King Corn
Mia Brito
Published on 2/25/19 - Food
If you look in your kitchen, what do you see?
Bread, meat, dairy?
What most people don’t understand is that mostly every food in their kitchen has one thing in common, corn.
Corn is everywhere; it's in everything. Corn, in its true form, is just a simple carbohydrate. Many people think of corn as on the cob with its rows of starchy kernels, but the American food industry has turned it into something a lot more complex than that. As a nation we rely heavily on corn crop. We use it for all types of products, but elsewhere it is used as a key part of childhood nutrition.
Corn in America is, for the most part, used for biofuels and animal feed.
Corn products include:
- Ethanol (gasoline)
- Corn flour, cornmeal. corn gluten, cornflakes, etc.
- Cornstarch, also listed on labels as starch or vegetable starch
- Corn oil
- Corn syrup or high fructose corn syrup
- Dextrins
- Maltodextrins
- Dextrose
- Fructose or crystalline fructose
- Xanthan gum
- Hydrol, treacle
- Maize
- Sorbitol
The U.S. is the world's leading producer of corn. Collectively we produce about 377.5 million metric tons of corn a year. 40% of this corn goes into making ethanol for gasoline and 36% goes towards animal feed. In fact, farmers use it to force feed animals so that they get fatter quicker.
That leaves just 24% of all corn produced for food products and other household items. It's so largely produced because corn is a cheap product. It’s so cheap that the government includes it in as many products as possible. Corn crops occupy about 30% of our countries farmland.
It's crazy to think that the same corn used to made the delicious elotes we buy on the street is used in batteries, cosmetics, and antibiotics. Corn is a staple but it is also causing countless farmers to lose everything they have.
Generally, farming corn is a safe bet, but it's becoming more an more common for small farmers to lose their farms because they are not making enough profit. Yes, these farmers are getting government compensation, but for those small, family owned farms are finding it increasingly difficult to turn a profit when competing with the giants of the corn belt.
The corn belt is a large area covering Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Missouri, Nebraska, and eastern Kansas. There is such an overabundance of corn here that its hard for small farms to make any money at all. Family farms, owned for generation are being forced to give up everything.
So is corn good or evil? It’s a simple crop in theory, but it's so much deeper than that. Corn is a vegetable, it's a starch, its sugar, meat, gas, oil, and paper. It's vital to your everyday life, but can this mass production be detrimental to the average farmers of America?
That remains to be seen.
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