There were dual messages in Tuesday's Wall Street Journal when it comes to the price of food.
On the editorial page, Texas Gov. Rick Perry wrote a letter lamenting his defeat at the hands of the Environmental Protection Agency on the renewable fuels standard. This column was widely popular on Tuesday because it was e-mailed to me a half dozen times from various people.
Perry's column began "At what price will corn be so expensive that the federal government will decide that it is time to stop driving up the price of food?"

A few paragraphs down, Perry adds "As we can see now, the diversion of our corn supply from grocery stores to gasoline pumps has caused the price of corn to spiral out of control. Corn prices were once driven by market forces. Today they are artificially driven up by a government mandate. In 2004, before the mandates were imposed, the cost of corn hovered around $2 per bushel. Now it is close to $8 per bushel."

This is driving up the cost of staple food items at the grocery store. and it is also driving up the price of corn-based feed, devastating the livestock industry to the point that Texas cattle feeders have been operating in the red since 2007."

Even our largest agriculture companies are taking a hit. Pilgrim's Pride and Smithfield both posted huge losses this past year. Tyson's bonds were downgraded. And New Way Pork, Texas's largest independent pork producer, has been driven out of business by feed costs that have risen 50% since 2004."

Late in the column, Perry points out that "Last Thursday, the EPA announced it was denying my request. Why? Because the agency's agriculture and energy economists said the mandates are not causing sufficient damage to warrant action. This not only goes against common sense, but runs counter to the experience of Americans at the grocery checkout counter."

While Perry's column was popular to send around, only one person drew my attention Tuesday to p. B6 in the WSJ looking at earnings for Sysco Corp., "the world's largest food service company." The article stated that higher costs for "fruit, vegetables and dairy products have been the main drivers of inflation in the sector," according to the article, and not "center of the plate meat products."
"Meat producers have not been the biggest contributors to inflation," the article quoted Dick Schnieders, Sysco's chairman and CEO.
Sysco stated that food inflation for the first half of the year reached 6.2 percent. Sysco was focusing on cost control to counter higher input costs.
Schnieders also added his company was working with customers, which are largely the nation's restaurant industry. They are redesigning menus and adding cheaper ingredients. Schneiders said in the article that some restaurant chains had not boosted their menu prices for seven or eight years. "In this environment, that's deadly."
Of course, it also raises the question of whether these restaurants got by for seven or eight years without raising prices because they were able to live on flat-priced commodities for nearly a decade as well.