Here's my rant on High Fructose Corn Syrup:
Children of the Corn
We do it more than sex. We plan for it. We worry about it. We spend a good deal of our earned income on it. It can cause anxiety and in certain cases depression. It’s the thing that got Adam and Eve busted in the Garden.
It should be reasonably simple. We’ve been doing it for as long as there’s been life on planet Earth. C’mon! Invertebrates, bivalves, and even simple cells do it.
So who would have guessed that eating would become so complex? When did buying an egg or a carton of milk become a civic act? How did the word ‘consumer’ become an ugly euphemism for eco-terrorist? And how for Pete’s sake, could something we need for our continued existence, the life sustaining food chain itself, have turned into the very thing that may be our eventual undoing?
Anthelme Brillat-Savarin said, “Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are.” Would he tell us then, after looking at our national diet, that we are a society living in the golden age of cornography? If we are truly what we eat, aren’t we the Children of Corn?
Corn Stalkers? Corn Heads?
In the world of the never-ending pickings available to a professional chef and self-proclaimed food wonk, I always find myself inundated with more questions than answers: Carnivore, omnivore, vegetarian or vegan? Organic, locally grown or micro-local? – and yes, there is a difference. Hormone free, free range, cage free? Carbo-load or carbo-phobe? (Are potatoes really the evil rulers of the produce empire?) What the hell is Xanthan Gum anyway and what’s it doing in my fig bar? But the 800-pound gorilla of all food related questions is this; do we really want a steady stream of all things corn funneled directly into our primary food chain?
High fructose corn syrup, or HFCS, genetically modified corn starches, corn-flour, corn oil are just a few of the molecularly questionable ingredients pumped into almost every American breakfast, lunch and dinner. It’s in bread, muffins, dressings, catsup, sports drinks, sodas, deli-meats, cereals, commercially made beer, coffee-creamer and ice cream. It can be found in things we think are by and large healthful –like peanut butter and low-fat yogurt with fruit, which may contain as many as ten teaspoons of high fructose corn syrup in a single serving. It’s the frying oil and the binding agent that is the glue for the twelve, (yes twelve), corn ingredients that make up and hold together the Chicken McNuggets we eat by the ton. Shiver and Gag. And HFCS have covert names too – dextrose and all the di- and tri-glycerides…so sneaky. The meats we consume, even the organic ones, are corn-fed, not grass-fed, as they should be. Fish like salmon, once an exclusively carnivorous species, are now being ‘re-engineered’ to eat nothing but corn. Even the packaging the corn-based-food is shipped and sold in is corn derived, as is the wax on your apples and pears, and your toothpaste, cosmetics, disposable diapers, trash bags and batteries - to name but a few non-edible, but never-the-less kernel derived products. Keeping an elevated awareness level when negotiating the maize minefield in the local supermarket is an especially prudent idea when this idea hits you; out of the 45,000 standard grocery store items, approximately twenty-five percent are made from and feed with…right, you guessed, corn. Side by side with corn, I guess the humble potato is starting to look a lot less creepy and a good deal more benevolent than we’ve been led to believe these last few carbo-phobic years.
Don’t get me wrong, I have no beef with corn itself; after all it sustained a myriad of healthy indigenous people, like the Mayans, for ages. I just don’t want to be assaulted with the presence of its alter ego –HFCS- everywhere I go. It haunts me in the grocery store and I can’t seem to get away from it …kind of like Rachel Ray. And it’s making our country lazy and ill ...kind of like Rachel Ray. As a nation we’re facing serious eating related dilemmas; cardio-vascular disease, obesity and diabetes are driving the health of our nation down and the cost of our health care up. We’re fatter and unhealthier than any first-world country on the planet.
Corn does not cause disease per se. The real culprits are the agro-industrialists who over-produce and Franken-Stein the true stuff until it is damn near unrecognizable and then upload it - super-sized of course- into our food chain. Corn is cheap and there’s an abundant supply of it. More than 80 million acres are devoted to growing corn in the United States, thanks in large part to policies instituted during the Nixon Administration, which control and subsidize corn productivity. And let’s not forget the import quotas and stiff tariffs, which directly affect our diet and health. Since 1982 the U.S. has imposed soaring import taxes on natural cane sugar, (which, unlike high fructose corn syrup, our bodies can metabolize in regulated amounts), making it prohibitively expensive to import the white stuff for use in food production. Lo and behold! Two years later in 1984, both Coca-Cola and Pepsi switched entirely from cane sugar to HFCS in all of their soft drink production. Hello Big Gulp. A vast number of American food manufacturers and agro-businesses supported the import tax initiatives with generous campaign finance contributions. Not good. The government makes it easy for big-biz to produce Franken-Foods on the cheap and let’s face it – when crappy food is decidedly less expensive and more plentiful than whole foods that are grown in a natural and sustainable environment without modification or pesticides, people are going to eat the crappier stuff and get fat and sick. They don’t call it ‘junk food’ for nothin’.
Food is primal, an essential part of human nature. In fact,
many researchers believe our brains may have developed into the sophisticated organs that they are out of the simple need to figure out which foods would nourish and sustain our race and which would kill us dead. Up until now, we’ve been pretty good at it. But times, they are a’ changing. Many of us are not making conscious decisions about the foods we eat. We want convenience. Pile it on and make it snappy. The nuclear family dinner table has become the fast-food joint or increasingly, the car; 19% of our meals are eaten while driving. More and more food manufacturers are designing pre-packaged foods so they can be eaten in the driving environment; Go-Gurt anyone? For the tens of millions of us who are chained to our cell phones, i-pods, laptops, computers and steering wheels, eating may be one of the few visceral, insightful or sensually pleasing experiences we have left. We should be right concerned about what we’re putting in our grocery baskets, on our tables (or dashboards) and into the bellies of our children. Regrettably, most of the appeal of industrio-cuisine is its handiness; it offers families who log long hours at work a quick and easy way to farm out the task of feeding ourselves and our families to the food manufactures that make pre-packaged, pre-processed meals. And as much as I beat on Rachel Ray, I give her credit for devoting at least 30 minutes a day to cooking a real meal. (Even if it’s a really lame one that involves Cheese-Whiz.)
