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| Processed Views Cornscape - Test 1 |
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| Processed Views - Cornscape Test 2 |
Monumental Cape Horn inspired us to consider the monumental mountain of corn that looms over Americans' diet.
Corn is the keystone species of the industrial food system, along with its sidekick, soybeans, with which it shares a rotation on most of the farms in the Midwest. I'm really talking about cheap corn — overproduced, subsidized, industrial corn — the biggest legal cash crop in America. Eighty million acres — an area twice the size of New York State — is blanketed by a vast corn monoculture like a second great American lawn...
Overproduction sooner or later leads to overconsumption, because we’re very good at figuring out how to turn surpluses into inexpensive, portable new products. Our cheap, value-added, portable corn commodity is corn sweetener, specifically high-fructose corn syrup. But we also dispose of overproduction in corn-fed beef, pork, and chicken. And now we're even teaching salmon to eat corn, because there's so much of it to get rid of.
There is a powerful industrial logic at work here, the logic of processing. We discovered that corn is this big, fat packet of starch that can be broken down into almost any basic organic molecules and reassembled as sweeteners and many other food additives. Of the 37 ingredients in chicken nuggets, something like 30 are made, directly or indirectly, from corn.
--- Michael Pollan
Pollan has written extensively about the American diet. Additional information at:
Numerous articles address not only the destruction of our own digesters, but also the destruction to the land created by industrial monoculture agricultural practices.
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| Carleton Watkins - Cape Horn, Columbia River |
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