…and it’s back

I was recently contemplating when my corn strike should end. I couldn’t remember if I had set a date and didn’t really want to look back to check because I wanted to set a new date: Thanksgiving. I wasn’t sure what the holiday would bring (we don’t usually have a corn dish at our annual feast), but I knew that I wanted this incredibly expensive and much-needed trip home to be a real vacation, at least as much as possible. And so I decided that the corn strike ended when my feet hit midwestern soil. I rationalized this decision by telling myself that I would need to blog about the experience of reintroducing corn into my diet during the last two weeks of the semester, as well as outline how this project will continue for me beyond the semester’s end.

No matter how I rationalized it, nothing mattered once we got to one of our St. Louis mainstays: Bottleworks. A local brewery where my favorite order is a piece of salmon, which comes with a side of maple mashed sweet potatoes and pan fried corn. I was ready to return to corn.

Lucky for me that I did because my Aunt Sue made an amazing new addition to our Thanksgiving feast, a cold vegetable salad filled with corn. Since I don’t eat turkey, I would have been incredibly sad to pass up a side dish like this. (Note: I was too excited by eating corn all weekend and neglected to take any pictures of my corn dishes, so the picture above is simply representative of what was eaten.)

Alternative Food Fair

Last Monday (November 24th), five of us held an Alternative Food Fair in front of the school for approximately an hour. It was Ann (of the sea vegetables), Emily (of the local foods), Matt (of the vegan food), Rosanna (of the insects), and I at a table set up in front of the main building at school. Matt made us a wonderful poster, but since we were short on time, not many got put up, so I think most of those who visited our table just happened to be going by. In fact, we definitely benefitted from the departure and arrival of several Oakland shuttles. We advertised that we would have free samples relating to each of our projects from 3 to 4 pm, but ended up setting up a bit early. When I looked at my watch at 3:05, I was amazed at how early it was since so much of my food was gone. What was my free sample, you ask? Well, since many foods are naturally corn free but wouldn’t necessarily make a statement, I really had to dig deep to come up with what I wanted to hand out. I wanted something that would really get people’s attention. I realized that I really want people to focus not on eliminating all corn from their lives, but to gain an overall awareness of how much we accidentally consume and knowledge that there is food beyond corn. So my decision was to make corn-free corn bread. Sounds pretty crazy, right? Well, people certainly did a couple double takes when I said, “no, that’s not corn bread. it’s corn-free corn bread.” Everyone asked me how that was possible, but no one seemed to question it once they tried a bite. With a mouth full of delicious bread, no one was missing the corn, much to my delight.

Along with the corn bread, I gave out cards with my blog address and facts about corn. I also made a little table tent (which I don’t think anyone took the time to read. it was all eat and run) and a couple of anti-corn buttons which were snatched right up. Overall, I think the fair was a success. We closed up shop early since several of us were out of food. Emily had delicious local tomato-basil-cheese kabobs as well as local clementines and apple cider. Ann handed out spicy toasted nori, which I had never had before and thought was excellent. Matt’s vegan spicy tempeh sushi flew off his plates. Rosanna’s chocolate covered crickets and mealworm chex mix were surprisingly really popular. Some people came over to our table just because they heard there were bug samples, while others were disgusted and walked right by her end of the table. Still others ate some of her samples, perhaps without fully realizing that bugs were inside…

I promised tasters that I would include a copy of the corn-free corn bread here, so voila:

1 cup white rice flour
2 tablespoons Ancient Harvest quinoa flakes*
2 tablespoons sugar
3 teaspoons corn-free baking powder (1 teaspoon cream of tartar, 1 teaspoon arrowroot powder, and 1 teaspoon baking soda)
3/4 teaspoon non-iodized salt
1/2 teaspoon Mexican granulated garlic
sprinkle of caraway seeds
2 tablespoons expeller-pressed oil
1 organic, free-range egg
1/2 cup water

Preheat oven to 425, and grease an 8’’ glass pie plate.
Whisk together dry ingredients in large bowl.
In smaller bowl, combine wet ingredients with fork or whisk. Pour over dry ingredients, combining gently with a rubber spatula just until moist. Do not overmix!
Pout into greased glass pie plate.** Top with 1 tablespoon minced onion and a sprinkling of dried parsley or oregano.
Bake for about 17-20 minutes until lightly browned.
Cool, still in pie plate, on wire rack. Cut into wedges and serve with hearty bowlfuls of winter vegetable soup!

