Meat is hugely inefficient, but Americans demand it. If you told Americans in a crisis, "For food security reasons you're all limited to a quarter pounder per day", we'd have a national riot. They're used to three times that.
They'd insist that they'd die without enough protein, and vegetable protein sources don't count. Even limiting their meat to a half-pound per day would cause riots, even though that is more than enough protein.
So efficiency just isn't on the table here. We're going to over-support our meat industry.
That doesn't explain growing corn for ethanol.
You can't turn farming capacity on and off. If you need a given level of capacity, it has to already be there up & running, the entire system including all the people filling all the roles with all the experience, and all the machinery, all the distribution and economic relationships and countless support dependencies.
What you CAN do quicker is change what you use that capacity for.
And even what you do with the current product right this moment even before you have time to change what you will harvest next year. Corn that that is normally only fed to animals is still absolutely a ready resource for people if they need it. Most of our food is fully artificially constructed out of base ingredients these days. Every box and bag and can on the shelves that needs a carbohydrate barely cares at all where it comes from or what it originally tastes like raw.
But what is this system trying to secure against?
America already grows enough animal fodder without counting corn for ethanol. If some calamity strikes corn production for animal fodder, it will equally affect corn production for ethanol. Because it's the same crop.
And also why can't you scale farm production up and down? It isn't like manufacturing and factories. Preserve farmland and produce enough for the country's consumption needs. That'll keep farm labor and machinery sufficiently busy. It also prevents the waste of fertile soil growing food that's never eaten.
That can explain a little. Not the 40% of all corn grown that is used for ethanol.
Which would be better for the nation's security? Having all this ethanol, or having 31x the energy provided by that ethanol via solar production? We couldn't actually use that much solar power right now, but that's part of the opportunity cost: we aren't gearing up to make use of it because we're generating all of this ethanol that we don't need instead! The capacity maintenance argument works both ways: pay to maintain the capacity to grow vastly more corn than we'll ever need, or pay to maintain the capacity to generate tons more energy that we're far more likely to need.
(Also, taking land that has been largely destroyed by industrial corn farming and changing it into land that's growing some more valuable food crop isn't just a matter of changing your mind about what to grow the next year.)
Growing corn for ethanol is mostly political. Iowa grows a lot of corn, and as the first state in the political primary process, it gets way more attention than it deserves.
So the corn farmers are sacrosanct. We can make various mumblings about energy independence and surplus food capacity, but we all know that the real reason it remains is that anybody who proposes doing otherwise would get massacred. (Not just individually. Their entire party would take the blame.)
You made a "mumbling" about surplus food capacity yourself https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47869026 :-D
But you're right. It's entirely political. It's not clear why it needs to be. Can farmers really swing that many elections?
Why not pay them to fallow land instead? I remember Catch-22 had a passage describing it, but I have no idea if that's true IRL. It preserves farming skills, labor, and farmland, and gives farmers free money. Political slam-dunk and a boon for food security.
We absolutely did and do pay farmers not to farm. Today we call it the "Bridge Assistance Program", to avoid admitting what it really is.
https://www.usda.gov/about-usda/news/press-releases/2025/12/...
I think that's why we don't just do more of that: it's kind of embarrassing. Farmers don't want to hear just how little they actually matter.
That still doesn't explain why we're so busily kowtowing to farmers. I suspect a fair bit of it is inertia: it's the accepted wisdom that insulting farmers is bad (and telling them that they don't actually need their subsidies is an insult). There may well be a day when some political candidate goes to Iowa and says, "Eff you and your stupid caucus. I'm going to spend my time in New Hampshire, and tell them how I'm going to cancel corn subsidies and use the savings for maple syrup subsidies".
> Meat is hugely inefficient
wondering if there is a strong evidence for this?.. What is more efficient?