Mary Hinge wrote: The Future of Life
You ***MIGHT*** enjoy this book then...
The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
The great edifice of variety and
choice that is an
American supermarket turns out to rest on a remarkably
narrow biological foundation comprised of a tiny group of plants
that is dominated by
a single species: Zea mays, the giant tropical grass
most Americans know as corn.
Corn is what feeds the steer that becomes the steak. Corn feeds the
chicken and the pig, the turkey and the lamb, the catfish and the tilapia
and, increasingly, even the salmon, a carnivore by nature that the fish
farmers are reengineering to tolerate corn. The eggs are made of corn.
The milk and cheese and yogurt, which once came from dairy cows
that grazed on grass, now typically come from Holsteins that spend
their working lives indoors tethered to machines, eating corn.
Head over to the processed foods and you find ever more intricate
manifestations of corn.
A chicken nugget, for example, piles corn upon
corn: what chicken it contains consists of corn, of course, but so do
most of a nugget’s other constituents, including the modified corn
starch that glues the thing together, the corn flour in the batter that
coats it, and the corn oil in which it gets fried. Much less obviously, the
leavenings and lecithin, the mono-, di-, and triglycerides, the attractive
golden coloring, and even the citric acid that keeps the nugget “fresh”
can all be derived from corn.
To wash down your chicken nuggets with virtually any soft drink in
the supermarket is to have some corn with your corn. Since the 1980s
virtually all the sodas and most of the fruit drinks sold in the supermarket
have been sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS)—after
water, corn sweetener is their principal ingredient. Grab a beer for your
beverage instead and you’d still be drinking corn, in the form of alcohol
fermented from glucose refined from corn. Read the ingredients on
the label of any processed food and, provided you know the chemical
names it travels under, corn is what you will find. For modified or unmodified
starch, for glucose syrup and maltodextrin, for crystalline
fructose and ascorbic acid, for lecithin and dextrose, lactic acid and ly-
sine, for maltose and HFCS, for MSG and polyols, for the caramel color
and xanthan gum, read: 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, the frosting and
gravy and frozen waffles, the syrups and hot sauces, the mayonnaise
and mustard, the hot dogs and the bologna, the margarine and shortening,
the salad dressings and the relishes and even the vitamins. (Yes,
it’s in the Twinkie, too.)
There are some forty-five thousand items in the
average American supermarket and more than a quarter of them now
contain corn, just one single diseased susceptible, genetically identical, variety of corn at that.
