Chapter 7
Fat from corn
Can you eat more, please? PartII.
Three of every five Americans overweight; one of every five is obese. Among kids, its almost as bad Seventeen percent of kids age six through nineteen are obese. This giant public health problem, costing the health care system an estimated $90 billion a year. Fast-Food adversting encourages us to eat supersized meals. It is actually cheaper to eat high-calorie, fatty, processed foods than whole foods. All these explanations are true, but they don't tell the whole story.
Extra Calories
Snice 1977, an American average daily intake of calories has jumped by more than 10 percent. Snice we aren't excercising more, the calories end up being stored away in fat cells in our bodies. Where did all those cheap calories come from? If you've read this far, you already know the answer--most of them come from cheap corn.
Cheap Fat
Surprisingly, the health problems of eating too much hit poor people hardest. Thats because if you count the calories, foods loaded with sugar and fat are the cheapest foods in the market. A recent study showed this was true. In a typical supermarket, one dollar could buy 1,200 calories of potato chips and cookies. The same dollar could only buy 250 calories of carrots and other vegetables
Gems:
Cheap food cost more fat. But healthier food cost more?. Shouldn't they balance each other out, to provide for the people. They shouldn't have to use cheep corn for everything. Animals should be able to grow how they are suppose and so should humans. We are moving to fast.
Chapter 6
Splitting The Kernel
Precis:
To make processed food corn is first broken down into different parts. Those parts are put back togetther in new ways to make the sweeter in your soft drink or the starch in your hamburger roll. All of this happenes in a factory called a "wet mill".
Industrail Digestion
The mill itsself is maze of stainless steel pipes, valves, filters, and tanks. Corn travles through the maze and is broken down through a series of steps including grinding(like the teeth) and soaking in acid(like the stomach). By the time it reaches the end, the corn is reduced to simple molecules, mostly sugars. Soy beans go through a similar process.
The frist step in the" digestion" of corn is to spilt the Kernel into different parts:
- The yellow skin.
- The germ, the tiny dark nearest the cob. Thats the part that holds a tiny embryo of corn plant.
- The endosperm. The biggest part of the kernel filled with carbohydrates.
Starch Into Sugar
whats left after that is white liquid thats poured out into a stainless steel table.
Why do we say corn is healthy?
What about other vegetables?
Can this chain ever be broken?
Gems:
I guess corn is processed food too. Everything we eat is processed . Not only do the majority of the humans think corn is a healthy vegetables but all we are eating is corn-beef. This is very disponding, Corn is not healthy no more I don't think it ever was. This makes it harder for the farmers not to grow corn because it part of every food but makes it easier for the Companies that support Corn feeding. Therefore it all in it to win.
Chapter 5.
The Feedlot-Turning corn into Meat
Precis:
The feedlot appeared suddenly, but the stench of the place had rising for more than a mile I soon learned why. At frist I thought the cattle were standing or lying in a grayisk mud. Then it dawned on me-- that wasn't mud at all. It manure. At endless series of cattle pensstrenched to the horizon, each one to a hundred or so animals. The cattle pens filled with animals and their waste, are built around corn mill.
CAFO -Concentrated animal feeding operation
The old -fashioned way of raising cattle, like the old -fashioned way of growing corn, was on the small family farm. Cattle are now rasied in densely packed animal cities like Poky's. These places are called CAFOs. Farmers gave up rasing cattle because , as strang as it might seem, it costs a farmer more to grow feed corn than it cost a CAFO to buy it.( Thanks to those government subsidies). Eating meat used to be a special occasion in most American homes. Thanks to CAFOs, meat is now so cheap that many of us eat three times a day. Of course, The Americans tax-payers have already paid part of the cost by subsidizing corn. On the old-Fashioned farm, there is really no such thing as waste. Animal manure goes back into the fields as fertilizer.But the waste Animal from CAFOs is huge source of very toxic polution.
Why would they except CAFOS?
Why organic does not work with the agribusiness? does it take more work if they grew aniamls regular?
do we blam the people for eating the meat?
why do need to make cheep meat in the first place?
Gems.
From this chapter i can conclude that they treat anmails like business for money and pleasure, There no harm to what they are doing to the animals . They fact there is a bussines of cow growing ( CAFOs) its very bitter and more about the money. CAFOs does make meat cheep but then theirs complains about health and environmental issues when meat factories and farmers has to do with the problem as well.
Chapter 4.
The Grain Elevator
Precis: Grain Elevators are tall, hollow concrete tubes, like silos. They are the tallest building by far in this part of Iowa. You can see them for miles. But what stood on this gray days was a bright yellow pyramid the size of a circus tent piched near the base elevator. The next afternoon I met a Mexican American crop scientist named Rocardo Salvador, a professor at Iowa state university. He told me he'd had a similar reaction the frist time he'd seen kernels littering Iwoa roads in october.
