One of the purposes of this class is to recognize the disconnect that exists in most peoples' minds between the food we eat and where it comes from. This week we begin bridging that disconnect by looking at where it all starts: the modern American farm. We're reading the first three chapters of Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma, which highlight the centrality of corn in our industrial food system. As Pollan notes, with few exceptions, "every edible item in the supermarket is a link in a food chain that begins with a particular plant growing in a specific patch of soil" (p. 17). For over a quarter of those items, the first link in that chain is a corn field in the American Midwest. In addition to being a primary source of feed for industrial meat (the consequences of which we cover later this week), it's in most of the unpronounceable items on processed food ingredient lists and, of course, in ubiquitous high fructose corn syrup, which appears in everything from bread to pasta sauce to breakfast cereal. Perhaps even more surprising are the non-food items that contain corn, including (among many others) cosmetics, disposable diapers, trash bags, batteries--even the coating that gives glossy magazine covers their shine.
A grain elevator (photo courtesy of New York Times):Pollan's point is that all of these uses for corn have been invented to provide an outlet for the corn surpluses that have arisen out of agricultural policies from the 1960s to the present. In a nutshell, the structure of corn subsidies encourages farmers to grow more and more corn, even though the market price of corn is lower than the cost of growing it. Such intensive corn production requires dependence on chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and other inputs that are costly to both farmers and the environment. While farmers operate at increasingly narrower profit margins, corporations that sell them inputs and buy, process, and distribute their raw output benefit the most financially. In terms of the environment, one of the most egregious effects of this system of production is the Gulf of Mexico's hypoxic dead zone, which is a result of run-off from agriculture and other sources into the Mississippi River. (For a good overview, see the National Geographic story "Fish Free Zone" here.)
The following pictures provide a visual overview of the processes that Michael Pollan writes about in the three chapters summarized above:
An Iowa corn field:
Corn leaving a grain elevator by rail (courtesy of Iowa Department of Transportation):
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