Doesn't corn cause bad soil degradation though? Or is that more a general crop thing?
t. knower of livestock, not crops

>>34625
It does because the plants are so big with long roots that exhaust the soil in depth of everything worthwhile leaving just dust.
Also most of the calories in corn are hard to digest starch or outright sugar. Its a cheap but not very healthy way of feeding a population.

>>34622

>So why haven't Europeans adopted the superior staple crop of the New World?

You gotta be surprised.

>>34636
I was gonna say this but thanks you beat me

>>34627
Any kind of intensive enough agriculture does this eventually. It's why you're supposed to rotate crops and leave some fields fallow.

>>34622
Yeah but as the German said guess what OP a lot of that is sugar. I mean just look at your map. Do you seriously think Americans eat more corn than we eat things like wheat? Probably something utterly ridiculous like 90% of that calorie count is coming in through HFCS which they use in goddamn everything in this country, even including our bread and peanut butter. All our juices are flavored with it and that's just the stuff that contains actual juice in it that comes from a real living organism not whatever godforsaken things are manufactured in some New Jersey chemical plant and then dumped in a bright fluorescent mixture of dyes and water.

Actually you know what I just realized something you know how there was a ton of crap about how sugar is supposedly bad for you? I always thought that claim was asinine but couldn't think who would even benefit by attacking cane sugar. I only just realized now that the war on sugar was probably declared by the massive agri corporations from our shithole states to convince incredibly naive and gullible Americans to listen to their propaganda disguised as science. I swear to fucking God not even the Soviets had to put up with this much brainwashing and propaganda as we do and at least the average Soviet citizen probably knew it was propaganda which is why it didn't work and ours does

I think a lot of that corn is for cattle feeding, no?

That map is highly misleading because most of that corn is probably just used to make sugar. I guess it might still count as a staple food in the quantities that we consume it, but when you think of the "realm" of a grain, its perception as a central staple is important, meaning consumption should be highly visible and in grain form.

>>34627
It's better if you eat it properly, i.e. how Mexicans do it. Untreated corn is for dumb Old World peasants who don't know any better.

Also, sweet potatoes are vastly superior in calories per acre as well as nutritional value. And flavor.

Sweet potatoes, normal potatoes, corn. All the best crops come from the New World. Old Worlders can't even come close to the biological sorcery of Mexicans and Peruvians.

>>34640
Corn lobby's war on sugar cane in USA is well known. Sugar cane lobby is much smaller but successful nonetheless.

This corn stuff is ridiculous, it's soviet tier, you produce tons of it and only latter you worry about how to spend it, and this is why corn lobby is go gigantic. And this shit is now also spreading to Brazil. Same arguments, they argue that nothing beats corn when you look at productivity numbers, it's very resistant to both drought and rain, absorbs lots of sunlight, produces lots of callories per hectare, etc, and this is why we should plant more corn, but conveniently ignore that we do not consume this much corn in our daily lives unless it's highly processed. So they lobby the shit out of everybody to push their corn shit down everybody's throat.

Corn here is also threatening ethanol production from sugar cane. Sugar cane is far more productive and green when it comes to ethanol, but corn is cheaper, because it can be easily stored to be processed all year round. Sugar cane has to be processed in a max of 48h after it has been harvested. When your corn lobby lobbied the Bush administration to subsidize corn ethanol, they lied, claiming that they could turn cellulose into ethanol too. Breaking cellulose isn't rocket science, but doing it in an economically feasible scale has always been a challenge. Everybody knew that corn was nowhere near as green as sugar cane, everybody knew that the celulose thing was bullshit, and in any case, cellulose exists in all plants, sugar cane cellulose could also be turned into ethanol if such technology became available. But your corn lobby kept lying, they said that they could do it, but never delivered. When americans finally became disillusioned with corn ethanol, realizing that it was never going to be green, your corn lobby quietly released a statement admitting that the whole cellulose thing was never achievable, but that they needed subsidies anyway, as well as laws forcing your refineries to mix corn ethanol with gasoline (because otherwise refineries wouldn't do it), because "it's still our better option for green fuel". Which once more is a lie, you could greatly expand sugar cane plantations in florida and other parts of your south, plus Puerto Rico, but your corn lobby has successfully lobbied against your sugar cane for decades. And because our farmers couldn't compete with your corn ethanol, they begun to switch from sugar cane to corn too. But more importantly, in the end, because americans didn't believe in biofuel anymore, thanks to your corn ethanol, they begun to look forward to electric cars as the new green tech. Basically, your corn lobby is responsible for Elon Musk.

