For the last few years, more and more corn has been used not as a food source, but for conversion to fuel. Since the corn used was for animal feed, it was promised that it would not effect food prices. It did anyway. It became more expensive to feed animals and the price of meat went up. Along with that you have the massive amounts of nitrogen fertilizer used to grow corn, at least half of which is converted from natural gas, causing a price spike there too.

As more corn moved from the sugar and animal feed plants to the ethanol factories, those who were pushing companies to drop HFCS from their lines, were rewarded when it was no longer monetarily advantageous to use it instead of sugar.

Enjoy the taste of real sugar while you can.

Scientists at the Agricultural Research Service, in a search to find an alternate crop for the production of ethanol, have discovered that sweet potatoes and cassava:

yield two to three times as many carbohydrates for fuel ethanol production, per acre, as corn does. That puts sweet potatoes at the low end of yields for sugar cane. Corn typically has about 60 to 65 percent starch in the kernels; and that’s the principal source for ethanol. Sweet potato has about 80 to 90 percent total carbohydrates in the tuber. The other advantage is that, of those carbohydrates, in sweet potato, about 20 to 30 percent of them are sucrose, are sugar, and can be more easily converted into ethanol than starch can.

These aren’t your regular supermarket sweet potatoes either. They can weigh in at as much as 30 lbs. And for an added bonus do not require the excessive amounts of fertilizer that corn does.

There is no telling what will happen with HFCS if/when sweet potatoes and cassava replace corn for ethanol production and corn prices drop again. We can only hope that those companies that have made the switch back to natural sweeteners, stay there.

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