Move Over, Quinoa. There’s a New ‘It’ Crop in Town.
As the trade war strands sorghum in Kansas, the state’s farmers hope to push the tiny grain with an uncool name onto dinner plates
By Joe Barrett, The Wall Street Journal, April 27, 2025
Kansas farmers are seeking domestic buyers for sorghum because of tariffs and the trade war with China.
Sorghum is a high-protein, gluten-free grain being marketed as a ‘super food’.
Sorghum marketing efforts face challenges because of its name and association with animal feed.
Getting more people to eat sorghum is taking on new urgency for Kansas farmers caught in the middle of the global trade war. They grow the most sorghum in the U.S., the largest producer of the world’s fifth-biggest grain crop. …
In recent years, China has been buying more than half the U.S. crop to feed hogs and produce baijiu, among the world’s most-consumed liquors. But China canceled some purchases and mostly pulled back from the market in January, expecting stiff new tariffs under the second Trump administration. Now, storage facilities across the western half of the Sunflower State are packed to the rafters with sorghum as operators struggle to find domestic buyers ahead of next fall’s harvest…
Sorghum has twice the protein of quinoa and four times that of rice or corn…
Kansas is flat and dry and drought-resistant sorghum thrives… [end quote]
I’d be willing to try sorghum. Sounds good for people (as well as animal) food and the environment. But it’s not marketed effectively in groceries. It’s probably sold in small bags in the expensive “exotic grain” section.
Anti-China tariffs had a Macro impact on farmers in 2020 but the government subsidized them. It would be better if the product could be diverted into the human food supply on a large scale.
Wendy
Based on my observations in school cafeterias in the 60s, anything the farmers can’t sell, will be bought up by the government, and distributed to school lunch programs around the country. The US used to dump surplus food as “foreign aid”, flooding those foreign markets and destroying the local farmers in the process. But with “foreign aid” shut down, expect spawn in school to be force fed soy and sorghum five days a week.
My Grandmother used to make cookies with sorghum molasses. They had a very distinctive sweet taste. She grew up on a farm in Iowa in the late 1800s, so sorghum wasn’t anything new to her. There were still a few farmers in that area that grew sorghum when I was a kid. The leaves look somewhat like corn, but the plants have a different sort of head on top, as I recall.
We can’t eat our way out the trade crisis. There are only so many calories humans can consume. If we all start eating sorghum then we have to stop eating something else.
Gah! You gave me a flashback to an old ep of “Pawn Stars” on Defy last night. One of the kids was trying to lose weight, so was munching on rice cakes. The “old man” tried one. Hated it. Then he put some chocolate syrup and imitation whipped cream on it, and pronounced it an improvement.
In related “news”, the evening “news” reported 70% of the stuff in US grocery stores is “ultra processed”. As I have been saying, “adulterated food is a traditional American family value”.
If they want it to become popular, all they need to do is to rebrand it with some other name. Keep “sorghum” for animal feed, and come up with some jazzy name for human consumption. I would eat it.
I had some on a cruise last year or the year before. I don’t see it in the store very often because it is quite expensive (near $30/lb) and doesn’t sell well.
Wikipedia seems to indicate over-fishing has been a problem.
From the wiki: Orange roughy fisheries exist primarily in New Zealand, Australia and Namibia.[5] Annual global catches began in 1979 and increased significantly to a high of over 90,000 tonnes in 1990. These high catch levels quickly decreased as stocks were fished down. For many stocks, the lack of understanding of the biological characteristics meant that they were overfished. By the end of the 1990s, three of the eight New Zealand orange roughy fisheries had collapsed and were closed.[2] Because of its longevity, late maturation and relatively low fecundity, orange roughy stocks tend to recover more slowly than most other species.
There is also a graph, showing how the volume of caught fish peaked around 1990, then significantly decreased.
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Something else to consider: Because of its longevity, the orange roughy accumulates large amounts of mercury in its tissues, having a range of 0.30–0.86 ppm compared with an average mercury level of 0.086 ppm for other edible fish.
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The huge amounts of coal being burned in Asia and elsewhere have several negative effects, in addition to contributing to the atmospheric CO2 concentration. Coal is the source of much of the mercury contamination in the world.
When my grandmother was still alive, we ate carp regularly. It is one of the most tasty fish out there. She mostly made it poached in a kind of sweet broth. And then served it with nusssauce, a sauce made with ground nuts. Extremely tasty, but I haven’t had it in more than a decade. However it has a big problem that can’t be solved with a new name. It’s bone structure is terrible and you have to be extremely careful while eating it. The adults never allowed us kids to have any in “piece” form, and even after being disassembled by an adult, it always had residual bones in it. In the end, carp was mostly deboned while raw and then ground up, sometimes mixed with ground whitefish, seasoned and then cooked in various ways.
First, the “Local Foods for Schools program” was established in December, 2021, meaning it was not done by TIG, therefore it needs to be cancelled.
Second, quoting from the article:
Proposed spending cuts to fund (pending) tax bill include raising the poverty level needed for schools to provide universal free meals without an application. Restricting eligibility for food assistance programs and requiring income verification for free or reduced price school meals, two proposals for cutting costs, would also likely cut out eligible families from accessing food, the School Nutrition Association said.
The top priority is covering another “JC” tax cut. That makes school lunch programs expendable.
We old phartz remember the school lunch “reform” of the 80s, when catsup and pickle relish were deemed “vegetables”.
Burkina Faso
Mali
Nigeria
ralph