Waltzing with Bears
Random things I encounter through my day/nights that fit into the format of this webpage.
Nutrition and the Free Market
Today I am wondering about the ability of the free market to regulate our nutrition as individuals. Currently, farm subsidies support the growing of corn and related to this, we have a large amount of corn-derived foods in our diets. While corn is notable for it’s ease of being grown, it also goes to note, that it may be the cheapest food to produce. As a food, it is target of the most concern in the form of high fructose corn syrup—the main ingredient in soda.
In a recipe that I use to make a french toast with a caramel topping, the original recipe called for a corn syrup to help the butter and brown sugar get the right consistency. I found, that I can easily substitute the corn syrup (highly processed) for Grade B Maple Syrup (boiled tree sap). Both are sweet and I might say that the version using the Maple Syrup does have a little bit of a better taste to it. While I don’t have the nutrition background to argue that one of these sticky substances is better for you than the other, as they both contain an incredible amount of sugar, one thing that stands out is their difference in price.
For our purposes here, let’s assume that both syrups have the same sweetness and behave the same when used in cooking. The cost of producing the corn syrup is cheap due to the cheap and high supply of corn along with various processing techniques.
On the other hand, maple syrup is expensive and is harder to come by. Sap is taken from trees during the fall and many gallons of sap is boiled down to just a small batch of syrup.
Simply stated, I’d hypthosize that the cost of acquiring the maple syrup is more in tune with it’s nutritional content than high fructose corn syrup. With costs staying low, it allows people to cheaply acquire a sweetness that should be more expensive and therefore appreciated more. The demand for both is high, but it’s too cheap to purchase high fructose corn syrup.
I guess I need some help here from either an economist or a nutritionist to move this argument any further.
