Fritos With Feet

/ from the foodie files

"They are walking corn chips with feet," said an expert on NPR I heard during a road trip a few years back. As I recall, he was speaking about excess corn in the diet, using Latin Americans as an example. Whatever the details, the end result included extra weight, clogged arteries and higher rates of diabetes in these corn-eating cultures.

 

According to science journalist, Michael Pollan, the same might now be said of us in the States, and not because we eat too many corn flakes.

 

Our own hidden "corn toll" arises largely because so much of what we consume is laced with corn syrup and other corn derivatives. (If you doubt it, start checking how often the words "high fructose" or "corn" appear at or near the top of your ingredient labels.)

 

It's no big mystery why food makers love the syrup or we as a nation slurp it up. As Pollan points out, it makes things taste sweet. It makes things look golden. It sates the gluttonous, craving parts of the primal brain. And best of all, it is cheap, accessible, and it makes hay for farms in the heartland (how many of those farms are still family-owned we won't discuss at the moment).

 

There is so much "hidden" corn in our food chain now, tests show its distinctive molecule has become the most plentiful foreign substance in the blood of many Americans. Apparently we have become walking corn chips ourselves.

A continuous excess of corn in the diet is as hard on the liver as drinking too much alchohol, Pollan contended this weekend in his own NPR interview (details below). But the average American rarely connects those dots partly because it's too rarely mentioned in print. Pollan believes that our next big "inconvenient" truth will be about the many ways we are hurt by what's now in our food.

 

An Eater's Manifesto

Pollan has made it his business to connect the dots on the American diet for a number of years and has written two highly acclaimed books on the topic. The first was Ominovore's Dillemma, and the second just out this year is In Defense of Food. (See Amazon links at end.)

 

For most of human history, what to call "food" has not been in dispute, says Pollan on his web site. Our forebears needed no gurus or scientists to tell them what was and was not OK to ingest. But today it is hard to find any packaged edible that has not been "enhanced" in some way, while "thirty years of nutritional advice has only made us sicker and fatter," he says.

 

Feedlots and Fritos

It's not just the packaged foods, like Fritos, Pollan observed on the radio. Excess corn consumed unseen is just as big a problem in the feedlots where the cattle are eating Fritos too, so to speak.

 

The hub and I happened to pass some giant feedlots along an interstate in CA last week. Hordes of bobbing heads stretched out as far as the eye could see, hovering over long troughs of feed, and the smell, well, suffice it to say you knew the cattle were coming from miles away. None of the big lowing beasts looked as if they were having a very great day.

 

Beef were meant to eat grass, Pollan explains. But it's so much cheaper and faster to raise them in pens than run them out on the range these days.

Pen-raised beef are fed corn, not grass, which results in a number of unpleasant side-effects. A corn-centric diet leaves the cattle more prone to disease and it takes continuous doses of antibiotics to keep their germs at bay. Presto, change-o, about as fast as you can watch a toppling chain of dominoes, we have now messed so much with the microbe ecology that we have fast-breeding SuperBugs that no antibiotic can touch. And if all that wasn't enough, bringing a calf up from birth to slaughter is said to leave a carbon footprint close to 100 tons per animal.

 

If grass-fed instead, that same meat which is sapping our health would be giving us lots of nutrients along with the protein, Pollen contends. But it doesn't take a Ph.D. in Econ to see that the added costs of raising hordes of herds out on the range could make a burger from Mickey D. cost something more like a serving of Kobe beef.

 

Build green, drive green, eat greens

Mother Nature seems to be telling us that humans have now become so dense and so numerous that we need not just to be building green and driving green to keep the planet healthy. We need to be eating greens in quantity if we want our personal selves to be healthy too.

 

I have been hearing for years from Andrew Weil and others that it would be healthier all around to treat meat more like a condiment and less like an entre, such as you see in a classic Asian diet. Now that my cholesterol is hitting a lifetime high (even though I eat almost no packaged food and few sweets), I guess I need to take these meat warnings even more seriously.

As Pollan says in his first food title, all of this is very hard on an omnivore who enjoys her red and white meats as much as her fish and her greens. I'll keep you posted on how it goes with me, and I will be ordering one of Pollan's books and sharing more detail from him downstream.

 

All I will say as a sneak preview is that if you have to ask what Michael Pollan thinks about sushi as served and eaten in Tokyo, you probably don't want to know. But since I am a sushi-loving lady too, I will revisit that particular aspect real soon.

---

References:

o NPR, "Chef's Table" from radio station WHYY, 11/1/08
o The Ominovore's Dilemma: A Natural History of our Meals, Michael Pollan
o In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto, Michael Pollan
o Michal Pollan's web site, including its link list of sustainable food sources


Afternote: Just spotted at Amazon..
Pollan also helps viewers go for the kernel of this issue in a DVD called "King Corn"  in which a review at Amazon says.. "Director Aaron Woolf and co-writers Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis offer irrefutable proof that the US is virtually drowning in the stuff. Corn meal, corn starch, hydrologized corn protein, and high fructose corn syrup fuel a multitude of products, from soft drinks to hamburgers."