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Comment by quantum_magpie | Hacker News Reader

Aren't ethanol, animal feed, and human food corn all separate, non-interchangeable species? Usually ethanol stuff and animal feed stock are completely inedible, at least in my EU country.

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Yes, but the farm equipment that plants and harvests it is the same. Planting different seeds is easy, buying new equipment is not.

Also, as the transportation sector transitions to electric vehicles the demand for corn ethanol should drop off so if we need to produce more edible corn there should be excess capacity available.

I'm not sure how that works with corn, but quite a few things that aren't fit for human consumption in times of plenty are quite edible in a famine, or can be made so.

I don't think it's that but that most human digestive systems will catastrophically fail trying to digest ethanol-corn or animal feed-corn.

You can eat field corn just fine. You shouldn't eat it raw at maturity because of the high starch content, but the solution to that is simply to harvest a bit earlier before all the starch is formed. It's not very sweet, but it's perfectly edible.

There are two primary types of corn: field corn and sweet corn. Only sweet corn can be eaten raw or lightly cooked, but field corn can be turned into edible products (e.g. cereal) with some standard processing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixtamalization

might be separate, non-interchangeable species (I don't know) but they require the same farmers, equipment, logistics, etc, to be in place and as everyone learned the last few years those things don't just scale up and down like latest cloud tech here.

That's mostly inedible for direct consumption, like corn on the cob. Processing into something like cornmeal though is open to much more species, including the original maize that all corn was essentially bred from.

The land is interchangeable, and 'human food corn' encompasses a lot more than just corn eaten directly by humans. Almost every processed food in the US uses some corn derived product; and animal feed is still part of the supply chain for human food.

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