You are what you eat, and I am corn

After diving into Michael Pollen's novel, The Omnivore's Dilemma, I was shocked to discover how vital of a food staple corn is- more than 25% of the items in a supermarket contain corn. Pollen clarifies that "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" (19).

It amazes me how distant I am from the food I eat. The closest I have ever been to a growing plant of corn was in a Corn Maze last Halloween. When I recollect on my thoughts of corn before reading this book, I never would thought of myself as a big corn eater or correctly guessed how much corn I actually consumed. I would have only considered the corn that I "directly" ate, meaning that it appeared on my plate on the cob, or among other kernals, or even as popped corn. But as Pollen states, this represents only a tiny fraction of the corn we eat. Each American is personally responsible for consuming a ton of corn every year (85).

After taking a few years of chemistry, I have gotten in the habit of looking at food labels curious to see if I could understand the name of ingredients that compose the food. But somehow it never occurred to me that the ingredients were all basically derivatives of Zea mays- corn. Upon first realizing this, I believed this to be a positive thing. After all, corn is a vegetable, vegetables are healthy, therefore whatever contains corn must be healthy and good for the body. But this line of reasoning is completely flawed, because the corn gets processed so heavily in the "wet mills" and broken down into countless simple compounds that no longer reflect the original nutrition of the cob.

Upon reading the recipes for the Mess O' Greens and Hoppin' John that we prepared in class today, I was relieved to discover that none of the ingredients contain derivates of corn. That is until I thought hard about the bacon... which came from a pig... and most certainly was fed corn. Oh well, I suppose corn is now one of those elements that mankind will never rid itself of because of the way we have come to depend on it. After all, we are corn's koala!