Corn starch, corn syrup, cornmeal. What do all these products have in common? Obviously, corn. Pickles, candy, peanut butter. What do these products have in common? Trick question: the answer is also corn.
Most people don’t even realize the endless list of corn by-products we use and consume every day. Corn by-products make up about one quarter of the shelves at the supermarkets. You may be wondering “why would this matter?” The fact is there may be a lot more negative effects from corn than you would have thought.
The origin of most of the problems corn causes is the massive amount of land it takes to grow corn. To give you an idea, in 2010 around 88.2 million acres of land were used for the crop. Farmers are creating more ways to plant corn rows closer to each other to get the maximum amount of corn grown. But after a couple of years the corn uses up all the nutrition in the soil and that land becomes useless. This means the farmers need to find more land every couple years which deteriorates the soil in another place.
Farmers also need pesticides to keep insects, weeds and fungi away from their crops. But a lot of the pesticides we use evolved from chemicals like mustard gas and nerve poison that were used during World War I and II. Since corn is such a widely grown crop in America, this means more and more pesticides run off into the environment. They also end up in the corn itself or in the systems of the animals we eat that have fed off that corn.
“Corn is what feeds the steer that becomes the steak…The milk and cheese and yogurt, which once came from dairy cows that grazed on grass, now typically come from Holsteins that spend their working lives indoors tethered to machines, eating corn,” says Michael Pollan in his book Omnivore’s Dilemma. Pollan tells readers how cows and other animals that are used to eating things like grass are now fed corn, which is unhealthy for those animals. Additionally, the animals produce waste that then carries the harmful elements in corn (phosphorus, nitrogen, pathogens) which runoff and pollute the soil, water and air. What is animal manure also used for? To plant new crops.
When one mentions this to people, they are rarely aware of it being a problem and are generally shocked to find out about it. Pollan’s goal in Omnivore’s Dilemma is to raise awareness. For more detail on the corn issue and other fascinating issues and problems related to the modern ways food is produced, check out Omnivore’s Dilemma.