The Corn Conspiracy.
Well, in case you didn’t know, our country runs on corn. And as we look forward into the painfully slow process that the government is making out of energy source changes, it seems that this fact will become even more true. In case you want to know more about corn, I urge you to visit the Corn Products International <— An actual website!
On their website alone, the list of products includes the usuals: corn starch, high fructose corn syrup, dextrose, cooking oil, beer, animal feed, plastics, oil industry machinery, and good ol’ moonshine. And don’t forget new classics like corn kernel boxes (think sandboxes), fish bate, maize mazes, corn silk herbal supplements, adhesives, cosmetics, and the likes. But let’s take a deeper look into the world of corn.
In America, corn is grown at a standard rate (I’m not going to delve completely into factory farming here – just the basics) of 8 feet tall for the most part. These stalks, grown under modern “farming” techniques, usually produce just shy of one full ear on average because they are grown so densely. That doesn’t seem effective at all, right? Farming in America = highly ineffective, among a few other problems. Corn has its own built-in antibiotic, giving it strong resistance to pests and natural attackers, which making farming it a breeze. The US, with the help of oddly rationed subsidies, helps farm corporations produce half of the world’s entire corn output.
Over history, as corn slowly spread from the Americas to the rest of the world, there were problems with cultural misunderstanding of how to prepare it in order to avoid pellagra. This even occurred in the Deep South of the U.S. as it began to be widely used as a crop in the 1800’s. Now, with emphasis on a balanced diet, we have sidestepped this problem, sort of. Don’t worry, even if you have corn making appearances in your toilet bowl, this is not indicating pellagra. It really indicates that our digestive systems have been evolving to digest meats and not as many vegetables and natural starches as we used to… a story for another day.
That’s not all – corn has a laundry list of health problems. First, a study on rats tested with genetically modified corn mentioned resulting blood problems and internal organ issues. Additionally, corn is one of those foods to which people are often allergic, if just mildly. And think about high fructose corn syrup. First created from corn in the 1970’s, this sweetener is in everything, and not just sodas anymore. Think breakfast cereals, “fruit” juices, applesauce, frappuccinos, Wonderbread, ketchup, cookies, crackers, flavored yogurts, pickles, hotdogs, A1 sauce, and tons more! Essentially, you can blame obesity in this country partially on corn.
And if body/fat fuel isn’t enough, biofuels are potentially the wave of the future, even though that presents its own problems. To make a long explanation short, here are the basic issues with corn as a fuel:
1. Our infrastructure (machinery) for harvesting fuel is built on diesel power – that’s going to take a very long time to convert.
2. The large-scale production of corn, if it isn’t already considered that, would be impossible to ever meet the energy demands of current energy consumption.
3. There’s some kind of strange psychological issue with tying the world’s energy consumption to the same resource as people’s individual nutritional energy consumption.
4. The current farming techniques are too hard on the environment to warrant conversion to the widespread use of this agricultural product as an energy resource. Perhaps that will change, but I personally would rather look for a better solution.
oh do not forget that the fertilizer used to grow said corn is made out of crude oil