But that's only partially true. We wouldn't eat it directly -- it could still be turned into masa or sugar or some other processed food and then eaten.
But yes if people get hungry enough, field corn easily qualifies as actual food.
Sweet Corn: For Fresh Eating and therefore harvested with a high moisture content which hurts preservation without freezing and total yield.
Dimple is a Field corn, harvested later resulting in a dryer product, lasts longer and has a higher yield.
Flint Corn: Mostly decorative as it looks cool, but again still edible after grinding.
Heirloom: lots of shapes and sizes but significantly lower yield.
Popcorn: A tiny slice of the market but pops when heated.
Corn is amazing. My favorite use of it is for alcohol though.
(Corn doesn't need special processing to be edible, but it does need special processing if you want to avoid dying from nutritional deficiency when having a corn-based diet).
After we phased out TetraEthyl Lead from gas, we still needed an octane booster, because for gas to be cheap, it uses low octane components. So we used something called MTBE. The problem is that your average corner gas store has terrible infrastructure, and their gas tank leaks a lot. MTBE kept getting into water sources and hurting people.
Ethanol is a good octane booster, and it doesn't poison anyone or the environment. It also slightly reduced dependence on foreign oil at a time when that was still an issue.
So it's wasteful, not at all "Green", and inefficient, but do we have a replacement octane booster that wont poison people?
It's not at all a jobs program. Corn growing is extremely mechanized. It's done entirely by megacorp megafarms. They are very wealthy companies owned by very wealthy people who continue to vote for republicans exclusively for lower taxes on wealthy people. They don't do it for better policy, as Trump alone has cost that industry over $30 billion in lost sales during his two terms, from poorly run trade wars.
I'm not sure it's all that wasteful. The waste product from biofuel production is distillers grains [1] which are just fed back to animals afterward for the protein, fiber, and fat content.
The "limited value" isn't so limited when we're talking about an additive to gasoline. The first thing we tried polluted the entire world with a background level of lead!
I have no idea about the US, but in Europe it's absolutely not the case. We've replaced huge quantities of land that was twenty/thirty years ago dedicated to other crops.
Also, we could actually convert them to pastures, that have a much better ecosystemic value (or even let them grow into unexploited forests, for even better environmental effect).
> They can't grow better crops without massive works of engineering and tons more fertilizer and energy use.
Most crops in the modern world run an engineered soil anyway.
In fact, in Europe the most fertile soils have long been destroyed by urbanization (because they were where the population density was the highest in agrarian times and where the megalopolis arose).
> The "limited value" isn't so limited when we're talking about an additive to gasoline. The first thing we tried polluted the entire world with a background level of lead!
We only got there because it was promoted by denying scientific evidences for many decades. Diesel engines have their own issues but they don't require these additives and you cannot pretend they don't exist.
> Most crops in the modern world run an engineered soil anyway.
What do you mean by engineered? The most fertile places in the US (i.e. the southwest) run on multi-million year old alluvial plains where micronutrients are deposited from mountain runoff. NPK and some micronutrients are supplemented but the most fertile regions tend to be the least "engineered". The engineering goes into the massive irrigation projects, not the soil, precisely because engineering the latter is so much harder.
In a pasture for instance, grass can grow because the plant incorporate enough organic matter in the soil to be consumed by microorganisms that will in return fixate the nitrogen from the air into nitrates that can be consumed by the plant. Then you have some equilibrium-ish (it depends on the seasons and the precipitation so it's not an actual equilibrium) amount of nitrogen and organic compounds in your soil.
When you plow the soil, you accelerate decomposition of organic matter that was previously sitting there (because you bring excess oxygen). In the short term, it favors the fixation of nitrogen by the microorganism of the soil (which is why fallow works) but the following years you have less nitrogen fixation than you'd have had otherwise (because there's less organic mater to provide energy to the microorganisms).
Enters the nitrogen fertilizer: with them you don't need microorganisms to provide the nitrogen for your plants, and as such you don't care about the organic matter load of your soil. That's what I call “engineered soil” in opposition to the soils that are driven by the microorganisms who balance the carbon/nitrogen content of the soil.
Of course that doesn't mean that the whole content of the soil is man-made, but coupled with other fertilization methods (which bring nutrients that were naturally almost absent from the soil before), it helped transformed regions which used to be margins with very low yields, into agricultural powerhouses (For instance, Brittany, the region I'm from in France, went from being one of the poorest due to low soil fertility, to the agricultural leader of the country).
The same way, humans have engineered forests since prehistory, but there's still a massive difference between a prehistoric forest and a modern exploited one.
We poisoned the world with lead because it was more profitable for a single company.
It's not a “job program” per se (these crops require basically no human work to do nowadays) but it's indeed a subvention program for farmers (and more importantly, land owners).