My Steak Is Made of M&M's and Potato Chips!

Thanks to laughinggoddess for the tip--who points out, and I echo, that this isn't PeTA, Greenpeace, or even the Sierra Club telling you "ZOMG MADE OF M&M's!"--it's the Wall Street Journal.

Short version:
Corn prices are going through the roof for several reasons, but the two I know are:

• Oil prices went through the roof:
  • More expensive to move the machinery that moves the grain.
  • Most fertilizers are petroleum-based, so that went up too.
• There's strong interest in corn-based ethanol right now--which costs more (fossil-fuel-generated) energy than you get out of it until and unless the efficiency of the process improves considerably.

Now, it's faster and cheaper to feed cattle grain (and incidentally a cocktail of hormones and antibiotics) to get them up to market weight than to let them graze. If corn (the primary component of cattle feed) becomes uneconomical, then farmers have to use something else on the feedlot that's less expensive, which includes byproducts of any other food industry. As this segment is in rural Pennsylvania, that means potato chips and M&M's, but really this could be anything--"anything" used to include "ground-up cattle slaughter leftovers", which gave us the several Mad Cow Disease scares.

Grass-fed beef, concludes WSJ, is more expensive, but quantitatively better for you, what with those vitamins, minerals, and Omega-3 fatty acids that help lower cholesterol--oh and has less cholesterol.

It's more expensive--on the other hand, concludes I, "less meat and white starch, more whole grains, fruits, and vegetables", is the current favorite for Most Well-Balanced Diet from those raving liberals at the USDA.

There, I hope I've sufficiently footnoted where "I say" and "they said". Proper footnoting is part of my religion, you know.

-- Lorrie