Michael Pollan is professor of journalism at the University of California at Berkeley. He is a contributing writer to the "New York Times Magazine." He is the author of "The Botany of Desire." His "The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals," was selected as one of the ten best books of 2006 by the "New York Times."

 The reason I brought these groceries is to make a couple points. One is that I greet you not as an expert. . But I'm a consumer. I'm a consumer like you. I'm an eater trying very hard to figure out what I should eat. I ended up having to write 460 pages to answer that very simple question. And in a way that's sort of the point, that things have gotten so confused and so complicated that it took quite a journey of four years to figure out what I should eat.
Before I could do that, I needed to figure out what I was eating. So I had to embark on what I call food detective stories. I looked at the different food chains that we're part of. I'm going to concentrate mostly on the biggest, most important food chain that feeds most Americans most of the time. That, of course, is the industrial food chain, the food chain that ends up in your supermarket or fast-food restaurant with these sorts of products. I followed a bunch of these products back to the land. Because let us remember where this energy question really begins: it begins with plants growing in soil somewhere underneath the sun, taking carbon dioxide from the air, using sunlight and water, a couple simple minerals, nitrogen from the soil, and storing that energy in the form of carbohydrates. The whole food game is essentially about either eating the carbohydrates that only plants can create from the air with sunlight directly or eating the animals or the mushrooms that eat the carbohydrates gathered by plants.

So I tried to look at the whole question of even this stuff ecologically. Even a Pop-Tart, even a Twinkie links us to the earth in this way. Those carbohydrates, with the exception of some ingredients that are actually made directly from petroleum—some of our food additives are; the chicken nugget, which I didn't bring any of, actually has some butane in it. I'm not kidding. It's a preservative. But all this food begins somewhere in the sun collecting energy in a plant.
One of the first surprises in doing this book is that I kept finding myself, as I followed this kind of food back to the earth in the exact same place. I'm going to start by reading a very brief passage from the beginning of the book about that quest and then talk to you a little bit about what it means that all these foods begin with that one plant and what that has to do with the issue of energy and agriculture.

 "When I started trying to follow the industrial food chain, the one that now feeds most of us most of the time and typically culminates either in a supermarket or a fast-food meal, I expected that my investigations would lead me to a wide variety of places. And though my journeys did take me to a great many states, and covered a great many miles, at the very end of these food chains, which is to say at the very beginning, I invariably found myself in almost exactly the same place—a farm field in the American Corn Belt. The great edifice of variety and choice that is an American supermarket turns out to rest on a remarkably narrow biological foundation comprised of a tiny group of plants that is dominated by a similar species, Zea mays, the giant tropical grass most Americans know as corn. Corn is what feeds the steer that becomes the steak.

Corn feeds the chicken and the pig, the turkey and the lamb, the catfish and the tilapia, and increasingly even the salmon, a carnivore by nature that the fish farmers are re-engineering to tolerate corn. The eggs are made of corn, the milk and cheese and yogurt that once came from dairy cows that grazed on grass now typically come from Holsteins that spend their working lives indoors tethered to machines eating corn.

Head over to the processed foods and you find even more intricate manifestations of corn. A chicken nugget, for example, piles corn upon corn. What chicken it contains consists of corn, of course, but so do most of the nugget's other constituents, including the modified corn starch that glues the thing together, the corn flour and the batter that coats it, and the corn oil in which it gets fried. Much less obviously, the leavenings and lecithin, the mono-, di-, and triglycerides, the attractive golden coloring, and even the citric acid that keeps the nugget fresh can all be derived from corn.

To wash down your chicken nuggets with virtually any soft drink in the supermarket is to have some corn with your corn. Since the 1980s, virtually all the sodas and most of the fruit drinks sold in the supermarket have been sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup, HFCS, after water, corn sweetener is their principal ingredient. Grab a beer for your beverage instead, and you would still be drinking corn in the form of alcohol fermented from glucose refined from corn. In fact, I've since learned that many American beers are now adding high-fructose corn syrup to just make the beer a little bit sweeter. You don't have to disclose the ingredients on alcoholic beverages. It's very interesting. We have no idea what's in that stuff. That's why you should buy German beer, because they have a law about this. Read the ingredients on the label of any processed food and, provided you know the chemical names it travels under, corn is what you will find. For modified or unmodified starch, for glucose syrup and maltodextrin, for crystalline fructose and ascorbic acid, for lecithin and dextrose, lactic acid and lysine, for maltose and HFCS, for MSG and polyols, for the caramel color and xanthan gum read corn. Corn is in the coffee whitener and Cheez Whiz, the frozen yogurt and TV dinner, the canned food and ketchup and candies, the soups and snacks and cake mixes, the frostings and gravy and frozen waffles, the syrups and hot sauces, the mayonnaise and mustard, the hot dogs and the bologna, the margarine and shortenings, the salad dressings and the relishes, and even the vitamins, and, yes, it's in the Twinkies, too. There are some 45,000 items in the average American supermarket today, and more than a quarter of them, far more, in fact, than a quarter of them, now contain corn. This goes for the non-food items as well. Everything from the toothpaste and cosmetics to the disposable diapers, trash bags, cleansers, charcoal briquettes, matches, and batteries, right down to the shine on the cover of the magazine that catches your eye by the checkout—corn. Even in produce, on a day when there is ostensibly no corn for sale you will nevertheless find plenty of corn. In the vegetable wax that gives the cucumbers their sheen, in the pesticide responsible for the produce's perfection, even in the coating on the cardboard it was shipped in. Indeed, the supermarket itself, the wallboard and joint compound, the linoleum and fiberglass and adhesives out of which the building itself has been built is in no small measure a manifestation of corn."

