"Processed Corn, Walking"

Every time I read a new book or see a new documentary on modern day food practices, it astounds me that I could have been so uninformed about what I'm putting into my stomach before knowing all of this new-found information. Before reading Michael Pollan's food-conscious narrative, though, I thought that it would be pretty standard in terms of books written about food -- it would go into a "The Jungle"-esque description of a meat-packing plant or a slaughterhouse, revealing the true nature behind fast food while providing a wealth of knowledge that would probably go along with "Food Inc."'s premise. Turns out...I was wrong. The main focus of this section of The Omnivore's Dilemma : CORN. Corn, corn, corn, and more corn. I knew that corn was a pretty big ingredient in many of the foods we eat, but I had absolutely no idea that every food we eat is basically entirely comprised of it.
Out of all the books and articles we've read for this class, The Omnivore's Dilemma is definitely the least like a memoir. Bourdain's book was full of voice and personal experience, Bik's was a story of her childhood, and the New Yorker article was about a woman's travel and food experiences and how they tie together. Pollan's book is almost entirely factually based, geared towards informing us about food -- not food as an experience, but food as what it is in its literal form. I found that the parts about experiences that he had while finding more out about food were the most interesting; when he and his family went to MacDonald's, or when he spent time with the steers. This book definitely doesn't have as much voice or personality as any of the others we've read, and at times I found myself getting a bit distracted while reading certain parts -- but overall, this book was an interesting and informative book that definitely got me thinking even more about what I'm eating every day at the caf!
I really liked the section about the history of corn; where it came from, how America embraced it as the cheapest calorie available to us. This book is written for a population of educated people, who are concerned about the state of both the country's economic and agricultural health. I really liked the evolutionary concept that kept coming up throughout this section, that corn has adapted over time to how we as consumers utilize it. I had little to no knowledge about corn's function in agriculture and in the food we eat daily, and in this section Pollan almost personified corn -- the corn is "push[ing] the animals and their feed crops off the land" (40), and it's pushing people off of the land too -- I had this weird image of corn with an evil dictator face, conquering all the country's land and forcing inhabitants out of it.
When I thought of cows and other animals eating corn before reading this, I had pictured it as a more humane and vegetarian way of feeding them. Turns out, it's completely horrible. Instead of letting them eat the grasses that their body is built to digest, we're forcing corn into their digestive systems that end up making them sick and actually making their meat more unhealthy for us to consume. Pollan really stresses the importance of speed in today's society, which I can completely see; where it used to take four or five years to raise cows for meat, we've now narrowed it to fourteen months. I know that our population is exponentially increasing and there's an ever growing demand for food, but I have to wonder -- the rate at which we consume food is unhealthily fast, and this not only is horrible for the obesity epidemic but also forces the agricultural system to shorten animals' lifespans using unhealthy fattening methods...is this worth it? Reading about corn-fed animals and their abscessed livers made me worry about this even more than before.