What A Confusing World

The more I learn about the world I live in, the more confused I get. All around us people are telling us to be green, to recycle everything we can, and eat organic. The issues surrounding the environment and conservation are much more complicated than the ad campaigns say though. I am in a few courses at Michigan State University that opened my eyes up to how the world I live in really operates. The most interesting thing to me is the complicated system that is the modern food chain.

Did you know what the item of food Americans eat the most of? Can you guess? Corn. Corn is in nearly everything we eat. I learned this from the documentary King Corn. In the Midwest of America, corn is grown in droves, especially in Iowa. But none of this corn is edible straight off the farm. To make this corn edible it has to be processed into things like High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS), that ever-so-common sweetener in the vast majority of our foods. Now before this documentary I knew about HFCS and it’s presence in our foods, but I had no idea how much corn permeated our society in its various forms.

Corn is not only in our processed foods, but it is also an inherent part of our meat. We feed our cattle, pigs, and chickens grain from corn, even though these animals were never meant to eat such large amounts of corn. It is unhealthy for them and if we didn’t slaughter the animals when we do, then the animals would die anyway from complications of all the grain. The documentary visited a concentrated animal feeding operation (CAFO) where cows were kept in small stalls and force fed grain all day. Feeding them grain brings the animals up to market weight faster, so they can be killed and made into food in a shorter amount of time.

With all of this corn in our diet, the two people in the book discovered that humans in America are actually made of corn after taking a sample of hair. The hair sample showed that the carbon in their bodies originated from corn. America is truly a land of corn people, which Michael Pollan discusses in his book The Omnivore’s Dilemma. The book looks at all of the food in the average American life and traces it back to its origins. The issue of the overly complicated food chain is intriguing and far more confusing than the popular cry to eat local and organic food. The question I am now confronted with – what I should do about our complicated food chain – is one I don’t have an answer to yet. I can’t afford to buy food that promise me they are “all-natural” and I definitely can’t afford to buy meat that is specified as “grass-fed” instead of corn-fed. Should I just continue as I have been and accept there is nothing I can do? I don’t have answers to these questions, but I do know that life in America seems to balance precariously on a few precious resources (corn, oil, etc …) and it seems to me that one day this balancing act will have to fall.