All of this shit because your greedy corn farmers keep trying to push their over-production down everybody's throat (and our farmers are now also doing the same thing here). Corn farming is a plague on Earth.

>>34689
Also forgot to say that another reason why corn is cheaper than sugar cane is because corn can be seeded, while sugar cane is a grass, it has to be cultivated in incubators and latter planted in the fields, wait for it to take roots, and then dedicate that field for sugar cane for many years, unless you want to repeat this whole process every year. Corn on the other hand can be rotated with other crops through out the year.

>>34688

>calories/acre

Do you mean 4046.8564224m² or is it 4046,8726099m² that you want to use as a divisor of a multiple of 4,1868(kg*m²)/s²?

>>34689
Honestly I used to be pretty libertarian but lately I've become so disillusioned even Socialism is starting to seem acceptable in comparison.

>it's Soviet tier

You know, I've actually been spending some time learning about the Soviets and while it is still clear they are absolute shit all it's ended up doing is highlighting our vast array of the many many problems America has and how our corporate State is in fact a dystopia. Somehow there's something about me having to treat my drinking water with koolaid to make it drinkable that made me have some sort of epiphany. Like, this is it. This is glorious American Capitalism with roads paved in gold and it rains moloka. I don't know if it's just a problem with being a modern empire or what but the problems became clear to me. I've actually started looking past all the memes and propaganda and it's hard not to see the Soviet tyranny and incompetence and all these dumb bydlo being patriotic about their modern empire and just normal people trying to lead normal lives dealing with it all paralleling our own.

Like this here corn commercial
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ILAMjdMCtQ and this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTsV34-Q280 interesting story about Kruschev has really humanized them to me and been giving me a perspective of, I don't know how to describe it, reality? Like I am suddenly looking at how things actually are. It makes me wonder what the average Soviet citizen thought of America and Americans. Like I had no idea about this story I think partly because what we've all been taught is that basically Kruschev visited America to see our superiority in how to feed his starving citizens. I knew nothing about that story with Kruschev and the farmer actually talking to each other man to man and then being bothered by all these retarded US state apparatus and journalists when the man just wanted to talk about farming and planting corn. I know it's RT but after watching this it somehow really reminds me of Jimmy Carter in a way.

But anyway as to your point yes, America is ruled basically by a collective of corporations. While this is widely known I think that what is somewhat less acknowledged is we do not have anything even closely resembling a democracy. What we instead have is a form of government that's basically an oligarchy ruled by competing corporate factions all of which have a hand in the apparatus of the State. It is for this reason I roll my eyes at whatever dumbass deigns to impart his wisdom to me about some dumb shit study about how corn is now going to give me cancer because I already know most of these studies are funded by corporations. If you have any academic background at all then suddenly it's way easier to see through all this authoritative sounding junk science and how the studies are flawed at best or outright bullshit.

Like I remember back in the 2000s having to actually suffer through all these idiots trying to tell me how no OxyContin isnt addictive. And no one batted an eye! I'm serious it's insane. Because some doctors and some big pharma funded studies were trying to tell people that if you take these hard drugs for like back pain you won't get addicted if you're treating pain. This is seriously what they told us all. They actually said that no, you can only get addicted to Vicodin and OxyContin if you take it to get high; you won't get addicted to these new time release formulations if you're only taking it for pain. And all these people believed! Can you even imagine it? So now of course everyone is acting like this was some mystery that oxy addicts were everywhere and the worst part is when the government closed that spigot all the people who got turned on by the ocean of pills washing over us started turning to the much cheaper heroin--that we now controlled from invading Afghanistan https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7Y1laXKvOM go to 6:40. Interestingly apparently the Taliban had wiped out poppy production in the year 2000. By 2002, 2003 heroin and opiate production was through the roof, which I might add you need to cultivate papaver somniferum to have the precursors to making things like MSContin, Percocet, Lortab, Vicodin and so on.

So this is kind of the reality and every time I read or watch something about the absurdity of living under Communism rather than make me appreciate my life I just keep ending up seeing everything through the lens of, had the Russians won the cold war what would they be saying about us? What jokes would they tell about the daily absurdity of American life living under corporate oligopoly and consumer Capitalism? How would they portray us and make those jokes and discuss the utterly corrupt and dysfunctional nature of our government and our society and the average citizen who's just trying to get by and treat his water with Koolaid and being told by the corn lobby and other corporate propaganda outlets that of the things in my water, the only one that's going to give me cancer and sicken and kill me is sugar? It's just really been making me think lately.

