Congrats, Connie!!

brenda, ha! A friend of mine who teaches at a Catholic Girls' School posted (Facebook) yesterday that she of course ran into a student at the grocery store. In the cart were vodka, tampons and an US Weekly.

Connie - congratulations!

And I wonder how much the percentage of grain subsidies would go down if you took out corn.

Or if you took out grains that were going to animal feed and only looked at grains that would be eaten by people.

Animal feed doesn't even catch it all since there's the ethanol question with corn, even if you leave aside the HFCS stuff. (Soy has some issues also but an order of magnitude less significant.)

Report from 2008 says that 55% of corn in the US goes to animal feed, 19% to ethanol, less than 10% to corn-based foods like corn meal and corn chips, and about 1% just eaten as corn by people. [link]

Wow.

Now I really want to do a study looking at cost per calorie and cost per nutrient of various foods. Like, on Peapod right now, ground beef is about $5/pound, and spinach is about $2.50 per pound. But ground beef is about 1200 calories per pound, and spinach is 100 calories per pound, so with the beef, you're paying about .4 cents per calorie, and with the spinach you're paying 2.5 cents per calorie. But spinach has way more iron per calorie than beef does (I can't find the numbers right now), so you might be paying more per milligram of iron with the beef than with the spinach. My bet is that the foods that give you the most calories per dollar would also give you the fewest nutrients per dollar, but I haven't seen that analysis done anywhere.

OK, the closest iron per calorie values I could find were for sirloin and romaine lettuce. Sirloin has .7 mg iron per 100 calories, and romaine has 7.9 mg iron per 100 calories. So with the beef, you're paying about 57 cents per milligram of iron, and with the greens, it's 32 cents per milligram of iron. (I wish I had better numbers to play with.)

And... it looks like I'm on a jury.