Corn

Page history last edited by PBworks 16 years, 11 months ago

I took a biological anthropology class, called Health, Food, and Culture by Dr. Dixon. In her class she addresses the use of corn syrup in almost every American product.

Maize (Originally "corn" was a generic English word for any kind of grain, even a grain of salt--hence "corned beef") itself is good for you. It gives you energy and binds to bile to clean out your intestines. It was part of the trilogy of plants, Three Sisters Crop--Corn, Beans, Squash for Native Americans. Dr Dixon assigned a necessary book on the use of corn in the U.S. by Michael Pollan, titled "The Omnivore's Dilemma". The first chapter in the book is titled The Plant: Corn's Conquest. It basically boils down to the over production and use of extra corn.

Kellee mentioned that it is very expensive to buy natural foods. I second that. I like to eat healthy, locally grown foods. One of the best places to get natural, fresh foods, is at a market, like the Saturday Morning Market in downtown St. Pete. In Michael Pollan's book, he has a subsection about a naturalist in the supermarket:

When you first walk into a supermarket, a shopper will notice the produce section, with species of food that we can identify: eggplant, onion, potato, lettuce, apple, banana, oranges, and so on. That part of the supermarket is where we are apt to think "Ah, yes, the bounty of Nature!" Venture farther, and you come to regions of the supermarket where the very notion of species seems increasingly obscure; the canyons of breakfast cereals and condiments; the freezer stacked with "home meal replacements" and bagged platonic peas: the broad expanses of soft drinks and towering cliffs of snacks; the unclassifiable Pop-Tarts and Lunchables; the frankly synthetic coffee whiteners and Linnaeus-defying Twinkie. Plants? Animals? We haven't yet begun to synthesize our foods from petroleum, at least not directly.

Chevonne mentioned that, "It is always interesting to understand how something that you consume daily is created." Micheal Pollan does that. He writes:

When I started trying to follow the industrial food chain--the one that now feeds most of us most of the time and typically culminates either in a supermarket or fast-food meal--I expected that my investigations would lead me to a wide variety of places. ... I invariably found myself in almost exactly the same place: a farm field in the American Corn Belt.

Pollan mentions a lot of interesting origins of most foods:

Corn is what feeds the steer that becomes the steak. Corn feeds chicken and the pig, the turkey and the lamb, the catfish and the tilapia, and, increasingly, even the salmon, a carnivore by nature that the fish farmers are reengineering to tolerate corn. The eggs are made of corn. The milk and cheese and yogurt, which once came from dairy cows that grazed on grass, now typically come from Holsteins that spend their working lives indoors tethered to machines, eating corn.

Who likes chicken nuggets, my four year old daughter loves them, just like most kids. Micheal Pollan found that a chicken nugget, piles corn upon corn: what chicken it contains consists of corn, of course, but so do most of a nugget's other constituents, including the modified corn starch that glues the thing together, the corn flour in the batter that coats it, and the corn oil in which it gets fried.

Corn. Read the ingredients on the label of any processed food and, provided you now the chemical names it travels under, corn is what you will find. For modified or unmodified starch, for glucose syrup and maltodextrin, for crystalline fructose and ascorbic acid, for lecithin and dextrose, lactic acid and lysine, for maltose and HFCS, for MSG and polyols, for the caramel color and xanthan guym, read: corn.

Even non-foods have corn--everything from the toothpaste and cosmetics to the disposable diapers, trash bags, cleansers, charcoal riquettes, matches, and batteries, right down to the shine on the cover of the magazine that catches your eye by the cheout: corn.

We are basically made of corn. That book has 415 pages of useful information.

I also came across a term known as slow food, which uses the trilogy of plants in their recipe. Everyone should take a look at the slow food movement, here in the U.S.

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