The Sweet Tomorrow
Are you a New York Times reader? If so, if not, check out Sunday's NYT Business section page on for a lovely little big of smoke screening about high fructose corn syrup. In case you need a link, try...
The article, courtesy of NYT Business section staff writer Melanie Warner, proposes that the recent demonization of high fructose corn syrup is based on bunk science, and that it's really no more harmful than good old refined sugar. Ms. Warner takes care to cite many a scientist and food expert about the health effects of HFCS, constantly correlating them to the rise in obesity, but insisting that the chemical makeup of HFCS just can't be the cause for such a, ahem, ballooning.
Hats off, Ms. Warner, for utterly, completely, pathetically missing the point. I'll get right out and admit to having enjoyed MANY of Ms. Warner's articles lately (her Wal-Mart organic article is a stitch). When I saw that she was taking on HFCS, I thought that there might be much to learn from her, or entertainment value at the least. What I read was a 2,933 word explanation about how corn syrup is our sweet, processed friend, and we shouldn't give it such a hard time for being so sweet.
Forget the sweet. Real critics of HFCS don't waste their time with such nonsense. Sweet is sweet, however you get it, and sometimes it's too sweet, sometimes not sweet enough, and sometimes, oh yeah, it's just the sweetest sweet ever.
The beef with corn syrup isn't the sweet, it's the CHEAP. The United States government in a bid to prop up our agricultural sector heavily subsidizes corn and its byproducts. Between 1995 and 2004, corn subsidies in the U.S. totaled $41.9 billion. That's hardly chump-change. This year congress passed a $190 billion farm subsidy package, over a fifth of which is targeted at corn subsidies (and yet somehow the democrats are considered fiscally irresponsible?). That money is all aimed at supporting what was until the civil war 70% of our economy, and now represents less than 1%- agriculture.
Our proud heritage of agrarianism, however, has its costs when super-processed products like HFCS are the most supported output- products with HFCS become CHEAP. REAL cheap. So cheap that there's really no reason to buy anything else. The ever-swelling poor masses of our great country end up buying goodies loaded with HFCS because it's all that they can afford. They eat it, they get NOTHING from it (no satisfaction, no nutrition) except calories, and they go out and buy more.
High Fructose Corn Syrup is not food poisoning- it's social and economic poisoning. I won't even bother with the wastefulness behind processing the heck out of any given product- others' arguments are surely more sound. Consider, though, that in the 1930s Americans spent as much as 22% of their money on food. Today, we spend less than 6%. That money I assume has been reallocated into places like housing, automobile expenses, and body armor. It's certainly not going into the very fabric of one's body, and it's certainly not doing much for the American farmer.
Ms. Warner wasted an opportunity to open up an argument by taking advantage of an opportunity to close an argument. I expect better from the writers and editors of the New York Times. They aren't supposed to put the lid on things; they're supposed to blow the lids off!
Poem for the day
Black and white summer smear
inching down my chin like a snail,
half chocolate, have vanilla,
like 1859 Virginia,
all good, guaranteed by the sweaty man
smiling in the ice cream truck,
oh smear, of what are you made?
From the churned white nectar
of satisfied bovines humming and cooing
amongst the tall grasses of summer?
Or are you made from the mashed, dashed,
split, ruined, pulped, spun, dunked, thrashed,
spoiled, soiled, flushed, smushed remnants
of ears of corn long gone?
