The High Cost of Cheap Food: Fast Food Is Made of Corn

What's so bad about making food out of corn? Ask the people who invented it.

If you are what you eat, and especially if you eat industrial food, as 99 percent of Americans do, what you are is "corn."---Michael Pollan, “We Are What We Eat”

Corn is petroleum based.

In “Fast Food Nation,” Eric Schlosser traces a hypothetical fast food meal to its origins in a representative cornfield in Iowa. Further probing reveals that the fuel and fertilizers that allow vast monocropped fields of corn to dominate rural landscapes are made from fossil fuels. Modern corn is grown with so many petroleum inputs that we may as well call our diets “petroleum based” rather than “plant based.” Only by applying liberal quantities of fertilizer and pesticides, having fleets of trucks to transport the corn from those remote fields, and using more petrochemicals to disguise its natural flavor and texture, is the industrial food chain capable of transforming rows of maize into the thousands of products lining supermarket shelves across America.

We sure wouldn’t buy more than a ton of corn, per person, per year if we had to figure out what to do with this much corn as a dry commodity. But disguised as everything from cake mix to Value Meals, Americans eat and drink 1500 pounds of corn per person, annually.

Why do we eat so much corn-based “food”?

Corn is a commodity.

One reason is because it’s less expensive than real food. Value Meals exist because of the subsidies we pay farmers to keep them producing commodity crops like corn and soy, which are then turned into a dizzying array of industrial foods. These products aren’t good foods to base your diet on, and particularly not the versions sold today. Michael Pollan, tracing the same route as Schlosser, has concluded that the 2.5 times corn production has increased since the 1970s is the consequence of US farming subsidies---welfare for Big Food---and that all this corn is the cause of an ongoing epidemic of obesity. The exact mechanism is uncertain: whether hyperpalatability simply drives us to eat more calories, or something more sinister---highly processed and possibly dangerous ingredients, irradiation, trans fats, carcinogenic rancid oils, genetically modified foods---is to blame.

Most corn is now genetically modified---patented, and possibly unsafe.

The vast majority of corn grown in the US---88% last year---is genetically modified to resist applications of herbicides and/or pesticides, resulting in increased use of these products. Worldwide, 30% of corn is genetically modified and increasing, a practice that threatens small farmers because of their cost and the aggressive way seed producers “protect” their patents by suing farmers in whose fields GM seed has landed. Legislation in Argentina favoring industrial farming practices represents a threat to subsistence farmers there, in the second largest producer of GM crops after the US, while in Mexico, peasant farmers see the incursion of Monsanto as “looting” the genetic diversity of native seed.

The Wikipedia page on GMOs describes the controversy over foods as one of labeling, and in which accusations of bias have been made against regulators. That the FDA has a “revolving door” at the top has been widely documented; GM seed has not so much been tested as declared not significantly different from hybridized counterparts. And while Monsanto tested their corn as animal feed for only 90 days, longer tests on rats have revealed that Roundup Ready corn causes organ damage in rats.

We could all have pellagra, and not even realize it.

Another danger of eating a diet largely made of industrially produced corn is that the corn is not nixtamalized. Corn requires nixtamalization to be eaten as a staple food because it’s imbalanced as a source of amino acids for human health. The principal storage protein in corn is zein, an imbalanced source of amino acids; the nixtamalization process reduces zein, but this protein is prized by food industry. Corn’s amino acid makeup is low in tryptophan, which is converted to niacin in the liver; niacin is an important B vitamin and potent serum cholesterol reducing nutrient.

Traditional corn nixtamalization is a poorly understood process that makes it possible to use maize as a staple food for humans.

“Nixtamalizing turns the niacin in maize into free niacin, allowing it to be absorbed by the body and preventing niacin depletion. It also reduces mycotoxins. [Link is mine. JC] Minerals are absorbed from the lime---especially calcium---which can be increased by 750%. The protein zein is also reduced, enhancing the balance of amino acids. And of course nixtamalization greatly enhances the taste of the maize. Yes, it’s most certainly worth the effort.” ---Erda Kroft’s blog entry on Nixtamal.

When corn has been grown as a staple crop without the accompanying knowledge of how to correctly process the grain, the result has been outbreaks of pellagra, a disease of niacin deficiency. Native Americans, who created modern maize (it does not self pollinate and is very unlike its nearest native relative, teocinte), also developed the nixtamalization process, in which corn is soaked in an alkaline solution and hulled. Nixtamal, hominy, masa flour, and corn tortillas made from corn processed with lime---all traditional foods---can be eaten regularly without concern.

Corn as it’s used in industrial food, however, and regular corn meal, are not nixtamalized, and this is most of the corn we eat in the US today. Since we’re a corn fed nation once again, it’s worth asking whether we’renewly at risk of pellagra. Is our Fast Food Nation suffering widely from depression, high cholesterol, irritability, weight gain, an inability to concentrate, insomnia, and carb cravings because we’re malnourished?

Image credit: photofarmer/Flickr

The Food Economy of Cities

Is it a waste of resources for urban foodies to garden on their rooftops?

Will Boisvert points out to locavores in “The Breakthrough” that transportation is only 5% of the energy used, on average, to get food on your plate, reducing the locavore dilemma to one of choosing between being a “rather cultic” farm share owner and accepting the efficient solution of factory farmed produce from California. But there’s more value in getting close to your food sources than simply saving fuel, and you don’t have to move to the country to get some of the benefits.

Harvesting your own food, even occasionally, gives you more respect for the land and the people who do farm labor. It’s satisfying on an animal level to see and smell the soil and air, and to taste what they yield. It inspires confidence to serve---and is actually more nourishing to eat---foods that you know well and enjoy. Meeting food where it lives advances that knowledge and pleasure.

Boisvert says he’s an environmentalist, not an agribusiness executive, but the ways in which the author of “A Locavore’s Dilemma” ignores the differences between conventional Red Delicious and heirloom Belles du Boskoop in comparing apples with apples, makes him sound more like the heartless businessman behind institutional cuisine than a passionate foodie. Just as focusing on transportation costs in food production is a red herring to environmentalists, focusing on efficiency in food production is largely irrelevant to people whose priorities include health, social justice, and flavor.

The author is correct that a city’s efficiencies force certain lifestyle standards on people in the city that give them smaller environmental footprints. 24 hour subway service is an efficiency that works for the most populous city in the United States, not so well for the Pioneer Valley. But why not encourage city folks, as Shel Horowitz suggests, to use spaces that wouldn’t be otherwise used? New Yorkers are not likely to drop off the grid entirely. They’re going to grow a few salad vegetables, and hopefully take ownership of their diets in a new way.

Consider those rooftop greens a gateway drug to lining up like “junkies,” as Boisvert describes those of us with farm shares. Some items in the reasonably priced (for organic) share box will represent a challenge at first, but the lifestyle changes of eating locally have made us more resourceful consumers: better educated, more confident, with more real answers to the question, “What’s for dinner?”

Instead of having respect for the people who produce his food, Boisvert thinks that growing your own arugula is work properly done by “Mexicans”, middle class urbanites who do it for the vegetables and a sense of accomplishment are suckers, and CSAs are “the worst food deal imaginable.” He imagines fresh produce as no more nutritious than canned , and a hydroponic operation in a Brooklyn warehouse as locally grown food. But canned food is cooked, which destroys nutrients in fruits and vegetables, and hydro is more factory than farm.

In hydroponics, there’s no terroir to convey the distinctive flavors and nutritive qualities of the soil, making locale irrelevant, and there’s no sun as a free energy input for plants. Instead, there are grow lights and vitamin solutions: micro-factory farming. This is convenient for restaurants and grocers that want delicate greens delivered on a just in time basis, year-round, but as Boisvert points out, it’s not an efficient use of energy to produce food. It also doesn’t teach city folk to respect the origins of their food, but to expect it to conform to the same control and mechanization as other aspects of city life.

Every solution has to be localized, even if it partakes of global solutions. In New York City, foodies seeking ingredients from upscale groceries and farmer’s markets can add local hydroponic salad greens to their options. As well as scouring the city for goods, aspirant urban locavores have their rooftops on which to grow, although there is the concern Horowitz raises, that the air up there is no cleaner than at ground level, and not as clean as the air in California, or the Hudson Valley.

But rooftop arugula and hydroponic mache are additions to, not replacements for, what feeds the vast majority of New Yorkers: the fields of not just California, but the world. The U.S. may be self-sufficient in the staple crops that make industrial food, but the foods we eat fresh, livestock and produce, are increasingly grown in other parts of the world. The USDA puts very little emphasis on the importance of fresh, raw, and green vegetables in our diets, as reflected by the tiny percentage of USDA subsidies that go to garden crops, and the gradual de-emphasis of vegetables in dietary guidelines.

Which brings us to the real issue at hand, the priorities on which we base our lifestyle choices. True urban locavorism may be science fiction (or a future dystopia of vat food), but urban food production on a small scale is currently being practiced, if not for its efficiency, than for other qualities important to people, such as freshness, nutrient density, flavor, and novelty.


---Image of NYC rooftop garden credit: Jeffrey/Flickr

Meat and potatoes

Meat and potatoes have gotten a bad rap over the years, and they don’t deserve it. I’ve changed how I source and prepare my food so that I can be sure it’s good, healthy food, all the way to its source. Your meat and potatoes are probably going to kill you, but it’s not for the reasons you might think.

Frying potatoes in freshly rendered suet

Let’s start with the potatoes. How do you take your spuds: pre-fried and then individually quick frozen? Pre-fried, frozen, and then refried? Mash from a box? Unless you’re buying organic, chances are your convenience potatoes are grown with an eye for convenience to the supply chain rather than nutrition and flavor. Conventional agricultural practice requires so many toxic pesticides that potatoes are on the EWG’s “dirty dozen” list of vegetables you should never buy from conventional growers. Who does buy from conventional growers are the commercial producers of potato products: the companies that sell you frozen fast food French fries, hash browns, potato chips and other industrial potato products. And it’s not just the cheap meals that are made with conventional potatoes: just about every restaurant uses conventional produce and frozen convenience foods. Whether you’re washing down drive-thru hash browns with coffee, having a bag of chips with your sandwich, or order a baked potato with your steak dinner, the potato is likely to have been conventionally grown in a monoculture of Russet Burbanks that are sprayed with poisons, as well as being genetically modified to make their own pest killing chemicals.

Doesn’t that sound delicious?

Then there’s the frying oil. If you’re old enough and were raised within a few miles of a McDonald’s, you can remember what potatoes fried in beef fat smell like. According to “Fast Food Nation” author Eric Schlosser, for decades McDonald’s used a mixture of mostly beef fat with some cottonseed oil to fry their famous shoestring potatoes. In 1990, they switched to pure vegetable oil, although they still add “natural flavor” from “an animal source” to their French fries to evoke that beefy flavor and odor. Vegetable oil might be a step up from shortening, which really will kill you, but it’s still several steps back from the healthiest frying choice: their original, beef fat.

People have only started using large amounts of vegetable oils recently. In antiquity, we ate oils from fruits like the olive, which are evidently oily to the casual observer, and can be pressed by hand. The kinds of vegetable oils used today in great quantities, like canola and cottonseed, are extracted from tiny, hard seeds using pressure and heat, changing the chemical structure of the oil and generally making it rancid. Rancid oils are carcinogens. Wellness Mama’s blog post on why you should never eat vegetable oil or margarine includes a flow chart the describes the process of manufacturing vegetable oil. Margarine is typically made from hydrogenated vegetable oil (like Crisco) and has had its fats warped in such a way that they are recognized as harmful: New York City banned trans fats in city restaurants in 2008.

Dr. Mercola points out that Crisco was originally developed for candlemaking, but when that industry declined in favor of electric light, they began marketing it as a healthy alternative to saturated animal fats. Suet has also been used in candlemaking. It is very firm and waxy, and once rendered, is snowy white in color. Old-school cooks in the South and elsewhere swear by rendered animal fats for the flakiest pie crusts and light, crispy fried fish.



Two hundred years ago in Ireland, a family could support itself in good health on an acre of potatoes and a milk cow. Potatoes are a nutritious food, not only energy dense, but full of potassium, vitamin A, protein, and fiber. Raw dairy supplied more protein and other vitamins, as well as the saturated fat essential to life. 

Traditionally raised and prepared pork ribs, collards, and fried potatoes

A hundred years ago, people ate virtually no vegetable oils, and the average American ate about 18 pounds of butter a year. Today, people eat half that amount of butter, but have added 70 pounds of vegetable fat a year to their diets.

The idealized diet in the West now looks like a meal you can buy at McDonald’s: a small amount of lean flesh from grain fed animals (like a chicken breast or beef patty), and the rest of the diet being made up of high-density vegetable fat, like cooking oil, and carbohydrates from vegetable sources, either naturally dense or made so with refining: the white flour bun, soda, and fries. This is a long way from a buttered roasted potato, as it was commonly eaten and enjoyed two hundred years ago, in every regard: ratios, sources, methods, the length and complexity of the chain from soil and sun to dinner plate.
This week, I made a dinner of French fries fried in freshly rendered beef fat, and slow-cooked pork ribs, with a side of slaw. The next night, I ate the leftovers with some garlicky collard greens. The fried potatoes were surprisingly light, not greasy, and the scent reminded me of how fries used to taste when I was a kid. The ribs, from a locally raised pig that foraged, were strong in pig flavor and muscle fiber, not mushy like grain fed pork can be after slow cooking. The meat was delicious and tender and pulled away from the bone cleanly.

This weekend, having ground beef, bacon, mushrooms, Cheddar, suet, and potatoes all on hand, I will probably make a gluten-free equivalent of the fast food classic: a beef burger with all the fixings, and a large serving of French fries. The meat isn’t going to kill us, any more than the fat will, because we’re supposed to eat animals that lived naturally. The ground beef and tallow both came from a grass-fed bull. I might eat some kale with it, but I don’t need to add greens to redeem this meal. Food made the right way, all the way back to its origins in the Earth, will nourish, and I can trust my senses to tell me when I’ve had enough of any part of it. A restaurant meal can end in bloat and regret, but this never seems to happen when I make it myself from scratch.

A meal of conventionally raised meat and potatoes can look identical to one prepared with the right ingredients. Thanks to the flavor industry, you may even be fooled into thinking they taste very similar. Yet the two meals can be different in every important and measurable way, from its genetics, to the health of the organisms when they were alive, to its current chemical composition and nutritional profile. These differences extend to including whether the two meals in question---one produced traditionally, the other, produced industrially---will feed you or poison you, and in what measure they will satisfy and nourish, or discomfort and deplete.