The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan [33]
This is a system designed to keep production high and prices low. In fact, it’s designed to drive prices ever lower, since handing farmers deficiency payments (as compared to the previous system of providing loans to support prices) encourages them to produce as much corn as they possibly can, and then to dump it all on the market no matter what the price—a practice that inevitably pushes prices even lower. And as prices decline, the only way a farmer like George Naylor can keep his income from declining is by producing still more corn. So the mountain grows, from 4 billion bushels in 1970 to 10 billion bushels today. Moving that mountain of cheap corn—finding the people and animals to consume it, the cars to burn it, the new products to absorb it, and the nations to import it—has become the principal task of the industrial food system, since the supply of corn vastly exceeds the demand.
Another way to look at this 10-billion-bushel pile of commodity corn—a naturalist’s way of looking at it*—is that industrial agriculture has introduced a vast new stock of biomass to the environment, creating what amounts to an imbalance—a kind of vacuum in reverse. Ecology teaches that whenever an excess of organic matter arises anywhere in nature, creatures large and small inevitably step forward to consume it, sometimes creating whole new food chains in the process. In this case the creatures feasting on the surplus biomass are both metaphorical and real: There are the agribusiness corporations, foreign markets, and whole new industries (such as ethanol), and then there are the food scientists, livestock, and human eaters, as well as the usual array of microorganisms (such as E.coli O157:H7).
What’s involved in absorbing all this excess biomass goes a long way toward explaining several seemingly unconnected phenomena, from the rise of factory farms and the industrialization of our food, to the epidemic of obesity and prevalence of food poisoning in America, to the fact that in the country where Zea mays was originally domesticated, campesinos descended from those domesticators are losing their farms because imported corn, flooding in from the North, has become too cheap. Such is the protean, paradoxical nature of the corn in that pile that getting rid of it could contribute to obesity and to hunger both.
MY PLAN when I came to Iowa was to somehow follow George Naylor’s corn on its circuitous path to our plates and into our bodies. I should have known that tracing any single bushel of commodity corn is as impossible as tracing a bucket of water after it’s been poured into a river. Making matters still more difficult, the golden river of American commodity corn, wide though it is, passes through a tiny number of corporate hands. Though the companies won’t say, it has been estimated that Cargill and ADM together probably buy somewhere near a third of all the corn grown in America.
These two companies now guide corn’s path at every step of the way: They provide the pesticide and fertilizer to the farmers; operate most of America’s grain elevators (Naylor’s member-owned cooperative is an exception); broker and ship most of the exports; perform the wet and dry milling; feed the livestock and then slaughter the corn-fattened animals; distill the ethanol; and manufacture the high-fructose corn syrup and the numberless other fractions derived from number 2 field corn. Oh, yes—and help write many of the rules that govern this whole game, for Cargill and ADM exert considerable influence over U.S. agricultural policies. More even than the farmers who receive the checks (and the political blame for cashing them), these companies are the true beneficiaries of the “farm” subsidies that keep the river of cheap corn flowing. Cargill is the biggest privately held corporation in the world.
Cargill and ADM together comprise the vanishingly narrow sluice