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You can only eat fresh corn when it's in season, and only within a week or so after it's been picked. To be a suitable year-round survival food, corn has to be

You can only eat fresh corn when it's in season, and only within a week or so after it's been picked. To be a suitable year-round survival food, corn has to be processed into corn meal. This usually entails treating it with lye, drying it, and grinding it. This gets you corn meal, grits, polenta. Or hominy if you skip the grinding step. We don't have the equipment to do this at the necessary scale. Corn just isn't used as a survival crop this way, so there's never been an economic need to invest in the machinery to do it. We probably do have the infrastructure to keep producing wheat bread in mass quantities. Do we have the peanut production and processing infrastructure to handle peanut butter becoming our primary protein source? I doubt it. And of course with soybeans... they would need to be dried or canned, packaged, stored, and shipped. Doable but different from what we are currently set up to do. And of course there's the psychological impacts of all of that, which again are probably oreferable to starving but wouldn't be good. People fight wars (or gang wars)over this kind of thing.

randomdata 8y ago
> And of course with soybeans... they would need to be dried or canned, packaged, stored, and shipped. Doable but different from what we are currently set up to do. As a soybean farmer, and one who has focused on IP soybeans for the human market for most of my career at that, unless I am misunderstanding you, that is exactly how we do it. The beans are harvested dry, packaged, stored, and then shipped (primarily) to the Asian markets who are interested in such product. The trouble in North America is that few know what to do with them. To be honest, I have never even tried my own product. I also grow navy beans and have cooked with them. They are more of a common staple in these parts. But they are also a much more fickle crop. You're not going to easily replace soys with other edible beans.
- GlenTheMachine 8y ago
  I stand corrected.
- tomcam 8y ago
  Dude... make yourself some edamame! It rocks.
  - randomdata 8y ago
    Oh, I've had edamame on numerous occasions. But it is served quite differently to the dry beans we're talking about.

randomdata 8y ago

> And of course with soybeans... they would need to be dried or canned, packaged, stored, and shipped. Doable but different from what we are currently set up to do. As a soybean farmer, and one who has focused on IP soybeans for the human market for most of my career at that, unless I am misunderstanding you, that is exactly how we do it. The beans are harvested dry, packaged, stored, and then shipped (primarily) to the Asian markets who are interested in such product. The trouble in North America is that few know what to do with them. To be honest, I have never even tried my own product. I also grow navy beans and have cooked with them. They are more of a common staple in these parts. But they are also a much more fickle crop. You're not going to easily replace soys with other edible beans.

GlenTheMachine 8y ago
I stand corrected.
tomcam 8y ago
Dude... make yourself some edamame! It rocks.
- randomdata 8y ago
  Oh, I've had edamame on numerous occasions. But it is served quite differently to the dry beans we're talking about.