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Wallerstein served on the board of directors at McDonald's, but in the fifties and sixties he worked for a chain of movie theaters in Texas, where he labored to expand sales of soda and popcorn. He found he simply could not induce customers to buy more than one soda and one bag of popcorn. He discovered that people would spring for more as long as it came in a single gigantic serving.

It's this guy's fault!

Since 1985, an American's annual consumption of HFCS has gone from 45 pounds to 68 pounds. You might think that this growth would have been offset by a decline in sugar consumption, since HFCS often replaces sugar, but that didn't happen: During the same period our consumption of refined sugar actually went up by 5 pounds. Our consumption of all added sugars has climbed from 128 pounds to 158 pounds per person.

That 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. Considering that the human animal did not taste this particular food until 1980, for HFCS to have become the leading source of sweetness in our diet stands as a notable achievement on the part of the corn-refining industry, not to mention this remarkable plant.

Clever marketing (supersized portion; advertising to children). Changes in diet (more fats; more carbohydrates; more processed foods).
All these explanations are true, as far as they go. But it pays to go a little further, to search for the cause behind the causes. Which, very simply, is this: When food is abundant and cheap, people will eat more of it and get fat.

You hear plenty of explanations for humanity's expanding waistline, all of them plausible. Changes in lifestyle (we're more sedentary; we eat out more). Affluence (more people can afford a high-fat Western diet). Poverty (healthier foods cost more). Technology (fewer of us use our bodies in our work; at home, the remote control keeps us pinned to the couch) ... (cont.)

Resistant starch has the corn refiners particularly excited today. They've figured out how to tease a new starch from corn that is virtually indigestible. You would not think this is a particularly good thing for a food to be, unless of course your goal is to somehow get around the biological limit on how much each of us can eat in a year.

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The more complex your food system, the more you can practice "sub-stitutionism" without altering the taste or appearance of the product. So if the price of hydrogenated fat or lecithin derived from corn spikes one day, you simply switch to fat or lecithin from soy.(This is why ingredient labels says things like "Contains one or more of the following: corn, soybean, or sunflower oil.)

Try as we might, each of us can eat only about fifteen hundred pounds of food a year. This leaves companies like General Mills and McDonald's with two options if they hope to grow faster than the population: figure out how to get people to spend more money for the same three-quarters of a ton of food, or entice them to actually eat more than that.

Ha, why not do both?! Oh ... wait ...

The prestige of technology and convenience combined with advances in marketing to push aside butter to make shelf space for margarine, replace fruit juice with juice drinks and then entirely juice-free drinks like Tang, cheese with Cheez Whiz, and whipped cream with Cool Whip. You would never know it without reading the ingredient label, but corn is the key constituent of all four of these processed foods.

Hidden corn - do you know if you're eating corn or not?

At this point the process has yielded a white slurry that's poured out onto a stainless steel table and dried to a fine, superwhite powder—cornstarch. Cornstarch comprised wet milling's sole product when the industry got its start in the 1840s. At first the laundry business was its biggest consumer ...

Then why did someone think it was a good idea to eat this shit?

The mill starch undergoes a progressively finer series of grindings and filterings and centrifuges. At each step more fresh water is added—it takes five gallons to process a bushel of corn, and prodigious amounts of energy. Wet milling is an energy-intensive way to make food; for every calorie of processed food it produces, another ten calories of fossil fuel energy are burned.

Stupid corn.

Petroleum is one of the most important ingredients in the production of modern meat. When 534 moved from ranch to feedlot, from grass to corn, he joined an industrial food chain powered by fossil fuel—and therefore defended by the U.S. military, another never-counted cost of cheap food. (One-fifth of America's petroleum consumption goes to producing and transporting our food.)

Switching a cow's diet from corn to grass or hay for a few days prior to slaughter reduces the population of E. coli in the animal's gut by as much as 80%. But such a solution is considered wildly impractical by the cattle industry and the USDA. Their preferred solution for dealing with bacterial contamination is irradiation—essentially, to try to sterilize the manure getting into the meat.

You gotta be kidding me.

Most of the microbes that reside in the gut of a cow and find their way into our food get killed off by the strong acids in our stomachs, since they evolved to live in the neutral pH environment of the rumen. But the rumen of a corn-fed feedlot steer is nearly as acidic as our own stomachs, and in this new, man-made environment new acid-resistant strains of E. coli, have evolved.

Lovely.

