King Corn

The Paul Revere of industrial agriculture sounds the alarm, but this time the invading enemy is not the Redcoats, it’s that tassel-waving, husk-cloaked “monstrous mutant grass Zea mays.”

A speech by Michael Pollan

"Corn is, in America today, our biggest cash crop Actually in terms of cash, marijuana is a little bit bigger…It’s our biggest… legal cash crop. It now covers an area of 80 million acres; that’s an area twice the size of New York State. It’s vast. This huge monoculture is covering most of the middle West and a lot of the rest of the country like a second great American lawn. Who’d have thought it really? I mean, this was of course the plant of the conquered people. You would have guessed after 1492 that this plant, like the people who grew it, would have been crushed.But in fact, the conquered people’s plant has conquered the conquerors. And I think it’s…the first big irony about corn. From its humble beginnings in Southern Mexico it has insinuated itself into our landscapes, into our food system, into our government, into our economy, and into our bodies."

"…If you are what you eat, and especially but not exclusively if you eat industrial food, like as we understand 99 percent of Americans do, what you are is corn. That carbon in your body, is corn upon corn upon corn. All these products, as different as they appear, consist of carbon that was fixed in a cornfield. The sweetener in the soda, the meat in the Big Mac, but also the corn syrup in the bread in the Big Mac and the secret sauce which also has high fructose corn syrup, that Slim Jim if you read the ingredients, is full of high fructose corn syrup, dextrose, corn starch, a great many additives, and the Lunchables meal, for all of its four different fuels, all four of them are essentially corn based. Even the French fries are made from potatoes, it’s true, but odds are they’re fried in corn oil, and that’s where 50 percent of the calories in a McDonald’s box of French fries come from, is the oil. So even there you’re getting corn. Even in the salads at McDonald’s, you’re getting corn…They’re full of high fructose corn syrup and various thickeners that are made from corn. This is not just an assertion, or it’s an assertion that’s susceptible to scientific proof…."