Three of every five Americans are now overweight. Some researchers predict that this generation will have a shorter and less healthy life expectancy than their parents. Enormous changes in the fields of food production and agriculture have left us in a sticky nutritional, economical, ecological and political stew. Our food system has changed more since the end of World War II than it has in the previous 5,000 years. We’re producing more food than ever before in the history of the world (while a countless number of children remain malnourished), yet we have no relationship to the foods we eat or the places it comes from. We know our plumbers, carpenters and computer repair geeks better than we know the people who grow the foods we’re eating everyday. Wait, it gets worse; we don’t know what the foods we are eating will actually do to us or to the environment in the long run.
Here’s the rub; HFCS and the other processed fillers that are interjected into our food supply are making us sick. And fat. There is a correlation between the decline of the family unit and industrial agriculture. Maybe it’s not crystal clear (yet) but once we devote attention and resources to unearthing the overall consequences of our current eating habits, like global warming, the evidence about the evils of HFCS will become incontrovertible. Researchers do know for certain that it takes a tremendous amount of natural resources to produce industrial foods. In the U.S. one-quarter to one-third of every gallon of oil we use goes into producing a single bushel of corn. They know for certain that there are concrete reasons to avoid HFCS in the diet too. In a study on the effects of diets high in HFCS, two groups of lab rats were tested – one group was fed glucose (sugars found naturally in whole foods, such as fruit and cane sugar) and the other group was restricted to HFCS only. Scientists distinguished that the HFCS rats developed multiple health problems. The male rats did not reach adulthood. They had anemia, high-cholesterol, and heart hypertrophy – (in simple terms, their hearts enlarged until they exploded) – as well as delayed testicular development. The female rats fared just a tiny bit better. They were merely more susceptible to cancer and unable to produce live young. Like rats, humans can metabolize glucose in every living cell in the body; however, fructose can only be metabolized in the liver. The livers in the HFCS group of rats looked like the livers of alcoholics; plugged with fat and cirrhotic.
Public health officials are finally beginning to worry in a bigger and broader way. Obesity and type-2 diabetes rates are reaching unprecedented levels in the United States. In 1970, the average American consumed less than one pound of high fructose corn syrup. In 2005 that number jumped to an unconscionable 42 pounds per person per year. Do the math. The USDA did. They are finally connecting the dots. Finally. Even with big agro business breathing down their backs and filling campaign coffers with donations and the halls of congress with lobbyists, it’s hard to flat-out deny that there’s no correlation between disease and HFCS consumption. The amount of processed sugars we take into our bodies matters because it directly affects everything from our weight to how our bodies produce insulin, so therefore, the amount of processed corn products in our diet affects our health significantly.
This mess of diet related conundrums may have you feeling baffled or running to the nearest bookstore or library for the latest “How to Eat and Not Die” book and I’m not sure that I’ve helped. But, wait up. Take it from someone who lives and breathes food; better to simply read the labels when we buy our food and educate ourselves about what we’re really eating. Avoid processed foods and unnatural additives or anything you can’t pronounce. Here’s a good bit of advice from Michael Pollan, agro-sleuth and best selling author of “The Omnivore’s Dilemma”; if your grandmother wouldn’t recognize it as food, best not to eat it yourself. We can’t simply put the onus of our health on the government or big food business or shrug off those extra pounds as the unfortunate result of being covertly super sized. We can no longer afford to harbor the illusion that our primary role is that of the ‘end user’, a defenseless consumer of market commodities. Facing an entire future generation of un-well citizens should be sufficient reason to raise serious practical and ethical questions and force deliberation on food ethics in the public sphere, in educational facilities and in our own homes. Keeping our local economies healthy buy buying locally grown and raised agriculture is more than a quaint or sentimental idea. It’s a matter of critical importance, one that affects every single consumer in this country. I would hope that if I told you that we were unwittingly raising a generation of alcoholics or drug addicts that you’d start banging down some congressional doors. This issue is as important. Get pissed, because it needs our collective attention. So, start small… pack yourself or your kid a lunch tomorrow instead of hitting the drive-thru. Swear off all processed beverages for 30 days. Plan a family meal at least twice a week – sans Cheese Whiz. Learn to read food labels. Re-acquaint yourself with your kitchen. Yes, undoubtedly it’s more work. Shopping will take longer and may be a bit more expensive. We have to put in more effort in order to have an improved food system, but it will bring back the gratification associated with food… real food. One of the sweetest gifts we share as human beings is the talent to choose the best tasting things with which to feed our brains and hearts, as well as our bodies. We are being force fed a pack of lies about the grind and unpleasant pains of food preparation so that food manufacturers have a viable market for their junk foods. Baking and breaking (non-genetically-modified) bread with those closest to you creates community and wellness. Don’t be fooled…cheap and quick food will not nourish the body or satisfy the soul. Eating well perfects human nature and whets the appetite for free will and choice. The human appetite as a whole invites a kind of thoughtful analysis of our culture. Without it, we may as well be made entirely out of corn.
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