Then there's the deep pile of manure on which I stand, in which my steer sleeps. The speed at which these animals are slaughtered and processed—four hundred an hour at the plant where he'll go—means that sooner or later some of the manure caked on these hides gets into the meat we eat.

Oh god ... no ...

The rules still permit feedlots to feed nonruminant animal protein to ruminants. Feather meal and chicken litter (that is bedding, feces, and discarded bits of feed) are accepted cattle feeds, as are chicken, fish, and pig meal.

Though the industrial logic that made feeding cattle to cattle seem like a good idea has been thrown into doubt by mad cow disease, I was surprised to learn it hadn't been discarded. The FDA ban on feeding ruminant protein to ruminants makes an exception for blood products and fat; my steer will probably dine on beef tallow recycled from the very slaughterhouse he's heading to in June.

Wut.

Rendered bovine meat and bonemeal represented the cheapest, most convenient way of satisfying a cow's protein requirement (never mind these animals were herbivores by evolution) and so appeared on the daily menus of Poky and most other feedyards until the FDA banned the practice in 1997.

Well, good lord, at least they banned something.

Calories are calories, and corn is the cheapest, most convenient source of calories on the market. Of course, it was the same industrial logic—protein is protein—that made feeding rendered cow parts back to cows seem like a sensible thing to do, until scientists figured out that this practice was spreading mad cow disease.

Derp. This just seems like common sense! Why ... why would someone feed cows, cows?

Cows fed corn get fat quickly; their flesh also marbles well, giving it a taste and texture American consumers have come to like. Yet this corn-fed meat is demonstrably less healthy for us, since it contains more saturated fat and less omega-3 fatty acids than the meat of animals fed grass. Yet the USDA's grading system has been designed to reward marbling and thus the feeding of corn to cattle.

This is so stupid.

What got corn onto the menu at this and almost every other American feedlot is price, of course, but also USDA policy, which for decades has sought to help move the mountain of surplus corn by passing as much of it as possible through the digestive tracts of food animals, who can convert it into protein.

Flaked corn was the only feed ingredient I sampled, and it wasn't half bad; not as crisp as Kellogg's flake, but with a cornier flavor. I passed on the other ingredients: the liquefied fat (which on today's menu is beef tallow [wut]) and the protein supplement, a sticky brown goop consisting of molasses and urea. The urea is a form of synthetic nitrogen made from natural gas ...

And then we eat these cows! D:

A million pounds of feed pass through the mill each day. Tanker trucks back up to silo-shaped tanks into which they pump thousands of gallons of liquefied fat and protein supplements. In a shed attached to the mill sit vats of liquid vitamins and synthetic estrogen beside pallets stacked with fifty-pound sacks of antibiotics.

Yummy.

It might be foolish for us to presume to know what a cow experiences, yet we can say that a calf grazing on grass is at least doing what he has been supremely well suited by evolution to do. Oddly enough, though, eating grass is something that after October my steer will never have the opportunity to do again.

That's so sad.

Raising animals on old-fashioned mixed farms used to make simple biological sense: You can feed them the waste products of your crops, and you can feed their waste products to your crops. One of the most striking things that animal feedlots do is to take this elegant solution and neatly divide it into two new problems.

distill the ethanol; and manufacture the high-fructose corn syrup and the numberless other fractions derived from number 2 field corn. Oh, yes—and help write many of the rules that govern this whole game, for Cargill and ADM exert considerable influence over U.S. agricultural policies. These companies are the true beneficiaries of the farm subsidies ... Cargill is the biggest privately held corporation in the world.

Though the companies won't say, it has been estimated that Cargill and ADM together probably buy somewhere near a third of all the corn grown in America.
They provide the pesticide and fertilizer to the farmers; operate most of America's grain elevators; broker and ship most of the exports; perform the wet and dry milling; feed the livestock and then slaughter the corn fattened animals ... (cont.)

What's involved in absorbing all this excess biomass goes a long way toward explaining several seemingly unconnected phenomena, from the rise of factory farms and the industrialization of our food, to the epidemic of obesity and prevalence of food poisoning ... Such is the protean, paradoxical nature of the corn in the pile that getting rid of it could contribute to obesity and to hunger both.

So ass-backwards.

So the mountain grows, from 4 billion bushels in 1970 to 10 billion bushels today. Moving that mountain of cheap corn—finding the people and animals to consume it, the cars to burn it, the new products to absorb it, and the nations to import it—has become the principal task of the industrial food system, since the supply of corn vastly exceeds the demand.