"Water, water everywhere..."

      Pollan, M. 2006. Page 15 -119 in The Omnivore’s Dilemma. The Penguin Press. New York.       

                 Corns importance to the 21^st century North America cannot be emphasized enough. Virtually everything we eat is made up at least in part of corn in one form or fraction. Number 2 corn is grown in vast amounts across the United States, in giant seas of green, yellow and white. As patriotic as that may sound, it is not, for number 2 corn is “basically inedible,” and is a commodity that must be “processed or fed to live stock before it can feed people” (Pollan, 34). As inedible as this corn may be in a pickup and eat aspect, it manages to weasel its way into our diets more than any other plant; The meat we eat comes from cows feeding almost exclusively on this corn (and antibiotics for good measure), the soda pop we drink if sweetened with high fructose corn syrup processed from this over achiever, and even our beloved fast food (gasp!) is made of processed corn. As Michael Pollan states in The Omnivore’s Dilemma the ancient Mayans considered themselves corn people and we must as well (unfortunately in an extremely industrial way). Throughout the first act of Pollan’s ode to our eating habits, he follows  corn from the farm to feedlots to the processing plant to the consumer – an extremely daunting task and one he describes himself as trying  to “follow a bucket of water once it has been dumped into a river”  (Pollan, 87).

                “Measured in terms of output per worker, American workers like Naylor [corn farmer] are the most productive humans who have ever lived” (Pollan, 32). A single farmer like Naylor produces enough food to feed 129 people but unfortunately it “can no longer feed the four that live on it” (Pollan, 34). This is due to the ridiculously cheap price of commodity corn and just how far we break it down. The drop in price causes farmers to produce more corn which in turn results in an overproduction of corn that fuels the system for subsequent turns. It’s sort of like self-perpetuating positive-feedback system comparable to the one used in many functions in a human body (such as childbirth), except the biology is an industrial one. Typical farmers sell their “corn for a dollar less than it costs him to grow it” (Pollan, 53) causing farmers such as the Iowa folk discussed in Ominvores Dilemma to bend a knee and succumb to the corn in order to (ironically) feed themselves and their family. And so the “plague of cheap corn goes on and on” (Pollan, 54).

                Probably the most eye opening part of the book was the section where Pollan visited a feedlot to see the steer he purchased earlier in the year. On top of the horrible living conditions that many people know about (or plead ignorance about), the cows are also forced to eat this corn that we dub as inedible, day in and day out rather than their typical diet of grass. Feeding on corn causes the cows to grow faster so they can graduate from “Bovine University” as the Simpsons eloquently put it, but scientific research is starting to determine that “corn-fed meat is demonstrably less healthy, since it contains more saturated fat and less omega-3 fatty acids” (Pollan, 68). So once again, we trade health and quality for speed and quantity the way only a human would. We force these animals to eat food that they would not instinctively eat for our own profit, forcing them to “trade their instincts for antibiotics” (Pollan, 76). Much like the farmer must do to feed his family, the cows themselves must “adapt or die,” but unfortunately we won’t let them just die (because it wouldn’t benefit us, of course).

                Wet milling, or basically industrial digestion, processes the corn in giant plants to pieces, fractions, and chemicals of commodity corn so it can be used it basically everything bad for your health. Even of love and dependency on fossil fuels is linked to processing corn as for every “one calorie of processed food it [wet milling] produces, another ten calories of fossil fuel energy is burned” (Pollan, 88). The processed food industry is a fierce one as companies bide for the best new product for as long as they can before their competition mimics it. The intensely secretive nature of such grandiose inventions as Count Chocula are a “...supply driven business” (Pollan, 94) that I look at as who can make the next best cookie cutter to shape the processed and moulded corn to appeal to a mass audience. For everyone to make money, the overproduced corn must be used in high amounts and this is where marketing tricks us into buying more, bigger, better products that wow our taste buds. Of course super size is not needed, but it is just a few cents more so why not? Because we are fuelling a system that causes overproduction by under paid farmers and tricks us into buying more of the densely fatty and calorie ridden foods. We are wired to enjoy sugary or high calorie foods from our hunter gather roots to allow us to coast from meal to meal easier, and these are what these processed foods are – a food with more fat and calories per square inch than any natural food. They are playing off your natural evolution and biology and getting you to eat more and more of these foods that are putting us in early graves. The entire system of this commodity corn has a sheen of moral ambiguity. What Pollan managed to do in Omnivore’s Dilemma is astounding – it frightens, disgusts, and enlightens the way a message of this importance should.