*After frantically running around Rainbow for a good 30 minutes, I finally found these quinoa flakes in the cereal aisle!

**I don’t have a pie plate, much less a glass one, so I filled each of my loaf pans with a double recipe and it worked out just fine. Note that I had to bake them for approximately double the length of time.

Happy Meal?

The bf (or does a ring make him just an F?) found me this great little blog post from Wired magazine called Fast Food: Just Another Name for Corn. The post reiterates and strengthens much of what I’ve discussed on my own blog. Most importantly, the post ties obesity to fast food and fast food to corn, boosting the theory that corn is what is making us fat.

It’s the vicious government-funded cycle that I have been getting at here lately: The government subsidizes corn, making it a ridiculously cheap and convenient feed choice for livestock, who become high-calorie, high-fat fast food, which is eaten for its ridiculous cheapness and convenience and becomes padding on the American body until diabetes sets in and the real money comes in to pay for healthcare. We think it’s cheap and convenient because we don’t think past today’s lunch. Meredith Niles from the Center for Food Safety says, “We’re seeing that corn is the number-one reason that fast food is so cheap and available. U.S. programs are subsidizing obesity in this country.”

Science is beginning to back up those claims and see the part corn plays in this game. A. Hope Jahren, co-author of the fast food study, and her team “analyzed hamburgers, chicken sandwiches and french fries from multiple McDonald’s, Burger King and Wendy’s restaurants in six U.S. cities.” Chemical analysis of both types of meat revealed corn-heavy diets. In fact, 150 of the 162 beef samples “came from animals that ate nothing but corn.” The french fries were also literally dripping with corn, as they were all fried in corn-based oil.

NYU food studies expert Marion Nestle wasn’t surprised by the findings, but conceded that “most people aren’t aware of the extent to which corn ingredients permeate the food supply.”

Jahren considers it a political issue. She says, “When you give a nickel to fast food, invariably it goes right back to the corn industry.” Grabbing a McDonald’s burger might seem convenient, but it’s not doing farmers or your own body any favors. If anything, you’re supporting the government’s continued push for cheap crappy food for all.

Then Came Diabetes

Following along the same idea of the previous post (corn derivatives in large supply=obesity), I thought I’d share some slides on diabetes that my dad handily shared with me a couple weeks ago. A known risk factor for Type II diabetes is obesity. As the corn in our diets has increased, the rate of obesity has risen, and the percentage of the population with diabetes has grown. I’m not saying there is a one-to-one relationship between these three phenomena, but I do think there is a relationship. The following graph represents the total occurrance of diabetes in Americans by age in 2005:

According to this data, one-fifth of the population of Americans over 60 has diabetes. I find that number to be incredible. According to another slide from the same presentation, the total direct medical expenditures on diabetes in America is $92 billion. So all of that money we’re all saving on the convenience of fast food and packaged foods is costing us down the road in medical bills, taxes, and our own health. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather cook.

Corn and Obesity

As I start figuring out what sort of action I want to take to steer people away from corn, I began looking into the health issues related to our corn saturated diets. Apparently, some members of the scientific and medical communities think that the key to our nation’s obesity epidemic lies with fructose. They concede that over eating and lack of exercise are huge components in the steep incline in obesity rates, but even when those two factors are under control, fructose remains as a powerful culprit. According to one source,

“We think fructose makes you obese not simply by the calories it provides but because it also tricks hormonal systems that control appetite…You don’t get a sense of being full so you keep eating. It (fructose) may also be important in the development of diabetes, kidney disease and heart disease.

Fructose naturally occurs in fruits, but is found in cereals, pastries, and of course sodas. So we are not strangers to fructose, though we are now consuming fructose in alarmingly high doses as it replaces sugar in just about every packaged food. A recent study at the University of Florida studied the effects of fructose on rats. In the course of this study, the scientists made some incredible discoveries about leptin.

