June 2, 2011, 7:01 pm
Corn and More Corn
By Henry Woodbury
On the day that the USDA unveiled a nonsensical replacement for its hopelessly-compromised food pyramid, it’s important to understand what kinds of foodstuffs the government actually promotes.
Roger Doiron of Kitchen Gardeners International has produced this image of what the White House garden would look like “if it were planted to reflect the relative costs of the main crops subsidized by US taxpayers”:
The data is from the Farm Subsidy Database.
Comments
Regardless of what you think about farm subsidies, this comparison is misleading. Crops grown on industrial farms will obviously be very different from those grown in back yard gardens. How many people do you know who plant a garden to produce fiber, cooking oil or ethanol, or to fatten cattle?
Posted by John S. on June 6, 2011 at 5:45 am
To the extent that the diagram implies that certain kinds of crops deserve subsidies they aren’t getting, I agree with you that the comparison is misleading. In my reading the point is to illustrate how few crops receive government support, in contrast to the romantic notions of the family farm and the farmer’s market.
Posted by Henry Woodbury on June 6, 2011 at 9:10 am