It's a chicken-and-the-egg proposition...

...but don't forget the grass, the cows, the manure, the photosynthesis, and the symbiosis of it all. What am I talking about? Food, stupid...I'm talking about food. But what you don't realize is that most of the food we eat these days is related to -- if not downright consisting entirely of -- CORN. And this corn isn't the maize of our fairly distant ancestors; this is commodity corn (Hi-Bred 34H31 or the genetically modified 33P67, et al).


Before I get up to my eyeballs in corn, let me preface this blog by saying that I just finished the Michael Pollan book "The Omnivore's Dilemma." In this book, Pollan investigates three separate meals, which fall along a spectrum of options: the Industrial, which culminates in a McDonald's meal that uses corn in virtually every aspect; the Pastoral, which features food all sustainably grown on a farm that uses grass as a common denominator; and the Personal, a meal that was picked, foraged and hunted entirely by Pollan himself in the hills of San Francisco.

Reading about the agro-industrial complex, which dominates the first meal, is so eye-opening -- and stomach churning -- I felt as if I was Neo as he unplugged from The Matrix for the first time.

• Did you know the US Government subsidizes the growth of corn to the detriment of the actual farmland itself? The more corn you produce, the more the payout; here's a tasty little Catch-22: when the price of corn drops, the farmer must produce even more corn to cover the downswing in cost. I'm no economist, but doesn't that pretty much reverse supply & demand? And the continuous growth of one plant damages the soil so much that the farmer must then buy pesticides and other chemicals to keep up production.

• We grow so much corn in this country that it's unaffordable not to feed it to Cows. Unfortunately, we didn't ask the cows how they felt about this. They are ruminants, which means that their diets consist of grass -- not corn -- and this transposition of their diet requires a pretty heavy dosage of anti-biotics. Fun side note: "fermentation in the rumen produces copious amounts of gas, which is normally expelled by belching during rumination. But when the diet contains too much starch and too little roughage, rumination all but stops, and a layer of foamy slime forms in the rumen that can trap the gas. The rumen inflates like a balloon until it presses against the animal's lungs. Unless action is taken promptly to relieve the pressure, the animal suffocates." p. 77-78.

• Speaking of drugs, cows get all kinds of drugs: they have some to halt mad-cow disease, which is a by-product of the fact that we feed rendered cow parts back to the cows (Hey, protein is protein, right?); and the crowding of cows into smaller, denser CAFOS (Concentrated Agriculture Feeding Operations -- seriously) results in a widespread and rapidly evolving immunity to most anti-biotics.

• If none of that bothers you, try this one on for size: in these CAFOs, the stalls that house each cow form a circle around a lagoon...this lagoon is formed from the manure that has oozed out of the cow stalls; but, that manure moves pretty slowly. This means that our cows -- our hamburgers, NY strips and ribeyes -- stand and even sleep in manure: "...sooner or later some of the manure caked on these hides gets into the meat we eat. One of the bacteria that almost certainly resides in the manure..." (p. 81-82) is Escheridia coli O 157:H7 -- does that sound familiar?

Understand that as dirty as this situation seems on the surface, one underlying element unites the entire agro-industrial complex, and that is Oil. How do you process are those ears of corn? And move those ears to the CAFOs? And move those cows to and from their slaughter? What about collecting and planting those ears of corn? Oil, oil and more oil...

Check back soon for my -- much more positive -- description of the Pastoral meal.