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Article Excerpt
Family farmers started to get elbowed out of the food business in the 1950s. Large corporations bought up land and brought efficiency, planning, and mechanization on a grand scale to food production. Corporate agriculture--agribusiness as it's known--increased crop yields and dramatically lowered the price of food. It has radically changed the way we feed ourselves.
Just look at what's happened to Zea mays; that's a giant tropical grass better known as corn. It's been a staple of the diets of many people, including Canada's Native people. More recent newcomers to our continent didn't take to corn at first.
In North America, we eat about ten times more wheat flour than corn flour; that's our European cultural heritage at work--bread, pasta, and pastry was always made from wheat flour because corn was an unknown plant until Europeans stumbled on the Americas. Yet, when scientists examine our bodies at the molecular level, they see a different picture. They see bodies constructed and fuelled by large quantities of corn. Todd Dawson is a University of California biologist who's done research in this area. He says, "We North Americans look like corn chips with legs." That's because corn, pummeled and processed, finds its way into much of the food we eat. Sometimes, it turns up in quite surprising places.
It took the inventive wizardry of corporations to turn corn into the ever-present product it is today. Who else would have thought of feeding it to fish? In its natural habitat salmon never came across fields of corn, so they did not adapt to make it part of their diet. But, scientists tweaked salmon genetically to make them able to digest corn and started raising them in huge shoreline pens.
Livestock that once grazed on grass are now fed on corn. Cattle, sheep, pigs, chickens, and turkeys all turn corn into meat. Eggs, cheese, yogurt, and milk often start out with corn as a raw material.
The central aisles of the supermarket are a corn-rich zone. Turned into corn starch, corn flour, corn syrup, and many other ingredients derived from corn it's hard to find a food product that doesn't have corn in it. Corn flakes (duh!) and just about every other boxed cereal. Virtually all pop and most fruit drinks are sweetened with corn syrup. In his 2006 book The Omnivore's Dilemma (ISBN: 1594200823), Michael Pollan lists of few of the other products that 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, 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 ...
"Everything from the toothpaste and cosmetics to the disposable diapers, trash bags, cleansers, charcoal briquettes, matches, and batteries, right down to...
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