Would you like some petroleum with that corn?

[Fridays Child]

It's been out for a few years but I'm just now getting around to reading Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma: a Natural History of Four Meals. If you're not familiar with the book, check it out. The author has taken a complicated topic--an interconnected series of complicated topics, really--and produced a comprehensive, but very readable, account of the American diet. Despite what foods our bodies have been evolutionarily designed to convert to energy, we've become corn and petroleum eaters, thanks to federal policy, in service to Archer Daniels Midland, Cargill, General Mills, and others. And just exactly how such a thing has come to pass is a pretty amazing story, as it turns out.

A few facts from the book:

The use of more antibiotics in livestock feed than for the direct treatment of human infection, is a major catalyst in the emergence of drug-resistant pathogens.

According to the U.N., in 2000, the number of people suffering from overnutrition exceeded the number suffering from malnutrition: one billion versus 800,000,000.

Although no one ever tasted high fructose corn syrup before 1980, Americans now consume more of it than any other sweetener.