So, in a word, there is our industrial food system, to oversimplify only a little bit. There is some soy there, too, the plant that takes turns in the field, of course, with the 80 million acres of corn in this country, 125,000 square miles. And if you combine that with soy acreage and they take turns—it's one complex, the corn-soy complex—you're talking about 240,000 square miles, an area equivalent to two Kansases and an Iowa or the entire area of California.
So corn. Big deal. Why does it matter? I want to argue to you that this 10 billion-bushel pile of corn that we're growing in this country is the elephant in the room, in our economy and our society. It explains a great deal about the food system and our whole national eating disorder; it explains the American landscape, and I don't just mean the corn fields but the fast-food strips and animal factories; it explains a raft of environmental problems, including water pollution; it explains much of the crisis in American agriculture, the obesity and diabetes epidemics, and even a good part of the energy crisis. Weirdly enough, corn also helps explain both obesity at home and hunger abroad. This sounds like a kind of monomaniacal fixation on one thing, one factor. It's a cornocentric view of recent American history. But bear with me for a while and see if you aren't convinced.

A couple facts. It's our biggest crop in dollar value, our biggest legal crop. The biggest crop in dollar value is one I've written about before, cannabis. Over the past 30 or 40 years, really since with World War II but intensifying in the 1970s, it has conquered a huge amount of the American landscape. It's actually taken over several whole states. Iowa has essentially been conquered by corn. There is very little of anything else left, including people. It has its own corporations, ADM and Cargill, its own department of the federal government, the USDA, charged with promoting the overproduction of corn and then promoting interesting ways to get rid of the overproduction of corn. It has its own university. Iowa State at Ames is the university of corn. It's taken over our diet, it's taken over the diet of all the animals we eat, and now it has taken over our bodies. We are the people of corn. To get rid of all this corn, we put it in every conceivable product. And if you read afterwards, you should come over and read some of the ingredient labels on these products. We dump it on Third World nations. We loot the treasury to subsidize every single bushel of it. We poison our land and water to grow more of it. We change the genetics of animals so they can better digest it, the salmon and the cow. And now, eyeing a hungry beast that might absorb more of this surplus, we're planning to feed to it our cars in the form of ethanol. And we can talk a little more about whether that's a good idea or not.

Who would have thunk this? Here is a grass that 6,000 years ago was just a grass, teosinte, a very inconspicuous plant growing in central Mexico. It's very unusual that the food of the conquered people, the Native Americans, should conquer the conquerors. The bison, for example, was the meat of Native Americans, and that was virtually eliminated, intentionally eliminated. But corn somehow kind of pulled this jujitsu and ended up faring much better than the Native Americans who essentially developed it, and took us over.

When I say it's conquered our bodies, I mean that literally. If you were to take a tooth or a slip of your fingernail or hair, if you've been eating industrially, and run it through a mass spectrometer, you will discover that the carbon of which you are made—and remember, we are the carbon life form, as Dr. Spock used to say—came from corn. I didn't realize this was possible. I didn't know that the identity of corn could actually be detected even after it had been processed and passed through animals and turned into meat or passed through ADM and turned into high-fructose corn syrup and in that soda. But indeed it can. And I found this out because I was talking to a colleague of mine at Berkeley, a biologist named Ignacio Chapela, who is Mexican. I said, "I've been doing all that research about Americans and corn, and I believe we're even more the people of corn than you Mexicans," because the Mexicans still fatten their animals on grass and they still sweeten their soft drinks with cane sugar. They don't like high-fructose corn syrup. They can taste the difference and they reject it. And he said, "You could prove that. Go talk to Todd Dawson over in biology." And I did. Todd Dawson has a mass spectrometer. And he said, "Absolutely. If you run these tests on Mexicans and Americans," as he put it, "under the machine we look like corn chips on two legs."

