Commodification is about taking products of different quality and marketing them as though they're actually the same. It creates an incentive to make products o

Commodification is about taking products of different quality and marketing them as though they're actually the same. It creates an incentive to make products of the lowest quality possible because lower quality means lower production costs and more profit. Then over time, consumers get used to increasingly low quality products and so it becomes a race to the bottom for producers; who can make the lowest quality product which only just meets the minimum required grade. I just did a search for "commodity quality standards" on Google and came across a document which explains how corn is graded in the US; the criteria that they use includes things like "Heat damaged %" and "Broken corn and foreign material %". The criteria for other commodities like grains were also similar (focused on damage and presence of foreign material) - It doesn't appear that the chemical/nutritional composition of the commodities are taken into account when grading them. It's easy to see why this would drive the wrong incentives when it comes to things like choice of fertilizer (natural vs artificial) and using GMOs.