Down With King Corn, Part 1

"Down With King Corn" is a two-part series highlighting how cheap, commodity corn creates problems for our health, farmers, and the environment. Click here to read Part Two.

To those of us familiar with the sustainable food movement, it's obvious why corn is so maligned and why the industry's recent attempts to improve the cob's public image are so laughable. But not all of us have read The Omnivore's Dilemma, so here's an overview reminding us precisely why our nation's flood of cheap corn (along with it's companion crop, soy) present some of the biggest problems for our health, farmers, and environment.

As the Corn Farmers Coalition so helpfully points out, the U.S. government has worked vigorously and effectively (whoever said the government couldn't get anything done?) to ensure that corn is overproduced and cheap. That's achieved primarily through millions of dollars in subsidies that leave farmers chasing an ever-lowering bar. As their profit margins decrease, farmers must grow more and more corn to stay afloat, creating a corn surplus that of course drives corn prices even lower. It's a cyclical system that's gone on for decades, providing America with more corn than we even know what to do with.

Thus, commodity corn (which is distinct from the sweet corn we eat directly) is the source of the majority of the calories we Americans consume. Corn comes packaged as ingredients like cornmeal, corn syrup, and cornstarch; as animal feed; or as processed food additives like high fructose corn syrup, maltodextrin, xanthan gum, or mono- and di-glycerides. In fact, it's almost impossible to find a packaged food in the supermarket that doesn't contain corn. This is problematic because the more that corn is processed, the more it becomes just empty calories that serve a particular manufacturing purpose. Corn can make food sweeter or improve its texture, but it provides almost no nutritional value. As food scientists come up with new ways to rearrange corn molecules, they're able to cram more and more calories into the same amount of food. That means the public is consuming an increasing number of calories with every bite. And suddenly it becomes clear why we have an obesity epidemic.

High fructose corn syrup is an especially prevalent problem. There is some evidence that it may be worse for you than sugar and that it may regularly be tainted with mercury. But even if high fructose corn syrup were equivalent to table sugar (as the corn lobby would have us believe), it's still a big problem simply because it's so inexpensive. The syrup is so sweet and so cheap that food companies love to add it to almost anything they can, simultaneously skyrocketing our consumption of sugar and calories. The result is our current epidemic of obesity and diabetes.

I wish it weren't so, but corn's bad reputation doesn't end here. Stay tuned for the next installment of Change.org's two-part "Down With King Corn" series.

Photo credit: Darwin Bell via Flickr