So we performed some tests. And, in fact, we also tested a McDonald's meal and put it through the machine. It was fascinating to see that when you go to McDonald's, even though there is no corn on the menu, you're eating corn. The soda—you have to remove the water; this is dry weight—100 percent corn; milk shake, 78 percent corn; salad dressing—this is Paul Newman's salad dressing—65 percent corn; the Chicken McNuggets, 56 percent corn; cheeseburger, 52 percent corn; the French fries—the French fries? Yes—23 percent corn on any given day. Some days they're fried in corn oil, some days they're in soy oil. So once we got zero, once we got 23 percent. So we are now the corniest people on the face of the earth.
How did this come to be? How did corn become really the greatest winner in the dance of domestication here in America? You know how this works, especially if you read Botany of Desire. Plants, domestic species, plants and animals, co-evolved with us, essentially, and the ones that put forth qualities that we like, that gratify our desires and needs, are the ones that get to reproduce the most. And they give up a lot. They give up their independence in exchange for our health. In fact, corn is so implicated in our lives and we in its that if we were to disappear from the planet tomorrow, within three or four years there would be no corn left. Corn would vanish, too.

The reason for that is this husk arrangement. It cannot germinate without us to separate its seeds and spread them. So that's how much it's thrown in its lot with us and we with it. So corn can't live without us. It's still a mystery why it created this very unusual setup of its seeds and this husk, but it certainly served us. It protected the husk. It allowed us to harvest it without shattering. And it was a good deal for us for a long time. It helped us settle this country. In fact, without corn this country would have been very hard to settle. But arguably corn now has the better of us. We are doing more for corn than corn is doing for us, I would argue. Corn is calling the shots.

Why corn? Why not wheat? Why not rice? Why not soybeans? There are a lot of reasons. I'll run through them really quickly. It's incredibly productive. The same reason you can identify corn in a mass spectrometer is because it has a very distinctive signature. It basically can grab more carbon, more indiscriminately when it's performing photosynthesis than most other plants. It's what's called the C4 plant: it grabs four atoms of carbon and puts them in these carbohydrate molecules, where many other plants only grab three. And it's not picky: it will take carbon 13, it will take carbon 12. Fine, fine. That's how you can tell the difference. The isotopes are different. It is so variable, so promiscuous genetically that it can adapt very quickly to everywhere from tropical climates, where it begins, all the way up to Canada. Different day length, different water conditions, corn is fine with it.

One of the reasons is that you can breed it so quickly and it breeds itself so quickly. Corn has essentially allowed us into its bedroom, into its sex life in a way that very few plants have. The fact that the cob is kind of in the middle of the plant, which allows us to grab a lot more nutrients than it would—most grasses would be like this—helps, but the fact that the male part is up here and the female part is down here, the pollen has to fall on the little threads, the silk, to pollinate the thing is a very interesting setup, because it allows us to intervene. So we can take the pollen from one plant and attach it to the silks of another plant and very quickly breed this plant. In fact, the Native Americans figured out how to breed corn, and they've been doing it for thousands of years.
It's the perfect capitalist plant in many ways. It's something you can eat in its fresh stage after just a couple months, or you can save it, dry it, and it turns into a commodity that you can accumulate, a form of wealth. Grain is a form of wealth. So in that sense it's very good for making that transition from subsistence to accumulation. It has built-in property rights, very important if you're going to be the perfect capitalist plant. Hybrid corn, even without GMOs, can be controlled by the breeder, because it doesn't come true in the second generation. It's a long story. I won't explain exactly how it works, but basically you have to go back to the breeder for new seed every year if you're planting hybrid corn. And that was an enticement to breeders to put a lot of research and development money into it and increase yield.

It also responded like no other plant to oil, to a cheap energy economy. Let me explain how. The way we grow corn is with vast quantities of pesticide and chemical fertilizer, both of which are fossil fuel products. They're both really legacies of World War II. The pesticides are made from petroleum, and the ammonium nitrate fertilizer that this plant can use like no other plant—it's what farmers called a greedy plant—is made usually from natural gas but can also be made from oil. After World War II, basically we converted the nerve gases into pesticides. Hey, if it can kill people, maybe a little bit can kill bugs. That's basically how we invented pesticides. And ammonium nitrate we took from munitions. We were turning natural gas into bomb materials. After the war, we had this amazing capacity to produce ammonium nitrate, and we were trying to figure out what to do with it. And the people at the USDA figured out—first they were going to spray it on the forests to grow the trees more. And then somebody had a better idea, which is let's put it on the crops. That is a key event in natural history, because what happens when you can take natural gas and create fertility with it, which before could only be created by the sun in the soil—there were a couple ways you get nitrogen in the soil. One is lightning, which gives you a light shower of nitrogen—because there's tons of nitrogen in the air, but it's self-involved, it won't deal with anything except itself so you've got to try to split that bond and hook it up to other things to make it useful to life on earth—and bacteria on the roots of legumes can do it. That was basically it for fertility.

But when we figured out how to turn energy directly into fertility, an invention that corn exploited more than any other plant on earth, the rules of the game changed. We moved from an agriculture and a food chain that was based on solar energy to one that is to a considerable extent and an ever-growing extent based on petroleum. So that's a key moment.

