The great edifice of variety and choice that is an American supermarket turns out to rest on a remarkably narrow biological foundation comprised of a tiny group of plants that is dominated by a single species: Zea mays, the giant tropical grass most Americans know as corn.
When it comes down to it, this is really a book about corn. Not by design and certainly not by mistake; the research kept leading the author back to the same place. The average read—for that matter, the above average reader—is likely to be surprised if not shocked when they discover to what extent the bulk of their daily intake of food is comprised corn in one form or another. In fact, a walk down those supermarket aisles takes shoppers every day past literally thousands of individual products where more than half the constitutional makeup derives from the crop which replaced cotton as king.
The unnaturally rich diet of corn that undermines a steer's health fattens his flesh in a way that undermines the health of the humans who will eat it. The antibiotics these animals consume with their corn at this very moment are selecting, in their gut and wherever else in the environment they end up, for new strains of resistant bacteria that will someday infect us and withstand the drugs we depend on to treat that infection.
The theme that drives the narrative of this book is not just that corn is so prevalent in the American diet that is can be fairly be said to power much of the engine that is the American economy. Again and again, the point is driven home that everything from the seeds planted on the farms to the bites of food that go into the mouth is a link in a long, convoluted chain. And what impacts one part of the chain inevitably impacts the end of the chain and the chain always ends with the human stomach. Well, the next to last link in the chain is the stomach, anyway.
As a society we Americans spend only a fraction of our disposable income feeding ourselves—about a tenth, down from a fifth in the 1950s. Americans today spend less on food, as a percentage of disposable income, than any other industrialized nation, and probably less than any people in the history of the world.
Considering the epidemic of obesity among Americans, these figures are likely to come as a surprise. How can so many people be so overweight spending so little on food? If the final assertion there is true, it raises an obvious question: why isn’t the rest of the world as fat as America? The answer is quite simple and also quite complicated. But it all boils down to a combination of two factors: most food in America is industrialized (cheaper, fatter, saltier and not of the highest quality) and most food producers are subsidized, which means it is less subject to the fluctuations of supply and demand and thus can be sold artificially lower. In fact, food in America could be even cheaper if certain ideas were implemented. So, it’s not that Americans don’t spend a lot of money on food; it’s that a Big Mac costs twice as much in other countries as it does in America.
…we should at least acknowledge that the human desire to eat meat is not, as the animal rightists would have it, a trivial matter, a mere gastronomic preference. By the same token we might call sex— also now technically unnecessary for reproduction—a mere recreational preference. Rather, our meat eating is something very deep indeed.
The book does not shy away from the ugly truth of meat. The author takes the reader into the slaughterhouse and out on the hunt and the killing of food in both pursuits is not romantic or downplayed. But on the subject of vegetarianism as a healthier option in concert with animal rights, the author reminds the reader that humans evolved as meat eaters and the most obvious evidence of that is teeth designed for tearing flesh from the bone. Less obvious, however, is that meat also provided prehistory hominids with the vitamin and minerals necessary to increase the size of the brain and as a civilized species, much of human culture revolves around the participatory meals at which meat is always the central serving.
