Look through your cupboard and your fridge.  Wander the aisles of your grocery store and Kwiki-Mart.  Check out the goodies displayed at your school or work cafeteria.  Now think about your body- how 90% of its particles have been created THIS YEAR by what you've put into your belly.  All of that- all that food, all those groceries, all those molecules in your body... are at stake right now on Capitol Hill.

The Farm Bill, as Michael Pollan wisely pointed out, isn't really a "Farm" bill anymore.  It's a "Food Bill", since about a quarter of it has anything to do with farms.  Much attention goes to subsidies for food industrialization, and large swathes cover land zoning.  This year (or 5th year- it comes up every 5 years), the "Farm Bill" becomes an "Energy Bill", as its pages decide the fate of American Ethanol production.

A great deal of our country's population gets its energy from corn, since corn syrup (long subsidized through the "Farm Bill" winds up in just about everything.  Lately, though, more than bellies rely upon corn for replenishment.  As ethanol production ramps up, towns across the plain states are turning from future-ghost towns to new-fangled boom towns, with ethanol processing plants popping up in the strangest locations (like in the picture above, found in Eastern South Dakota).

Corn as a food-stuff barely suffices within the definition of "food" (and surely asserts "Food" as a four-letter-word), and thus far as a fuel source it offers a pale substitute (literally and figuratively) to oil- currently it takes one-and-a-quarter gallons of gasoline to make one gallon of ethanol.  The ease with which massive agricultural firms grow it en-mass insures that, on top of its other failings, corn also acts as an environmental blight, spoiling soil and tainting water supplies.

And now, courtesy of the potential switch in the food bill from subsidizing corn-as-food to subsidizing it as oil, the price for that nasty grain has doubled in the past three months, up-ending big food manufacturers, increasing the cost of food, and causing even more farmers to get on the corn-growing bandwagon.  All for something that offers no nutrition, and actually burns more energy than it offers up.

I have to hope that the price increase in corn at least has a trickle-down effect in the American diet.  Hopefully, all those cheezy-poof manufacturers will soon have to shirk their long addiction to crappy corn additives, and get back to using, you know, "Food".  Corn isn't going away any time soon, thanks to the oil option, but at the very least I can hope that people stop eating that crap.

Yes, I call corn "crap".  Just like I'd call a spade a spade, or a rabbit a rabbit.  Or a "Farm Bill" a "Food Bill".

-Ian K, Peeled Skinny