault. Don't worry, we are here to help you".
By subsidizing and policing the farming industry, the government is telling farmers not to worry about difficult years, or not to think about whether there might be too many corn farms already in a market that only requires so many. The end result is that the entrepreneur looses his sense of self-accountability for his decision to go (or remain) in the farming business, or what sort of grain to use, or what his competitors are up to, etc.
If the government keeps that up for a few generations, you endup with a society that is very different from what it used to be. Here, I don't mean different in a "good" way.
With all this said, do I think the government or even private organization can "engineer" accountability back in our society? No, I don't think so.
I think that the only way out of this situation is to remove governmental interference with private activities, both social and economic. It is difficult to do that however, in a society where too many people haven't learned to accept (at least within themselves) responsibility for their actions.
That is the context in which I made my "education" remark.
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Kharin
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Re:why corn is evil
« Reply #10 on: 2003-11-19 11:22:45 » |
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Quote:| "I must not be expressing all this very clearly because I certainly don't want to suggest that collective agreement on personal responsibility and accountability can be "engineered". Even less so if the government is in charge of such an endeavor. " |
I apologise for pouncing on what was an offhand comment rather than a full exposition, but I must admit to a certain degree of curiousity on this point. The reason for this is that having looked at your five conditions of libertarianism (http://virus.lucifer.com/bbs/index.php?board=60;action=display;threadid=29646;start=0;boardseen=1) I noticed that I could give a (sometimes qualified) yes in all five categories. As an example, I would certainly observe that from my point of view communism failed to recognise individual achievement and therefore failed to provide any incentives for developments that could be counted as achievements. To borrow your phrasing, it distorted affairs and annulled individual responsibility.
On the other hand, much of what you are saying does seem to me to beg questions as to what counts as inherent nature prior to governmental or social interference. An anarchist or marxist might well argue that innate tendencies towards co-operation and social support are distorted by unequal power relations; something like Peter Singer's left wing Darwinism would certainly say the same today. To a large extent I'm left wondering whether this is any less well founded than a presumption of collective resources displacing individual responsibility. For example, you suggest that a sense of social obligation at the expense of personal responsibility is a product of government establishing health as a common resource. But in that case, why do assumptions of social obligation for things like welfare start as early as medieval Europe and typically fly in the face of state attempts to deny such concepts? Why did Victorian attempts to preach the virtue of self-help do nothing to prevent the development of the welfare state?
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Mermaid
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Re:why corn is evil
« Reply #11 on: 2003-11-19 13:23:38 » |
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[Ophis]My comments did not apply to the linked article, only to the full article that you sent to the list/board. As far as that article is concerned, yes I read it all, pondered on it and I don't think I need to "read it again to gain perspective".
[Mermaid]Errr..even so...it doesnt say anywhere in the full article that the common man should be stopped at all costs, including coercive tactics, from reaching for that BiGmAc and bIgGuLp.
[Ophis]I don't suggest censorship, and I agree that anyone can to judge whoever, however one wants.
[Mermaid]Yet, you reacted violently to a very sane article.
[Ophis]Just to be clear on this: I don't find the author or the article to be coercive agents, but the article does call for coercive action by the government to alter a situation that the author judges to be inappropriate.
[Mermaid]Actually, the article calls for the reversing of a politically motivated and useless system known as farm subsidies.
[Ophis]The author recommends imposing a new set of policies on the farming industry, policies that would ultimately force his "solution" (higher food prices) to what he perceives to be a "problem" (too much food).
[Mermaid]Wrong. The article suggests that we revert back to the New Deal system where grains and commodities didnt flood the market. It calls to revert to a system where there was no overproduction and that even in the event of overproduction, there should be proper price controls and price supports.
[Mermaid]Time for a simplified example:
Farmer produces 30 pounds of GrainX. It costs him 30 dollars to cultivate the 30 pounds. He sells it for 60 pounds at 2 dollars/pound in the market. It brings in 30 dollars a year as profit. Enough to support his family.
Suddenly, the govt says that if you produce 60 pounds of GrainX instead of 30, the govt will give you 20 dollars of subsidy. It still costs you 60 dollars to cultivate 60 pounds of GrainX. So you think you will sell it at 120 dollars and so you can pocket 60 dollars of profit plus the 20 dollars of subsidy.
Unfortunately, so does all of the Mid West. The price of GrainX crashes. So instead of selling at 2 dollars/pound of GrainX in the market, the farmer is only able to sell at 0.5 dollars/pound. That gets him 60 dollars and zero profit since it costs him a dollar per pound to cultivate it. His only income is the 20 dollar subsidy he receives from the govt. Since he needs 30 dollars to support his family, he is still 10 dollars short. So he makes it up by increasing his production of GrainX so he can make ends meet. This ONCE AGAIN leads to a fall in price of GrainX.