It really happens in 1947. There is a day when the big munitions plant at Muscle Shoals, Alabama, converts from making bombs to making fertilizer. And corn just sucked up the stuff and grew and grew and grew, because corn, more even than most plants, learned to sip fossil fuels, essentially. It loves life in the factory. It loves industrial capitalism. It just kind of works in that system. It also lends itself to mechanization. Yields rose from 20 bushels an acre around the turn of the last century, which was the Native Americans' historic average too, to more than 200 bushels an acre today in places like Iowa. And there are records of 400 and 500 bushels occasionally. This is an amazing accomplishment. There is no other domesticated species that has increased its yield to these degrees with the exception of there is one animal that rivals this, which is the Holstein cow, which also, thanks to corn and breeding, has become extremely productive.

We say bushels. Does anybody know how big a bushel is? Yes, it's this big. But it's 56 pounds of corn kernels. So 200 bushels an acre is 10,000 pounds of just the kernels. That is a vast amount of food. And that is why today one farmer in Iowa can feed 129 of us. That is an amazing accomplishment. One hundred years ago one farmer could feed about 12 people. This is the precise reason there are very few farmers left. We don't need them. We have corn instead. So corn grew and grew, and these yields grew and grew.

They were always made under the banner, We need to feed the world so we need higher yields. We need to feed the world. The problem is, the way we're feeding the world with corn has made it harder for the world to feed itself. Just a very brief digression into what happens when you produce too much corn overseas, and then I'll concentrate on what happens when you produce too much corn domestically.
As I said, corn, helps explain hunger abroad. We are dumping so much corn now on—let's use Mexico as an example—because we can produce it so cheaply. I shouldn't say that. We can sell it so cheaply because our government subsidizes the price of corn. In fact, we sell it for a dollar less than it costs to produce it per bushel. Under NAFTA, when Mexico opened their borders to us, corn flooded in. The price of corn in Mexico fell, plummeted, by half. The farmers who made their living growing corn in Mexico, superior corn, by the way, as anyone who eats tortillas and has done a taste test will tell you, could not survive the flood of cheap corn. 1.5 million Mexican farmers left the land when we started dumping corn. A lot of them moved to the cities, where they couldn't find jobs, where they found themselves hungry.

You would think all this cheap corn would lead to cheap food in Mexico, but in fact over the same period since 1994 the price of tortillas doubled as the price of corn dropped by half. Go figure. Tortillas in Mexico are controlled by a monopoly. The monopoly decided, Why pass on these savings? We've got a bigger urban population that needs more tortillas. We're just going to charge more for them. And then other Mexican campesinos forced off the land by dumped corn came north. They're here. They're working at slave wages on our farms. These are farmers who used to be able to support themselves growing corn in Mexico. So that's feeding the world, right, with overproduction.

How about us? Overproduction of corn has a lot to do with the obesity epidemic. When you've got 10 billion bushels of corn, marketers, food processors are going to figure out ways to get rid of it. Some of it they dump abroad, others of it they try to induce us to eat. And they use any trick in the book to get us to eat all this cheap commodity. The way to make money in food is not growing food, it's processing cheap industrial commodities, a very high-energy process, by the way, into things like high-fructose corn syrup. Since the 1970s, American farmers are producing between 500 and 700 more calories a day. That's a result of farm policies, that's a result of improvements in technology, that's a result of spreading more and more fossil-fuel fertilizer and more and more fossil-fuel pesticides. Of that 500 to 700 calories, we are managing, heroically, to consume an additional 200 calories each. A big hand for helping put away all that corn. Right there in that 200 calories is the obesity epidemic. We're putting away 30 to 40 percent of this overproduction. The building block of the fast-food nation is cheap corn.

Supersizing is a great example. Cheap corn explains how you can go from that svelte, sexy bottle of Coca-Cola, which was how Coke came when I was a kid, to that big, fat, what is that, 2-liter bottle. In real money the price is not that different from the 1970s, what a Coke cost then to what it cost today. The general one is a 20-ouncer. That chubby 20-ouncer has replaced the old one. Why should that work? Because when the raw materials are that cheap and the price of the raw materials is falling, a food processor has a choice: they can either lower the price of food or give you more for the same amount of money,
 which ends up being a much better strategy because you induce people to eat more.
Supersizing was invented by a man named David Wallerstein, who recently died. This is a guy who worked for a theater chain in Texas. This was in the 1960s, early 1970s. His job was the concessions. Get as much money from the concessions as possible. That's where you make money in a theater. You don't make it on film rental; it's the soda and the popcorn and the candy. He was trying to goose sales up—he was a really ambitious businessman—and what he found, though, is he could not get people to bite. When he offered two-for-one specials, matinee specials, he could not get people to get a second. You remember how popcorn used to come in those narrow little bags, if you're old enough, and the sodas were in these 8-ounce cups. And people wouldn't come back for seconds. He had an insight. His insight was, people feel piggish getting seconds. The sin of gluttony hangs heavy on us. But what if we made the firsts bigger. And he came up with this idea of supersizing portions, putting popcorn in bushel buckets and soda in 32- and even 64-ounce sizes. There are 64-ounce sodas now, Big Gulps. And people bought them. They felt, Well, I'm just having one soda. Wallerstein's brilliant invention would have died in Texas with him except that, his genius recognized, he got a job at McDonald's.

