It’s the ethanol in gas, hand soap, adhesives, chewing gum, paints and fireworks, most medication, makeup and so on and so on.
In: Chemistry
Corn is cheap, like insanely cheap. In the US at least this is at least partly because the government subsidizes it.*
That’s kind of it, when you have a sufficiently cheap material it’s often the most cost effective to find as many uses for the really cheap thing as you can. Because we can process those raw materials and turn them into lots of different things.
For example, ethanol is because it’s easy to take corn and turn it into an alcohol. Which you can use to power a car.
It’s used in meds by turn it into a corn based protein and then using that protein to make capsules.
Is there a different source of ethanol or protein to coat your pills? Sure. You can take basically any plant and turn it into either of those. But it won’t be cheaper.
*I don’t know exactly how important those subsidies are. Like if corn is cheap almost exclusively because of that and would be a terrible crop on it’s own, or if corn is actually amazing on it’s own and the subsidies are just a little boost to help it out.
The entire US processed food industry has modified every recipe to use as many corn products as possible such as high fructose corn syrup instead of cane sugar. This is because it is available so cheaply as it produced and sold below cost due to subsidies. The overall net effect is higher health costs and an unhealthier population.
Because in the US we grow an absolute metric fuckton of corn, and anything that can be used will be used. We grow over a third of the entire world supply of corn. 350 million metric tons in 2022. We eat it, we feed it to livestock, we turn it into Ethanol, we turn it into starches and oil and syrups and powder and then put all that into other products, you can do a ton of stuff with corn. And it’s byproducts.
Any useful byproduct from processing corn into something else is going to be available at rock bottom prices due to the supply. And if it’s cheap and available and it’s something you can use, it tends to be used.
The US government in the 70s began subsidizing corn farmers in order to reduce the overall cost of food and keep farmers employed, and it had the side effect of basically putting Mexican corn farmers out of business in turn making the US the worlds largest corn supplier.
Combined with decades of crop science led to increasing large yields and even cheaper corn.
Corn and corn by-products became so cheap and available that companies started to find uses for them in everything from foods to industrial products.
Which is why soda for example switched from using Beet Sugar and to Corn Syrup in the 80s.
Corn is now used in just about everything and is a a major source of cattle feed.
While there’s no known direct scientific connection between the switch to corn by-products and obesity, the obesity epidemic did start around this time leading a lot of people to conclude that this was one of the main causes.
If that does prove to be true, this would be yet another awful thing you can blame on Richard Nixon.
First, corn is incredibly adaptable, can grow pretty much anywhere in the world where there are warm seasons, and responds well to breeding. Corn was not a serious crop anywhere until the early part of the 20th century when new hybrid forms were bred that had larger ears and allowed corn stalks to grow much more closely together. Corn production took off after that, because farmers could get significantly higher yields — more corn to take to market — from the same plot of land.
Second, modern corn is incredibly *energy dense*. In fact, it has the highest calorie/gram ratio of any modern vegetable because of its high starch (carbohydrate) content — although potatoes are right on its heels. This makes it a superb source of calories, which is why a huge percentage of the corn grown is used as cattle feed.
Third, mostly because of that high carbohydrate content, modern corn is incredibly versatile and can be processed into numerous different forms: the germ/bran of the grains can be processed into oils and the starch can be processed into mulitple forms, including corn starch (which has many uses from cooking to adhesives to medical uses), or further processed into very energy-dense sugars (e.g. corn syrup), and those sugars can further be fermented and distilled into alcohols (whiskey) or ethanols (fuel).
Very little of the corn grown in the US is actually eaten by humans *as corn* in its natural form. The overwhelming majority of corn is grown (a) for cattle feed (and those cultivars are mostly inedible for humans) or (b) to be processed into other forms for industrial uses.
If the TV show The West Wing taught me something about corn in America, it’s that the subsidising of corn farming by the American government is extremely politicised, and not supporting these subsidies would be political suicide for any politician.
So as a result America grows way more corn than they need, and need to find all sorts of ways to use it, including fuelling the obesity epidemic by putting high fructose corn syrup in as many foods as possible.
Lobbyists for the corn industry.
Same reason kids have to drink milk at school, the dairy lobby.
You remember the Iowa presidential caucus last month that kicked off this cycle? Iowa and then New Hampshire together selected one of two viable candidates for the highest office in the country. And Iowa grows a lot of corn.
The reason that the US uses so much corn is because no politician wants to piss off Iowa.
Corn is a grain native to the American continents, and the US produces well over a 1/3 of all corn in the world.
The reason the US produces so much corn is because it is cheap, abundant, easy to grow and has a diversity of uses. Because of that, the US government pays farmers to grow corn, making it even cheaper and ensuring more reliable crops.
Why do they do this? In the 1930s, there was starvation in the US due to the Dust Bowl (massive crop failures) and the Great Depression (massive economic failures).
The goal was to stabilize food supplies, and corn was one of the most important crops to do it. Throughout the next 100 years, Americans doubled down on corn (and a few other crops, like soybeans, wheat and rice) because of their ability to ensure reliable harvests and food access.
So if you’re an American company looking to make food, you’re going to use as much corn as possible because it’s artificially cheap. The US government subsidizes the price, which means you can sell your goods cheaper and/or pocket a higher profit margin.
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