corn, corn, corn

"When I started trying to follow the industrial food chain- the one that now feeds most of us most of the time and typically culminates either in a supermarket or fast-food meal- I expected that my investigation would lead me to a wide variety of places. And though my journeys did take me to a great many states, and covered a great many miles, at the very end of these food chains, I invariably found myself in almost exactly the same place: a farm field in the American Corn Belt. 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"

I hadn't ever given much thought to what goes into the processed foods that line the shelves at the grocery stores. I have made attempts to read the list of ingredients, sure, but food labels are written in their own language one in which you have to have a working knowledge of food chemistry to understand. I was under the impression that most of the ingredients were chemically manufactured in a lab, but in reality, most of the ingredients actually come from one source: processed corn. As Pollan points out, "there are some forty-five thousand items in the average American supermarket and more than a quarter of them now contain corn, this goes for the nonfood items as well." That is a staggering number of products made from corn. People say that we are in the age of technology; without even knowing it, we have found ourselves in the age of corn as well. Never-mind the fact that society couldn't function without technology, we would literally die without corn. Considering the fact that, as Pollan discovers, most of the items that come from the industrial food chain start with corn, imagine all the food shortages should corn not exist! One of the things that surprised me about Pollan's revelation about the industrial food chain was that corn makes up the majority of the diets of the beef on the market. I wasn't aware that cattle ate corn, and apparently they don't! Or at least they aren't supposed to. So much corn is grown that, as the law of supply and demand dictates, the price of corn went down so much that buying corn became cheaper than buying grass. Farmers started feeding the cheap corn to their cattle and found that it was an easy way to fatten them up. Slowly and quietly, corn has started to take over our society. What a world we live in when a large part of our lives depends on something as insignificant as a vegetable.