Ravi, in Conversation

We are prone to imagine that cultivating vegetables, given a choice between, say, tomatoes and corn, would not make sense, since tomatoes are less useful than crops like soy and corn. Corn recently has had a surge in demand due to its utility ranging from High Fructose Corn Syrup (Coke and Pepsi, you got it right!) to renewable ethanol fuel. This is what Wikipedia has to say about HFCS:

High-fructose corn syrup, derived from corn, is more economical since the American and Canadian prices of sugar is artificially far higher than the global price of sugar and the price of #2 corn is artificially low due to both government subsidies and dumping on the market as farmers produce more corn annually. The food industry turned to HFCS as a substitute, with both Coca-Cola and Pepsi switching to HFCS in 1984.

Do you know that some crops are subsidized in the U.S., like corn, soy (which again gives you oil and even milk - now with all the enzymes, since you can't be sure of the quality of cowmilk, people seem to be switching to soymilk!), cotton (all your clothes - fashion has overturned the hierarchy of needs), wheat (all that bread), and rice (that most common cereal after wheat), while other vegetables are not?

Well, who cares about vegetables anyway, when we have all those chickens and cows? Wrong; when did we imagine we can survive just on meat! Well, don't we need to subsidize some of these crops, so that farmers "become intelligent" and start to produce more of them? Wrong; when did we imagine that farmers don't know their markets?

Here is an op-ed article in NYT by a Midwest-based farmer which talks about the lack of freedom that farmers face when they try to meet the demand for fresh fruits and vegetables. This gives us some insight into how government policies can unnecessarily skew the food habits of a population. Another good read would be this article in the Feb 2008 issue of USDA AmberWaves. The graph below is from that source: