The Omnivore’s Dilemma – Power of Corn

I recently starting reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan and so far I have found that it is extremely informative and is reshaping the way that I think about food.  So far, I have only completed the chapter on corn, and while I realized that Corn was extremely important to farmers, but I never really thought that I was a big corn eater. I simply didn’t understand to what level it is used in the manufacturing of all sorts of processed food products and in fact the average person consumes a ton of Corn a year.

At the end of the day, Pollan outlines how corn has moved from a real food source to an industrial raw material The process of ‘wet milling’ creates an amazing amount of by products that are used by all sorts of the manufactured food industry – citric and lactic acid, glucose, fructose, ethanol, sorbital, mannitol, xanthan gum,  and the list goes on and on.  If you’re anything like me, you’ve seen these products listed time and time again on product’s packaging but never had any idea where they came from.

Overall, incredibly interesting to learn where these processed foods come from – and Pollan goes on to discuss how we have become an ‘industrial eater’ who has evolved to consume corn is all these ways  into an amazing eater of processed foods. In so many of the food that you consume corn suppliers the carbohydrates, soy supplies the protien and the fat can come from etiher plant. Using these building blocks food is not longer grown – it is manufactured and processed into anything.  It is something that I have totally taken for granted during my life, and Pollan’s explanation will help me make more informed buying decisions in the future.

I expect that this reading just 200 pages of this book will drastically change my diet. This motivates me to move closer to ‘real food’ – that is using more and more real fruits and vegetables and less of the manufactured and processed foods. I have always looked at the nutritional facts of the food that I purchase, but I think that I will play closer attention to exactly what is going into the food that I eat.  It is absolutely terrifying to think that a scientist is taking various corn and soy products to create ‘food’ in a laboratory.

Pollan does an excellent job of outling the history of Corn farming in the midwest and exactly how the economics of farming have brought us to the point we are at today.   I can only hope that the remainder of the chapters make me stop and think as much as the first chapters did.