Zea Mays: The cornerstone of an unhealthy diet

Michael Pollan's "The Omnivore's Dilemma" is a brilliant dissection of our one principle need as humans (aside from oxygen); Food, as it is warped and constricted by the guise of perpetually infinite choice in our consumer industrialist society. His analysis of our food culture is most enlightening, in my mind, when he delves into the horrors of our incredibleCorn consumption. I had a vague idea about the tenacity of the dreaded "zea mays", but never knew it was listed (or not listed) among the ingredients in well...everything! On pgs 18-19, Pollan rattles off a list of corn-infused products including but not limited to; Pop, beer, processed foods, glucose syrup, maltodextrine, coffee whitener, Cheez Whiz, frozen yogurt, TV dinners, frosting, mayo, hot dogs, and even Vitamins! The vitamin comment struck me as particularly horrifying, as I assume it is referring to the sweet glossy shell vitamins are encased in. Even something as ostensibly healthy and harmless as vitamins has been subsumed into the Corn machine. I believe this sort of fixation with one food source is highly unsustainable, as it is robbing the soil of nutrients and starving the farmers who have been essentially coerced by corporations to grow it.

I believe Pollan would agree with me that our Corn Culture has fundamentally altered the course of nature and the course of humanity as we know it. Pollan remarks quite shrewdly that we eat/use so much corn we have in fact become "corn people" (p. 23). This is a bold statement that I find incredibly valid. You are what you eat, after all. We eat so many corn derivatives we are lucky it isn't coming out of our ears, to use the parlance of yesteryear. This is an epidemic that has a stranglehold on us as consumers. It is very, very difficult to buy cornless products. Even organic cows and chickens were probably fed corn. Not to say that a little bit of corn is a bad thing. I happen to enjoy the taste, even though it is fairly indigestible. I am waiting for Pollan to discuss the ramifications of a staple food that is apparent in perhaps 1,000s of products that they body can't even break down...see any variety of corn-embedded feces for evidence. Gross, I know, but it seems that not only does corn provide a disconnect between those who grow it and those who eat it (Pollan visits a farmer names George Naylor whose corn farm produces enough food for 129 other people but cannot sustain his own family. The kicker is, George never meets the people he grows for. Indeed, Pollan writes "the 129 people who depend on George Naylor for their sustenance are all strangers, living at the far end of a food chain so long, intricate and obscure that neither producer nor consumer has any reason to know the first thing about the other" (p. 34)) but it is also not exactly an endlessly rewarding life-source. It may have "entered the industrial age and, in time...brought the whole American food chain with it" (p. 31), but what good is that if our bodies have an especially hard time breaking it down! We might as well make our staple food gravel or tiny pieces of plastic. It is disgusting also that the corn we feed our livestock and crush up into our preservative-friendly tv dinners is not edible in its natural form. This is quite a concern, especially when we think that this is the same insidious substance that makes up a good percentage of our bodies and our world!

In the end, I believe our fixation on corn rests firmly in the hands of avarice-driven corporations looking to exploit farmers and make a lot of capital. Why else would they have bred such oddities as the "genetically modified [seed] 34B98" (p. 36), a scary fast growing seed that costs farmers an extra $25 a bag. This is shameless capitalism gone awry. Not to mention the widespread use of pesticides and fertilizers that we developed for "the making of explosives [and] based on poison gasses developed for [world war I]" (p. 41). Why do we put our faith into these corporations so blindly? This book, thus far (and I haven't even read 50 pgs) makes me want to never eat a processed meal again (but I probably will), and I'm sure I haven't even gotten to the juicy parts yet. I am disgusted by the pervasiveness of our corn-fed nation. Tonight it is only fresh foods for me, no Mac'n'Cheese or Hungry Man dinner. Pollan has already made me re-think my eating habits, which is probably something I should have done a long time ago.

Whitman's Instructions

Walt Whitman, preeminent American poet, finds a lot to love about nature in his seminal Leaves of Grass. We get a sort of pastoral beauty in descriptions of "the tinge [awakening] over the willow tree and the mulberry tree/the he-birds carol mornings and evenings while the she/birds sit in their nests/the young of poultry break through the hatch'd eggs" etc. This motif of birth up from the earth for all beings is important and implemented by the poet to reiterate the incorruptible power of nature. Whitman wonders how the land is not poisoned entirely, but recognizes its resilience. This rings especially true today when we are faced with toxically destructive elements invading from every corner of the globe, in our oceans, in the sky, seemingly everywhere and yet nature sallies on.

Whitman, however, remains oftentimes deliriously optimistic. He states that "the winds are really not infectious...[and as] I recline on the grass I do not catch any disease." The world is a re-birth mechanism, it will not be sullied by our bad intentions. It this these intentions, I believe, that evoke Whitman's lamentation that "I am terrified at the Earth..with such endless successions of diseased corpses." Here is a world where everything dies, especially when humans expedite the process. We must recognize instead a utopian "unseen moral essence" that goads us subliminally. We must follow this guiding natural way, instead of mutilating the pastoral landscape with "the echo of teamsters' calls and the clinking chains, and the music of choppers' axes." We must protect our investment, so to speak.

I agree wholeheartedly with Whitman that we need to "build a grander future." Though, I'm not sure, in his epoch, or in ours, we have really made it. The last stanza seems a bit too hopeful for me. Call me cynical but I don't think that in 1874, there was any kind of "genius...clearing the ground for...the true America." In fact, in the time since elapsed, we have seen a bit of the opposite. Whitman's intentions are good and maybe its my proclivity for the harsher ramifications of toxic discourse but I didn't find the ending of this excerpt all that believable. We are not quite "proportionate to Nature", but at least, I suppose, we are trying.