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Published on Visualizing Ecology (http://www2.evergreen.edu/visecowinter)

Christina Weeks - week 6

When I First started reading Omnivore’s Dilemma I was uninterested. I thought if anyone is going to talk about the food humans eat for an entire book why would he choose corn for a whole third of it? …very boring. But after a few pages into it I became completely sucked in. I had never realized how much corn is involved in our daily consumption of food, especially when considering all of corns derivatives. After reading Pollan the amount of corn that we use seemed obvious corn starch, high fructose corn syrup, starch, MSG, and much more. It makes me wonder how many people are make the connection of the amount of products corn is used in. Most interesting to me was when Pollan compared America, a “wheat people,” to Mexico, a “corn people”:

“carbon 13 doesn’t lie, and researchers who have compared the isotopes in the flesh or hair of North Americans to those in the same tissue of Mexicans report that it is now we in the North who are true people of corn.”

To me it seems that there are some very obvious connections to why many Americans are unhealthy and overweight. When considering the fact that we very clearly have an unbalanced isotope ratio due to our “Industrial food chain” it shows how uninformed we really are. When looking back to an interesting statement in Pollan’s introduction he reinforces this idea by comparing the American diet to Italy and France’s diets:

“Italy and France … eat all manner of unhealthy foods, and, lo and behold, wind up actually healthier and happier in their eating that we are.”  

It is common knowledge that a majority of American’s are unhealthy and overweight. Many people take numerous attempts at different weight loss diets that never work. People are obviously uninformed about some of the reason why they are unhealthy. I wonder if it was common knowledge that the amount of corn in our diets, and its effects, if it would help people to start to make a difference in the way they eat and thus push our “food chain” away from the industrial side of the spectrum.

Source URL:
http://www2.evergreen.edu/visecowinter/visecowinter/christina-weeks-week-6