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Federal policy on biofuels goes from bad to worse under Trump (www.canarymedia.com)
submitted 6 months ago by to c/climate@slrpnk.net
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By diverting food crops into fuel and inflating demand for grain and vegetable oil, Trump’s jacked-up mandates will increase food prices, food shortages, and food insecurity. They’ll also accelerate deforestation and greenhouse gas emissions, inducing the world’s farmers to clear tens of millions of acres of new fields to exploit the higher prices for their crops. At the same time, they’ll inflate demand for fertilizer that’s already in short supply because of the Iran war, further increasing global food prices as well as corn-country pollution.

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[–] 8 points 6 months ago (4 children)

Only 1.5% of corn grown ever has been edible.

Are you talking about the difference between sweet corn and field corn? Because field corn is plenty edible... Just not for humans.

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  • [–] 3 points 6 months ago* (3 children)

    Field corn is edible for humans. It makes perfectly fine cornmeal, grits, hominy, etc. And of course it's processed into corn syrup, which is technically edible for humans.

    It just doesn't have as much sugar as sweet corn does, so it doesn't taste good when eaten as a vegetable.

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  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    Sweet corn is primarily harvested at a young stage, so it's not just the variety of corn, but also the choices of how and when to harvest and process.

    A lot of the edible varieties are different cultivars, generally categorized as flint corn or flour corn. Flint corns can be processed into grits and coarser cornmeal, while flour corns can be processed into corn starch and corn flour.

    Field corn/dent corn is the majority of what American farmers grow, and is generally not intended for direct human consumption, unless heavily processed into bourbon and corn oil and corn syrup.

    Even the stuff that is processed into ethanol (for whiskey to drink or for fuel or other industrial use) is still converted into animal feed and corn oil after the fermentable carbohydrates are extracted.

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  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago

    not intended for direct human consumption

    Certainly. But it's still edible. Dent corn, for instance, can be and is used for cornmeal, masa, tortillas, and so on. The industrial monoculture varieties of dent corn are optimized for animal feed, ethanol, or whatever, but nothing's stopping us from eating them (except, in theory, the ridiculous amount of herbicide and pesticide that gets dumped on them).

    The reason why we're growing so much corn that's not intended for direct human consumption is because of a whole shitload of broken incentives and megacorporation subsidies and America's meat addiction and the nagging worry that if we don't keep the land in use we can't justify stealing it from the natives however many generations ago.

    Which is part of what the article goes into.

    And it's why the idea that ethanol opposes Big Oil is so ridiculous. Ethanol and Big Oil go hand in hand. Their interests are aligned and Trump loves them both.

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