Food Inc.: An Illusion Of Corn

What do salad dressing, white vinegar, cake mix, and diapers all have in common? They all are products made with corn. Corn and the production of it were the main focus of a class by Professor Joe Braunworth at Grossmont College this week. This product that has infiltrated our shelves had created an illusion of diversity among products. Corn slowly but surely has taken over the agricultural arena. “What factors did you consider when deciding what to eat for lunch?” Professor Braunworth posed at the start of his discussion. Different answers were given, among them the following: price, availability, time, nutrition, habit, and taste. The most common, and seemingly important, however, were price, time, and taste. What these people appeared …show more content…
Very few people mentioned what was actually in the food. The professor then went on to share with the class a section of a video entitled Food Inc. The section watched covered multiple topics about corn. The aforementioned illusion of diversity corn has created comes from the fact that ninety-percent of processed foods have corn in them. Thirty-percent of the land base is used for corn, with an astonishing two hundred bushels of corn being grown per acre. A while back the government set policies in place that incentivized farmers to overproduce corn, which included subsidizing it by the bushel. With corn so readily in supply, the price has been driven down considerably and is now sold at below production costs. The low cost of corn has inspired people to put it in everything, especially food. This is where one of …show more content…
Well, that’s where the “Iron Triangle” comes in. Basically the “Iron Triangle” is a triangular shape consisting of three forces. In this instance, those forces are bureaucracy, Congress, and interest groups (i.e. Cargill, ADM, Monsanto, and farmer groups). These three bodies create bonds between them making it very hard for outsiders to break through. Interest groups need Congress to pass legislation in their favor, so they support Congress with money. Congress needs bureaucrats to implement their laws so they pass laws they will favor. The bureaucrats need the interest groups to continue paying congress so they pass favorable legislation for them. This means that if an individual or an individual group wants to make a difference in the laws surrounding food process they are going to have to battle and “Iron Triangle” of people who need each other. This makes it very hard to implement new rules. There is also the factor that corn in food makes it less expensive, meaning more people have access to a high variety of food. While Professor Cummings talks about the difficulty of paying for organic produce over regular, there are people in America who struggle to even buy regular produce. This is where the benefit of inexpensive corn comes in; these people who scrape together meals at night now have an alternative to high priced food, even if it’s not the highest quality, it is