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A comment on The Omnivore's Delusion: Against the Agri-Intellectuals. Parent comment

Re:The Omnivore's Delusion: Against the Agri-Intellectuals by bmj on Monday August 03, 2009 @07:08AM (#738968)
Livestock feeding isn't the only consumer of large amounts of corn. Consider that just about every processed food there is has some measure of corn products in them. Then there's the ethanol industry, too....
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Re:The Omnivore's Delusion: Against the Agri-Intellectuals by jrockway on Monday August 03, 2009 @09:09AM (#739102)
This is really only in the US, though, where the government pays more for corn than it's worth on the market. This makes it cheap, and since people want cheap food, "they" have figured out how to put it in everything.

When I go to Europe, the drinks on the flight there are sweetened with HFCS. On the way back, they are sweetened with cane sugar. "Corn in everything" is mostly and American thing. (And we're so healthy because of it!)

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Re:The Omnivore's Delusion: Against the Agri-Intellectuals by encoderer on Monday August 03, 2009 @10:00AM (#739195)
Don't kid yourself. It's far from Corn Syrup. Americans eat more Corn than other cultures, but Europeans still eat more corn than you're letting on. Even if there's a metabolism between the corn and your bodies, it's still corn you're eating. The Carbon 4 is still there, it can still be traced.
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Re:The Omnivore's Delusion: Against the Agri-Intellectuals by encoderer on Monday August 03, 2009 @09:56AM (#739188)
That's not my question... I understand the prevelance of Corn in just about everything in the supermarket. That's pretty much CW amongst those with a little brains nowadays I'd say.

But the OP said that the amount of naturally occurring Nitrogen is enough to feed 10bn people if we move towards a more vegetarian diet. That is, no need for artificial nitrogen.

Which brought me to my question that Corn is the #1 direct consumer of nitrogen. So unless livestock is consuming an awful lot of Corn, reducing the livestock headcount isn't going to reduce the amount of Corn per se.

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Re:The Omnivore's Delusion: Against the Agri-Intellectuals by bmj on Monday August 03, 2009 @10:02AM (#739200)
Which brought me to my question that Corn is the #1 direct consumer of nitrogen. So unless livestock is consuming an awful lot of Corn, reducing the livestock headcount isn't going to reduce the amount of Corn per se.

That's probably true, as the corn industry, at least in the US, will find another consumer for its quantities (since, if Pollan's research is to be believed, the corn industry and the government essentially created and supported the market that exists now).

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