Subsidy Sauce

Over the holidays my family and I stayed with my parents in the Cities.  One evening we had Kentucky Fried Chicken for dinner.  At the bottom of the bag of biscuits and coleslaw were half-a-dozen packets of honey.  At least, I assumed they were packets of honey.  I grabbed one and prepared to tear it open, when the label caught my eye.

Honey sauce.  Honey sauce?  WTF?  (That's 'What The Fudge' to those who do not know me.  I only swear when I stub my toe--then I let loose like a Portuguese sailor.  Only I don't actually swear in Portuguese.  Although it probably would be less offensive if I did.  To non-Portuguese listeners, at least.)

Anyway.

Honey sauce?  Huh?  My eye read through the ingredients: high fructose corn syrup, corn syrup, sugar, honey, fructose, contains less than 2% of: caramel color, molasses, water, citric acid, natural and artificial flavor, malic acid.

I was dumbstruck.  I probably shouldn't have been, but I was.  I have long known that HFCS has infiltrated food to an alarming degree, from pancake syrups to breakfast cereal to baked goods to canned fruit.  Why should I be so surprised about it showing up in a packet of fast-food sweetener?

What hit me hardest was the fact that since KFC decided to substitute HFCS (and CS) for honey, HFCS and CS must be cheaper to buy than honey is.  My brain tried to wrap itself around this deduction.  High fructose corn syrup is cheaper to buy, and hence produce, than honey.  Again, I shouldn't have been surprised.  Maybe discouraged is a better term.  Depressed and discouraged.

Consider the steps, and thus the human effort (and other energy inputs) required to make HFCS: buy/lease crop land, plow it up, add chemical fertilizers to the soil, purchase corn seed, plant seed, spray chemical herbicides on the weeds that sprout up, mechanically irrigate during dry spells, spray chemical insecticides on the bugs that show up, repeat the last three steps as necessary during the summer, combine the corn, truck it to the elevator, transport it to the processing facility, break the corn down using mechanical force and chemical solvents, extract the sweetener out of the corn slush, transport the sweetener to a packaging facility while disposing of the corn mash (likely to the local cattle feed lot or hog barn).  Back at the field the farmer still needs to fall till his field.  Add to all of this effort the material costs associated with it -- seed, fertilizer, herbicides, insecticides, tractors, tillers, planters, sprayers, combines, semi-trailers, elevators, processing machinery, chemicals, etc.

Now consider the steps required to make honey:  buy/lease pasture land, install hives, check on them a few times during the summer, give them some sugar water or medicine if necessary, extract the honey, transport it to a packaging facility.  If you have hives in the north you may have to do some weatherization to protect the hives during the cold months, but not in the south.  Input costs -- bees, hives, protective clothing, smokers, medicine, honey extraction equipment, trucks to haul it to a packaging facility.

Another thing to think about is the although the corn syrup requires a lot more effort to make, much of this effort is mechanized.  Admittedly, bee-keeping is more physically demanding work.  Which I suppose makes it less attractive to farmers.  But there's gotta be a more than a few high school students out there, particularly in rural areas, looking for a summer job.  How can paying a few people to help tend your hives outweigh the fuel, machinery, and chemical costs of growing and processing corn?

I suspect that it doesn't.  I suspect the truth is that making honey DOES cost less (considering all the inputs and indirect costs) than making high fructose corn syrup.  And it doesn't pump chemicals into the soil, and it doesn't wipe out insect life with herbicides, and it doesn't add excess nitrogen and phosphorous into our watersheds, and it doesn't erode topsoil from repeated tilling.

So why are we eating Honey Sauce instead of Honey?

Ask a farmer about subsidies, and she'll tell you they can't farm without them.  They are telling the truth.  The cost of growing corn these days is so huge (with all those costs I detailed above), that without the subsidies the farmers would go out of business.

Here is an analogy.  Let's say I have a pair of boots.  I like the boots, they fit well and I wear them a lot.  Over time, however, my feet change and the boots (exposed to rain and sun) wear and shrink, and they no longer fit.  In fact, my feet start to hurt from wearing them.  Now, I have two choices:  I could keep wearing these boots, which are extremely uncomfortable, or I could get another pair.  If I keep these boots, I'm going to feel a lot of pain.  So much pain in fact, that if I wear them I will need to take a pain-killer.  Ibuprofin should do.  Ibuprofin is cheaper than good boots, and I don't want to have to go to the store to pick out a new pair, so I choose to keep using my old boots.

Over time, my feet change even more, and the boots get holes in them.  I could still get a new pair of boots, or I could just take more painkillers.  More, and stronger painkillers.  It isn't long before I'm taking several Vicodin a day.  So, I'm not feeling the pain, but my feet are a wreck.  This goes on, and on, and on.  I'm paying lots more for my prescriptions now than I would on new boots, but by now I'm too old (and too proud) to switch. And frankly, I don't care anymore because I'm addicted to morphine.

So you see, subsidies are the morphine of agriculture. If the painkillers weren't there in the first place, maybe I would have bought the new boots, maybe farmers would change they way they do things.  Maybe we'd have more sustainable (ecologically and financially) farming practices.  Maybe we'd have healthier farm communities and economies.

And maybe we'd get packets of real honey with our biscuits.