Big Bad Corn Supply and Demand

If you’ve ever creeped your way through a corn maze at Halloween, you know how it can grab ahold of your imagination, turning benign stalks into monsters and discarded cobs into severed limbs. It’s just a trick of the light – but take a look at the ways that the U.S. uses corn, and you’ll see that a holiday thrill isn’t the scariest thing about this product. It was first subsidized in the late ‘70s as a fossil fuel alternative, but it’s turned out to be inefficient source of fuel. Not only that, ethanol from corn actually increases the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere at a higher rate than gasoline. Yet, the U.S. pays $10 to $30 billion dollars each years in farm subsidies to raise even more of it, with no clear benefit to consumers. So every time you eat a pound of corn products – which statistics say you will do 37 times over this year alone – remember this graphic, which was created so you can learn stuff about the effects of corn, America’s biggest agricultural product.