After watching "Food, Inc." and reading a selection from Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma this weekend, I keep thinking about our country's dependence on corn. I had absolutely no idea that corn is an ingredient, in one way or another, in things as varied as frozen yogurt and diapers. Although this staple crop is obviously providing much of our nutrition nowadays, I can't help but think that its omnipresence in our diet is a risky thing. Who knows what the effect of so many corn products in our food really is? In any case, it can't be truly healthy to get so many nutrients from only one foodstuff– we need variety!
I watched "King Corn" several months ago, a documentary that focuses on this American dependence on corn more closely. You can see in the trailer above that corn is enormously subsidized in our culture, thus its predominance in the supermarket. It seems that, perhaps due in some part to documentaries like this, consumers are becoming more aware of corn's prevalence and are starting to resist the corn industry's power, as evidenced by the TV commercials we occasionally see trying to rehabilitate high-fructose corn syrup's bad reputation. I think this is just another instance of "the apotheosis every few years of one newly discovered nutrient and the demonization of another," as Pollan put it. It simply exemplifies our culture's need for expert advice on what to eat.
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