The River of corn
People have to consume it in new ways, in new kinds of processed food. Animals that never ate corn before must be taught to eat it. We have to turn it into ethanol fuel for our cars. We have to get other nations to improt it. Making matter still more difficult, the golden river of corn is controlled by tiny number of corporations. It has been estimated that cargill and ADM together buy somewhere near a third of all the corn grown in America. These two companies guide corn's path every step of the way. They sell the pesticides and fertilizer to the farmers. They operate most of American grain elevators. They ship most of the corn exported to other countries.They mill the corn into its different parts to be used in processed food.
Questions:
Why stay a farmer?
What if cows and chickens started to die because of the corn? Will they go back to their regular food habits?
What if we were to make food in the right season?
Gems: Reading this chapter, make sense of where the food is comming from. Corn is very powerful and makes the food chain run successful. With out corn or gas the
agribusiness will not seceded. This is important because instead frocing food to grow faster or bigger. We can make food at the proper season, when its suppose to be grown, use the nautal nitrogen cycle instead of us making it more of global warming.
Chapter 3.
From Farm to Factory
Turning Bombs into Fertilizer
* Plants and Nitrogen: Plants and living organisms need the element nitrogen. Without nitrogen,cells cannnot make protenis or DNA.
Agribussiness also need cheap corn from which they make prcessed food and hundreds of other products.To get the corn flowing and keep it flowing, argibussness deponds on government regulations and taxpayer money. The goverment started seriously helping back in 1947. That was when huge weapons plant in Muscle Shoals Alabama,switched over to making chemical fertilizer. Chemical fertilizer was needed to grow hybrid corn because it is very hungry crop. The richest acre of Iowa soil could never feed thirty thousand hungrycorn plants year after year.
There goes the sun
The nitrogen for the fields would no longer be made witht the energy but with fossil fuels. Farming was no longer an ecological loop-- it was more like a factory,the indurstrial farm produces just one product.
The Omnivore’s Dilemma chapters 1-2
You are what you eat, its often. If this is true, then what we are today is mostly corn.
How Corn Took Over America:
The shelves are stuffed with thousands of different items. There are dozens of different soups and salad dressings, cases stuffed with frozen dinners and ice cream and meat. The rang of food choices is amazing.
Yet if you look a little closer, you begin discover.
ITS ALL CORN.
Corn is what feeds the steer that becomes your steak.
Corn feeds the chicken and the pig.
Corn feeds the catfish raised in fish farm.
Corn-fed chicken laid the eggs.
Corn feeds the dairy cows that produce the milk, cheese and ice-cream
The Hidden names of corn
Modified starch
Glucose syrup
maltodextrin
xanthan gum
Carbon From Corn
All of our food, in fact almost all life on earth, can be traced back to Corn uses slightly different tpyes of carbon than other plants.So by looking at the tpye of carbon in our cells, scientists can tell how much corn we been eating.
The Rise of Maize
Corn was describe as towering grass with ears as thick as a man arm, That grass was called maize but today we know it as corn. Corn began as a wild grass called Teosinte means “mother of corn “in the Native language. Since corn is easy to spread it went through Central America, corn begun its march to world domination. The Europeans presented a way of corn to spread even farther. The plant quickly adapted to the new humans and their needs. The farmer can take any surplus to market and sell or trade it . In the new colonies corn often took place of money.
Corn allowed farming settlements to become trading settlements. Corn made the slave trade possible.
Since we were discovering the facts about corn, it’s time to go into Iowa the field of corn. The business of agribusiness. This industry doesn’t look much like farming the way most people imagine it. Its more series of factories that turn raw materials into products. This is all of the food chain.
One Farmer, 140 Eaters
In Iowa has some part of the richest topsoil in the world, a layer nearly two feet thick. Tall-grass prairie grew here until the mid-1800s. George Naylor a man with a moon face is a farmer with fields of corn. Back in 1919, when Naylor’s bought this land farming was very different and so was Naylor farm. Naylor had all sorts of crops grew here: corn but also fruits and more vegetables, as well as oats, hay and alfalfa to feed pigs, cattle chickens and horses. The Average farmer grew enough food to feed twelve other Americans.
Now it’s different, Corn now over power plants and animals. The chicken, sheep, pigs and horses are gone. George Naylor now grows only two crops on his 470acrs- corn and soybeans. Corn even pushed most of the people off the farm. That means the average American farmer today grows enough food to feed 140 other people. George Naylor doesn’t know the people he is feeding and they don’t know him.
