The Omnivores Dilemma

Recently I have been occupying my time with the best selling book, "The Omnivore's Dilemma", and there honestly could not be a more pertinent book for me to be reading right now. The author, Michael Pollan, does a fantastic job of explaining the dillema that Americans mostly face of now having an abundance of food, and how that has created so many new problems for us as a population. Not only have we practically eliminated any real connection between ourselves and the foods that we eat, but these foods are now lacking any of the real nutritious elements that our bodies so crave and need. More directly linked to me and my current location though is how Pollan puts Iowa and its farmed corn at the center of these new food and health related problems. It has never been a secret that Iowa produces more corn than any other place on the planet and that the farmer's in the area that I now live have been getting rich off it for decades, but we as a country arent' really eating that much corn, so where does it all go? Well this book definitely answers that question and if you are un-enlightened as to the nutrional facts of what goes into the things that you eat, than you are sure in for a surprise. Pollan describes Americans as "Corn Walking". This term originated from the Maya living in Mexico because of how much corn they had in their diet, but Americans have far surpassed any other culture in the consumption of corn. Pollan states, "Corn is in the coffee whitener and Cheez Whiz, the frozen yogurt and TV dinner, the canned fruit and ketchup and candies, the soups and snacks and cake mixes, the frosting and gravy and frozen waffles, the syrups and hot sauces, the mayonnaise and mustard, the hot dogs and the bologna, the margarine and shortening, the salad dressings and the reslishes and even the vitamins. There are some forty-five thousand items in the average American supermarket and more that a quarter of them now contain corn." These facts are pretty amazing, but one thing that the book has not yet gone into (but I am sure it will as I progress) is that corn is mostly sugar. These concealed sugars present a large problem for me being in the childcare field; all of the school lunches that children are getting are loaded with not only preservatives but, also hidden sugars from corn which may cause children to become hyper, excited, and possibly cause their attention to drop. For me, this presents a problem when the children I watch are not napping and their sleeping schedules become erratic This can make a child groggy, angry, and not fresh. Many parents don't realize how much sugar is in certain foods and my absolute nemesis is Ketchup. What kid does not love ketchup? However ketchup is so full of high fructose corn syrup that we might as well be giving our kids candy.

So far, I don't believe that Pollan is making out corn and the Iowa farmers to be any more than a link to the much larger problems that we have with our national nutrition crisis, and it is a crisis, but living now in Iowa and seeing farmers every day that are paid six figures or more just to farm corn or in some cases to not farm anything at all, just drives this problem a little closer to home for me. Our nutrition problem is so bad off that the American government has made it impossible for its populus to ever get healthier unless the government is willing to lose money and cause the Farmer's that they bank role to go bankrupt.