(This series of posts looks in detail at some of the fascinating aspects of food production identified by Michael Pollan in his book The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006). All page numbers refer to that book, unless otherwise noted. Other related posts can be found here.)

The abundance of corn has made the economics of food shift towards unhealthier foods. If you have a limited budget, you can buy more calories based on corn-based fast-food products that you can from healthier foods. $1 buys 1,200 calories from potato chips and cookies vs. 250 calories from whole foods like carrots; 875 calories from soda vs. 170 calories from fruit juice from concentrate. (p. 108) Is it any wonder that poorer people, in order to feel satiated, are more likely to eat potato chips and follow it up with a soda than they are to eat carrots and follow it up with juice, since the cost of a calorie is five times as much for the latter meal?

In fact, an article published in the January 2004 edition of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition by Dr. Adam Drewnowski (director of the Center for Public Health Nutrition in the University of Washington School of Public Health and Community Medicine) and Dr. S.E. Specter (research nutrition scientist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture Human Nutrition Research Center in Davis, Calif.) reports that the correlation of obesity with income levels is striking. Unlike in the developing world where obesity is often the result of wealthy people eating a lot of rich and fancy food, in the US, obesity afflicts a lot of poor people trying to save money on food.

The study says that:

Energy-dense foods not only provide more calories per unit weight, but can provide more empty calories per unit cost. These foods include French fries, soft drinks, candy, cookies, deep-fried meats and other fatty, sugary and salty items. The review shows that attempting to reduce food spending tends to drive families toward more refined grains, added sugars and added fats. Previous studies have shown that energy-dense foods may fail to trigger physiological satiety mechanisms – the internal signals that enough food has been consumed. These failed signals lead to overeating and overweight. Paradoxically, trying to save money on food may be a factor in the current obesity epidemic.

What are ’empty calories’? This Wikipedia article explains:

Empty calories, in casual dietary terminology, are calories present in high-energy foods with poor nutritional profiles, typically from processed carbohydrates or fats. An “empty calorie” has the same energy content of any other calorie but lacks accompanying micronutrients such as vitamins, minerals, or amino acids as well as fiber as found in whole grains but less so in white flour. Michael Jacobson, head of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, coined the term in 1972.

Generally, unnecessary calories are converted in the body to fat. However, if calorie intake is limited for the sake of reducing weight, insufficient vitamin and mineral intake may lead to malnutrition. Dieticians recommend in every case that nutrient-dense food such as fruit and vegetables be substituted for empty-calorie food.

Drewnowski adds that the drive for lower costs is replacing nutrition-rich calories with empty calories:

It’s a question of money. . . The reason healthier diets are beyond the reach of many people is that such diets cost more. On a per calorie basis, diets composed of whole grains, fish, and fresh vegetables and fruit are far more expensive than refined grains, added sugars and added fats. It’s not a question of being sensible or silly when it comes to food choices, it’s about being limited to those foods that you can afford.

As result of policies designed to produce more and more corn, corn has been on a silent and unseen rampage though our diet, resulting in a whole host of undesirable effects. The massive output of corn has led to the “rise of factory farms and the industrialization of our food, to the epidemic of obesity and prevalence of food poisoning in America.” (p. 62) Since the explosive growth of corn production and cheap food containing mostly empty calories in the 1970s, obesity has risen since 1977 and the average American’s food intake has risen by 10%. (p. 102)

Since what we eat ends up being the source material that goes into creating the tissues in our own bodies, it is now possible to analyze human hair to see how much of us originates in corn. It turns out that the US diet contains so much of corn in various hidden forms that our bodies are becoming increasingly made up of tissues that originated in corn. As Professor Todd Dawson (Director of the Center for Stable Isotope Biogeochemistry at the University of California, Berkeley) who has analyzed the corn component in food and in our bodies, says, “we North Americans look like corn chips with legs”. We have a greater component of corn in our bodies than societies like Mexico that ostensibly seem eat more corn. (p. 23)

POST SCRIPT: Nuns beauty pageant cancelled

Two days ago, I reported on an Italian priest who had organized a beauty contest for nuns to show off their looks, and asked prospective contestants to send in photos.

He now says he has had to cancel his plans because of objections from his superiors in the church. I can’t imagine why.

(This series of posts looks in detail at some of the fascinating aspects of food production identified by Michael Pollan in his book The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006). All page numbers refer to that book, unless otherwise noted. Other related posts can be found here.)

