Food rationing hits USA

Last night, while Jen watched her chick shows in the living room, I retreated to the guest room to the Internet and the 13-inch TV. That's when I came across a documentary on PBS called "King Corn."

The premise was simple. Two buddies from Yale realized their great-grandparents had both lived in the same small Iowa town and were farmers. The Ivy Leaguers did a little research, decided to move to Iowa and grow an acre of corn. Along the way, they show how screwed up the US food chain is these days.

While Iowans are now getting an average of 200 bushels of corn per acre, it's all unedible corn. They can't pluck an ear, boil it or grill it and eat it. It's all some strain of corn that's only good for being turned into cattle feed or high-fructose corn syrup. They traveled with their corn to a feed lot in Colorado where 100,000 head were kept and force fed corn to fatten them up. They talked to nutritionists, scientists, farmers and ranchers.

They also talked to the former head of the Department of Agriculture, the guy who started the farm subsidy programs. While he was cast as somewhat of a villain (farm subsidies caused the end of family farms and the rise of industrial farms that crank out poor quality foodstuffs) he made a very good point - part of the reason for our affluence over the years has been the cost of food has been kept low. Our grandparents and great-grandparents used to spend about 60 percent of their income on food. The average American now spends only about 12 percent on food. With that extra 48 percent now available, we've bought bigger houses, SUVs, clothes, flat-screen TVs and whatever else.

Then today, I come across this story about food rationing happening in some stores on both coasts ...

http://nysun.com/news/food-rationing-confronts-breadbasket-world