Leptin is a hormone that plays a role in helping the body to balance food intake with energy expenditure. When leptin isn’t working–that is, when the body no longer responds to the leptin it produces–it’s called leptin resistance. Leptin resistance is associated with weight gain and obesity in the face of a high-fat, high-calorie diet…Although previous studies have shown that being leptin resistant can lead to rapidweight gain on a high-fat, high-caloric diet, this is the first study to show that leptin resistance can develop as a result of high fructose consumption.

So all of this means, if these scientists are correct, that consuming large amounts of fructose, as one invariably does when eating commercially prepared food, causes the brain to fail to send out signals telling you when to stop eating. Not to sound all conspiracy theorist or anything, but how odd is it that we have this giant surplus of corn, which the food industry decided to turn into sugar and add to everything, and that conveniently makes us want to eat even more? I don’t know about you, but I feel a bit duped.

Rethink and Revise

I’m starting to wonder if my original corn elimination plan was the right route to take. Tomorrow I am supposed to present to my class how I am going to get others on the “let’s eat less corn” bandwagon, but I haven’t even completely figured out how to eliminate corn from my life! Not to sound fatalistic, but the more research I do, the more certain I become that it is impossible to completely rid your life of corn. Take for example the article I was reading this morning. It’s list of corn’s presence in our lives made my jaw drop to the floor. A sampling of the big surprises:

• the adhesive on envelopes, stamps, stickers, and tape
• hair spray, breath spray, toothpaste
• aspirin, cough syrup, vitamins
• the lining of cardboard milk and juice containers
• the wax coating given to fresh produce

I’ll admit the list is a bit depressing. We’re not supposed to buy foods in cans because they’re lined with BPA, but cardboard is no better because it’s lined with corn (and so probably has traces of the pesticides used to grow the corn). Not that it’s any huge revelation, but I’m thinking that our reliance on modern conveniences—cardboard and canned foods instead of fresh or contained in glass—is doing us more harm than the convenience is worth. Now, I am definitely not one to preach that we should give up on all modern food conveniences. I may shop weekly at the farmer’s market for my produce and eggs, but I make regular trips to Safeway and Trader Joe’s for my cartons of soy milk and and cans of garbonzos. We are so busy these days that it seems outlandish to think that we could ever cook everything from scratch and “can’ our foods to last us through the winter. Regardless, the food industry is such that there are very few stores if any you can go to and avoid packaged foods altogether. I know Rainbow has an impressive selection of bulk foods you can pack into containers of your choice. But even Whole Foods, who rejected the PLA corn plastics (see previous post) for fears of genetically modified corn sells foods packaged in cardboard and cans.

So what’s a girl to do? I had already been thinking about designing a printable card listing the corn derivatives people might want to look out for while at the grocery store, but now I’m thinking I should take more action to tell people about the ways they can avoid corn (and why) in this confusing corn-filled world.

Back on Track—With Plastic

I’ve been a little lax lately with my blog, so my apologies. You know when the weather changes and you get distracted by all sorts of new things? Well, it happens to me and this time, I was distracted by an overwhelming sense of lazy. Luckily, lazy can get old and I am back to paying attention to what’s important—well, at least trying to. 

So my friend Jessie sent me this really fascinating article from the Portland newspaper on plastics made from corn. I was overall really impressed with the article because it did a really nice job of rounding out the facts. Essentially, the article tries to point out that, while the idea of a biodegradable plastic is nice, without an effective structure with which to deal with said plastic is in place, it’s really no better than conventional plastics. Plastic made from corn is a great advancement, especially considering that it uses some of the surplus corn that we would otherwise ingest as calories and turns it into the plastic products we’ve all come to rely so heavily on. However, it is not the answer to all of our problems.

The article starts out with the good: “PLA, or corn plastic, is made with Midwestern corn, not Middle East oil. Its production releases fewer toxic substances than making petroleum plastic and uses less energy, spewing an estimated two-thirds less greenhouse gas.” A spokeswoman for NatureWorks, one of the primary corn plastic manufacturers, put it another way: “It’s made from plants that can be grown in 100 days, not oil that takes 100 million years.” So OK, the plastic is good since it lessens our dependency on oil and produces a smaller carbon footprint than traditional plastics manufacturing. This plastic also gets its great rep for being biodegradable, a fact which would let us all continue to rely on disposable plastics without adding to landfill waste.

