Keynesian Economics Explain Our Dilemma

The U.S. industrial food economy has become an highly regulated, controlled system where the entire food chain has become a mechanized process from the farm fields to the food on our plates.  In The Omnivore's Dilemma Michael Pollan gives an accurate account of the current food industry, and particularly how corn has become a highly used and necessary crop in the United States.  When Pollan takes the reader through the industrial corn system he follows a keynesian economic paradigm.  He illustrates in his book that the corn industry has expanded into a system supported by fiscal policies and cheap, immediate resources that help build a food system that functions with a crop that defies the basic laws of supply and demand.

"...instead of supporting farmers, during the Nixon administration the government began supporting corn at the expense of farmers.  Corn, already the recipient of a biological subsidy in the form of synthetic nitrogen, would now receive an economic subsidy too, ensuring its final triumph over the land and the food system (Pollan 48)."

The Omnivore's Dilemma follows the farmers of America who make little to no profit while continuing to expand corn production and buy expensive hybrid strains that burden the land with high amounts of nitrogen fertilizers while reducing biodiversity.  In the farmer's perspective, corn should be an uneconomical crop that has an exceedingly high supply level, but government subsidies and big business interests prevent farmers from having any other choice.  This crop is now used in countless food items as well as providing food for livestock so that there are endless possibilities for corn.  Other topics were discussed in this book including the post WWII era where chemical fertilizers were suddenly promoted and recommended by the government due to leftover chemicals made from the war while the invention of synthetic nitrogen was the final catalyst towards our modern highly chemical, processed food system.

In a neoclassical perspective, it can be argued that The Omnivore's Dilemma supports the idea that the U.S. industrial food economy has followed laws of supply and demand without significant interference, and that corn prices had the highest impact on the food economy.  It is true that corn is a cheap, abundant resource that can easily be mass produced and versatile, however, in The Omnivore's Dilemma the keynesian paradigm describes the reality of the current U.S. industrial food economy because Pallan explains how this system is truly a harmful, wasteful process that was built by the interests of corporations government officials.  This system was not developed through the technical mechanisms of supply and demand simply controlled by prices, demand and output but it is a system with underlying policies, taxes, and incentives that established the current U.S. industrial food economy.