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.
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