Republic, Lost_ How Money Corrupts Congress--And a Plan to Stop It - Lawrence Lessig [22]
HFC is not even the most important effect of this policy by the government. Because corn is so cheap (and accounting for all the subsidies, some argue the cost of growing corn is actually negative),40 cattle ranchers feed corn to their cattle. That’s good for the ranchers (feeding cattle corn rather than grazing them on grass means more heads per acre and more profit on the bottom line). It’s not so good for small farmers or for the cattle.
Bad for small farms: This subsidy encourages the decline of the family farm. Subsidized competitors drive out perfectly profitable smaller farms. Elanor Starmer and Timothy Wise, for example, have calculated that subsidized feed for hogs has “had the effect of reducing [factory farm] operating costs compared to those of smaller-scale, diversified operations.”41 That artificial cost advantage in turn may be driving further industrialization in the livestock production system—even though the cost of that system, if fully accounted, would be no better than smaller, more traditional farms.42
Bad for cows: Cows don’t digest corn well. Their seven stomachs evolved to digest grass. Corn typically makes them sick, as bugs brew in the poorly digested mix stewing in their stomachs. And so to deal with that sickness, farmers have to supplement corn feed with tons of antibiotics, twenty-five million pounds of them per year, eight times the total amount consumed by humans.43
This profligate use of antibiotics might strike you as weird. Before you use antibiotics, you have to get the permission of a doctor. Cattle, it turns out, have greater freedom than we do, in this respect at least. They are fed antibiotics prophylactically. No doctor needs to make sure that their use is actually warranted.
But doesn’t that use then induce the spread of superbugs? you ask. For isn’t the reason that we don’t hand out antibiotics with every sneeze that we don’t want to foster the strongest, antibiotic-resistant bacteria out there?
Right again. But public health concerns about the overuse of antibiotics get checked at the door of the Department of Agriculture. That agency has a long history of pushing for the widespread use of antibiotics.44 And the consequence of that push, as many have argued, is that there’s an explosion of drug-resistant bugs such as E. coli 0157:H7 and salmonella.45 Were this book a movie, we’d now cut to a scene about a three-year-old boy who died after eating a hamburger, or a twenty-two-year-old dance instructor who can no longer walk.46
It gets worse. The strategy of the concentrated corn industry is not just to protect HFC. It is also to increase the demand for corn generally. Enter ethanol—perhaps the dumbest “green” energy program ever launched by government. Whole forests have been felled pointing out the stupidity of a subsidy to produce a fuel that is neither a good fuel (as in, it packs a good punch) nor, when you consider the cost of refining it,47 a green fuel. As libertarian author James Bovard puts it, ethanol is “a political concoction—a product that exists and is used solely because of the interference of politicians with the workings of the marketplace.”48 One 2008 report estimated that the biofuel mandates of Congress would cost the economy more than $100 billion from 2005 to 2010.49 That’s sixty-five times the total amount spent on renewable energy research and development programs during the same period.50
So the government protects sugar, and the government subsidizes corn. As a result, more foods get made with high-fructose corn syrup, and more cattle get fed corn, meaning more cattle get fed antibiotics. The quantity of high-fructose corn syrup thus goes up in our diet, and the prevalence of dangerous bacteria goes up as well. And in complicated ways tied in part to these changes, it is at least plausible that one cruel consequence of these