...Speaking of Meal

I'm currently reading The Omnivore's Dilemma and wow is it a dilemma. This book is so intense, I am taking a forced break from it for at least a day to process what I've read so far. I started this book as reading for an optional book club at school, and it has totally rocked my socks.

There are four parts to the book and I've only read the first part which is all about corn. We will call this your "Corn Course":

It costs about $2.50 per bushel to grow it and farmers are paid $1.50 per bushel. You're right! That doesn't add up. But the farmers keep growing more to maintain their income level and thus they drive prices down further. These pesticides that help them grow more were developed post World War II with our surplus of ammonium nitrate, no longer needed for bombs. Use of ammonium nitrate caused a boom of a different kind - an explosion in the amount of corn possible to grow per acre. The government also pays them per bushel of corn produced, so subsidies keep them afloat and encourage growing as much corn as possible, without regard for health of the land or demand in the market.

Use of ammonium nitrate, in excess of course to assure excellent crop yields, also causes lots of chemicals to flow off into the river which people drink from. This causes blue baby alerts, which are straight up creepy. Infants' bodies turn blue after they drink the water, which contains lots of nitrogen - oxygen's neighbor on the periodic table. Their hemoglobin (molecules that carry oxygen in your blood) bind with the nitrogen and NOT the oxygen and poof - you have a blue baby. See? Creepy.

So the fertilizer keeps flowing down the river and eventually to the Gulf of Mexico where it's caused ANOTHER boom - in the growth of algae, algae, and nothing but algae. Lots of fish and other sea creatures are gone, suffocated by how much algae is now in the water. Turns out it doesn't stop being a fertilizer when it leaves the corn field.

But back to the corn. Very little of it is actually eaten in its whole form. It is made into grain for cattle and chickens (who, by the way, don't even like the stuff), fuel for cars, high fructose corn syrup, and a slew of ingredients which you can find on the back of many packaged foods. Yeah, I'm talking about the ones you can't pronounce. Those are corn. Sort of.

And the animals who don't even like corn? It's the main ingredient in their grain. So far, I haven't read about the chickens because they're in the "Grass" section which is next. But the cows? They want to eat grass, that's all. Doesn't seem like a high maintenance request. The beauty of that arrangement is that they eat the grass and then their waste (cow pies) make the grass grow faster. It's a lovely little cycle. By feeding them grain, we introduce lots of digestive and bacteria issues we have mostly (but not entirely) figured out how to solve with more chemicals - introduce antibiotics and subsequently superbugs. Nice. Anyway, the grain makes them fattier and able to live in denser conditions since they don't need a bunch of silly grass to munch. This usually means they live among their poop. Maybe that's okay with you, but I don't want my food repeating one of our biggest public health mistakes: poop and food should be kept separate. Anyway, the cows get fat faster, we kill them faster and then we eat more of their meat, which is fattier than it would be if they ate grass, which probably explains at least part of the obesity issue we're having.

Turns out this wasn't so skinny.

So far, what it boils down to is that you can't care about certain things in public health because it is all connected. You can't say you care about the environment and not pediatric medicine or that you care about obesity and not the environment - it's all connected. We're making a pretty big mess apparently, and even though this is causing mild anxiety about pretty much anything I have been eating over the past few days, I'm glad I know. It's making me want to have less of an impact and certainly more appreciative of the effort and curious about the logistics involved in getting pretty much any food anywhere.

Stay tuned to find out more about your precious McNuggets when I write the "Grass Course."