Cornless diet, I have failed you

I'd like to begin by saying that I really tried to eat corn-free this week. At first it wasn't so hard -- I stuck to my usual regime of fruits and vegetables and beans. I was about to make myself a taco with my wheat tortillas, and I found out that those were a no-go. Corn starch, ascorbic acid, distilled monoglycerides, fumaric acid, tocopherol. 5 appearances of corn in just one non-corn product! Like Nadine mentioned, the corn-free diet became cumbersome pretty fast. Essentially all the food I buy has corn in it in some facet. Even my fruits and vegetables were probably grown with corn-based pesticides. So there's my excuse -- corn is utterly unavoidable.
Perhaps the corniest thing I gave into was my frozen dinner. This was a dinner of chicken (fed by corn no doubt) and vegetables. Just the chicken breast contained high fuctose corn syrup, corn oil, corn starch, caramel color, and iodized salt (which all in all is less disturbing than the fact that the chicken also contained "chicken juices"). As my meal heated up in the microwave and I read the opus that was the ingredients list, I counted 14 appearances of corn. I kept on thinking about what our guest speaker was said about the food we eat today, something along the lines of: You get out what you put into agriculture and food, and right now all we are putting into agriculture is corn-fed livestock and nitrogen phosphorous potassium-infused soil. What do you suppose we get out of this? What are we really putting into our bodies?

So what am I putting into my body? Corn -- and lots of it. Industrial farming of cheap corn has led it to seep into the products we eat and use every single day. It's really remarkable to think about the ways government-funded research has produced so many uses for one crop. Whole markets of new products -- from dyes to thickening agents to vitamins -- have been wholly constructed by finding every use possible for this crop. It makes me wonder when we'll be making nuclear bombs out of corn biproducts. Just think, my fellow bloggers: what if all the time, money, and energy spent into inventing things like hydroxypropyl methylcellulose and ethanol was instead spent on sustainable agriculture?