The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

by Michael Pollan

The first rough breakdown of all that corn begins with the subdivision of the kernel itself: Its yellow skin will be processed into various vitamins and nutritional supplements; the tiny germ (the dark part nearest the cob, which holds the embryo of the potential future corn plant) will be crushed for its oil; and the biggest part, the endosperm, will be plundered for its rich cache of complex carbohydrates. This oversized packet of starch is corn’s most important contribution to the industrial food chain: an abundance of carbohydrate molecules in long chains that chemists have learned to break down and then rearrange into hundreds of different organic compounds—acids, sugars, starches, and alcohols. The names of many of these compounds will be familiar to anyone who’s studied the ingredient label on a package of processed food: citric and lactic acid; glucose, fructose, and maltodextrin; ethanol (for alcoholic beverages as well as cars), sorbitol, mannitol, and xanthan gum; modified and unmodified starches; as well as dextrins and cyclodextrins and MSG, to name only a few.