Imagine if beings from outer space knocked on your door looking mighty hungry. You would show them the refrigerator, pantry and cupboards, and they would throw up their handlike appendages in dismay and mutter, "All you have to eat is corn?"
If that sounds far-fetched, go take a peek at the ingredients labels on your packaged foods and drinks. I bet you'll find corn, in one of its many forms, near the top of most of the ingredients lists. Corn is one of the main ingredients in more than 4,000 products found in American homes, even toothpaste. Some processed foods, such as Twinkies, contain more than 30 forms of corn.
Americans have become the true "corn people," more so than the Aztecs and the Incas. If you were to examine a typical American skeleton under an electron microscope, you would find corn isotopes throughout our bones. We have more corn isotopes than any other culture, past, present and perhaps future. Aliens from another planet would think that we worship corn, because most of our modern food system revolves around it.
Americans eat about 1 ton of corn per person, per year. This is not the delicious sweet corn our local farms grow. This is commodity corn, appetizingly called No. 2 corn, and is the main crop grown in our country. We primarily eat corn in the form of animal products.
Cows—ruminants, which naturally eat grasses -- are being fed corn unnaturally. Salmon never would eat corn in the wild but are fed corn on salmon farms. Chickens and pigs were designed naturally for varied diets but instead are fed mainly corn. In 2006, 6.1 billion bushels of American corn went to factory farms and feedlots to be turned into protein by animals, according to the Iowa Corn Promotion Board.
About 755 million bushels of corn went to make corn sweeteners, such as corn syrup, citric acid, lactic acid, sorbitol, enzymes, starches and thickeners. Thanks to the versatility of corn, our consumption of processed sweeteners has risen 25 pounds per person since we began mass-producing the stuff in the early 1970s, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. We also are eating almost 20 pounds more corn in the form of meat; 65 pounds more processed grains, such as wheat and corn; and almost 20 pounds more fats and oils per person, per year, according to the USDA. During this same period, we have seen such food-related illnesses as diabetes, cancers and obesity rise dramatically.
In spite of the surgeon general's warning of an "epidemic of obesity," we still are finding new and more fattening ways to consume corn.
Corn is also the most heavily subsidized commodity crop we grow. Under the latest farm bill, mega-corn growers bite off more than a third of farm payments, or about $51.3 billion. It costs Iowa farmers about $2.50 to grow a bushel of corn, yet they can sell the corn for only about $1.45, according to Michael Pollan in "The Omnivore's Dilemma." Our tax dollars are making up the $1 difference per bushel. This encourages farmers to grow even more corn, which further floods the market and pushes the price even lower. When this heavily subsidized cheap corn is exported to countries like Mexico, it undermines their food security because their small farmers cannot compete.
Corn is also one of the most environmentally devastating crops to grow. Corn guzzles fossil fuels in the forms of fertilizer, insecticides and heavy processing machinery. Each calorie of corn produced requires a calorie of fossil fuels to grow using standard farming practices. When that corn is converted into corn syrup, it requires 10 calories of fossil fuels to create one calorie of syrup. When corn is converted into ethanol, we get about four calories of fuel energy for every three of calories of corn, according to the USDA.
The hidden costs of fertilizer runoff into our rivers, creating "dead zones" in our lakes and oceans, and the devastation to wildlife by growing a single crop on so much land make corn extremely expensive to the environment.
Is there any way out of this maize madness? Well, you could plead with the aliens to take you with them or start demanding that our tax dollars fund saner agriculture policies.
In our country, eating is a political act. Every dollar you spend on food is a vote cast. When you pass up processed foods, with all of their hidden corn, and buy fresh, locally grown foods, you are helping to encourage more sustainable agriculture.
Americans consume more corn than any other people -- past, present and probably future -- according to bone scans. Unfortunately, most of our corn is consumed in the forms of animal protein and processed foods.
