Obesity and Global warming catturando 2 piccioni con una fava

Italy gets some attention

NO PASTA FOR YOU! Italians are on spaghetti strike today, refusing to buy all pasta in protest of a 20 percent increase in consumer prices, caused in part by demand for wheat as a biofuel. The average Italian eats pasta once a day, or 61 pounds of the starchy goodness annually.

While Italians might be incensed over expensive orchiette, the biofuel bull market affects food supplies all over the world, and developing countries will be hit hardest. In Mexico, where many poor, rural people survive on a diet built around nutritious corn tortillas, the ethanol rush is responsible for tripling and quadrupling the price of food staples. And ethanol production has a dark side in the United States' food system as well; the more corn we grow, the more we subsidize growing corn, which has already led to the massive, obesity-causing overuse of corn syrup in our diet. It's all food for thought the next time you hear a presidential candidate wax eloquent on the wonders of ethanol.

I comment



Watch out for typos. Italians are angry about overpriced Orichieti, Orchieti would be small testicles whose price is not affected by biofuels.

Also why not buy high fructose corn syrup for biofuels (for one thing fructose can be turned into a fuel which doesn't evaporate as easily as ethanol http://tinyurl.com/yohhw3).

Now it is possible to make bacteria which split sucrose into fructose and glucose and turn the glucose into ethanol leaving fructose, ethanol water and a nasty smell. distill out the ethanol and crystalize out the fructose then call the chemists.

Drive up the price of corn syrup as a replacement for corn price supports. Sounds good to me.

Sad to say I am totally ignorant. Corn Syrup contains glucose not sucrose.
Glucose is converted to fructose enzymantically. So the story is convert glucose to fructose then call the chemists. Alternatively one could just make ethanol from corn syrup. The point is that ethanol subsidies should be used to drive up the price of unhealthy foods not healthy foods. So the subsidy should be to purchases of corn syrup for conversion to ethanol not on production of ethanol.

Also we should import ethanol of course.

The fructose derived fuel might be better than ethanol. I have no idea.

update: thanks Nancy