This is in the 1970s. He tried very hard to persuade Ray Kroc to give up on those tiny little burgers and those tiny little bags of fries. You remember, if you're my age or older, that there was one kind of hamburger at McDonald's, and it was the size after big coin, essentially, with a roll, and you really did need a couple of them to fill up. The French fries came in these little bags, and the sodas were in 8-ounce or 10-ounce cups. He went to Ray Kroc and he said, "People want more food, and if we make the portions bigger, charge a little bit more for more, you will sell a lot more food." And Kroc was like, "My formula works. I'm not going to mess around with it. If they want seconds, they can get seconds." But Wallerstein stayed at it. He said, "I'm going to do a test for you. I'm going to show you." He did a surveillance in this McDonald's around Chicago. He took this tape and he showed people reaching down in the bottom of the bag to get those little burned crisps of French fry and little bits of salt—they were clearly still hungry—and the sound of people slurping the end of a 8-ounce soda. If you think about it, you haven't heard that sound in a long time, because nobody can finish a 20-ounce soda.

After Ray Kroc saw the evidence, he said, "All right, let's try it." They moved to Big Macs, two burgers with extra bread in between, and bigger sodas and large French fries, and sales took off. Because, as it turns out, we will eat the portions put in front of us, what the sociologists call a unit bias. If it comes in a plate this big, that's what you're supposed to eat. This is just a kind of weakness of human design. So if you increase the portions, we will eat up to 30 percent more. And, in fact, they've done tests with people who have amnesia. They will give them lunch, and then they will take it away and they will wait 3, 4 minutes and they'll say "Lunchtime." too much they and them It's a kind of cruel experiment, I agree. I didn't perform it, I just read about it. And they'll have another lunch. So we're a little disconnected from our biological signals. So supersizing was one way to get us to consume all this extra corn.
But before you go out and sue McDonald's for your expanding waistline, it's important to understand that this overproduction of cheap calories is our government's policy, and it has been since the late 1970s. That is when we changed the way we support farmers, under the influence of Earl Butz, President Nixon's agriculture secretary. We had a moment of hyperinflation of food prices in the early 1970s. The price of grain had gone up dramatically because of a grain deal with Russia that the Nixon administration entered into to help secure the farm vote, which they felt McGovern might threaten. This forced up the price of grain so high that you had inflation in food prices. Women were in the street protesting the price of butter. Horsemeat was showing up in butcher shops because beef was too expensive. Nixon realized this was a moment of real political peril. As you know, he had other things to worry about, but he did worry about this one, too. He told Butz, "Look, force down the price of food." And the way Butz went about it was to encourage farmers to move toward monocultures of corn, get rid of the polycultures, get rid of the animals and plant corn and soybeans fence row to fence row.

He also changed the nature of agricultural support. Instead of essentially loaning farmers money when the price of corn fell, as it invariably does because crises of overproduction are just part of the way agriculture has always worked, instead of loaning them money so that they didn't have to dump the corn on a weak market and they could wait to sell it in a stronger market, he said, "Instead of that loan we'll just cut you a check for the difference between some target price and the market price, and you can go ahead and sell it." So to the farmer in a way it didn't make a difference. They were making up the difference in some way. But to the market it made all the difference, because all this corn got dumped on the market, and the price fell and fell and fell, and the subsidies went up and up and up. And you get to where we are today, which is $25 billion a year in agricultural subsidies, about a quarter of which go to cutting checks to farmers to grow more corn. So it's not all technology, it's not all nature. It's agricultural policy and cheap energy.
Now our project, the USDA's project, is to get rid of all this corn. Where does it go? A lot of it goes into processed foods. I've talked about that a little bit, the great center of our supermarket where all the real heavy corn and soy products are. These are the cheapest calories in the supermarket. They are also the least healthy calories in the supermarket. We hear about an obesity epidemic, but you look around. Upper-middle-class people, there aren't a lot of obese people in this room. It is a class phenomenon, by and large. The reason for that is very simply that this system subsidizes the least healthy calories in the supermarket. If you've got a dollar to spend and you're just trying to get energy, calories to keep your family going, the rational thing to do is to buy junk food, because you get more calories per buck. There have been studies done. You can get something like 1200 calories for a dollar in the snack food aisle and only 250 in produce. You can get 875 calories of soda for $1 and only 170 calories of real fruit juice, of orange juice. So you see, our Darwinian inheritance is to get as much energy with as little expenditure as possible. This is what we're programmed to do as a species. If you don't have a lot of money, the way to do that is to eat badly.
That, again, is not a function of nature, it's not a function of the free market. It's a function of the policies that organize our food system. Make no mistake, we are subsidizing high-fructose corn syrup by subsidizing corn at a time when we have an epidemic of diabetes that is actually going to shrink the life span of an American born today. It will be shorter than his parents' for the first time in our history. Our government is contributing to this problem by subsidizing this substance. And now, since the Butz era, 1980, when high-fructose corn syrup was introduced into the food supply, we are managing to put away 66 pounds of it, each American, every year. You say, "Oh, but it took the place of cane sugar." No, it didn't. The 40 pounds are on top of the sugar that we never stopped eating. So right there, if you want to point to one factor in obesity.

