[pfdietz]

The drought explanation seems particularly plausible for the Hittites, IMO. They had grain storage, but ~3 years of drought would exhaust that. So if the climate becomes just a bit drier the chance of such a three year run increases enough to likely crash their society.

Today we have a huge buffer from the large use of grain to feed animals. In a crisis it could be diverted as human food, with some effort. Large geographic range from global shipping also smooths out blips. Still, a Toba-like eruption would be bad news.

[stymaar]

> Today we have a huge buffer from the large use of grain to feed animals.

This, plus the gigantic amount of agricultural land being used for biofuel production (almost as much as cattle food).

[bryanlarsen]

The standard counter-argument is that the corn grown for animal feed and for ethanol production is not suited for human consumption.

But that's only partially true. We wouldn't eat it directly -- it could still be turned into masa or sugar or some other processed food and then eaten.

[reactordev]

The corn grown that’s not for human consumption is only because it’s earmarked for feed or biofuels. Corn is corn. Where I live, 1 in 4 fields is “for human consumption”

[Retric]

Filed corn is harvested at a different time resulting in a dryer product.

But yes if people get hungry enough, field corn easily qualifies as actual food.

[reactordev]

There are 4 types of corn. Dimple/dent corn, pop corn, sweet corn, and flint corn. Each variety can be eaten. Prepared differently of course as they have different starches and flavors but the vast majority of corn fields in the United States grow dent corn for feed and biofuels.

[Retric]

Fair point, there’s many types of corn but for anyone interested.

Sweet Corn: For Fresh Eating and therefore harvested with a high moisture content which hurts preservation without freezing and total yield.

Dimple is a Field corn, harvested later resulting in a dryer product, lasts longer and has a higher yield.

Flint Corn: Mostly decorative as it looks cool, but again still edible after grinding.

Heirloom: lots of shapes and sizes but significantly lower yield.

Popcorn: A tiny slice of the market but pops when heated.

[inigyou]

Aren't there different varieties of corn?

[reactordev]

Yes, and they are all edible. But not all are palatable.

[brazzy]

Yeah, we're pretty good at making pretty damn anything "fit for human consumption", including quite a few things that are outright poisonous if consumed unprocessed.

[stymaar]

Related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixtamalization

(Corn doesn't need special processing to be edible, but it does need special processing if you want to avoid dying from nutritional deficiency when having a corn-based diet).

[throwaway27448]

Who ever thought the idea of biofuel was a good one? Is it just as much a blatant jobs program as it seems?

[mrguyorama]

While Bush Jr was definitely doing it to give yet another handout to corn growers, it solved a real problem.

After we phased out TetraEthyl Lead from gas, we still needed an octane booster, because for gas to be cheap, it uses low octane components. So we used something called MTBE. The problem is that your average corner gas store has terrible infrastructure, and their gas tank leaks a lot. MTBE kept getting into water sources and hurting people.

Ethanol is a good octane booster, and it doesn't poison anyone or the environment. It also slightly reduced dependence on foreign oil at a time when that was still an issue.

So it's wasteful, not at all "Green", and inefficient, but do we have a replacement octane booster that wont poison people?

It's not at all a jobs program. Corn growing is extremely mechanized. It's done entirely by megacorp megafarms. They are very wealthy companies owned by very wealthy people who continue to vote for republicans exclusively for lower taxes on wealthy people. They don't do it for better policy, as Trump alone has cost that industry over $30 billion in lost sales during his two terms, from poorly run trade wars.

[akiselev]

> So it's wasteful, not at all "Green", and inefficient, but do we have a replacement octane booster that wont poison people?

I'm not sure it's all that wasteful. The waste product from biofuel production is distillers grains [1] which are just fed back to animals afterward for the protein, fiber, and fat content.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distillers_grains

[stymaar]

It's wasteful in the sense that we are exploiting lots of land for the limited value it brings.

[akiselev]

The vast majority is grown on marginal land, just above pasture. They can't grow better crops without massive works of engineering and tons more fertilizer and energy use. The alternative is to just use slightly less of that land, because the animals are going to have to replace that feed from somewhere. Distillers grains are valuable because the fat and protein are used for finishing cattle for human consumption in feedlots so the sugars are either going to the cows or the biofuels.

The "limited value" isn't so limited when we're talking about an additive to gasoline. The first thing we tried polluted the entire world with a background level of lead!

[pfdietz]

It's the result of politics, and that's not always pretty.

[throwaway27448]

What isn't the result of politics? This is a bad explanation—how is there so little will to act in rational self interest?

[pfdietz]

Everyone, or at least almost everyone, acts according to personal interests. There's a whole branch of political science, Public Choice Theory, that deals with this. Where did you get this idea that altruism was common?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_choice

[lazyasciiart]

How did you get the idea they think anyone is being altruistic? Usually the complaint that people won’t vote in rational self interest is suggesting that people are voting based on irrational evaluations of their self interest: for the benefit of their unlikely future selves.

[stymaar]

Public Choice theory is "a whole branch of political science" the same way "historic materialism" is though, with Buchanan instead of Marx, as it was created with the same kind of ideological motivations, with “state bad” instead of “capitalism bad” as the alpha and omega of the discipline. Interestingly enough, both shared the same contempt of democracy.

[stymaar]

> is it just as much a blatant jobs program as it seems?

It's not a “job program” per se (these crops require basically no human work to do nowadays) but it's indeed a subvention program for farmers (and more importantly, land owners).

[idiotsecant]

It's unlikely that rich countries would experience famine as severely as poor ones and consequently they would probably still demand meat. Grain that could feed people would still feed livestock.

[bryanlarsen]

A draw down of animal stocks increases meat supply in the short term. As grain gets more expensive, farmers sell animals for meat rather than keeping them to reproduce.

[stymaar]

But “As grain gets more expensive” middle eastern countries (that rely almost entirely on import for their grain source) would start facing grain shortage (due to balance of payment issues) or at least severe deprivation of the poorer part of their population.

The Tunisian, Egyptian, Syrian and Libyan revolutions didn't occur at the same moment out of coincidence…