we-are-what-we-eat

During the last year I've been following a bushel of corn through the industrial food system. What I keep finding in case after case, if you follow the food back to the farm — if you follow the nutrients, if you follow the carbon — you end up in a corn field in Iowa, over and over and over again.

Take a typical fast food meal. Corn is the sweetener in the soda. It's in the corn-fed beef Big Mac patty, and in the high-fructose syrup in the bun, and in the secret sauce. Slim Jims are full of corn syrup, dextrose, cornstarch, and a great many additives. The “four different fuels” in a Lunchables meal, are all essentially corn-based. The chicken nugget—including feed for the chicken, fillers, binders, coating, and dipping sauce—is all corn. The french fries are made from potatoes, but odds are they're fried in corn oil, the source of 50 percent of their calories. Even the salads at McDonald's are full of high-fructose corn syrup and thickeners made from corn.

Corn is the keystone species of the industrial food system, along with its sidekick, soybeans, with which it shares a rotation on most of the farms in the Midwest. I'm really talking about cheap corn — overproduced, subsidized, industrial corn — the biggest legal cash crop in America. Eighty million acres — an area twice the size of New York State — is blanketed by a vast corn monoculture like a second great American lawn.

I believe very strongly that our overproduction of cheap grain in general, and corn in particular, has a lot to do with the fact that three-fifths of

Americans are now overweight. The obesity crisis is complicated in some ways, but it's very simple in another way. Basically, Americans are on average eating 200 more calories a day than they were in the 1970s. If you do that and don't get correspondingly more exercise, you're going to get a lot fatter. Many demographers are predicting that this is the first generation of Americans whose life span may be shorter than their parents'. The reason for that is obesity, essentially, and diabetes specifically.

Where do those calories come from? Except for seafood, all our calories come from the farm. Compared with the mid-to-late 1970s, American farms are producing 500 more calories of food a day per American. We're managing to pack away 200 of them, which is pretty heroic on our part. A lot of the rest is being dumped overseas, or wasted, or burned in our cars. (That's really how we're trying to get rid of it now: in ethanol. The problem is that it takes almost as much, or even more, energy to make a gallon of ethanol than you get from that ethanol. People think it's a very green fuel, but the process for making it is not green at all.)

Overproduction sooner or later leads to overconsumption, because we’re very good at figuring out how to turn surpluses into inexpensive, portable new products. Our cheap, value-added, portable corn commodity is corn sweetener, specifically high-fructose corn syrup. But we also dispose of overproduction in corn-fed beef, pork, and chicken. And now we're even teaching salmon to eat corn, because there's so much of it to get rid of.

There is a powerful industrial logic at work here, the logic of processing. We discovered that corn is this big, fat packet of starch that can be broken down into almost any basic organic molecules and reassembled as sweeteners and many other food additives. Of the 37 ingredients in chicken nuggets, something like 30 are made, directly or indirectly, from corn.

Now, how do you get people to eat so much of this reengineered surplus corn? That took the ingenuity of American marketing. One example is supersizing. When I was a kid, Coke came in these lovely little eight-ounce glass containers. Today, a 20-ounce container is the standard size for soda. The idea that you could sell soda that way was an invention. It has a history, and you can find the individual responsible, an ingenious movie theater manager named David Wallerstein, who invented the idea of supersizing and sold it to Ray Kroc, founder of McDonald's.

Before you go out and sue McDonald's over the size of your waistline, consider that overproduction of cheap corn is government policy. It's done in the name of the public interest, using our taxpayer dollars. American taxpayers subsidize every bushel of industrial corn produced in this country, at a cost of some four billion dollars a year (out of a total of 19 billion dollars in direct payments to farmers).

But before you blame subsidies for all these problems keep in mind that agricultural overproduction is an ancient problem that long predates subsidies. In any other business, when the price of the commodity you're selling falls, the smart thing to do is to curtail production until demand raises prices. But farmers don't do that, because there are so many of them, and because they all operate as individuals, without any coordination. So when prices fall farmers actually expand production, in order to keep their cash flow from falling. This economically and environmentally disastrous phenomenon has resulted in an increase in the American corn harvest from four billion to ten billion bushels since the 1970s.

How do we begin to change this system? First, we all need to begin to pay attention to the Farm Bill, working to develop farm programs that allow farmers to stay in business without falling into the trap of overproduction. Most city people don't realize the stake they have in it. They assume it's a parochial concern of members of Congress from farm states, but it's not. If it were called the Food Bill, I think we would all pay a lot more attention to it, and get a saner result. The Farm Bill sets out the rules of the game that everyone is playing in, whether you're an industrial or an organic farmer, whether you're eating industrially or not.

The other thing we can do is become responsible consumers. I’ve never liked the word \"consumer.\" It sounds like a character who’s using up the world, rather than creating anything. I was at a gathering in Italy last October where Carlos Petrini, the founder and president of Slow Food International, offered a wonderful redefinition of the word. He called the consumer a “cocreator.” I

think that’s exactly right, and we’ve seen why: with the organic movement, consumers and farmers have shown how they can work together as cocreators of an alternative food system. We need to join together now, to recruit a larger and larger army of cocreators, to rewrite the rules of the game — and “cocreate” a different kind of food system.

This essay is excerpted from an article that originally appeared in The New York Times Magazine. It is reprinted with permission from the author, a contributing writer for the magazine.

如果你是你吃什么，特别是如果你吃的工业食品，99％的美国人，你是什么是“玉米”。

在过去的一年中，我一直在一蒲式耳玉米的食品工业体系。 我发现情况后的情况下，如果你按照食品的农场 - 如果你遵循的营养物质，如果你遵循的碳 - 你结束了在爱荷华州的玉米地，一遍又一遍又一遍。

一个典型的一顿快餐。 玉米是汽水中的甜味剂。 这是玉米喂养的牛肉巨无霸饼，高果糖糖浆的发髻，和中的秘密武器。 超薄吉姆的玉米糖浆，葡萄糖，玉米淀粉，和一个伟大的很多添加剂。 “四个不同的燃料”在Lunchables餐，基本上都是以玉米为主。 鸡块，包括饲料的鸡，填充剂，粘合剂，涂料，蘸酱是所有的玉米。 薯条是由土豆，但赔率是他们炒玉米油，50％的热量来源。 甚至在麦当劳的沙拉是高果糖玉米糖浆，增稠剂由玉米制成的。

玉米是关键物种的食品工业体系，随着伙伴，大豆，与它共享一个旋转的大部分在美国中西部的农场。 我真的谈论便宜的玉米 - 生产过剩，补贴，工业玉米 - 美国最大的法律经济作物。 八十万英亩 - 纽约州面积的两倍大小 - 美国第二大草坪像一个巨大的玉米单作覆盖。

我坚信，我们一般的廉价粮食生产过剩，尤其是玉米中，有五分之三的美国人现在超重的事实有很多事情要做。 肥胖危机是复杂的，在某些方面，但它以另一种方式是非常简单的。 基本上，美国人平均每天吃200多卡路里的热量比他们在20世纪70年代。 如果你做到这一点并没有得到相应更多的锻炼，你会得到很多胖。 许多人口学家预测，这是第一代的美国人，其寿命可能比他们的父母更短。 其中的原因是肥胖，本质上，和糖尿病具体。

这些热量来自哪里的呢？ 除了海鲜，我们所有的热量来自于农场。 相对于20世纪70年代中期到后期，美国农场生产500多卡路里的食物每人每天美国。 我们管理的打包带走200人，这是非常英勇的我们。 其余很多被弃置海外，或浪费，或在我们的汽车燃烧。 （这是真的怎么样，我们正在努力，以获得摆脱它现在：在乙醇。问题是，它需要几乎一样多，甚至更多，能量一加仑乙醇的比你得到的乙醇。人们认为这是一个非常绿色的燃料，但它是不是绿色的。）

生产过剩迟早会导致过度消费，因为我们是非常善于盘算着如何把盈余为价格低廉的便携式新产品。 我们的价格便宜，增值，便携式玉米的商品是玉米甜味剂，特别是高果糖玉米糖浆。 但是，我们也处理生产过剩的玉米喂养的牛肉，猪肉和鸡肉。 而现在我们甚至教学鲑鱼，吃玉米，因为有这么多的摆脱。

是在这里工作的一个强大的产业逻辑，逻辑的处理。 我们发现，玉米是这个大包的淀粉，脂肪下降到几乎

所有的基本有机分子可以分解和重新组合作为甜味剂和许多其他食品添加剂。 的37个成分中的鸡块，像30，直接或间接地来自于玉米。

现在，你如何让人们吃了这么多的这个重新设计的过剩玉米吗？ 美国市场的聪明才智。 一个例子是supersizing。 当我还是个孩子的时候，可口可乐在这些可爱的小八盎司的玻璃容器。 今天，20盎司容器是苏打水的标准尺寸。 你可以卖苏打这样的想法是一个发明。 它的历史，你可以找到负责人，一个巧妙的影院经理名叫大卫·沃勒斯坦，发明的想法supersizing的，并把它卖了，麦当劳的创始人雷·克洛克。

在你走之前，你的腰围的大小起诉麦当劳，廉价的玉米生产过剩认为是的。 这是做对公共利益的名义，用我们纳税人的钱。 美国纳税人资助在这个国家生产的工业玉米每蒲式耳，一年（总共19十亿美元直接支付给农民）的成本约四十亿美元。

但是，所有这些问题之前，你能怪补贴记住，农产品生产过剩是一个古老的问题，长早补贴的。 任何其他业务，大宗商品的价格，你卖的瀑布，聪明的做法是削减产量，直至需求引起价格上涨。 但农民不这样做，因为有这么多的人，因为他们都作为个人，没有任何协调。 因此，在价格下跌时农民扩大生产，以保持其产生的现金流量下降。 经济和环境灾难的现象，导致在20世纪70年代以来美国玉米收成增加从四十亿十个亿蒲式耳。

我们如何开始改变这个制度呢？ 首先，我们需要开始关注的农业法案，努力发展农业项目，让农民留在企业，而不陷入生产过剩的陷阱。 大多数城市人并没有意识到他们在火刑柱上。 他们以为这是一个来自农业州的国会成员的狭隘关注，但事实并非如此。 如果它被称为食品条例草案“，我想我们都给予了更多的关注，并得到了理智的结果。 农场条例草案订定规则的游戏，每个人都在玩，无论你是一个产业或有机农民，无论您是工业或不食用。

其他的事情，我们能做的就是成为对消费者负责。 我从来都不喜欢这个词“的消费者。” 这听起来像一个字符谁在使用了世界，而不是创造什么。 我是在一次聚会于去年十月在意大利慢餐国际的创始人和总裁卡洛斯·彼得里尼，提供了一个美妙的重新定义这个词。 他呼吁消费者“cocreator。”我认为这是完全正确的，我们已经看到了为什么：有机运动，消费者和农民，他们如何能够共同努力，作为替代食品系统的cocreators的。 我们需要携手合作，，招聘一个大的cocreators，，改写了游戏规则 - 和“共同设计”不同种类的食品体系。

本文摘自最初出现在纽约时报杂志“的一篇文章，它是从作者的许可，贡献的作家为杂志转载。