Another place we want to get rid of it today is ethanol. I mentioned earlier, we should feed it to our cars. There was a laudatory article on the cover of your newspaper today saying, "Two New Ethanol Plants Coming to Oregon." It sounds very progressive. Bill Gates is behind it. This is the next new thing. I'm very skeptical. What you need to remember to understand it is what you've already learned, which is that this is not simply taking a green plant and turning it into an energy source, because this green plant already consists of a huge amount of fossil fuel. To grow the corn to make the ethanol takes a great deal of fossil fuel, such that the most generous estimates are that when you count the cost of the fertilizer, that energy, the pesticide, the combines, the planting tractors, it takes two-thirds—this is the best estimate—two-thirds of a gallon of oil to make one gallon of ethanol. The estimates that really count all the energy factors come out to .9. And there are people who argue actually it's a net loss. We're subsidizing this ethanol production at great expense. We're insisting that it now be contained in gasoline, with the result that there was an estimate in The Wall Street Journal—this is not left-wing media I'm quoting here—that it will cost the taxpayer $120 for every barrel of fuel saved by switching to ethanol. A very expensive way to save.

So feeding corn to our cars is very good for ADM, arguably it's good for some of the corn farmers. Is it good for the environment? Well, global warming, possibly, although you've used all this fuel to grow the corn. Air quality, actually not. It's a net loss in air quality to put ethanol in gasoline. And it raises the price of energy quite a bit. So I don't think that that's a good way to go. There are other things you can make ethanol from.
But the bulk of this corn goes into animals. One of the things I did in my book is I followed a steer through the process. I bought a steer, in fact, No. 534. I met him on a ranch. I bought him from ranchers and I followed him through the food chain. And I had a reunion with him at a feedlot in Kansas, in Garden City, the inaptly named Garden City, Kansas. There is no one here from Garden City, Kansas, is there? It is the smelliest town in America, because it's feedlots wall to wall. This is where feedlots began. These are huge, medieval, pestilential cities of cattle. I went to find my cow, and there he was with 40,000 other cows in a pen standing up to his, whatever that's called, his hocks, in manure overlooking a manure lagoon eating corn, a substance that cows have trouble digesting, a substance that for cows to eat you have to give them antibiotics so they don't get sick. But it makes sense. It makes industrial logical sense, because corn is such a cheap form of energy. If you can get your cow to tolerate corn, he will marble, he will fatten quickly. And speed is of the essence in an industrial system.
I stood there and looked at this city of cows, and it was one of the most absurd landscapes I had ever been in. There was kind of a cathedral where they were taking the corn, which was arriving by tractor-trailer. Every half hour another 50,000 pounds, this golden flood of corn, would go down into the ground dropped from the bellies of these trucks, and then it would come up on a conveyor belt and be crushed into corn flakes. And this pounding you heard all over the place. This was a cathedral in the middle of the city making this corn food. You know what? Corn is the most wholesome thing in this food. There is also beef tallow. Yes, we are still feeding cows to cows, contrary to what the FDA tells you. And hormones and antibiotics. This unsavory brew of food.

I found my cow. I stood there watching him dip his great head in this trough of corn, and I thought about this place and where this food chain really began. You could follow that stream of corn back to a field in Iowa or Kansas or wherever it was, but in fact you had to follow it even further because that food chain doesn't actually begin anymore in that farm field in Iowa; it begins all the way back in the Persian Gulf, where the fossil fuel that we need to grow that corn comes from. To grow beef this way consumes nearly 100 gallons of gasoline equivalent for every steer. We have turned this ruminant, this amazing creature, that has the ability to turn grass into high-quality protein, into yet another fossil fuel guzzler. What a waste. What a waste. Here is an animal that can eat something we cannot digest, can take solar energy and convert it through grass into food, and we've insisted on forcing it into this cheap fuel economy. I won't even mention the pesticide and the atrazine and the food-borne illness that comes out of growing animals this way. There are so many problems.

Cheap food is incredibly expensive. That's the lesson I want to leave you with. The costs, though, don't show up in the price of that 99-cent burger. They get charged to the treasury in the form of agricultural subsidies. They get charged to the public health in the form of obesity and diabetes epidemics. They get charged to the environment in the form of degraded land and polluted water and a dead zone in the Gulf which has become corn's toilet bowl, essentially. There is a dead zone in the Gulf the size of New Jersey that's largely consisting of all this excess nitrogen fossil fuel fertilizer we're putting on our corn. And that really is the motto of this food system we have: Cheap at any price. And energy is a big, big part of this false economy. Between 17 and 20 percent of all our fossil fuel use in this country is going to feed ourselves this way. That's more than we use for personal transportation. And it goes to growing the corn and all the other crops, it goes to processing them, these high-energy processes, and it goes to trucking them around the country.

