The problem my readers (and even I) have run into is this: Is corn really bad?
I realized that it is even hard for me to go back through my previous posts and try to map out for people what I have discovered on my corn journies. I’m adding this page as a quick reference guide to what I’ve learned so far.
Is corn really bad?
- Nutritionally, corn has healthful benefits including being a source of fiber, folate, and vitamin C. However, corn is actually a grain not a vegetable, so it is higher in calories than a typical serving of vegetables and should be eaten in moderation.
- Around 80% of corn is genetically modified to grow closer together, so that more can be produced on less land. We have no long term statistics on the effects of genetically modified food on our bodies, but we do know that pesticide use is commonplace on GMO plants because of an increased susceptibility to pests.
Why give up corn?
- In 1972, Nixon’s second secretary of agriculture, Earl “Rusty” Butz encouraged farmers to expand their farms and grow more corn, while he changed the New Deal system from dealing with loans to giving direct payments to farmers. This encouraged farmers to sell their corn at any price since the government would pay the difference. However, since the government has consistently lowered the target price of corn, paybacks to farmers have consistently decreased. So why don’t farmers stop growing corn and start growing something else? Farmers already have a long-term investment made in growing corn because it is such an efficient way to produce energy. So farmers find themselves stuck in a viscious cycle. They produce as much corn as they can, but when the market price goes down, they must produce more corn in order to sustain the farm. But the more corn they toss on the market, the lower prices fall, leaving farmers broke and without many options.
- I am giving up corn to understand just how dependent we have become on these farmers who can no longer even afford to feed their families on the income they earn from corn. The surplus of corn is going somewhere, much of it into our own diets and everyday products, whether we know it or not. I am giving up corn not to say that others necessarily should, but to understand its presence in our lives and learn about alternatives.
I noticed that you didn’t mention how heavily our monoculture agricultural industry is dependent on foreign oil. Think of huge machines running on oil that harvest the thousand acre corn crops that are more heavily sprayed with pesticides and fertilizers (made from foreign oil). These practices are used to produce corn that will still be shipped in all directions to be processed into the toxins used by the food industry and then shipped to the manufacturers that will include these vile ingredients in their “pseudo-food” products which will then be shipped to grocery stores across the nation. We might just as well be eating oil. It all makes for a very unstable and vulnerable food system that depends on the continued availability of cheap oil. I don’t think any of us can really delude ourselves into thinking that cheap oil will be available for much longer – no matter how many middle eastern countries we invade.