The Omnivore's Dilemma Part 3

Processed Food

SPLITTING THE KERNEL.

Do you eat a lot of corn? Looking at it one way, each American eats only about a bushel of corn per year. But that number only includes the corn that looks looks like corn-corn on the cob, or corn out of a can, or corn chips. like corn-corn on the cob, or corn out of a can, or corn chips.

But if you count all all the corn we eat, directly and indirectly the average American eats a the corn we eat, directly and indirectly the average American eats a ton of corn ton of corn every year. We don't recognize it as corn, though, because it's been turned into something else. Almost half is eaten by animals and turned into beef, chicken, fish, or pork. One-tenth of the U.S. corn crop is turned into processed food. every year. We don't recognize it as corn, though, because it's been turned into something else. Almost half is eaten by animals and turned into beef, chicken, fish, or pork. One-tenth of the U.S. corn crop is turned into processed food.

To make processed food, corn is first broken down into different parts. Those parts are put back together in new ways to make the sweetener in your soft drink or the starch in your hamburger roll. All of this happens in a factory called a "wet mill." (The old sort of mill, which simply grinds grain into flour, or meal, is a "dry" mill.) To follow the industrial food chain, I had to follow the river of corn through a wet mill.

There are twenty-five major wet mills in the United States, most of them owned by two corporations, Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland. George Naylor's corn probably went to Cargill's mill in Iowa City. ADM runs a giant plant in Decatur, Illinois. Both of those companies refused to let me to tour their plants.

Luckily, I was allowed to visit a smaller mill at Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa. Iowa State really should be called the University of Corn. Corn is the hero of many of the sculptures and murals on campus. (The soybean, Iowa's second-largest crop, gets its share of attention too.) The school's wet mill is part of something called the Center for Crops Utilization Research. Larry Johnson, the center's director, was more than happy to show me around.

INDUSTRIAL DIGESTION.

Johnson described the wet mill as kind of an industrial digestive system. The mill itself is a maze of stainless steel pipes, valves, filters, and tanks. Corn travels through the maze and is broken down through a series of steps including grinding (like the teeth) and soaking in acid (like the stomach). By the time it reaches the end, the corn is reduced to simple molecules, mostly sugars. Soybeans go through a similar process.

The first step in the "digestion" of corn is to split the kernel into its different parts: * The yellow skin.* The germ, the tiny dark part nearest the cob. That's the part that holds a tiny embryo of a corn plant.* The endosperm. The biggest part of the kernel, filled with carbohydrates.

When a s.h.i.+pment of corn arrives at the mill, it is soaked for thirty-six hours in a slightly acid bath. This swells the kernels and loosens the skin. After the soak, the swollen kernels are ground in a mill. "By now the germ is rubbery and it pops right off," Johnson explained.

The germ is then squeezed for corn oil. Corn oil can be used as a cooking or salad oil. Some of it is hydrogenated. That means hydrogen is forced into the oil molecules. This makes the oil stay solid at room temperature and so it can be used for margarine. Doctors used to think margarine was healthier for you than b.u.t.ter and would not cause heart disease. Now researchers think these hydrogenated trans fats in margarine are actually worse for our hearts than b.u.t.ter. Trans fats are also used in processed snacks, baked goods, and many other processed foods.

Once the germ has been removed for oil, the kernels are crushed. That makes a white mush of protein and starch called "mill starch." The mill starch can be used in animal feed.

STARCH INTO SUGAR.

What's left after that is a white liquid that's poured out onto a stainless steel table. It dries to a fine, superwhite powder-cornstarch. Cornstarch was wet milling's first product back in the 1840s. At first the starch was mainly used for laundry-to make s.h.i.+rts stiff. Then cooks and food companies began adding cornstarch to as many recipes as they could. The starch was cheap and had a nice white color that people thought was "pure."

By 1866, the mill owners had learned how to break down cornstarch into a kind of sugar called glucose. The glucose corn syrup wasn't as sweet as sugar, but it was cheap. Ever since, corn sweeteners have been the industry's most important product.

