Progressive Wednesday

This Wednesday: Corn, from Ascorbates to Zein

September 26th, 2007 by Progressive Wednesday

Problem:

What’s better than an ear of sweet corn rolled in butter and sprinkled with salt and pepper on a warm summer evening, your whole family celebrating the beautiful day by eating dinner on the back deck? Okay, some of you might not like the seemingly endless flossing that must succeed this indulgence if you don’t want that stuff stuck between your teeth, or the flies buzzing around the cobs tossed on the ground, or the “slurp-chomp-smack” sound that Uncle Billy makes while getting half in his mouth and half in his beard, but it tastes good and has become a staple of the American summer diet.

And that’s all right. An ear or two each week during the summer isn’t going to make you fat by itself or destroy our air, water, soil, economy or politics. It’s the corn you don’t know about that will.

 

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Make Progress:

Corn is everywhere. If you walk into a grocery store and pull something off the shelf at random, there is about a 70% chance that it will have corn or a corn derivative in it. The plastic bag they put it in when you leave is made from corn. The carpet on the floor as you walk out? Yep, corn. The tires, spark plugs, and fuel in your car? Made from the same thing you eat at the movie theater.

Corn advocates love to flaunt the list of products made from corn. And don’t get me wrong; I’m all for using every bit of the plant in order to minimize waste. But we don’t grow so much corn because it can be used for so many things; we use it for so many things because we grow so much corn. The government subsidizes corn more than any other crop, so people grow a lot of it. So we find new uses for it. So we need more, subsidize more, and grow more. It’s a vicious (and, to some, delicious) cycle.

But there are things that the government and the growers of this miracle crop aren’t telling us.

• Learn
• Eat
• Install

Photo by this corn-loving picture clicker.

Learn:

With most issues, progressive or otherwise, people usually realize that a problem exists or at least that improvements can be made. We squabble over whether or not it’s worth fixing, how to go about doing that, how important the issue is, what side effects our actions might have, etc. But at least we know that there is a problem. Not so with corn. Here are some of the impacts the over subsidizing and overproduction of corn has on our society, in bullet form for your convenience:

• Corn is the most subsidized crop in our country. From 1995-2005, over 51 billion dollars were given to farmers in the US of A, more than twice that of the next closest crop.
• Cows are ruminants whose stomachs are designed to eat grass, not corn. They are given antibiotics to stave off infection until they go off to slaughter. This promotes antibiotic-resistant bacteria that can be transmitted to humans that eat corn-fed beef.
• Corn strips the soil of more nutrients than any other mainstream crop and therefore requires much more fertilizer and pesticides, and consequently, more gas and oil to produce.
• Hormones and antibiotics given to cows to make them grow faster and bigger end up in our meat, soil, and water.
• Corn acidifies a cow’s stomach, providing a haven for bacteria like E. Coli. Most of these animals are raised in Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) where these diseases are easily spread.
• Compared to 1970, farms (which grow corn) today produce 500 more calories per person each day. We pack away an average of 200 of those calories.
• By many formulas, ethanol made from corn burns nearly as much fossil fuel, if not more to produce the crop as it would to just burn it in our car. Ethanol made from other plants such as sugar beets is much more efficient. Making ethanol is good; making it good is better.
• High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) is the most common sweetener in the country. It is cheaper and easier to make than sugar from beets or sugar cane. But (there’s always a “but”), it doesn’t stimulate the pancreas to make insulin or leptin to let us know when we are satisfied. The result? We crave more, eat more, get fatter, and get sicker. We are literally subsidizing obesity.
• Many scientists are now attributing the latest honeybee die-off to chemical pesticides used in fields of sweet corn.
• Corn is Iowa’s number one crop. Iowa has the earliest Presidential Primary. Need I say more?

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Eat:

We won’t tell you to stop eating food with corn or corn derivatives in it; that wouldn’t be reasonable. But a few changes in our eating habits would certainly lower the need for corn. This site has a list of additives, preservatives, etc. that are made from corn. There are about 600, and the list is not exhaustive. It would be tough to cut these out completely (imagine being allergic to corn), but just knowing how much corn is in your ice cream might make you think differently the next time you’re at the grocery store.

This horse is so dead that it’s totally decomposed, but we’re gonna beat its bones anyway. Buy organic food. Being organic doesn’t necessarily mean that there is no corn in it (corn can be grown organically), but generally there is much less corn used to process organic food. Plus, organic food tends to have ingredients spelled out more fully, making it easier to sidestep corn products. For more info on the benefits of organics, click here.

There are 38 ingredients in McDonald’s Chicken McNuggets. That’s scary enough, but 13 of them are directly derived from corn, and a dozen or so more are processed with corn products. A Big Mac contains corn-fed beef and has high fructose corn syrup in the bun and sauce. And that large Coke has 310 calories from corn. Another reason to stay away from fast food.

Finally, consider buying grass-fed meat. It’s leaner, free of antibiotics and hormones, and much less likely to contain E. Coli, fungus, or other contaminants. Here is a list of suppliers in your state, or you can have it shipped to your home. Supporting businesses that go against the grain (pardon the pun) to provide a product that is ethically superior is a big part of progressivism.

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Install:

I’ve been going on and on about how bad corn is for our economy, our bodies, our land, our air, our water, and even our politics. Hopefully it isn’t all starting to taste like corn-fed chicken by now, but in case it is, I’ll offer up a good thing that corn can be used for: heating your house.

Corn stoves and furnaces are becoming increasingly popular because they are cheap to run, clean burning, and über-efficient. Unlike with ethanol, the energy you save with a corn stove vastly outweighs the energy used to make that small amount of corn. In term of dollars and cents, a corn furnace can save you over $1,000 bucks a year, depending on where you live. But does it get hot enough? Well, they’re controlled by a thermostat, just like any other modern heater, and if you turn it up high enough it’ll get as cozy as a sauna.

I’m not just getting this information from the endless loop of internet articles with as much credibility as an Exxon-Mobile representative talking about the effects of fossil fuels on global warming. Our photo editor, James B. Robinson, swears by his corn stove. And he doesn’t exactly live in Texas. Try Lake Placid. My wife and I honeymooned there. It’s cold.

Here’s a good site with lots of information on corn stoves and furnaces, how much they cost, where you can get them, how much you’ll save, where you can get the corn… the whole nine yards acres. If we are going to contribute to the endless cycle of overproduction begets over-subsidization begets overproduction, we should at least do so in the smallest, most energy-efficient, and most progressive way.

Oh, I almost forgot. Installing that corn stove will get you a tax rebate, if that pushes you off the fence and into the corn field.

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