One of the surprising things I learned is that it is possible to track corn as it proceeds through the food chain, even as it is transformed into other things.

One thing that many people do not realize is the amount of a plant’s weight that comes from the air. If you ask people where most of a plant or tree’s mass comes from, they will likely say that it comes from the ground, absorbed through the roots. But most of a plant is carbon, and this carbon was initially in the air as carbon dioxide. During the photosynthesis process, plants absorb this carbon dioxide, retain the carbon, and release the oxygen back into the atmosphere. Some of the water the plant absorbs also comes from the water vapor in the air. Pollan says that in the case of corn, 97% of the plant comes from the air and only 3% from the ground. (p. 22)

Carbon atoms in the atmosphere contain two kinds (called isotopes) of carbon atoms: those containing a total of 12 protons and neutrons (called C-12) and a much rarer isotope that contains a total of 13 (C-13). The chemical properties of these two isotopes are almost identical so that they are usually equally likely to take part in the chemical and biological processes of life. But not always. It turns out that the photosynthesis process is one situation where they differ slightly and this enables us to distinguish the carbon in corn from the carbon in almost all other plants.

It turns out that most plants during photosynthesis create compounds that contain three carbon atoms. Such plants are called C-3 plants. But a very few plants (corn and sugar cane are examples) make compounds that contain four carbon atoms (C-4). It turns out that C-4 plants have a larger C-13/C-12 isotope ratio than C-3 plants, and this signature can be used to identify the amount of carbon in plants and animals that originate in corn (or sugar cane). Thus we can track the amount of corn-based carbon in our food. (p. 21)

The way corn has dominated our diet so that we have become a nation of corn eaters can be seen in how much of the carbon content of a typical McDonald’s meal originates in corn: soda (100%), milk shake (78%), salad dressing (65%), chicken nuggets (56%), cheeseburger (52%), and French fries (23%). (p. 117) Since one in five of all meals in America are eaten in the car (a number that I found to be disturbingly high), we can see how the corn in fast food is dominating our diet. (p. 110)

Perhaps the most telling marker of the power of corn has been the rise of the now ubiquitous high-fructose corn syrup, which has become the sweetener found in almost all processed food. It is surprising to learn that high fructose corn syrup did not even exist until 1980 but now about 530 million bushels of the annual corn harvest is turned into 17.5 billion pounds of it. (p. 103)

But all this corn production and subsidies does not necessarily mean that corn farmers are raking in the dollars. It turns out that most of this money goes to the big agribusiness giants like Archer Daniel Midland (ADM) and Cargill, and food processors like Coca-Cola and Kellogg that turn the corn into finished products like high fructose corn syrup. For example, for every dollar consumers spend on eggs, 40 cents goes to the producer. But for every dollar spent on corn sweeteners, only 4 cents goes to the grower. ADM, Coca-Cola, and Kellogg get most of the rest. (p. 95)

So we have this situation where American farmers have incentives to grow as much corn as they can, while the government tries to keep the prices high, either by subsidies or by mandating the use of corn in fuels (in 2007, nearly 20% of the corn harvest went to ethanol), and food processors find ways to replace other ingredients in our food with corn-based products that can provide high profit margins.

Recently the price of corn has risen sharply but the relationship of the price of corn that the farmers get to the price we pay for food is not simple.

When there are cost shocks in the food production system due to changes in the commodity or farm product market, most retailers respond by passing on a fraction of their higher costs to consumers. Among factors affecting this pass-through rate is the level of processing and value-added services that take place between the farmgate and the grocery store aisle. Products that require more processing and packaging are usually less directly linked to changes in farm prices, while the price of less processed foods more closely follows the changes in farm prices. For example, changes in farm prices for eggs, fresh fruit, and fresh vegetables show up in more volatile retail prices for these less processed foods.

What people may not realize is that most of the cost of the food we purchase has little to do with the actual food.

For example, an 18-ounce box of corn flakes contains about 12.9 ounces of milled field corn. When field corn is priced at $2.28 per bushel (the 20-year average), the actual value of corn represented in the box of corn flakes is about 3.3 cents (1 bushel = 56 pounds). (The remainder is packaging, processing, advertising, transportation, and other costs.) At $3.40 per bushel, the average price in 2007, the value is about 4.9 cents. The 49-percent increase in corn prices would be expected to raise the price of a box of corn flakes by about 1.6 cents, or 0.5 percent, assuming no other cost increases.

So despite the dominance of corn in the food chain, the price of almost all our foods are do not fluctuate as widely as the prices that farmers get for their corn.

