[sbierwagen]

Humans managed to scrape along for ten thousand years without the ability to eat fresh fruit and vegetables at any time of the year. I think doubling the price of an apple in exchange for Los Angeles to continue to exist is an okay tradeoff.

[dboreham]

Yes but there weren't this many people for the last ten thousand years.

[sbierwagen]

Sure?

According to https://afdc.energy.gov/data/10339 the US used 5.38 billion bushels of corn to produce ethanol in 2019.

A bushel is 56 pounds of grain. 87,696 calories. Assume a human needs 2500 calories a day, times 365 days per year. 912,500 calories. About 10.4 bushels of corn. Feed about 517 million people just with the corn the US wastes to make a few thousand Iowa voters happy.

The world is not short of food.

(Although once you start talking about synthetic fertilizers needed to grow that corn...)

[na85]

Calories in corn is mostly from the sugar and it doesn't contain enough essential nutrients. Calories alone is not the whole story.

[AlotOfReading]

That's an artifact of immature harvesting. Nixtamalized, mature maize is almost nutrient complete, lacking only protein, a couple amino acids, and fat. All are pretty easy to add in and eating pure corn gruel for every meal would get old pretty quickly anyway. We know that this is a perfectly viable long-term diet because maize spent thousands of years as the overwhelmingly dominant calorie source for many indigenous groups prior to European colonization.

[klipklop]

Humans also used to commonly starve to death as well.

[sbierwagen]

According to https://www.cdfa.ca.gov/Statistics/ California exports $6.09 billion of almonds, $2.22 billion of strawberries and $1.94 billion of pistachios a year.

Do you rely on strawberries and pistachios in your daily diet to the point that you would starve to death if they were twice as expensive?