The big breakthrough came in the 1960s. That's when j.a.panese chemists discovered an enzyme that could transform glucose into the much sweeter sugar molecule called fructose. High-fructose corn syrup was born. It's a blend of 55 percent fructose and 45 percent glucose that tastes exactly as sweet as table sugar. Today it is the most valuable food product refined from corn.

High-fructose corn syrup, or HFCS, is by far the biggest food output of the country's wet mills. But there are hundreds of other food ingredients created from the remaining cornstarch. Some is made into other sugars like maltodextrin, which can be used to make instant pudding or gravy. Some is fermented to become ethanol. Some of the fermented starch is used to make plastic. At the end there's almost nothing left. Even the dirty water from the process is used to make animal feed.

The wet mill is like a giant steel beast, with a maze of pipes and machines inside. At one end it eats millions of bushels of corn fed to it every day by the trainload. At the other end of the beast are hundreds of spigots, large and small. Out of each spigot flows a different product made from corn, called "fractions" by the food industry. Many of these fractions, the sugars and starches, the alcohols and acids, the emulsifiers and stabi lizers with the strange names, will be made into food. They are put together to make cereal or snack food or chicken nuggets or TV dinners or just about anything else you can imagine and ingest. In fact, you would be hard-pressed to find a processed food today that isn't made from corn or soybeans.

CEREAL SECRETS.

A few years ago I had the chance to visit one of the places where new foods are invented. I was given a tour of the research and development laboratory for General Mills, the sixth-largest food company in the world. The lab is called the Bell Inst.i.tute and it is housed in a group of buildings on the outskirts of Minneapolis. Here nine hundred food scientists spend their days designing the future of food.

Much of their work is top secret, but nowhere more so than in the cereals area. Deep in the heart of the Bell Inst.i.tute is a maze of windowless rooms called, rather grandly, the Inst.i.tute of Cereal Technology. The secrecy surrounding cereals like Lucky Charms seemed silly, and I said so. But an executive explained to me that recipes can't be patented or copyrighted-which means that once you introduce a new cereal, anyone can put out another one just like it. All you can hope for is to have the market to yourself for a few months to establish your brand. That's why companies keep their new cereals top secret.

In the interests of secrecy, the food scientists would not talk to me about current projects. But they would talk about past failures, like the cereal in the shape of little bowling pins and b.a.l.l.s. "The kids loved it," the product's inventor told me, "but the mothers didn't like the idea of kids bowling their breakfast across the table." Which is why bowling pins never showed up in your cereal bowl.

Source: Adapted from Twinkie, Deconstructed, by Steve Ettlinger and www.hostesscakes.com Breakfast cereal is a great example of why companies love to make processed foods. A box of cereal contains four cents worth of corn (or some other grain). Yet that box will sell for close to four dollars. Cereals generate higher profits for General Mills than any other food. In the same way, McDonald's makes much more by selling you a chicken nugget than a piece of recognizable chicken.

The farmer, on the other hand, makes more money from whole foods than processed foods. For example, for every dollar a consumer spends to buy eggs, forty cents finds its way back to the farmer. But for every dollar a consumer spends on HFCS, say in a soft drink, farmers get only four cents. Companies like ADM and Coca-Cola and General Mills capture most of the rest. That's why George Naylor told me more than once: "There's money to be made in food, unless you're trying to grow it."

Source: USDA.

CAN YOU EAT MORE, PLEASE?.

It seems that food corporations have got it made. The U.S. government helps pay for their raw materials. They make more money from selling food than farmers. But they have one big problem that limits their sales: the size of the human stomach.

Unlike many other products-CDs, say, or books-there's a natural limit to how much food we each can consume without exploding. Try as we might, the average person can eat only about fifteen hundred pounds of food a year. The demand for food rises only as fast as the population grows. In the U.S., that's around 1 percent per year.

This leaves food companies like General Mills with two choices. They can figure out how to get people to spend more money for the same amount of food. Or they can get us to eat more food than we need. Which do they choose? Why both, of course.

Processing food allows companies to charge more for it. Consumers will only pay so much for an ear of corn. But they can be convinced to pay a lot more for the same corn if it has been turned into a funny shape, sweetened, and brightly colored. The industry calls this "adding value."

