Big Food Shifting the Blame Higher Grocery Costs
by Chris Thorne (Growth Energy/NewsOK) letter to editor: Regarding “Corn ethanol is burning up food budgets” (Point of View, May 13): J. Patrick Boyle, president and CEO of the American Meat Institute, misled readers about the real reason behind rising grocery prices. It’s not ethanol but oil and grocery manufacturer profits that are driving up grocery costs. Ethanol creates both fuel and food. For every bushel of field corn (and ethanol only uses field corn) used for ethanol production, a third is returned to the food supply as animal feed. Ethanol production only removes the starch from corn, leaving behind high-protein distillers grains that give livestock producers more bang for their buck.
Also, the U.S. ethanol industry uses just 3 percent of the global grain supply. It isn’t reasonable to suggest that this causes hunger — especially when we have a surplus of food in the United States. READ MORE