PrintIn the 1700s, Americans celebrated a revolutionary agricultural achievement: the corncob. Native to the New World, sweet corn emerged from thousands of years of domestication to become a favorite of colonial settlers over the next three centuries. As Caribbean-grown sugar simultaneously made the drastic transition from consumer luxury to household staple, the idea that corn would one day replace cane sugar as America’s primary sweetener would have seemed just as controversial as the idea of corn-based biofuel and bioproducts is today.
These days, corn sweeteners seem much more important than sweet corn. According to the Corn Refiners Association, “Last year, corn sweeteners supplied more than 55 percent of the U.S. nutritive sweetener market.” In fact, Americans are consuming more calories in the form of corn-sweetened drinks than ever before—in Brooklyn alone, about 139 million gallons of soda, equivalent to 20,000 acres of corn, are consumed each year. That’s larger than the area of Manhattan. Clearly, a major transformation in the American diet has taken place. Whether or not we should care that synthetic corn sweeteners have largely replaced table sugar is another question.
Walter Willett, professor of epidemiology and nutrition at Harvard University, thinks we should care—a lot. In King Corn, a 2007 documentary, Dr. Willet states that obesity may be the “most conspicuous symptom of the nutritional crisis occurring in America.” But increased girth is only part of the problem: “high consumption of sweeteners like high fructose corn syrup has quite adverse metabolic effects,” he continues.
The history of USDA agricultural policies and farm subsidies helps explain how our country made the transition from sucrose to corn syrup. In an interview, Gabriella M. Petrick, assistant professor of food studies at NYU, explains that “industrial farming is a product of the post-WWII economy.” During the Great Depression, when people tended to be poor and undernourished, new agricultural practices led to overproduction and, subsequently, cheap food. More recent changes in technological infrastructure have led to an even greater shift over the past 25-30 years: While Americans once ate too few calories altogether, now we tend toward consuming too many empty calories. But according to Dr. Petrick, corn alone can’t account for America’s expanding waistline. “Not to say that corn doesn’t contribute, but it could be a million things people associate with corn, with processed food,” she says. “It could just as easily be soy, which is equally ubiquitous in our diets.”
She adds that our dietary problems probably have more to do with the changing availability of food calories and the lack of moderation in people’s diets than they do with corn. Dr. Petrick points out that it’s easy enough to tell people to eat more fruits and vegetables, but the price of produce poses great limits on people’s food choices and likewise shapes their eating habits. “Obesity is class-based. The working class and the working poor suffer more,” she says.
According to Dr. Marion Nestle, author of Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health, we should focus on reducing corn subsidies rather than narrowly fixating our national awareness on high fructose corn syrup. Those subsidies also fund corn production for use as cattle feed, even though cows’ stomachs are made to digest grass. “Cheap feed promotes industrial meat production, with all of its environmental and health implications,” she explains. “CAFOs (confined animal feeding operations) ... have truly dreadful effects on the environments of the communities in which they operate, are not healthy for animals, and overuse antibiotics, which affects human health. Corn subsidies make CAFOs possible.”
Corn-fed beef can also contain up to seven times as much saturated fat as grass-fed beef. Additionally, livestock is responsible for 70 percent of antibiotic consumption in the United States. It doesn’t take an Ivy League-educated brain to guess where all those antibiotics eventually end up: unsuspecting consumers.
But how did corn get so cheap?
Before the 1970s, corn farmers primarily produced food. But after President Richard Nixon appointed Earl Butz as secretary of agriculture in 1971, America’s corn crop was transformed from a food into an industrial raw material used in food processing.
As a result of subsidizing farmers to overproduce corn, a few farms expanded at the expense of many other smaller family farms. As expected, those small family farms gradually disappeared while major agribusiness corporations flourished.
Over the course of the next 10 years, $190 billion in taxes will go towards corn subsidies. Our tax dollars are subsidizing junk food corporations’ cheap use of high fructose corn syrup, America’s obesity epidemic, and the lack of diversity within our diets—and that’s without taking corn-based biofuels and bioproducts into consideration—things that affect our environment as well as our food security. Perhaps our money would be better off subsidizing healthier foods, like fruit and vegetables.
At least Ina Tsagarakis, Columbia’s registered dietitian, has some reassuring words. “Dining Services prides themselves on preparing food fresh. Most of our ingredients come in fresh and our chefs prepare meals each and every day,” she says. “When you use fresh ingredients, you do not have to worry about HFCS [high fructose corn syrup]. Some prepared products may have HFCS, but as mentioned, our use of prepackaged, convenience foods is minimal. Only the Regular Russian Dressing and fountain soda contain HFCS.”
Then again, she also admits, “While we surely try to purchase local meats at every opportunity and our meats are sometimes provided by local farms and are pasture-raised and antibiotic-free, the majority is produced by conventional methods.” That’s right: government-subsidized corn.