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What if the United States stopped producing high fructose corn syrup is the real question. Most of the corn crop in the United States goes for HFCS, because farmers get subsidies through the farm bill to keep producing corn to produce more HFCS, which is in everything from bread to soda to cereal.
Really, I don't have a problem with farmers deciding to grow corn for ethanol instead of growing corn to make HFCS. HFCS is incredibly unhealthy and a leading contributor to the obesity epidemic in the United States, as well as the rise in adult-onset diabetes. As for the foods HFCS goes into--it will probably end up being like the recent transfats issue, where in order to say they had 0 transfats, most food companies reformulated their products. HCFS is easily replaced with real sugar or other alternatives like manufactured fructose or glucose. I don't think we need to worry about the price of processed foods going up too much via the increase in the cost of sugar to put in the product. The fact is that our food prices are already going up due to the cost of transportation, so any difference created by reformulating a product is probably still outweighed by the cost of the oil needed to get the product on the shelves.
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If I am not better, at least I am different. --Jean-Jacques Rousseau
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