The bad part comes along when you consider that this biodegradable plastic “composts only in high-temperature commercial composting systems, not backyards. It’s difficult to distinguish from regular plastics in the recycling mix. And a small amount can foul recycling of conventional plastic…” So now that we are all conditioned to recycle our plastics, especially here in California where a high percentage of plastics are accepted, we’re told that this new magic type of plastic, which is virtually indistinguishable from other types, is a danger to our other recyclables. I have several problems with this. One is that there is very little information about what to actually do with your corn plastics when you’re ready to dispose of them. I have a corn plastic container from Rainbow Grocer in my fridge right now with some delicious cilantro pesto, but my building doesn’t collect compost. What do I do with it when I’m done?

Well, the manufacturers recommend recycling it, calling contamination worries “overblown.” However, they have “agreements with customers to slow distribution if ’serious contamination’ shows up in a market.” That’s all well and good I suppose, but what good are these new plastics to us if we can’t actually compost them as they are meant to be composted? Granted, the production of these plastics creates less pollution, but they are ending up in landfills where they are as unlikely as traditional plastics to breakdown. Plus, when they do end up being recycled, these corn-based plastics have a good chance of contaminating the plastic that is meant to be recycled.

Whole Foods actually managed to make my final argument for me. Wild Oats was one of the early purchasers of corn-based plastics, but when the company was bought out by Whole Foods, the plastics were dropped because of concerns about genetically modified corn. “Whole Foods packages use plant fiber and compostable cardboard instead.” While I agree that relying on corn for plastics production is better than relying on oil, I think we would be better off growing less corn and returning to traditional farming methods rather than finding ways to turn it into a new product. Or, even better, reduce our dependency on plastics! I don’t always agree with Whole Foods and their relationship with food, but I think they did the right thing here. If there are plastics alternatives that don’t get involved in the messy genetically modified corn industry and don’t potentially taint plastics recycling, I think that is the better route to head down.

Bad!

I’m bad. So bad! I have been neglecting this blog and my corn practices. This avoidance is leading me to believe that I made the jump to get rid of corn syrup and high fructose corn syrup too quickly. Perhaps I should have eliminated those more slowly since they are in so many things. Plus, it was Halloween and candy kept coming my way! I will rethink this latest self discovery tomorrow in between my many classes and do some writing when I regroup.

Sin happens

I’ve been bad. Really bad. Not only have I not written here in almost a week, I never wrote to give something up this week! To make myself feel better, I’ve decided that giving up corn syrup and high fructose corn syrup in one week was a big enough task to spread over and count for two weeks worth of corn quitting. That being said, I didn’t do all that well at out-maneuvering the syrups. My biggest blunder involved trolling the aisles at Target and finding a clearance bag of York Peppermint Patties. Not only were they on clearance, but the inside pepperminty stuff was pink! I could not resist and instantly threw them into my cart without a second thought so I couldn’t talk myself out of buying them. A good 5 or six days later, well on my way to the bottom of the bag, it dawns on me that I never read the ingredients and sure enough, high fructose corn syrup is ingredient #2. Damnit!

I also came across much free food, some of which may very well have corn qualities. I accepted a free cupcake from Kate V. (can you blame me?), a ginger snap cookie during snacks in Contemporary Issues class, and a mini butterfinger today at Arch! I’m not so sure that I will be able to be a good scientist and test my theories about better overall health on a corn-less diet. Not that I’m giving up, but I am a bit disappointed in myself that I am weak in the face of free, possibly corn-filled food.

As I write this, I’m eating a mug full of Rice Dream Vanilla Gingersnap “ice cream.” I got it at Safeway tonight as a Halloween treat for myself since just about all candy has some type of corn in it and my favorite fro yo is certainly out (see previous post about haagen-dazs). I feel like I’m eating cardboard. I had to force myself to finish the last few spoonfuls—it was that bad. I don’t want to say that corn syrup makes things taste better, because I don’t think that. However, brown rice syrup is not a good substitute. Would it be that hard to go back to regular old sugar? Is it still too expensive for us to use on a wide spread basis? And if it is, would that be a good thing since it would force our highly diabetic society to cut back on sweets?