>>34697
*some dumbass study about how sugar is going to give me cancer

>>34697
I'm not trying to blame corporations or economic systems. I said it's soviet tier because there's a mismatch between production and consumption. People look at the high productivity per hectare of corn, and think that it's the best food ever, ignoring that this thing can barely be considered food. Like I said, they produce a lot and latter have to find a way to use it.

Not sure who's to blame, we all are liable to reason like that: Oh look corn is so high yield, so productive!

>>34622
We have. It's grown all over Europe. Western Europeans use it for feeding pigs. We bake bread with it and feed chickens.

>>34622
Because calories are irrelevant for almost all things I do with food. Corn flour makes for a great base with burrito dough but is worthless if you want to make fluffy pizza dough or crêpes.
When I make bread I have no use for rice but dinkel wheat does just fine.

Your question seems loaded.

>>34746
What the fuck is burrito dough?

t; mexican

The thing is, what can you even use it for?
Practically none of our dishes use corn.

We have corn on the cob, which is a seasonal beach food here, popcorn, which is a snack, and also canned corn, which is used as a condiment.
Can't think of anything else corn is used for around here, other than feeding livestock.

>Eat corn
>Get shot

>>34698
>>34640
Sugar will fuck you, man. It doesn't really matter so much on the type but here we've just had decades of diet foods containing truckloads of sugar.

You might enjoy this article:

>So began the war on fat, in which Atwater’s calorie calculations were an unwitting ally. Because counting calories was seen as an objective arbiter of the health qualities of a foodstuff, it seemed logical that the most calorie-laden part of any food item – fat – must be bad for you. By this measure, dishes low in calories, but rich in sugar and carbohydrates, seemed healthier. People were increasingly willing to blame fat for many of the health ills of modern life, helped along by the sugar lobby: in 2016, a researcher at the University of California uncovered documents from 1967 showing that sugar companies secretly funded studies at Harvard University designed to blame fat for the growing obesity epidemic. That the dietary “fat” found in olive oil, bacon and butter is branded with the same word as the unwanted flesh around our middles made it all the easier to demonise.

>A US Senate committee report in 1977 recommended a low-fat, low-cholesterol diet for all, and other governments followed suit. The food industry responded with enthusiasm, removing fat, the most calorie-dense of macronutrients, from food items and replacing it with sugar, starch and salt. As a bonus, the thousands of new cheap and tasty “low-cal” and “low-fat” products which Camacho used to diet tended to have longer shelf lives and higher profit margins.

https://www.1843magazine.com/features/death-of-the-calorie

>>34746

>When I make bread I have no use for rice but dinkel wheat does just fine.

LIES. The first Japanese buns used rice and rice flour is taking on:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1o692aw94s

t. watcher of hotel-tier documentaries

>>34749
Unprocessed corn is shit. The best you can do with it is cornbread, which only tastes good if you load it up with sugar and honey (and what doesn't taste good with tons of sugar and honey in it?).

But in the place where people developed corn, and had to rely on it as their only staple crop, virtually all corn was consumed after being boiled in an alkaline solution. It transforms the flavor, texture, and nutrient value of the corn into something completely different. The taste is deeper and subtler, and you can form a proper dough out of it.

The traditional primary forms of consumption are the tamale and tortilla. The tamale is a dumpling of wet corn dough steamed in a corn husk or banana leaf. It's usually filled with some sort of spiced and stewed meat, but it can also be filled with cheese, chilis, or even sugary desert fillings. You can make them without any filling though, and back in ye olde Aztec times this was more common. Tortillas are more common as a staple food today, with tamales being more of a main dish in their own right, but it's likely that tamales were actually the primary source of calories during the height of Mayan civilization, as the archaeological record shows scant evidence of the large griddles used to prepare tortillas.

I'm sure you have a general idea of what a tortilla is, due to the inexorable force of American cultural imperialism, but the wheat flour tortillas that Americans focus on are very different from the humble corn tortilla. This is the indigenous Mexican equivalent of bread or rice, or Indian chapathi. The corn dough is pressed into a flat circle, and cooked on a griddle. They taste absolutely divine when they're fresh, but the quality degrades rapidly with storage.

Other uses for proper corn are pupusas (essentially a thick tortilla, stuffed with meat, beans, and/or cheese) and atole, which is a gruel or beverage, depending on thickness, optionally flavored and sweetened, or made with toasted corn flour. This was probably as important as tortillas and tamales as staple food for the actual Aztecs, but today it's mostly a breakfast food equivalent to oat or wheat porridge, or a hot cinnamon-y desert beverage.

>>34749

>The thing is, what can you even use it for?

The american made clear that vyou can turn it inot flour like you can do with rice.
What I was actually wondering why you don't take that question for "european" wheat in exchange? It's basically only used processed as well.

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