The New Food Pyramid: Just Corn

To answer the question of what I discovered/learned from this experiment:

I learned that just about everything contains corn. To not eat corn means eating mostly pure, unprocessed foods. When not eating corn, I relied heavily on my stock of vegetables and the few other staples that, by chance, didn't contain corn. However, I did eat some things with corn in them. Most of the time, by accident. I would eat something, and then double check it with the list- finding that most of my foods had corn under some other name.

I've seen the documentary Food, Inc. many times, and they discuss how most foods in the supermarket have corn in some form. So, going into this experiment- I understood that and I knew it would be difficult. Yet I was clearly unprepared for just how difficult it would be.

Many healthy eating experts tout the importance of eating unprocessed (often synonymous with unpackaged) foods. I think that has a lot to do with corn as an ingredient. From what I experienced, processed almost always meant corn would be an added ingredient in some way, shape or form.

I find this incredibly unfortunately because of the environmental impacts that industrial corn growing is having on the corn belt. Top soil is being lost and we're starting to grow all sorts of genetically modified corn strains (this is also completely ignoring the fact that no foods containing GM ingredients have to be labeled as such). In all, the prevalence of corn in every aspect of our daily lives as food consumers is a serious issue. What is this doing to our bodies? What is this doing to our planet? People often ignore the ingredients list, or skip over ingredients like "maltodextrin." I'm sure there is also something to be said about seeing "corn extract" on the list of ingredients- it's basically corn, so it can't be so bad, right? Wrong.

It's also important to note what we could be doing with the land that we're using (and abusing) to grow all this corn. Overall, I believe it is a serious issue, and something that I'm going to be interested in learning more about and being more conscious about in the future.