Corn, the Other Other White Meat

My Mac runs a "movie trailers" widget that pulls up new up-and-coming movies from the Apple trailers website. A new one caught my eye; Food, Inc.

I took a few minutes to check out the movie. The label says that Food, Inc is due in theaters June 12th and from what I can glean from the trailer it's a documentary highlighting how food corporations are secretly poisoning us with genetically modified animals and plants as well as using derivatives of certain items to create additives used in food that we wouldn't suspect have those items in it.

If that last bit is confusing, let me clarify by saying that the movie reminded me of a series of stories that I had read in the near-past about the corn content of fast food, probably sparked by Michael Pollan's book The Omnivore's Dilemma. A quick Google jogged my memory; an entry on Al Nye the Lawyer Guy's website described, from that book, that a McDonald's McNugget was %56 corn. Of the 38 listed ingredients in a McNugget, 13 were corn-derived. After running through the list of items that are corn-derivatives, it then mentions some non-food-derived additives, including a form of butane.

I also found another link on diet-blog.com that stated the corn additive issue in a very simple manner; when you eat a McMeal of a Big Mac, Fries and a Coke, the bun, Coke, fries, and ketchup, the Big Mac sauce, and the cheese all have corn-derived additives in them, not counting the meat patty made from cows that were fed corn in the first place.

There are numerous sites that highlight the state of frankenfoods and have taken up the crusade to fight the american diet of pseudofood, blaming it for everything from cancers to obesity. Does genetically modified, additive-laden, and petroleum-derived ingredients actually contribute to our health problems? I don't really know.

What I do know is that Joe Average probably doesn't want these ingredients to be removed.

Everything done to create "frankenfoods" is done to increase the product's "quality" while making it affordable. The additives make increase durability of food, decrease the time to have a slaughterable animal, increase yield, and generally make it cheaper to get a couple cheeseburgers for the price you'd pay to get some decent fresh vegetables at the grocery store. And when this is coupled with the government subsidies awarded to those growing feed corn and other filler ingredients you generally help create the great American diet that keeps poor people eating a fatty but cheap diet of bologna and fast food and keeping healthy foods out of their range.

I can get a double cheeseburger from McD's for a buck. My local supermarket is currently selling a pound of broccoli crowns for a buck-fifty. A gallon of 2% milk is two bucks. Greenhouse on-vine grown tomatoes are three bucks a pound. A pound of 97% fat-free ham is five bucks.

Some would argue that while the cost is higher, the value is still enough to justify that cost. This is a topic for another time but at the moment suffice it to say that for many people that impulse dollar purchase getting an entire meal in five minutes is obviously the choice a huge number of Americans opt for.

I think the documentary looked interesting but I don't know if I'll get it or not. I did find in researching the topic a movie called King Corn which I added to my Amazon wishlist. I'm interested in the topic, I really am. But I'm also a bit of a realist.

The foods are modified today to make them cheaper and thus more affordable and easier to store. No direct causation has been established saying that eating a twinkie is going to poison you and liquify your kidneys, and at the same time a lot of these efforts to increase yields for less money have helped in fighting starvation and food shortages.

At the same time the people proclaiming "organic this, no additive that" are so caught up in their own cause that they can't bring themselves to acknowledge the fact that once in awhile these modified foods aren't quite as harmful as they'd like us to think, and I really think that if they had their way we'd see prices for food rise across the board making it even harder for people trying to save money to continue to do so. And the effects of what they're calling for arean't limited just to fast food; it's hard to find foods in the supermarket that aren't affected by the things they're arguing needs to be eliminated. Unless you grow all your own foods yourself, you may be hard pressed to completely eliminate the additives and influences that this movement claims is poisoning you.

Maybe sometime I'll read The Omnivore's Dilemma, but I have a mental stumbling block if I start reading a book that is too far into preaching a case without a good, logical basis on which to argue their point as well as addressing the facts as they stand; namely, we have had a building crisis of health and obesity in America that so far seems very well explained by our obsession with huge portions and overindulging in unhealthy habits in general, not because our McNuggets are more corn than chicken. Maybe I just don't want to hear what they want to say. Maybe I actually have a valid point, that Americans have other issues contributing to problems more than some tiny fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a percent of butane being in food; we probably have more contamination from the preparer's hands than is in the food in that case.

This may be an issue worth exploring. I'm just saying that it would be nice to keep things in perspective.

Someday I'm going to eat a McNugget again. Butane and corn and all. Because they taste good.