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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@gilanet.com>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] The Food Detective
  • Date: Mon, 07 Feb 2005 08:12:35 -0700



from The Food Detective
By Russell Schoch, Tomdispatch.com. Posted February 7, 2005.

Michael Pollan discusses food chains, ecological dead zones, and the
amazing power of corn.
http://www.alternet.org/envirohealth/21185/
...
You've taken a critical look at what you've called "the cornification of
America." What do you mean?

It appears I have a kind of corn obsession. I'm like that character in
Middlemarch, Professor Causabon, who thought he had the key to the
universe, the key to all mythologies. In corn, I think I've found the key
to the American food chain.

How so?

If you look at a fast-food meal, a McDonald's meal, virtually all the
carbon in it – and what we eat is mostly carbon – comes from corn. A
Chicken McNugget is corn upon corn upon corn, beginning with corn-fed
chicken all the way through the obscure food additives and the corn starch
that holds it together. All the meat at McDonald's is really corn. Chickens
have become machines for converting two pounds of corn into one pound of
chicken. The beef, too, is from cattle fed corn on feedlots. The main
ingredient in the soda is corn – high-fructose corn syrup. Go down the
list. Even the dressing on the new salads at McDonald's is full of corn.

I recently spent some time on an Iowa corn farm. These cornfields are
basically providing the building blocks for the fast-food nation. In my new
book, I want to show people how this process works, and how this
monoculture in the field leads to a different kind of monoculture on the
plate.

What does this do to the land?

Corn is a greedy crop, as farmers will tell you. When you're growing corn
in that kind of intensive monoculture, it requires more pesticide and more
fertilizer than any other crop. It's very hard on the land. You need to put
down immense amounts of nitrogen fertilizer, the run-off of which is a
pollutant. The farmers I was visiting were putting down 200 pounds per
acre, in the full knowledge that corn could only use maybe 100 or 125
pounds per acre; they considered it crop insurance to put on an extra 75 to
100 pounds.

Where does that extra nitrogen go?

It goes into the roadside ditches and, in the case of the farms I visited,
drains into the Raccoon River, which empties into the Des Moines River. The
city of Des Moines has a big problem with nitrogen pollution. In the
spring, the city issues "blue baby alerts," telling mothers not to let
their children use the tap water because of the nitrates in it. The Des
Moines River eventually finds its way to the Gulf of Mexico, where the
excess nitrogen has created a dead zone the size of New Jersey.

What is a dead zone?

It's a place where the nitrogen has stimulated such growth of algae and
phytoplankton that it starves that area of oxygen, and fish cannot live in
it. The dead zone hasn't gotten much attention, compared to carbon
pollution; but, in terms of the sheer scale of human interference in one of
the crucial natural cycles, it's arguably even more dramatic. Fully half of
the terrestrial nitrogen in the world today is manmade, from fertilizers.

Our dependence on corn for a "cheap meal" is a fundamental absurdity.
Seventy percent of the grain we grow in this country goes to feed
livestock. Most of this livestock is cattle, which are uniquely suited to
eating grass, not corn. To help them tolerate corn, we have to pump
antibiotics into the cattle; and because the corn diet leads to pathogens,
we then need to irradiate their meat to make it safe to eat. Feeding so
much corn to cattle thus creates new and entirely preventable public health
problems.

In addition to contributing to erosion, pollution, food poisoning, and the
dead zone, corn requires huge amounts of fossil fuel – it takes a half
gallon of fossil fuel to produce a bushel of corn. What that means is that
one of the things we're defending in the Persian Gulf is the cornfields and
the Big Mac. Another cost is the subsidies: For corn alone, it's four or
five billion dollars a year in public money to support the corn farmers
that make possible our cheap hamburger. Then you've got the problem of
obesity because these cheap calories happen to be some of the most
fattening.

We're paying for a 99-cent burger in our health-care bills, in our
environmental cleanup bills, in our military budget, and in the
disappearance of the family farm. So it really isn't cheap at all.

Does this leave you pessimistic?

No. I can't write an article about industrial beef without pointing to an
alternative, which is grass-fed beef; or about the industrialization of
organic food without pointing to the reappearance of local food chains.
Most of my articles offer some modicum of hope at the end.





  • [Livingontheland] The Food Detective, Tradingpost, 02/07/2005

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