Corn Feeds the Profits of Agribusiness
Big Corporations Control the Production of Food in North America
Mar 13, 2009
Just look at what’s happened to Zea mays; that’s a giant tropical grass better known as corn.
In North America, we eat about ten times more wheat flour than corn flour; that’s our European cultural heritage at work - bread, pasta, and pastry was always made from wheat flour because corn was an unknown plant until Europeans stumbled on the Americas.
Yet, when scientists examine our bodies at the molecular level, they see a different picture. They see bodies constructed and fuelled by large quantities of corn. Todd Dawson is a University of California biologist who’s done research in this area. He says, “We North Americans look like corn chips with legs.”
Corn Turns up in Most Foods
Corn, pummeled and processed, finds its way into much most foods. Sometimes, it turns up in quite surprising places.
Livestock that once grazed on grass are now fed on corn. Cattle, sheep, pigs, chickens, and turkeys all turn corn into meat. Eggs, cheese, yogurt, and milk often start out with corn as a raw material.
The central aisles of the supermarket are a corn-rich zone. Turned into corn starch, corn flour, corn syrup, and many other ingredients derived from corn it’s hard to find a food product that doesn’t have corn in it. Corn flakes (duh!) and just about every other boxed cereal. Virtually all pop and most fruit drinks are sweetened with corn syrup.
In his 2006 book The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan lists of few of the other products that contain corn: “Everything from toothpaste and cosmetics to the disposable diapers, trash bags, cleansers, charcoal briquettes, matches, and batteries, right down to the shine on the cover of the magazine that catches your eye by the checkout: corn.”
And now, corn is turning up in our gasoline tanks as ethanol.
High Fructose Corn Syrup
Humans are hard-wired to seek out sweet flavours; that’s why we gulp down so much HFCS. Never heard of it? It stands for high fructose corn syrup and you’d be hard pressed to get through a day without ingesting some of it. HFCS came on the market in the 1980s and has become wildly successful. It is a low-cost sweetener used in most fast foods and in a very wide variety of prepared grocery items.
Dr. George Bray is a professor of medicine at Louisiana State University and is an obesity researcher. He says that HFCS is at least partly responsible for the obesity epidemic that is sweeping much of the Western world.
One corporation, Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), controls about 35 percent of the high fructose corn syrup market.
Corn Attracts Subsidies
ADM is a much-criticized company for the way it operates. The Cato Institute (a right-wing U.S. think tank) says the company “has been the most prominent recipient of corporate welfare in recent U.S. history. ADM and its chairman Dwayne Andreas have lavishly fertilized both political parties (Republican and Democrat) with millions of dollars in handouts and in return have reaped billion-dollar windfalls from taxpayers and consumers.” Those handouts come in the form of massive government subsidies to corn producers.
Richard Manning documents this in his 2004 book Against the Grain. Manning says that in the early 1980s, Archer Daniels Midland paid for a huge lobbying effort in Washington. The goal was to persuade the U.S. government to limit the imports of sugar. The campaign was successful. Cutting the amount of sugar imported into the country had the effect of forcing up its price; exactly what ADM wanted.
The price of sugar was now higher than high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) causing a wholesale switch to the ADM product. Today, HFCS is the dominant sweetener in North America; 42 percent of the corn grown in the U.S. goes into making it. If it weren’t for ADM’s lobbying efforts, no market for it would exist.
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