I can’t believe it happened to me. I never thought it would, my ego integrity being such that I thought I would never become so completely a different person. But it did happen. In the span of a few seconds I uttered words that were so alien, so not me it could have been stated by a complete stranger. I was not being ironic or funny. I didn’t even realize what I said until I was finished saying it and then for a fleeting few moments I couldn’t be sure it was really me thinking and saying this phrase, “For Gods sake, this is a health food store, why are they selling soda? And for that matter, what the hell is organic soda?”
As my wife pulled away from the end rack of said offending soda I suddenly had the most jolting moment of clarity in the middle of our local Nature’s Harvest health food store. Despite every effort to the contrary, my wife’s newfound allergy to wheat plus our collective endeavor to lose weight and eat better had turned me into one of those obnoxious foodie types that turn up their nose to anything found at your local supermarket. Folks, this is not me. A scant year ago three square meals consisted of a cereal bar (Cocoa Puffs or Cheerios) for breakfast, Tyson breaded chicken patties for lunch, and a plentiful serving of Taco Bell for dinner.
My indulgence of Taco Bell was legendary going all the back to high school. In fact, I lunched their so often that when I went away to college in Pittsburgh for a semester, it was rumored that the local Taco Bell I frequented went out of business because I was not their to support any longer.
So how does one go from such a complete junk food junkie to obnoxious health conscious foodie so darn quickly? The answer lies in “Botany of Desire” author and journalist for the New York Times Magazine Michael Pollan’s newest masterpiece, “The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals.” In this book Pollan takes great pains to show his readers how the average American meal develops and evolves from the farm to our plate. Many books these days concentrate solely on fast food and how horrible it is for you but Pollan not only tackles that well worn material, he goes above and beyond in displaying the entire military-industrial food chain that supplies every mainstream food outlet from Wal-Mart to the local bodega, from any major Supermarket to most American eateries.
When I bought this book I figured I’d be taught many things about Mad Cow Disease, pesticides and growth hormones, concentration camp-like conditions for farm animals, and most probably Franken-foods (genetically modified or cloned). That’s all in there but it is under the most odd of headings; corn.
According to Pollan corn is THE building block of the entire non-organic, non-foraged, food chain. That’s right, I said corn. I realize that at first glance, aside from barbeques and vegetable medley’s, one does not see corn so completely spread far and wide as Pollan insists it is. But that is what makes his book so incredible and such a pleasurable read. Pollan visits one of the biggest agribusiness farms in America and asks all of the right questions.
What we find is not only the history of how corn dominated human society by domesticating us (rather than the assumed belief that we domesticated corn) we follow Pollan on the path of corn as it finds its way into nearly every available food on the market in stores and restaurants. From the object itself, to meals fed to animals we eat (like chicken and beef), to byproducts such as high fructose corn syrup (which I swear is in nearly everything but the air we breathe) to even the heart of food policy as written by our Congress and paid for with taxpayer dollars. By the end of this section that was entirely dedicated to corn and its nightmare offspring, the quite literally named military-industrial food chain, I found myself wandering the eateries and shopping centers of Tampa crying out that everywhere lurked dreadful and unhealthy corn a la Charlton Heston of Soylent Green fame. Morgan Spurlock already had me yelling at every McDonalds that it was “Evil!” like I was a poor mans Abe “Grandpa” Simpson, so Pollans empire of corn revelation only made my food induced hysteria oh so much worse.
Incidentally, between the aforementioned wife’s allergy and subsequent discovery that even hot dogs and hamburgers had wheat in them combined with my reading of Pollan’s book and his description of corn, our car rides are peppered with the both of us screaming out of the car windows at every opportunity in banshee song, “Wheat…corn…wheat…corn, everywhere is wheat and corn…oh woe is us, woe-is-us!”