I'm going to read one more page from the book. At the end of each food chain I have a meal. And, of course, at the end of this food chain I ended up at McDonald's. I took my family to a McDonald's in Marin County and we had a classic McDonald's meal. We ate it in the car. Because our car was eating corn, too, it seemed only appropriate. Because they had just passed this law that even California, which has relatively clean air because of the way they refine gasoline there and high standards, now had to make its air worse so our cars could eat corn. And also the cars have been changed so we can eat in them. Nineteen percent of American meals are now eaten in cars. That's why we have cup holders. When J. D. Powers does consumer satisfaction surveys, one of the most important things people cite is how many cup holders are in their cars. Isn't that wonderful? So I just want to read you the end of the meal section. And then I would love to hear a couple questions.

"So what? Why should it matter that we have become a race of corn eaters such as the world has never seen? Is this necessarily a bad thing? Well, the answer all depends on where you stand. If where you stand is in agribusiness, processing cheap corn into 45 different McDonald's items is an impressive accomplishment. It represents a solution to the agricultural contradictions of capitalism, the challenge of increasing food industry profits faster than America can increase its population. Supersized portions of cheap, corn-fixed carbon solves the problem of the fixed stomach." This is an expression in the food industry, that selling food is different than shoes or CDs, because people can only eat about 1500 pounds of food a year. So it's a real challenge, if the population is only growing at 1 percent and Wall Street wants you to grow at 10 percent. What do you do? Well, you've got to persuade people to eat more or pay more. And the strategy we've gone with and the incentives dictate, get them to eat more. "We may not be expanding the number of eaters in America, but we've figured out how to expand each of their appetites, which is almost as good. Judith Isaac and I together consumed a total of 4,500 calories at lunch, more than half as many as we should probably consume in a day. We had certainly done our part in chomping through the corn surplus. We had also consumed a lot of petroleum, and not just because we were in a car. To grow and process those 4500 food calories took at least ten times as many calories of fossil fuel energy, the equivalent of 1.3 gallons of oil.

"If where you stand is on one of the lower rungs of America's economic ladder, our cornified food chain offers real advantages. Not cheap food exactly, for the consumer ultimately pays the added cost of processing, but cheap calories in a variety of attractive forms. In the long run, however, the eater pays a high price for these cheap calories: obesity, type 2 diabetes, heart disease.

"If where you stand is at the lower end of the world's economic ladder, however, America's corn-fed food chain looks like an unalloyed disaster. I mentioned earlier that all life on earth can be viewed as a competition for the energy captured by plants and stored in carbohydrates, energy we measure in calories. There is a limit to how many of those calories the world's arable land can produce each year, and an industrial meal of meat and processed food consumes and wastes an unconscionable amount of that energy. To eat corn directly, as Mexicans and many Africans do, is to consume all the energy in that corn. But when you feed that corn to a steer or a chicken, 90 percent of its energy is lost to bones or feathers or fur, to living and metabolizing as a steer or a chicken. This is why vegetarians advocate eating low on the food chain. Every step up the chain reduces the amount of food energy by a factor of 10, which is why in any ecosystem there is only a fraction as many predators as there are prey. But processing food also burns energy. What this means is that the amount of food energy lost in the making of something like a Chicken McNugget could feed a great many more children than just mine, and that behind the 4500 calories the three of us had for lunch stand tens of thousands of corn calories that could have fed a great many hungry people.

"And how does this corn-fed food chain look if where you stand is in the middle of a field of corn? Well, it depends if you're the corn farmer or the plant. For the corn farmer you might think the cornification of our food system has redounded to his benefit. But it has not. Corn's triumph is the direct result of its overproduction, and that has been a disaster for the people who grow it. Growing corn and nothing but corn has also exacted a toll on the
 farmer's soil, the biodiversity of his landscape, and the health of all the creatures living on or downstream from his farm. And not only those creatures, for cheap corn has also changed, and much for the worse, the life of several billion food animals, animals that would not be living on factory farms if not for the ocean of corn on which these animal cities float.

"But return to that Iowa farm field for a moment and look at the matter, at us, from the standpoint of the corn plant itself. Corn, corn, corn as far the eye can see. Ten-foot stalks soldiering in perfect 30-inch rows to the far horizon, an 80 million-acre corn lawn rolling across the continent. It's a good thing this plant can't form an impression of us, for how risible that impression would be. The farmers going broke cultivating it, the countless other species routed or emiserated by it, the humans eating and drinking it as fast as they can, some of them, like me and my family, in automobiles that have been engineered to drink it, too. Of all the species that have figured out how to thrive in a world dominated by homo sapiens, surely no other has succeeded more spectacularly, has colonized more acres and bodies than Zea mays, the grass that domesticated its domesticator. You have to wonder why we Americans don't worship this plant as fervently as the Aztecs did. Like they once did, we make extraordinary sacrifices to it.

