Saket Vora

My sister has a copy of The Omnivore’s Dilemma that was lying around the house so I picked it up on a whim. What caught my eye was that the entire first part is spent on corn. It is written by Michael Pollan, an award-winning journalist and professor at UC Berkeley, who uses an easy to read conversational writing style as he invites you to follow him on a journey that explores where our food comes from and what it means for us and the environment.

I am currently near the end of his ‘expose’ on corn. And I’m glad I read it. People will tell you that I’m a subscriber to the ‘corn conspiracy’, which I suppose isn’t really a conspiracy if you ask the right people. Corn plays a staggeringly enormous role in America; from the food we eat to our politics. Ask how many ears of corn the presidential candidates in Iowa have been forced to eat with a smile. Check up on how many billion dollars are spent annually on farm subsidies, a practice that is anti-capitalistic and instead often gives wealthy landowners government checks in the millions of dollars. (My facts are loose on this, I admit. But you get the gist). The Coca-Cola I drank while in Sweden was made with real sugar, instead of the high-fructose corn syrup used in America. That’s because there are tariffs placed on imported cane sugar (remember Cuba?), which makes homegrown corn syrup cheaper, despite it being more harmful to produce and less healthy. Pollan’s book greatly helped me understand why corn is so prized: it is the most efficient way to produce the most number of calories per plant. Pollan visits a farmer growing corn, buys a steer and follows it as it goes from its grazing farm to a crowded feedlot where it is forced to eat corn feed (which, as it turns out, cows aren’t evolved to digest well at all causing the cows to get invariably sick) and beef tallow for protein (creepy, huh), and visits a university where they show him how they take commodity corn and squeeze every possible substance from it until its just dirty water steeped in a tiny bit of corn residue (this is fed back to the steers in their feed).

Pollan also shows the role that our friend petroleum plays in all this. The only way our farmers can squeeze enough food from the land is to supercharge it with fertilizer. Gone are the days where diversified farms could use their livestock’s manure to fertilize their crops. The soil needs nitrogen. It gets this from ammonium nitrate, an incredibly energy-intensive product of the Haber process. Energy? You guessed it. Petroleum. It drives our food chain.

So anyway. Pollan’s book has a lot of really eyebrow raising facts and is an easy read. I don’t have any subversive goal to changing people’s diet (this isn’t just about meat, its about all the industrialized food we all eat). I just think we’d all be better citizens if we become more knowledgeable about what we eat.

Strange post I know, but Merry Christmas!