POST SCRIPT: Darwin talk

David Quammen, author of the biography The Reluctant Mr. Darwin will be the featured speaker at CWRU’s fall convocation at 4:30 pm in Severance Hall on Thursday, August 28, 2008.

The event is open to the public and more details can be obtained here.

(This series of posts looks in detail at some of the fascinating aspects of food production identified by Michael Pollan in his book The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006). All page numbers refer to that book, unless otherwise noted. Other related posts can be found here.)

One of the things that I had not fully appreciated was how dominant corn is in our diet. Like most people, I am only rarely conscious of actually eating corn, usually during the summer months when it appears in the produce section of the supermarket or when I eat tacos. But it turns out that we all consume a vastly greater amount of corn than we perhaps realize. In fact, corn is the colossus in the American food chain, dominating everything.

To get a sense of the magnitude that corn plays in our lives, here are some numbers. The annual harvest of corn in the US is about ten billion bushels (p. 85). . One bushel of corn is defined to be 56 pounds exactly. This is for shelled corn, after the husks and cob have been removed. The number of kernels in a bushel is approximately 72,800.

The amount of corn we eat directly as corn is less than one bushel per year person or less than 3% of the total. The rest has gone into the production of beef, chicken, pork, soft drinks, breakfast cereals, snacks, citric and lactic acid, glucose, fructose, matodextrin, ethanol (for alcohol and for cars), sorbitol, mannitol, xanthan gum, MSG, etc. (p. 85, 86)

So how did we end up growing so much corn anyway?

Part of the growth in production came with the development of new hybrid seed varieties in the 1930s followed by the introduction of synthetic chemical fertilizers in the 1950s. Then in 1973 the government began establishing a ‘target price’ for corn that makes up as direct payments to the farmer for some of the difference between the target price and the sale price. The later explosive growth of corn is the direct result of this new system of farming subsidies that exists to this day and encourages farmers to grow more and more corn.

Instead of supporting farmers, the government was now subsidizing every bushel of corn a farmer could grow – and American farmers pushed to go flat out could grow a hell of a lot of corn . . . Iowa State University estimates it costs roughly $2.50 to grow a bushel of Iowa corn; in October 2005 Iowa grain elevators were paying $1.45 . . . Yet the corn keeps coming, more of it every year. (p. 53)
. . .
This is a system designed to keep production high and prices low. In fact, it’s designed to drive prices even lower, since handing farmers deficiency payments (as compared to the previous system of providing loans to support prices) encourages them to produce as much corn as they possibly can, and then dump it all on the market no matter what the price – a practice that inevitably pushes prices even lower. (p. 62)

Corn production went from a 1920 average of 20 bushels/acre to a present output of 200 bushels/acre. (p. 37) This massive production increase now placed demands on finding ways to dispose of the corn. A human being can eat about 1,500 pounds of food per year in all its forms. (p. 94) You cannot force people to eat more food, let alone more corn. The only way to increase corn consumption is to use it to replace, directly or indirectly, other things in our diet, and even in our energy supplies.

Moving that mountain of cheap corn – finding the people and animals to consume it, the cars that burn it, the new products to absorb it, and the nations to import it – has become the principal task of the industrial food system, since the supply of corn vastly exceeds the demand. (p. 62)
. . .
To help dispose of the rising mountain of cheap corn farmers were now producing, the government did everything it could to help wean cattle off grass and onto corn, by subsidizing the building of feedlots (through tax breaks) and promoting a grading system based on marbling of beef that favored corn-fed over grass-fed beef. (The government also exempted CAFOs [Confined Animal Feeding Operations] from most clean air and clean water laws.) (p. 200)

Thus the government and researchers have deliberately tried to switch the diet of cattle from grass, which they have evolved to eat, to corn, since animals can be made to grow faster on a corn diet than on grass and growing grass requires more land. As a result of this push, about 60% of the commodity corn produced in the US goes towards feeding livestock. (p. 86) Federal mandates have also pushed for corn surpluses in the form of ethanol to be used to dilute gasoline. (p. 111)

And yet, the corn keeps coming, more and more, like an overflowing dam that will eventually drown us.

Next: How corn dominates our diet.

POST SCRIPT: Beauty contest for nuns?

An Italian priest, annoyed by what he feels is the unfair negative image that nuns have, has organized a beauty contest to show off their looks and asked prospective contestants to send in photos.

But he says that they will not be required to pose in swimsuits. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.