Sousy started an interesting post on the forums called “Big Corn” – which takes as its jumping off point a work by Michael Pollan called “The Omnivore’s Dilemna”. You can read the first chapter of Pollan’s book here (PDF). As Sousy observes, Pollan sees the root of this country’s national eating disorder in the ‘mountains of corn we see piled up outside of elevators every fall.’
Here’s an excerpt taken from The Energy Bulletin discussing Pollan’s book:
To simplify Pollan’s intricate, mesmerizing history drastically, the boom in synthetic fertilizer enabled farmers to grow vast quantities of corn without bankrupting their soil. Corn pushed out pasture-raised cattle and pigs and chickens, as it became more economical to warehouse them together in “Confined Animal Feeding Operations,” or CAFOs, and stuff them full of corn. One hitch: the stomachs of cows, one of the few mammals evolutionarily designed to be able to eat grass, can’t digest corn. It turns their stomachs acidic and makes them sick. No problem, says the machine: Just pump the cows full of antibiotics, which has the added benefit of making them grow bigger and fatter faster, so they can be slaughtered younger. At least most cattle still live outdoors, Pollan writes, albeit standing ankle-deep in their own excrement. Pigs and chickens, which can digest corn, suffer even more squalid existences, as he describes in the lone section of the book in which outrage can be detected beneath his even-handed tone.
The Industrial machine has been fine-tuned to produce vast quantities of processed cheap food. But its cheapness is deceptive. Corn, a farmer tells Pollan disdainfully, is the “welfare queen of crops.” Every bushel of corn currently enjoys a 50-cent subsidy from the U.S. government, the result of a spike in food prices in the early 1970s that caused the Nixon administration to switch free-market tactics. “We’ve been supporting agriculture since the Depression, but we’ve changed the way you do it — from essentially supporting the farmers to supporting the crop,” says Pollan.
Supporting the crop means supporting agribusiness, which leverages cheap ingredients into high profits. Corn is cheaper than sugar, so high fructose corn syrup replaced it as sweetener in sodas in the 1980s, and in just about everything else ever since. Corn stripped to its building blocks and reassembled is now the source for most food additives, from sweeteners to stabilizers to artificial colors and preservatives. In one of the book’s most jaw-dropping statistics, Pollan writes that more than a quarter of the 45,000 items in an Average American supermarket contain corn. “Corn is in the coffee whitener and Cheez Whiz, the frozen yogurt and TV dinner, the canned fruit and ketchup and candies, the soups and snacks and cake mixes…everything from the toothpaste and cosmetics to the disposable diapers, trash bags, cleansers, charcoal briquettes, matches, and batteries, right down to the shine of the magazine that catches your eye by the checkout: corn,” he writes. “Indeed, even the supermarket itself — the wallboard and joint compound, the petroleum and fiberglass and adhesives out of which the building itself has been built — is in no small measure a manifestation of corn. And us?”
Yup — we’re corn chips in clothes.
Pollan was on NPR’s Talk of the Nation last week as well.
You can listen to that interview here.
Update: 5/5/06 Non-Fructose soft drinks?