Added value can be anything. It might be the convenience of a dinner you just pop in the microwave. Or it might be a feeling like "this food product is good for me." Or it might be that a food is fun to eat-like ridged potato chips or cereal bars. That's why food companies spend so much on advertising-to convince us they really have added value to the corn and soybeans.

They also try to convince us that their corn or chickens or apples are better (and worth more) than those of another company. They don't want us to buy just any old chicken, but Tyson chicken or Perdue. They don't want us to buy any old oat cereal-they want us to buy Cheerios.

Companies can also try to convince us that their food is healthier, even a sort of medicine. We're used to having vitamins and minerals added to our food. (Of course, manufacturers wouldn't need to add them if they hadn't been removed removed during processing.) And some manufacturers are going even further than adding vitamins. One company, called Tree Top, has developed a "low-moisture, naturally sweetened apple piece infused with a red-wine extract." Natural chemicals in red wine called flavonoids are thought to fight cancer. So Tree Top has added value to an apple by injecting it with flavonoids from red wine. during processing.) And some manufacturers are going even further than adding vitamins. One company, called Tree Top, has developed a "low-moisture, naturally sweetened apple piece infused with a red-wine extract." Natural chemicals in red wine called flavonoids are thought to fight cancer. So Tree Top has added value to an apple by injecting it with flavonoids from red wine.

It seems that an old-fas.h.i.+oned apple just isn't enough anymore. We need an apple that fights cancer! We need orange juice with calcium that builds strong bones. We need cereal that keeps us from having a heart attack.

FOOD THAT DOESN'T FEED The latest invention to come from the wet mill and the lab is something called resistant starch. This new corn "fraction" has food makers very excited because-it can't be digested! That's right, it's a food that your body can't use. Since the body can't break down resistant starch, it slips through the digestive track. It's the ultimate diet food-food with no calories. It's food that isn't really food.

You would think this would be a bad thing. Imagine the advertis.e.m.e.nt: "Our food doesn't feed you!" But for food companies, it's an excellent invention. They have finally overcome the natural limit of what the human body will eat. You could eat this stuff twenty-four hours a day, like a human-size corn processing plant!

Maybe this fake food is corn's final victory. It has succeeded up until now by being useful to humans. Now it is about to succeed by being of no use at all.

7.

Fat from Corn

CAN YOU EAT MORE, PLEASE? PART II.

So food companies have been very successful at getting us to pay more for the same food. What about their other money-making scheme, to get us to buy (and eat) more food than we need? How has that worked out? Well, let's see . . .

Three of every five Americans are overweight; one of every five is obese. Among kids, it's almost as bad. Seventeen percent of kids age six through nineteen are obese. This is a giant public health problem, costing the health care system an estimated $90 billion a year. The disease formerly known as adult-onset diabetes has had to be renamed Type II diabetes since it now occurs so frequently in children, and the Centers for Disease Control estimates that one in three American children born in 2000 will develop it. Diabetes can mean blindness, amputation, and early death. Because of diabetes and all the other health problems caused by obesity, kids in the U.S. today may turn out to be the first group of Americans with life spans that are shorter than their parents'. To put it simply, Americans are getting fatter and it's killing us.

Sources: Journal of the American Medical a.s.sociation and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

You hear plenty of explanations for our expanding waistline. We sit all day at desks in school or at work, then sit around all night watching television. We play video games instead of sports. Fast-food advertising encourages us to eat supersized meals. It is actually cheaper to eat high-calorie, fatty, processed foods than whole foods. All these explanations are true, but they don't tell the whole story.

EXTRA CALORIES.

Behind our epidemic of obesity lies this simple fact: When food is abundant and cheap, people will eat more of it. Since 1977, an American's average daily intake of calories has jumped by more than 10 percent. Since we aren't exercising more, the calories end up being stored away in fat cells in our bodies. Where did all those cheap calories come from? If you've read this far, you already know the answer-most of them come from cheap corn.

Since 1970, farmers in the United States have managed to produce 500 additional calories per person every day. (The average person needs about 2,000 calories a day, but that number varies greatly depending on your age, size, and amount of exercise.) Where are those extra calories going? Some are sold overseas. Some are turned into ethanol for our cars. But a lot of them are going into us.