This is, of course, a very very simple example of how things worked post nixon/new deal. This doesnt even touch the obesity issues. This is an example of how the new deal that Roosevelt formulated to save America was raped and left to die. The author calls for the erasure of the nixon era blunders. Tell me where he fails in his logic or the rationality of his intent?
[Ophis]My reply is not a form of coercion either, it is simply part of a debate of ideas.
[Mermaid]It seemed to me that you were upset about the author telling you not to eat cheap Burger/fast food. The author is only saying that *you* pay the full price of the burger instead of subsidising it with tax payers money which goes into farm subsidies that bring down the cost of food. *Someone* is paying for it. It might not be the consumer at the McD counter, but it might be the same consumer who is paying for his Burger through the IRS. *Someone* is profiting from it and its not the consumer at the burger stand or the one who is slaving away to pay the taxes that fund the farm subsidies. Can you still not see how convoluted and perverse the system looks? *Sometimes* there is no such thing as a free lunch, no?
[Ophis]I am taking the author's "solution" (higher food prices) personally because it would impact my personal life AND I am considering -and disagreeing with- the merits of the author's argument (that too much food availability is the root cause of obesity); the two aren't mutually exclusive!
[Mermaid]I disagree. The author is asking for a normalisation of food prices. Food is cheap because of the cheap market price. This happened because of overproduction, dumping and flooding of the market. The cheap cost of grains etc is a burden the farmer doesnt have to bear because tax payers money goes into farm subsidies that enables him to sell it cheap and overproduce.
[Mermaid]You, my dear friend, are able to get cheap food because *I* and countless others subsidise it. It is not your right. Economic or otherwise. Not to mention that I dont even like burgers. (In fact, I dont like war either. But thats something that will have to be dealt with later. )I dont think I can stop the govt from spending my tax dollars on the war machinery, but I most definitely can attempt to spread the word about the perverse market forces that play in the artificial grains market. Now substitute "I" with the author's name. That is his intent.
[Ophis]Consider this quote from the article, which goes to the core of the issue:
Quote:| Article: We have devolved into a torpid nation of couch potatoes. The family dinner has succumbed to the fast-food outlet. All these explanations are true, as far as they go. But it pays to go a little further, to look for the cause behind the causes. Which, very simply, is this: when food is abundant and cheap, people will eat more of it and get fat. |
[Mermaid]I find it to be very true.
[Ophis]That's the author's root cause for "the most serious public-health problem facing the country". The fact is that food will remain, and indeed will be even more abundant and cheap as long as our society remains prosperous.
[Mermaid]This is why I thought you should read it again for perspective. Food is cheap because of overproduction and farm subsidies. Not a happy situation for everyone involved even though they might believe that its an ideal situation.
[Ophis]The author justifies his wanting to change govenment policies on the basis that too much food is bad because people can't control themselves.
[Mermaid]I read it differently. I read it as the illustration of one of the bad effects of cheap food and farm subsidies(both are connected.) I cant see the logic of your argument.
[Ophis]As a consumer who benefits from fast and low-cost food, I can only take it personally when someone suggests that I can't make the right choices for myself and that the government should adopt new policies in order to remove my products of choice from the market.
[Mermaid]As a tax payer who bears the cost of your cheap food and the misplaced guilt of being part of the machine that creates millions of obese americans, I take it very personally when someone claims the economic right to cheap food that isnt his at all in the first place. Anyone can be a couch potato and eat fast food all day because its their choice to do so, but not on my dollar.
[Ophis]What makes all this even more interesting is that I agree with much of the author's other arguments.
[Mermaid]I think you just over-reacted when you imagined that the author is making a moral judgement on people's food choices. The author is merely asking the consumer to pay the *real* cost of food. He also mentions that its very unlikely that people would eat as much as they do if they paid the real cost of food which would be substantially higher than what they are paying right now thanks to farm subsidies that are taken from tax payer's pockets.
[Ophis]When discussing the problem with current government policies, the author mentions:
Quote:| Article: first there's the $19 billion a year the government pays to keep the whole system afloat; then there's the economic misery that the dumping of cheap American grain inflicts on farmers in the developing world |
I'll even agree that the "New Deal" policies (seemingly favored by the author) would result in less government intervention in the farming industry. I also agree that adopting less interventionistic policies would likely raise corn prices temporarely.
[Mermaid]You were one of the people in my mind when I hit send on this article. I fully expected your participation in this thread re the discussion of farm subsidies. Never in a million years did I think you would take affront with the author's stance because of an imagined attack on certain eating habits.
[Ophis]What I don't agree with is that higher corn prices and less food is "good" for me and you. If that is truly the author's "solution", then the author is working against progress.
[Mermaid]He isnt asking for higher corn prices. He is asking for the normalisation of market forces instead of artificially or dare I say...coercively lowering prices with political gains in mind.
