Breaking the Food Chains

Bill and I recently experienced an epiphany regarding the food we put into our bodies and the bodies of our animals. It’s been coming for a long time now, but finally arrived with Michael Pollan’s books, The Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food. We are now looking at our diet from an entirely different perspective.

It was a shock to discover that commodity corn – that dry, golden-yellow stuff that we associate with animal food – makes up the majority of the average American’s diet. But even more shocking to discover exactly how many ingredients are wrenched from the individual kernels at the wet mill.

Commodity corn has had a long and intimate relationship with wet mills for over 100 years. Corn starch, a ubiquitous basic ingredient found in many kitchens, is a wet mill product, one of the first. It is used routinely to thicken sauces and desserts and to lighten deep-fried coatings. It is probably one of the most benign wet mill products, generally safe for consumption.

Wet mills have come a long way since the 19th Century. Now they more closely resemble huge petroleum crackers, extracting hundreds of value-added products from the lowly corn kernel. Corn syrup and corn oil spring to mind, familiar products on supermarket shelves. Then there is HFCS, or high fructose corn syrup, which is made from corn starch, as is corn syrup. The best part of the corn kernel, the high-protein gluten, is shunted off to be used in better animal feeds! Humans get to gobble up the starch and oil derivatives, lucky us!

Take the popular McDonald’s McNugget, formerly called Chicken McNuggets but lately just McNuggets or Nuggets. Breaking down this popular snack’s 38 ingredients, no less that 13 of them come from corn! Just knowing that there are more than 13 ingredients in a simple snack food (I confess, a guilty pleasure I own) that pretends to be batter-fried chunks of chicken is alarming enough. Knowing that 13 of them come directly from corn is horrifying.

The chicken itself is corn-fed, thereby making the chicken broth also a corn product. Then there are modified cornstarch, mono-, tri-, and diglycerides, dextrose, lecithin, yellow corn flour containing more modified cornstarch, cornstarch, vegetable shortening (corn oil), and citric acid. All that from corn! I’ll bet you thought that citric acid came from citrus fruit. I sure did!

But it gets worse. In addition to the 13 ingredients from corn there are are a handful of quasi-edible, synthetic substances that come directly from crude oil. These ingredients include sodium aluminum phosphate, monocalcium phosphate, sodium acid pyrophosphate, calcium lactate, dimethylpolysiloxene, and worst of all, tertiary butylhydroquinone (TBHQ). TBHQ is a form of Butane that is sprayed directly on the McNugget or on the inside of the box to preserve freshness. TBHQ should not exceed 0.02% of the oil in a McNugget. A gram of the stuff will produce nausea, vomiting, ringing in the ears, delirium, and collapse. Five grams will kill you.

I have ingested my last McNugget.

I have also eaten my last steak from the grocery store. Corn-finishing beef is just a fast way to get the beef from farm to meat case. The steers are crammed into small lots and encouraged to eat corn laced with antibiotics and antacids until they reach the peak of marbled goodness. Coincidentally this occurs a few days before the poor beasts start succumbing to bleeding ulcers. Corn is not really a good food for ruminants, their digestive system is not designed to handle it.

The list of ingredients above, derived from corn and crude oil, are not confined to fast food, nor am I just picking on McDonald’s. You will find them in all processed and fast foods to one extent or another. Read a few labels. If you see a lot of these ingredients, words you can’t pronounce, put the box back on the shelf and wander around to the store perimeter where the real food is kept in the fruit and vegetable departments.

We are going out of the supermarket altogether by increasing the amount of food we already grow ourselves. The poultry for meat and eggs, the cow for milk, butter, cheese, yogurt, sour cream, and ice cream, the steers and pigs we fatten on grass every year, and the fruits and vegetables we grow and can or freeze, can help us reach our ultimate goal to throw off the shackles of the modern, industrial food chain and return to the diet our great grandparents thrived on.

Instead of gorging on a steady diet of corn and petroleum products, we will instead dine on free-range meat and produce grown in soil enriched by the manure of these creatures.

Until viable alternatives appear, petroleum can be limited to making our vehicles go and kept out of our daily diet.

Who knows, maybe we will start slimming down as well…