“Planted, a single corn seed yielded more than 150 fat kernels, often as many as 300, while the return on a seed of wheat was something less than 50:1”
Source: The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
“Farmers facing lower prices have only one option if they want to be able to maintain their standard of living, pay their bills, and service their debt, and that is to produce more [corn]”
Source: The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
“The free market has never worked in agriculture and it never will. The economics of a family farm are very different from a firm's... the demand for food isn't elastic; people don't eat more just because food is cheap. Even if I go out of business this land will keep producing corn.”
Source: The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
“There are two kinds of persons which cannot be trusted in this world : the ones who do not greet you with a firm handshake and the ones who do not eat prawn heads.”
Source: The Portuguese Travel Cookbook
“By 1900, European scientists recognized that unless a way was found to augment this naturally occurring nitrogen, the growth of the human population would soon grind to a very painful halt... After Nixon's 1972 trip the first major order the Chinese government placed was for thirteen massive fertilizer factories. Without them, China would have probably starved.”
Source: The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
“[Smil] estimates that two of every five humans on Earth today would not be alive if not for Fritz Haber's invention of the Haber-Bosch process.”
Source: The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
“Though they won't say, it has been estimated that Cargill and ADM together probably buy somewhere near a third of all the corn grown in America.”
Source: The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
“There are some forty-five thousand items in the average American supermarket and more than a quarter of them now contain corn.”
Source: The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
“By far the biggest portion of a bushel of American commodity corn (about 60% of it, or some 50k kernels) goes to feeding livestock, and much of that goes to feeding America's 100 million beef cattle”
Source: The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
“A mere four giant meatpacking companies (Tyson subsidiary IBP, Cargill subsidiary Excel, Swift & Company, and National) now slaughter and market four of every five beef cattle born in this country”
Source: The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals