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Many anthropologists believe that the reason we evolved such big and intricate brains was precisely to help us deal with the omnivore’s dilemma.
Ecology also teaches that all life on earth can be viewed as a competition among species for the solar energy captured by green plants and stored in the
form of complex carbon molecules.
Descendents of the Maya living in Mexico still sometimes refer to themselves as “the corn people.” The phrase is not intended as metaphor. Rather, it’s meant to acknowledge their abiding dependence on this miraculous grass, the staple of their diet for almost nine thousand years.
there is every reason to believe that corn has succeeded in domesticating us.
No other group of species gained more from its association with humans than the edible grasses, and no grass has reaped more from agriculture than Zea mays, today the world’s most important cereal crop.
Planted, a single corn seed yielded more than 150 fat kernels, often as many as 300, while the return on a seed of wheat, when all went well, was something less than 50:1. (At a time when land was abundant and labor scarce, agricultural yields were calculated on a per-seed-sown basis.)
“Once the settlers had fully grasped the secrets and potential of corn, they no longer needed the Native Americans.” Squanto had handed the white man precisely the tool he needed to dispossess the Indian.
Corn’s dual identity, as food and commodity, has allowed many of the peasant communities that have embraced it to make the leap from a subsistence to a market economy.
Had maize failed to find favor among the conquerors, it would have risked extinction, because without humans to plant it every spring, corn would have disappeared from the earth in a matter of a few years.
raising nothing but corn and soybeans on a fairly typical Iowa farm, is so astoundingly productive that he is, in effect, feeding some 129 Americans. Measured in terms of output per worker, American farmers like Naylor are the most productive humans who have ever lived.
(there were only 225 tractors in all of America in 1920),
German Jewish chemist named Fritz Haber figured out how to turn this trick in 1909,
By 1900, European scientists recognized that unless a way was found to augment this
naturally occurring nitrogen, the growth of the human population would soon grind to a very painful halt.
If, as has sometimes been said, the discovery of agriculture represented the first fall of man from the state of nature, then the discovery of synthetic fertility is surely a second precipitous fall. Fixing nitrogen allowed the food chain to turn from the logic of biology and embrace the logic of industry. Instead of eating exclusively from the sun, humanity now began to sip petroleum.
More than half of all the synthetic nitrogen made today is applied to corn, whose hybrid strains can make better use of it than any other plant.
By fertilizing the world, we alter the planet’s composition of species and shrink its biodiversity.
The short, unhappy life of a corn-fed feedlot steer represents the ultimate triumph of industrial thinking over the logic of evolution.
Escherichia coli O157:H7 is a relatively new strain of the common intestinal bacteria (no one had seen it before 1980) that thrives in feedlot cattle, 40 percent of which carry it in their gut. Ingesting as few as ten of these microbes can cause a fatal infection; they produce a toxin that destroys human kidneys.
(One-fifth of America’s petroleum consumption goes to producing and transporting our food.)
Eating industrial meat takes an almost heroic act of not knowing or, now, forgetting.
The food industry has gazed upon nature and found it wanting—and has gotten to work improving it.
The parallels with the alcoholic republic of two hundred years ago are hard to miss. Before the changes in lifestyle, before the clever marketing, comes the mountain of cheap corn. Corn accounts for most of the surplus calories we’re growing and most of the surplus calories we’re eating. As then, the smart thing to do with all that surplus grain is to process it, transform the cheap commodity into a value-added consumer product—a denser and more durable package of calories. In the 1820s the processing options were basically two: You could turn your corn into pork or alcohol. Today there are
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nuggets and Big Macs to emulsifiers and nutraceuticals. Yet since the human desire for sweetness surpasses even our desire for intoxication, the cleverest thing to do with a bushel of corn is to refine it into thirty-three pounds of high-fructose corn syrup. That at least is what we’re doing with about 530 million bushels of the annual corn harvest—turning it into 17.5 billion pounds of high-fructose corn syrup.
Researchers have found that people (and animals) presented with large portions will eat up to 30 percent more than they would otherwise.
Very simply, we subsidize high-fructose corn syrup in this country, but not carrots. While the surgeon general is raising alarms over the epidemic of obesity, the president is signing farm bills designed to keep the river of cheap corn flowing, guaranteeing that the cheapest calories in the supermarket will continue to be the unhealthiest.
These days 19 percent of American meals are eaten in the
The nugget is the reason chicken has supplanted beef as the most popular meat in America.
a burned-out old dairy cow (the source of most fast-food beef)
That perhaps is what the industrial food chain does best: obscure the histories of the foods it produces by processing them to such an extent that they appear as pure products of culture rather than nature—things
the agricultural contradictions of capitalism, the challenge of increasing food industry profits faster than America can increase its population.
The existential challenge facing grasses in all but the most arid regions is how to successfully compete against trees for territory and sunlight. The evolutionary strategy they hit upon was to make their leaves nourishing and tasty to animals who in turn are nourishing and tasty to us, the big-brained creature best equipped to vanquish the trees on their behalf.
When we mistake what we can know for all there is to know, a healthy appreciation of one’s ignorance in the face of a mystery like soil fertility gives way to the hubris that we can treat nature as a machine.
everything eventually morphs into the way the world is.”
The food industry burns nearly a fifth of all the petroleum consumed in the United States (about as much as automobiles do). Today it takes between seven and ten calories of fossil fuel energy to deliver one
calorie of food energy to an American plate.
the Holstein, whose energy requirements were so great they could barely survive on a diet of grass.
Our food system depends on consumers’ not knowing much about it beyond the price disclosed by the checkout scanner.
experiences that banish irony are much better for living than for writing.
leaping the fence of current scientific understanding.