An awful lot of those extra corn calories are being eaten as high-fructose corn syrup. Not surprisingly, HFCS is the leading source of sweetness in our diet.

A SWEET DEAL.

In 1985, the average American consumed 45 pounds of HFCS a year. In 2006, it was 58 pounds. You might think that it has replaced other sweeteners in the American diet, but that isn't so. In addition to the extra HFCS, Americans are eating more old-fas.h.i.+oned cane sugar too. In fact, since 1985 our consumption of all sugars-cane, beet, HFCS, glucose, honey, maple syrup, whatever-has climbed from 126 pounds to 139 pounds per person. That's what makes HFCS such a "sweet deal" for the food industry since we like sweet things, adding it to our food increases the amount we eat.

Lately the companies that make HFCS have been fighting back. Their trade group, the Corn Refiners a.s.sociation, has been running ads on television and in newspaper suggesting that corn syrup has been unfairly criticized, and that it is no worse for us than sugar. They may be right about that, but the problem with HFCS is not that it is worse for us than sugar, but that it is everywhere in the food supply-in products that never used to be sweetened at all.

Read the food labels in your kitchen and you'll find that HFCS is everywhere. It's not just in our soft drinks and snack foods, but in the ketchup and mustard, the breads and cereals, the relishes and crackers, the hot dogs and hams.

But it is in soft drinks that we consume most of our fifty-eight pounds of high-fructose corn syrup. We can trace this back to the year 1980-an important year in the history of corn. That was the year corn first became an ingredient in Coca-Cola. By 1984, Coca-Cola and Pepsi had switched over entirely from sugar to high-fructose corn syrup. Why? Because HFCS was a few cents cheaper than sugar and consumers couldn't taste the difference.

The soft drink makers could have just switched one sugar for another. That would not have led us to drink more. But that wasn't all they did. They began to increase the size of a bottle of soda.

HFCS was so cheap that Pepsi and c.o.ke could have cut the price of each bottle they sold. But they had a much better idea: They would supersize their sodas. Since corn sweetener was now so cheap, why not get people to pay just a few pennies more for a bigger bottle? Drop the price per ounce, but sell a lot more ounces.

Did you ever see an old-fas.h.i.+oned c.o.ke bottle, from around 1950? It looks tiny, because it only held eight ounces. Today the standard size of a c.o.ke or Pepsi is twenty ounces.

SUPERSIZE!.

Soda makers don't deserve credit for the invention of supersizing. That belongs to a man named David Wallerstein. In the 1950s Wallerstein worked for a chain of movie theaters in Texas. Movie theaters make most of their profits from their snack counters, not from ticket sales. It was Wallerstein's job to figure out how to sell more soda and popcorn. Wallerstein tried everything he could think of but found he simply could not get customers to buy more than one soda and one bag of popcorn. He thought he knew why: Going for seconds makes people feel piggish.

Wallerstein discovered that people would buy more popcorn and soda-a lot more-as long as it came in a single giant serving. Thus was born the two-quart bucket of popcorn and the sixty-four-ounce Big Gulp. In 1968, Wallerstein went to work for McDonald's, but try as he might, he couldn't convince Ray Kroc, the company's founder, to try supersizing.

"If people want more fries," Kroc told him, "they can buy two bags." Wallerstein explained that McDonald's customers wanted more but didn't want to buy a second bag. "They don't want to look like gluttons."

Finally Kroc gave in and approved supersized portions, and what followed was a dramatic rise in sales. People had been holding back because they didn't want to seem greedy. Now Wallerstein and McDonald's had figured out a way to make them feel okay about eating more. After all, it was still just one serving, even if it was twice the size. They had discovered the secret to expanding the (supposedly) fixed human stomach.

One might think that people would stop eating and drinking these huge portions as soon as they felt full, but it turns out hunger doesn't work that way. Researchers have found that people (and animals) will eat up to 30 percent more if they are given larger portions. Our eating habits were formed over millions of years of evolution. Early humans, who lived by hunting and gathering, didn't always have enough food. Our bodies tell us to eat more when we have the chance, because hunger might be just around the corner. The problem is that with the mountain of cheap corn, hunger never comes (at least not for most Americans).