Besides my new revelation that corn syrup free ice cream is the pits, I have been making a few other observations along my jourey. The biggie is that organic foods rarely if ever have corn syrup or high fructose corn syrup. That may sound really obvious, but after all the surprises I had—corn syrup here, high fructose corn syrup there—I really started to think it was in everything. I will have to research this more. My assumption is that it’s pretty hard to make an organic version of corn syrup since (1) most corn is genetically modified to grow close together, (2) this modification makes the corn more vulnerable to pests, and (3) leads farmers to consistently use pesticides. In a quick search I did find some organic corn syrups for sale, but as far as my ingredient reading of late, organic foods tend to leave the corn out all together and find alternatives. Is this one reason organic products are more expensive? Probably. Corn is everywhere because it’s cheap. Choosing to seek alternatives to corn means having to spend a bit more. Because of that, I have been trying to stick to lots of fresh produce, which I can get on the cheap here in California, rather than fancy organic packaged foods that may leave out corn, but leave rather large holes in my food budget.

Corn is king

I assigned myself the movie King Corn a while back and rented it from iTunes. Well, you can only keep your digital rental for 30 days and today was the last of my 30 days, so I guess the assignment came due. Way to go me, leaving everything to the last minute! So I watched the movie today. It’s a 90 minute documentary by two guys from Boston fresh out of college, who decide to buy an acre of land to grow some corn and learn about the industry in the process. Here is its preview:

As you might be able to tell from the preview, it’s a movie very much in the style of Super Size Me. It’s about the two guys’ personal journey through their own experiment, with several surprises surfacing along the way. I was a bit disappointed that their surprises weren’t all that surprising to me. They even had several interview segments with Michael Pollan (who’ve I’ve much quoted on this blog). I won’t sum up the whole movie for you, since that would be rather dull (and you can rent it for yourself from iTunes for $2.99 or watch it on your computer if you have Netflix and a PC), but instead I’ll give you a couple of highlights:

• If you try to grow an acre of corn without government subsidies, you will lose money. Ian and Curt demonstrate this as they determine that it cost them $349.92 to produce their acre of corn (seed, renting the land, fertilizer, renting equipment, etc). Even at a high yield of 200 bushels of corn, which they could sell to the elevator for $1.62 per bushel, they were out a loss of $19.92. As one farmer says, the government payment keeps the industry going, not the true value of the crops.
  
• The industrialization of the farm has contributed to monster sized farms and equally large corn harvests. As tractors took over farm work, a single farmer could work more and more land and didn’t need their kids to help with the farming, so younger generations moved away. As the people disappear from the land, even more farming can happen without houses in the way.
  
• Livestock consume 70% of the antibiotics in the United States. Because cattle were never intended to graze on corn but were forced from a no grain diet to one of 90% corn in a relatively short period of time, more acid is produced in the cow leading to acidosis. If not treated for this condition, the cow could die, so cattle are regularly treated with a low dose of antibiotics to combat this condition.
  
• A feedlot with about 100,000 head of cattle produces as much waste as a city of 1.7 million people. The use of antibiotics in feedlots helps cattle survive the conditions of confinement which are standard to factory farming.
• A piece of corn fed meat has approximately seven times the fat of a piece of grass fed meat. Cows in feedlots are packed tightly into spaces so that they cannot move and merely eat all day long. This allows the cows to fatten up to slaughter weight more quickly. It’s lucky that they do fatten up more quickly because the corn diet they subsist on would otherwise kill them. The corn diet creates an obese animal, such that, as one man says, hamburger meat isn’t meat, it’s just fat disguised as meat with 65% of calories from fat.
• The corn plant that originally migrated north from Mexico had a higher protein content than what we eat today. As it was bred for higher productivity, scientists managed to expand the endosperm, or starch fraction of the kernel, rather than focus on the segment related to its protein. As one scientist said, most of what we’ve done in so called agricultural improvements has actually degraded our food supply from a nutritional standpoint.
• 1 in 8 New Yorkers has diabetes, though many cases go undiagnosed. Type 2 diabetes, which is strongly linked to diet and exercise has boomed along with the soda industry. There seems to be something about drinking calories that doesn’t trigger the same stopping mechanism as eating calories. One soda per day doubles one’s risk of diabetes.