Corn is a trash crop substituting for sugar, and substituting for flour, and substituting for superior oils and fats. Rape is also a trash crop used to add needless fat to foods. And soy? Soy? Honestly Tom, can you name ANY food that consumers knowingly choose because it has soy (or soy lecithin, or soybean oil, or soybean meal…) in it? What all of these trash crops have in common is that they're fillers, used in place of better ingredients to make the perverse laboratory-spawned junkfood “recipes” possible, instead of real food made from minimally processed high quality ingredients. It's not even financially rewarding! Junkfood is made because it's the cheapest way to use trash crops, trash crops are subsidized because it's the only way to make junkfood cheap, the whole thing would fall apart with one swift kick.
And don't try to tell me that garbage is good for animal feed, firstly because that isn't what most of it is used for, secondly because we should be grazing far more of our livestock.
Soy milk is considered pretty hard-core liberal!
WHOA. Hold on. Are you serious? You want more grazing? That's the most unenvironmentalistic position yet! Cutting down acres of forest just so we have more room for cows to fart. Bad idea.
But Cow And Chicken aren't running in 2012 so maybe we can get back on topic.
edited 3rd Apr '11 10:24:49 AM by TheyCallMeTomu
Done correctly, grazing is far better for the environment than feed, and (as a pesticidal/herbicidal/fertilizing mechanism) is even an improvement over abandoning animals. They can also be used to control wildfires. This would work even better if we switched livestock back to indigenous breeds, like bison and caribou.
It's all about making a system where all the pieces work together, instead of randomly mashing stuff together and artificially trying to compensate for the inevitable side effects.
Soybeans are used in tofu, one of the healthiest foods on the planet. (and it's popular too even in America)
Corn is used for a lot of things for healthy foods. Tortillas are made from corn in both forms cornmeal and corn flour. Tortillas themselves aren't junk food. Corn flour is a viable substitute for wheat flour owing to a variety of reasons including allergy risk, economics, and taste.
Then you have the fact in any given year much of the corn crop is harvested simply to be eaten as is. The grower's associations make more money selling them to supermarkets and canneries for fresh produce than selling them to Kellogg's. (Most of the companies that use corn syrup have either contracted fields or are vertically integrated. The majority of corn crops are not owned by big companies.)
Corn on its own is one of the few grains/vegetables that is extremely healthy for you right off the stalk yet at the same time doesn't have any of the taste stigmas against it like spinach or other leafy greens.
Do you really not know what crops are grown and used for?
Raw corn straight off the cob is extremely healthy for you loaded in fiber. Doesn't even need cooked.
The benefits of corn in culinary arts dates back over 1000 years. (It is after all the crop the Inca, Maya and Aztecs harvested before the Spaniards slaughtered them)
Add in the fact that with irrigation it can grow anywhere unlike rice, melons and a lot of sensitive shit like fruits.

It would just make politics more national, more in tune with the entire political spectrum's concerns, voting more popular, and basically eliminate pork. The breadbasket would be much better off too, since instead of being subsidized to grow trash crops like rape, corn, and soy, they would be growing things people actually want to buy (unless the entire idea of protecting American farmers from 3rd-world competition was dropped, which I admit is quite possible.)
I don't think campaigning would really be more expensive, since things would realign around parties, the national parties would handle most of the evangelism, and individual candidates would focus their (largely internecine) efforts on areas they knew were party strongholds.