[Ophis]Next year, some scientist somewhere will develop a new technology that will make food even cheaper and more available than it is today. And the year after that, another guy will come up with some other technology, and on, and on.
[Mermaid]If you believe that it is technology that is solely responsible for the current low prices, then I must say that you havent understood the economics of the situation. May I suggest once again that you read the linked article? What we are experiencing right now is a divorce between technological strides and economic forces. I am willing to bet a large amount of money upon the assertion that the current 'low costs' for 'higher living' in the united states is largely because of governmental control. Technology will bring prices down, I agree. But it is not a reason to overproduce beyond the needs of the consuming masses. That is what has happened with corn. It is not my intention to villify technology and reject lower prices. Even with technological strides, economic forces have a way of adjusting the playing field where the producers and consumers meet. But it wont happen when govt policy interferes with economic forces. It is not technology that brought down the price of corn. It is farm subsidies and hence leading to technology assisted overproduction which wasnt necessary in the first place anyways. America does not have a shortage of corn. It has an ABUNDANCE of corn. According to the article, farmers are producing more than 500 calories worth per person. If you can bang your head on the wall 50 times instead of 20 times, should you do it? Just because you can? Anyways with all the overproduction...all the excess corn has to go elsewhere. The Big Food Corp is forcefeeding the masses by enticing them to eat more by lowering costs so they can enjoy the profits. Consumers are stupid and the food urges are intimately tied to a lot of factors. Only one of them is hunger. Is it wrong for the Big Food Corp to manipulate the prices and consumer urges? No. They do it because they can. They are not responsible for their actions. They are entrepreneurs. So you take away the advantage they have so they cannot inflict more harm. The benefits of yanking away the farm subsidies will reflect everywhere...with the farmers, with the taxpayers..in the BMI of the consumer...
On another note, all this excess corn which the local population doesnt need anyways has to be dumped *somewhere*. But it doesnt go as corn. It goes as corn syrup and other processed corn products which is just ..well...poison to the body. Transporting corn as itself is extremely unviable in the economic sense. So not only are americans dying from too much of this poison called processed crap, we are exporting this poison by forcing(read as coercing) third world countries to buy our shit. The whole world is a dumping ground. And all of this is happening partly because the tax payers' dollars are subsidising the farmers in order to produce more and more and more. But you only see it as a personal attack on your right to get cheap food.
[Ophis]So what is the government to do then? What should the government do in year 2010, when corn costs (without government subsidies) 10% of what it costs today?
[Mermaid]If the cost of living doesnt fall because of technology, then the cost of corn(that has fallen because of technology) has to be artificially hoisted up to make it viable for the farmer and at the same time it has to be made affordable to the consumer.
[Ophis]Is the author going to suggest that we should tax corn because too much cheap corn is bad for "the country"?
[Mermaid]I think thats already happening.
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Ophis
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Re:why corn is evil
« Reply #12 on: 2003-11-19 19:30:06 » |
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Quote:Kharin:
On the other hand, much of what you are saying does seem to me to beg questions as to what counts as inherent nature prior to governmental or social interference. An anarchist or marxist might well argue that innate tendencies towards co-operation and social support are distorted by unequal power relations |
That is an excellent point that actually goes to the core of practically all socio-political arguments. Assumptions made at that basic level (the inherent nature of things) can become the foundations of very different social theories. If the assumptions are false, a theory that may seem very rational and consistent at higher levels may ultimately be inconsistent with "the nature of things". Unfortunately, agreement on natural laws aren't easy to come by.
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Ophis
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Re:why corn is evil
« Reply #13 on: 2003-11-19 20:07:25 » |
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Quote:Mermaid:
You were one of the people in my mind when I hit send on this article. |
I truly appreciate the thought and I also understand that the author is calling for policies that -he thinks- would bring the price of corn closer to what it would be in a free-market.
Unfortunately, the author doesn't talk about a free-market, he talks about "New Deal" policies that are, according to his judgement, "better" than the current policies. The problem I have with this is that regardless of whatever policies the government decides to enforce on the industry, they will end-up being abused one way or another and distord the market in ways that will displease someone or another.
The only solution to problematic government policies is to abolish the policies in question.
Quote:Mermaid:
As a tax payer who bears the cost of your cheap food and the misplaced guilt of being part of the machine that creates millions of obese americans, I take it very personally when someone claims the economic right to cheap food that isnt his at all in the first place. |
I am flabbergasted that you would truly believe that I claim a "right" to subsidized cheap food. I see only 3 possible explanations for this:
1- I am such a poor writer that I am able to convince a reader of the very opposite point I'm trying to make.
2- You haven't really read what I've written on this thread so far.
3- You're probably just pulling my leg.
In any case, I think I'll have to allow my previous posts to speak for themselves and hope that they do a better job at conveying their intended meanings to other readers.
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