Delicious Corn

Let me start off by clearly stating that I love corn. I think corn on the cob is delicious. Nothing quite goes with chili like a good piece of cornbread. Hell, I even like cornmeal mush over Cream of Wheat for a hot breakfast. Corn is one of the Americas greatest culinary gifts to the world (right next to tomatoes and potatoes), and one of the things that makes the dishes I mentioned above so tasty is their expressed need for corn as a key ingredient. Now, with that being said, for the love of god please stop putting corn byproducts in every god damn piece of food produced in the United States. (Please excuse the outburst).

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I really want to know why Corn Syrup and High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) are in the top 5 ingredients in every produced food. Even the whole wheat bread in your average supermarket has both ingredients near the top of the list. To be completely honest, I would a least be a little bit happier with normal sugar in the ingredients because at least cane and beet sugar is additive free and the process for making has been around for hundreds of years and it would diversify our diet options a little. The diversity of diet argument brings me to another aspect of the overuse of corn that I do not like. Most of our livestock is also corn fed. So my beef and chicken is essentially corn too because quite literally animals (including humans) are what they eat. With such a homogeneous diet, at its core, it is no wonder health problems and obesity are running rampant in the U.S.

I hate to agree with hippies because they put a bad face on just about everything I believe in but with this whole organic food movement I think they got it right. I used to think the organic food thing was completely stupid because pretty much everything we consume should be “organic” (I’ve never seen a synthetic cow before) but these days the organic label really means Corn Syrup and HFCS free as far as I can tell.

I could stop this article right now but I’m going to take it a step further into the political realm. With some political will and food standards from the FDA (a painfully stunted agency) the amount of Corn Syrup and HFCS, as well as the amount of corn in livestock feed, could be reduced significantly but out of date farm subsidies keep holding the government back from taking necessary steps to safeguard our nation’s health. Given that it is election season, one clear course of action to reducing the amount of influence corn producers have in modern politics would be to stop holding the Iowa Caucus as the first state in the primary election season. Iowa has had its time in the sun and corn producers have benefited greatly. Lets let some other state bend politicians to endorse their niche commodity. We can have Georgia be the first primary in the nation so that there is a glut of peace products until the next election cycle when the first primary is held in Utah so that they can try to revive prohibition and so on.

To top it off, a lot of our food isn’t competitive in foreign markets like Europe because they have strict food guidelines that won’t allow Corn Syrup and HFCS laden food, but the trade impacts that result from poor U.S. standards are a story for another day.