Life out of balance
Feb 17
I finished watching King Corn last night, and while I don't think there was anything there that I didn't already know, it got me thinking about the huge, complex systems that we live within, and the capacity for those systems to be just unbelievably broken, specifically when human meddling is involved.
To use the King Corn example: the government initially subsidized corn farmers by paying them to limit production. This was effective in that it kept crop prices stable and ensured farmers could make a solid living, thus in turn ensuring that the food supply was strong. Great, right?
Sure, except the fundamental principle of the plan, that of paying to reduce production, flies in the face of everything we understand about markets and capitalism and value for money and common sense and what have you. So, in the 1970's, the government started subsidizing the increase of production.
This was fabulous, because now instead of paying for nothing, we were paying for something, and that something was just unbelievable quantities of dirt-cheap corn. Specifically, feed corn, as opposed to sweet corn--the vast bulk of it was not actually edible by humans without processing. So it was processed. In some cases it was processed by factories into high fructose corn syrup and cornstarch and other additives, and in some cases it was processed by cows into beef.
That vast bolus of corn that we'd created was squeezed out into other systems. It turned our range-grazed cows into fattened, diseased animals standing in their own feces, and then we ate them and grew fattened and diseased ourselves. Not content to just get indirectly sick, we drank down corn-sweetened soft drinks and accelerated our obesity and the spread of diabetes.
This would seem a relatively straightforward problem to fix: just quit subsidizing increased production, right?
Unfortunately, the imbalance on the production and nutrition side is counterbalanced by the imbalance on the economic side. Farmers can't survive without the subsidies, but that's not all. A whole false economy depends on them, from the thousands of farmers who need the subsidy directly, to the food manufacturers and the thousands of employees who rely on the subsidized corn to make cheap food, to the millions of people who rely on food being cheap so they can afford to pay their huge mortage, or their huge rent.
How do you fix something that's broken like that?