"These, at least, were my somewhat fevered speculations as we sped down the highway putting away our fast-food lunch. What is it about fast food? Not only is it served in a flash but more often than not it's eaten that way, too. We finished our meal in under 10 minutes. Since we were in the convertible and the sun was shining, I can't blame the McDonald's ambience. Perhaps the reason you eat this food quickly is because it doesn't bear savoring. The more you concentrate on how it tastes, the less like anything it tastes. I said before that McDonald's serves a kind of comfort food. But after a few bites I'm more inclined to think they're selling something more schematic than that, something more like a signifier of comfort food. So you eat more and eat more quickly, hoping somehow to catch up to the original idea of a cheeseburger or French fry as it retreats over the horizon. And so it goes, bite after bite, until you feel not satisfied exactly but simply, regrettably, full."

Q&A
You promised you would leave us on a hopeful note. Can you do that for us?
I was afraid somebody would remember that. There is hope. It turns out, though, that that hope is not what I thought it was. I thought that hope was organic food. Organic food does use a lot less energy on the farm. Let me be specific. It does not use fossil fuel fertilizers, it uses compost. And this saves about 4 percent of the energy that goes into making our food. The problem is that the way organic is moving, as it becomes industrialized, as it expands and rises to meet the expectation of the supermarket shopper, the Whole Foods shopper or the Safeway shopper, it is becoming a mirror image of the food system we thought it would be an alternative to, so that—and I have a Whole Foods meal in the book in the second section—there are at the Whole Foods strawberries 12 months of the years that come from very faraway places. I had asparagus that had been flown in January from Argentina. There are now organic Oreos. We're not far from the days of the organic Twinkie. Making the same damn products with organic ingredients using just as much energy. To ship an organic, washed salad across the country, as we now are doing—in the East Coast we eat clean, beautifully packaged salads from the Salinas Valley—costs in energy 57 calories of fossil fuel energy for every 1 calorie of food energy. Lettuce doesn't have a lot of food energy. You're essentially shipping water across the country when you buy that winter lettuce. There are better things to eat in the winter. In what sense is that organic? What do we mean by that word? Technically it's organic, but—I'm getting away from hope, though. I can tell on your face.

The hope can be summed up in two words—eat local. That is how you get out of the cheap-energy food economy. There are alternatives. You've got to get out of the supermarket. We have to remember, we're complicit in this process. We have these expectations now. We want our food convenient. We want it picked, cut, washed, packaged, everything but chewed and digested for us. And if you want to eat that way, it's going to cost a lot of energy. If you want strawberries 12 months of the year, it's going to take a lot of energy. If you want anything, anytime, it's going to take a lot of energy. So at the end of the industrial food chain, organic or conventional, is an industrial eater. So you've got to change the way we consume before you can change the whole system.
What happens when you get out of the supermarket, when you go to the farmers' market or join the CSA, community-supported agriculture, is that suddenly a whole world opens up. You will not find processed food, you will not find strawberries 12 months of the year. You will find what the land produces now where you live. You will also find you're cooking again. You will be a new kind of eater, an old kind of eater, actually. So that, I think, is where the hope is. And we hear about the spectacular growth of Whole Foods, but at the same time we have had the spectacular growth of farmers' markets, the number of which has doubled in the last ten years.

Where you shop, whether you shop organic or local, depends on what you value, what you're trying to use your food vote, if you will, to elect. If your obsession is pesticides, you should buy organic, wherever it comes from. If you're concerned with energy, you should buy local. If you're concerned with the welfare of the animals, you've got to think that one through carefully because organic doesn't necessarily—it turns out we now have organic feedlots. These are words I never thought would be attached to one another, but they are. So you've got to be very careful. There is a lot to think about, and it is complicated.
But the beauty of it is that all these choices now exist. We're not stuck. We're more or less stuck in so many parts of our lives. We're largely stuck with transportation. I mean, there are some choices, but they're hard choices. When it comes to food right now, we can opt out. As taxpayers, we paid our taxes a couple weeks ago. Some of that money, whatever your politics are, went to support practices you find deplorable, I'm sure, morally revolting, perhaps. You can't do anything about it. You can't opt out without going to jail. The fact is, if you find this revolting, you can opt out. There are alternatives. That's a very empowering thing, and to me that's hope. If there were no choices around, it would be another matter, but there are. There are problems. They're more expensive. There are some challenges involved. But the fact is, you can vote with your fork. And there are some really good votes right now to cast.
So I think I'll leave it right there. Thank you.

For   information   about   obtaining   CDs,   MP3s,   or
transcripts of this or other programs, please contact:
David Barsamian
Alternative Radio
P.O. Box 551
Boulder, CO 80306-0551
(800)444-1977
info@alternativeradio.org
www. alternativeradio.org
©2007