So I began the process of applying for scholarships next year, which for me chiefly involves writing a letter to the nameless faces of some committee explaining to them how I am basically broke, can’t afford school, much less anything else, and how their money will continue to subsidize my education for another semester. It is an easy letter to write this year, gas prices are up, which, in turn, means just about everything else in the world is more expensive… including food.
Americans have an interesting relationship with food: on the one hand we have our foodies, gourmands searching for the next underwater delicacy to eat with their sushi, the next succulent berry to garnish their ice cream, and even coffee beans that pass through the digestive system of a cat, only to be pooped out and ground up and served at $100/cup. That with the epidemic of obesity on the other hand, most likely the product of, well, of corn. High fructose corn syrup is in everything from soda pop to pasta sauce. It is in the bread we eat, the cereal we have for breakfast. It is even in our meat. Yes meat. Corn fed beef. Most American who have never supped on a buffalo burger have never had beef that wasn’t corn fed, and corn fed beef is 5 times as fatty as beef raised on grass. Additionally cattle consume 70 percent of all the antibiotics used in this country because 90 days after you start feeding a cow corn, its stomach rots out with ulcers and they begin to get massive infections. Cows don’t like corn.
And neither, it turns out do I. My earliest memories of eating corn involve my requesting a sharp knife so that I could cut it from the cob, lacerate it and spread it around the plate in a vain attempt to conceal the fact that I hated the way the gooey stuff gets caught in your teeth, not to mention the fact that corn has no substantive nutritional value anymore, now that the protein has all been bred from it in order to produce a more sugary, starchy corn that is good for cows and soda pop.
Time to fess up. I am a twenty-year vegetarian who doesn’t like corn. But I am going to take this message to the masses by suggesting something even more radical. I propose that the most effective way to lower your carbon foot print for a week… it to consume nothing that has corn in it. No corn syrup, no gasoline, and definitely no McDonald’s where the soda is corn syrup, the beef is corn fed and the fries are deep friend in corn oil.
(I used to joke that McDonald’s menu items all tasted the same and probably all came from the same hose that sprayed grey goop into moulds that transformed it into soda, burger or fries, I just didn’t know then that what I was actually describing was corn.)
Are you ready for the challenge?
FYI for those that want to learn more, check out:
The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Pollan
or
King Corn on your local PBS television station
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2 comments:
gee, and I was going to try to make myself feel better by just foregoing the Happy Meal Toy. Surely that's one eency-weency step in the right direction? (And imagine how many fewer plastic bits of junk there will be to step on on our floor as we wander through the house in the dead of night, putting our children back in bed for the umpteenth time.)
I love the no corn challenge and your image of the McDonald's hose spurting goop that turns into fries, burgers, etc. Could the no corn week also be conceptual - no corny jokes?
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