King Corn

Earlier this year (April 22, 2008), The New York Times featured a story entitled "You Are What You Grow" that covered this very topic.

A few years ago, an obesity researcher at the University of Washington named Adam Drewnowski ventured into the supermarket to figure out why the most reliable predictor of obesity in America today is a person’s wealth (or rather the lack thereof).  Today, the people with the least amount of money to spend on food are the ones most likely to be overweight.

As you're story noted, we need look no further than the farm bill, which sets the rules for the American food system — indeed, to a considerable extent, for the world’s food system. Among other things, it determines which crops will be subsidized and which will not, and the farm bill as its currently written offers a lot more support to the cake than to the root.  Using a Twinkie as an example, it is basically a clever arrangement of carbohydrates and fats teased out of corn, soybeans and wheat — 3 of the 5 commodity crops that the farm bill supports, to the tune of some $25 billion a year. (Rice and cotton are the others.) For the last several decades — indeed, for about as long as the American waistline has been ballooning — U.S. agricultural policy has been designed in such a way as to promote the overproduction of these 5 commodities, especially corn and soy.

Ironically, much of the world today is facing a shortage of rice, yet the Farm Bill doesn't really subsidize rice production.  Also note that the real price of fruits and vegetables between 1985 and 2000 increased by nearly 40% while the real price of soft drinks (a.k.a. liquid corn) actually declined by 23%. The reason the least healthful calories in the supermarket are the cheapest is that those are the ones the farm bill encourages farmers to grow.  The "farm bill" is a misnomer; in truth, it is a food bill and so needs to be rewritten with the interests of eaters placed first.

The NYT article correctly noted that devil is in the details. Simply eliminating support for farmers won’t solve these problems; overproduction has afflicted agriculture since long before modern subsidies. It will take some imaginative policy making to figure out how to encourage farmers to focus on taking care of the land rather than all-out production, on growing real food for eaters rather than industrial raw materials for food processors and on rebuilding local food economies, which the current farm bill hobbles.

My friend Barry reminded me that the dinner I wrote about here included yogurt. And yogurt comes in large part from milk, and milk comes from cows.

I was sure that the organic yogurt that I eat (Oikos from Stonyfield Farms, which I wrote about here at http://www.healthcentral.com/diabetes/c/17/24357/greekstyle-yogurt/ ) came from cows that were totally pasture-fed.

Nevertheless, I called Stonyfield Farms to be sure. A very helpful customer service representative told me that the cows that produce the milk that they use are "mainly pasture fed"  and their milk comes from Organic Valley Farms.

The website for that company (www.organicvalley.coop )  says that "All Organic Valley cows are fed a mixture of forages and grains....Corn, barley, soybeans, oats, field peas and flax are grains. Corn makes up the bulk of the grain diet..."

So even if the only dairy product we consume in organic yogurt, we can't get away from corn! Damn!

Thanks for your thoughtful and carefully considered piece on the effect of corn on the national diet. I had not thought of corn in the comprehensive way you have explained it. I think you may be in the lead of a sober re-evaluation of our national diet. I wonder if you could fashion an article concerning how we can change this reality over time and what it would take to accomplish this change. A national movement needs to happen in order for true change to occur. The guidelines I have seen by nutritionists concerning diet have not been reassuring. John Dodson