{"id":7389,"date":"2017-07-27T16:28:25","date_gmt":"2017-07-27T16:28:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/?p=7389"},"modified":"2017-07-27T16:30:34","modified_gmt":"2017-07-27T16:30:34","slug":"everything-made-of-corn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/blog\/2017\/07\/everything-made-of-corn\/","title":{"rendered":"Must Everything Be Made of Corn? – Article by Jeffrey A. Tucker"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
\"The<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Jeffrey A. Tucker
\n<\/big><\/big><\/strong><\/span><\/div>\n
July 27, 2017<\/span>
\n<\/big><\/div>\n
******************************<\/div>\n
\n

This article was originally published by the Foundation for Economic Education<\/a> on November 28, 2016. <\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019ve finished Thanksgiving leftovers and I\u2019m digging into a store-bought blueberry pie, because few people have time to make such a pie from scratch. Crust should be made from flour and lard (which comes from pig), in my view, but when you buy from the store, the crust is almost always made from \u201cshortening\u201d which is a vegetable product.<\/p>\n

Meaning: corn.<\/p>\n

Then there is the pie filling. Usually at home, you would use sugar from cane to sweeten the berries. But when you buy from the store, the berries are sweetened from a syrup made also from \u00a0corn.<\/p>\n

So here you have two ingredients in the making of this pie that are radically dissimilar: sugar cane and a pig. Hard to think of anything in common between the two. They have both been displaced as ingredients by one thing: corn.<\/p>\n

Once you realize this \u2013 that the crust and the berries are living within the same core food group of corn \u2013 your mind stops playing tricks on you. There is a sense in which the whole thing, despite all looks and extraneous flavors, is a corn pie.<\/p>\n

Suddenly, you can taste exactly that.<\/p>\n

Now, it is time for the after dinner drink, perhaps a Margarita sweetened with lime juice. You look at the ingredients of that juice bottle.<\/p>\n

Corn again! You are going to drink corn.<\/p>\n

So you go for a chocolate but then take a look at the wrapper: corn!<\/p>\n

So you decide to go for a drive in your gasoline-powered car. What\u2019s in the tank? Thanks to the mandated additive of ethanol, there is corn here too.<\/p>\n

By the time you get to the movie theater and consider popcorn, you remember that you had corn in your crust, corn in your berries, corn in your cocktail, and corn in your\u00a0gas tank<\/a>. Who needs corn popped in corn oil covered with butter-flavored corn?<\/p>\n

So, instead of popcorn, and since most candy consists of different shapes of corn, you decide to settle for just a soda.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s in it? High-fructose\u00a0corn\u00a0syrup!<\/p>\n

It\u2019s too much! You feel like you\u2019re trapped in a Twilight Zone episode: like your night is going to end in one of those cornfield chase scenes you see in horror movies.<\/p>\n

Why does the whole of American life sometimes seem to be taken over by corn?<\/p>\n

To be sure, corn is a miracle food. But is it really so miraculous that everything we use should be made out of it?<\/p>\n

The Politics of Corn<\/strong><\/p>\n

Only if the market brings about this result. But it\u2019s not the market speaking. It\u2019s a deeply distorted market. The\u00a0power<\/a>\u00a0of the corn lobby is\u00a0legendary<\/a>. And mixed with that is the power of the\u00a0sugar lobby<\/a>, which keeps out imported sugar that would sell for half as much as we pay at the store, thereby incentivizing producers to seek out a substitute in corn, which turns out to\u00a0make us fatter<\/a>, thereby panicking do-gooders who try to ban products and limit consumption, so that our bad health will stop driving up health-insurance rates.<\/p>\n

Remarkably, all of this has happened only since the 1970s, before which there was no such thing as high-fructose corn syrup, to say nothing of corn-based gasoline. It\u2019s one intervention piled on top of another one.<\/p>\n

Foreign peoples find all of this mystifying. Indeed it is, until you look more deeply and see just how important the corn states are in winning elections. It turns out that the main and most valuable products generated by all this strange corn-based activity are political careers.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s for this reason that we have corn coming out of our ears.<\/p>\n

Christmas Corn<\/strong><\/p>\n

Don\u2019t despair: we\u2019ve got Christmas to look forward to, with corn-candied apples, corn-sweetened eggnog, ham from corn-fed pigs glazed with corn, perhaps a roast from a corn-fed cow, and that old favorite, mulled cider on the stove filling the house with the traditional and evocative smell of corn.<\/p>\n

After you have decorated your tree with strings of popcorn and candy canes made with corn syrup, don’t forget to forget to leave Santa cookies, baked with corn oil and corn sugar, because, as everyone knows, nothing says the holidays \u2013 or any day! \u2013 like corn.<\/p>\n

\n

\"\"<\/a>Jeffrey Tucker is Director of Content for the Foundation for Economic Education<\/a>. He is also\u00a0Chief Liberty Officer and founder of\u00a0Liberty.me<\/a>, Distinguished Honorary Member of Mises Brazil<\/a>, research fellow at the\u00a0Acton Institute<\/a>, policy adviser of the\u00a0Heartland Institute<\/a>, founder of the CryptoCurrency Conference, member of the editorial board of the\u00a0Molinari Review<\/a>, an advisor to the blockchain\u00a0application builder\u00a0Factom<\/a>, and author of five books. He has written 150 introductions to books and many thousands of articles appearing in the scholarly and popular press.<\/strong><\/p>\n

This article was published by The Foundation for Economic Education<\/a> and may be freely distributed, subject to a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License<\/a>, which requires that credit be given to the author. Read the original article<\/a>.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jeffrey A. Tucker July 27, 2017 ****************************** This article was originally published by the Foundation for Economic Education on November 28, 2016. I\u2019ve finished Thanksgiving leftovers and I\u2019m digging into a store-bought blueberry pie, because few people have time to make such a pie from scratch. Crust should be made from flour and lard (which comes from pig), in my view, but when you buy from the store, the crust is almost always made from \u201cshortening\u201d which is a vegetable…<\/p>\n

Read More Read More<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,5],"tags":[5286,5289,5290,1910,523,5288,225,862,5287],"class_list":["post-7389","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-politics","tag-corn","tag-high-fructose-corn-syrup","tag-ingredients","tag-jeffrey-a-tucker","tag-jeffrey-tucker","tag-lobby","tag-market","tag-special-interests","tag-sugar"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7389","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7389"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7389\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7393,"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7389\/revisions\/7393"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7389"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7389"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7389"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}