In the same way, our built-in instincts tell us to eat lots of sugar and fat. Humans, like most other warm-blooded creatures, have a built-in sweet tooth. The taste of sweet or fat tells our body we're eating an energy-rich food. Our instinct is to eat as much as we can, in case we can't find food tomorrow. Yet in nature we would never find a fruit with anywhere near the amount of fructose in a soda. We would never find a piece of animal flesh with as much fat as a chicken nugget.

You begin to see why processing foods is such a good way of getting people to eat more. The fast-food chains have been able to build foods that push our evolutionary b.u.t.tons. Huge amounts of sweets and fats fool our instincts and we wind up eating much more than we should. Animal experiments prove this is so. Rats presented with solutions of pure sugar or tubs of pure lard will gorge themselves sick.

CHEAP FAT.

Surprisingly, the health problems of eating too much hit poor people hardest. That's because if you count the calories, foods loaded with sugar and fat are the cheapest foods in the market. A recent study showed this was true. In a typical supermarket, one dollar could buy 1,200 calories of potato chips and cookies. The same dollar could only buy 250 calories of carrots and other whole vegetables.

On the beverage aisle, you can buy 875 calories of soda for a dollar. But a dollar will only buy you 170 calories of fruit juice from concentrate. These numbers show why people with limited money to spend on food spend it on the cheapest calories they can find. It makes even more sense when you realize that those cheap calories reward our instincts for fat and sugar.

King Corn shoved the other plants and animals off the farm. Now it is winning out in the supermarket too. It is so cheap and comes in so many different forms, the other foods just can't compete.

As we have seen, it has had a lot of help. The U.S. government (spending taxpayer dollars) helps pay farmers to grow corn and soybeans, but not to grow carrots. That means the government helped pay for your soft drink or cookies, but it won't help pay for green vegetables. One part of the government puts out food pyramids telling you to eat more fruits and vegetables and fewer sweets. Meanwhile another part of the government is making it cheaper for you to eat more sweets. The government says it wants you to eat healthy, then it makes sure that the cheapest calories in the supermarket are the unhealthiest. Talk about mixed messages!

The processed food industry has brought us corn in a thousand different forms. It's given us cheap corn sweeteners and hundreds of extra calories a day. It's managed to confuse our instincts, to get us to eat more food than we need. All of this is part of a bigger problem, and not a new problem either. It's the problem of figuring out what we should and shouldn't eat.

It boils down to this: As creatures who can eat many different things, how do we know what's good to eat and what's not? That's the omnivore's dilemma and it's growing bigger every day.

8.

The Omnivore's Dilemma

IS THAT FOOD?.

For some animals, there is no dilemma at dinnertime. The koala eats eucalyptus leaves. Period. To the koala, eucalyptus leaves=food. The monarch b.u.t.terfly only eats milkweed. There's no choice to make. Everything else in nature is not food.

The koala gets all the nutrients it needs from eucalyptus leaves. The monarch gets everything it needs from milkweed leaves. But, unlike koalas and monarch b.u.t.terflies, omnivores not only can eat different foods, we need need to eat a variety of foods to stay healthy. For example, we need vitamin C, which is only found in plants. But we also need vitamin B-12, which is only found in animals. Ultimately, our omnivore's dilemma is rooted in our nature as human beings-but we've made our choices much harder than they used to be. to eat a variety of foods to stay healthy. For example, we need vitamin C, which is only found in plants. But we also need vitamin B-12, which is only found in animals. Ultimately, our omnivore's dilemma is rooted in our nature as human beings-but we've made our choices much harder than they used to be.

The industrial food chain has brought the world to our supermarkets. Today we can buy just about any sort of food from anywhere in the globe, in any season. We can buy kiwis from New Zealand and grapes from Chile. We can buy fresh tomatoes in the middle of the winter, flown in from Israel or Holland or Mexico. Add that to the thousands of new processed foods-about 17,000 each year-and we have an incredible amount of food choices (even if most of them are made from corn). With all this variety and the constant stream of messages from the food industry and the media, how can we ever make up our minds?