Melanie_Alnwick's Blog

My first experience with food shock was about a month ago... when I discovered that the organic milk I buy for my two kids... is now SEVEN dollars a gallon.   I had started to wonder why my grocery bills were steadily creeping skyward... but this finally sealed the deal.  Some grocery stores have even posted signs apologizing for the high prices of milk and eggs.   So who's to blame?   We've been told that the use of corn for ethanol... is taking grains out of the world food supply.    The United States supplies 75 percent of the world's corn.   We use corn for everything from human food to animal feed to corn starches and corn syrup used to produce other foods.  Now we also use corn, to make ethanol.   Today the National Corn Growers Association said yes, a small part of increased food prices is because of the bio-fuel boom.. but that's only part of the complicated equation.     Severe drought in Australia and Europe has brought short crops ... developing nations have also developed an appetite for corn & corn-fed foods.  But the Industry pointed the biggest finger at oil prices.    Corn is a very fuel-intensive crop.  It requires a lot of fertilizer.  Farm equipment uses a lot of oil.. and corn crops travel about 1,000 miles from the farm to the grocery store shelf.    That's also the argument against ethanol... that it takes too much fuel to produce it, to make it worth the energy we get out of it.

So perhaps ethanol is not the culprit.  But it may not be the answer, either.