Corn
Just as corn is the predominant crop in the food industry today, corn is the predominant symbol of the industrialized food industry. Corn is essential to the food chain from the dirt in which it is grown to the feed of animals to be slaughtered to its competitive stance with cane sugar as the sweetener of choice. Corn is situated as the precise symbol of the manipulation of nature and foodstuff in the food industry when the author observes that of ten billion—that’s billion—bushels of corn that gets harvested each year, the average person will actually consume just one single bushel per year that is actually eaten as corn in its natural state.
Grass
At the opposite end of the symbolism spectrum is grass. Grass is the antithesis to corn in nearly every: it is more expensive, cattle have been eating for centuries while being fed corn for just a few decades, grass has fewer uses than corn and is widely advertised in marketing for “natural” foods while the food industry downplays the omnipresence of corn in the average person’s diet.
American Bison
The bison which once roamed the American plains in such numbers that herds could stretch out for miles is, perhaps surprisingly, the symbol of the consequences of human interaction with animals. The fossil record reveals that those enormous herds did not exist until indigenous tribes developed the ability to hunt and kill them. The transformation into prey did not just alter behavior, but resulted in physical changes as well such as upright horns instead of outstretched horns which had limited herding space as a means of protection.
Bar Codes
Bar codes are absolutely indecipherable to human beings even though this need not be the case. The bar code could allow consumers to be more selective buyers by providing them with a wealth of easily accessed information. Instead, the food industry uses bar to operate efficiently but furtively. In this way, the bar code is symbolic of the entire industrialized food industry which operates in a way that most people can’t understand, much of which they don’t want to understand.
Koala Bear
The koala bear is the symbolic opposite to the human omnivore. Koalas have no choice; they eat eucalyptus. Humans have too much choice; it is a source of anxiety. The koala’s health is fairly predictable because they have all eaten the same thing. A human’s health is utterly unpredictable because so much of it is based on the food choices they make. The koala is always chill; humans much, much less so. And the reliance on eucalyptus also explains why koalas are native to such a tiny part of the planet while humans have spread out across the rest of it.
