After having spent my first 18 years in rural Southern Indiana, I’ve picked up a thing or two about agriculture. For example, tractors are large machines with rear tires at least 4 feet high—you plow fields with them. Contrary to the beliefs of some folks from the city, a “lawn tractor” is not really a tractor. It is a lawn mower. Field corn—the kind fed to pigs and cows isn’t the same as the buttered sweet corn you eat straight off the cob. Milk tastes different depending on what kinds of foods the cow which produced it ate. Yes, I know all that and I wasn’t even a member of the FFA.

However, I learned something quite new about agriculture by reading the Wall Street Journal this week. We’ve turned to alternative fuels to mitigate our dependence on oil, with corn-based ethanol proving to be a viable option. But the production of ethanol is driving up the price of corn and farmers are now feeding their pigs and cattle the same junk foods we eat to save money! Everything from Kit-Kat scraps near Hershey, Pennsylvannia to French fries in Idaho—livestock are getting much more than their traditional grain-based meals! You are what you eat. So I have to wonder—is beef really what’s for dinner?