Thomas Keevill
Journal Assignment #6
10/23/14
Ever wonder where your meals you eat everyday originally come from? Or how about the processed foods you buy every week in a supermarket? Michael Pollan, the author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma was also curious as to where our food was coming from when he was in the stages of writing his book. When he “wanted to understand the industrial food system, he wanted to simply trace the source of his food. When you go through the supermarket what looks like this cornucopia of variety and choices is not. There is an illusion of diversity and only a few companies are involved, along with just a few crops being involved”. (Food Inc.) What surprised Michael Pollan the most was when he followed all this food back to its source, is that it always kept on ending up in the same place. This place was a cornfield in Iowa; so much of our food ends up to be corn which today has become a “commodity, in which it is as much an economic abstraction as it is a biological fact”. (The Omnivore’s Dilemma, pg.59) The origins of most of our meals that we consume on a daily basis is based off of corn. It has become an overwhelming crop that has made its stand permanently for most of our foods in relations to our industrial food system. Corn has conquered the world in regards to its properties it contains and its purpose. The crop has been engineered in which it not only creates other processed foods, but several ingredients. One in which is mostly familiar to all consumers is “Corn Syrup”, it is one of the key ingredients to all store shelved products which contain mostly 90% of what we see in a supermarket today. Not only has it become a reliable ingredient to our meals, but to our surplus of providing feed to our American factory farms. “Most of these kernels wind up about three of every five within these farms, a place that could not exist without them. Millions of food animals that once lived on family farms and ranches are gathered together in great commissaries, where they consume as much of the mounting pile of surplus corn as they can digest, turning it into meat. Enlisting the cow in this undertaking has required particularly heroic efforts, since the cow is by nature not a corn eater. But nature abhors a surplus, and the corn must be consumed.” (The Omnivore’s Dilemma, pg.64) Why use corn as feed for cows that are not accustomed to eating this crop? It is because simply put, corn is cheap to produce and farmers can make so much of it that it is the cheaper alternative for feed to our cows as it is compared to feeding them grass which is the
