This isn’t meant to be a discussion on the morality of the embargo, but the affects of the embargo ending for both countries. These affects can be political, economic, or social.
This isn’t meant to be a discussion on the morality of the embargo, but the affects of the embargo ending for both countries. These affects can be political, economic, or social.
They’d both suddenly benefit… the impact on America would be pretty minimal economically simply due to scale but it probably would improve health by moving us partially off corn syrup. And for Cuba it’d end decades of arbitrary economic kneecapping by the US. Tourism would probably explode since it’d be a shorter flight than cancun from the east coast and, y’know, not fucking Florida.
I don’t think it would have any significant impact on corn syrup usage.
The US already produces about nine times more sugar cane than Cuba does. We also import it from countries like Brazil and the other Caribbean islands.
Our usage of corn syrup is because it’s very cheap to begin with, and for various reasons it’s desirable to keep food production, including corn, higher than demand would normally require.
That has one effect of further lowering the price of corn syrup.
The only thing that’ll get us to cut back the amount of corn syrup in foods is the (slow) growing trend of consumers preferring foods that don’t have added sugar, which would also preclude cane sugar.
Corn syrup is mainly cheap because of the huge subsidies, putting that money to better use supporting veggie or fruit production would make us all a lot healthier
It’ll still be cheap and easy to use without the subsidies, since it’s not like we’re going to stop growing the corn even if it’s more expensive. Lowering the price of healthier foods will do a lot of good, but there’s also the part where people need to change their tastes.
We just like food that’s too sweet.
Moving from corn syrup to cane sugar in similar amounts is not really a health win. The make up of HFCS is not significantly different from came sugar. We just need to eat less sugars overall.
No and yes - we do need less sugar in things and that will be more impactful overall but HFCS is just plain worse in sweetening efficiency.
In terms of sweetening efficiency, HFCS is going to be sweeter in the same amounts because fructose is sweeter than glucose. HFCS generally consists of 55% fructose and 42% glucose while cane sugar is 50/50. They do metabolize slightly differently due to the slightly different makeup though. I know HFCS has become a boogeyman but the real issue is sugar in general. How cheap HFCS is due to corn subsidies and sugar tariffs causes it to be in damn near everything in large amounts. Try doing a month without added sugar in your meals and see how few options you actually have. It was pretty damn difficult when I did it and I live in a large city.