Corn

Do you know where your food comes from? or exactly what's in your food? do you really care? The answers for me were: sometimes, not exactly & YES!

I watched a documentary this weekend "King Corn" www.kingcorn.net Short synopsis, two college friends follow their roots to Iowa, farm an acre of corn, try to learn more about modern farming & where food comes from & goes after it's harvested.

Surprisingly, most of the corn in Iowa is non-edible, genetically modified, grown specifically for feed corn for cattle lots aka "feed lots" & for making HFCS (high fructose corn syrup). Surprised??? I was. I felt disgusted at the way our government has turned alot of farmers into people who make a living on something they cant even eat!

Learning about cattle feed lots was the hardest to watch. The cows are basically overfed with only corn feed & antibiotics to prevent them from getting sick in these conditions until they are slaughtered. The documentary explained that these cow's diet would kill them even if they weren't made into food. If you eat beef, try to look for grass fed labels and eat less of it. www.eatwild.com is a good reference

Our consumption of HFS has gone up 1000% in the last 30 years. Look at the ingredients of your food & most likely you will be shocked. WHY?? It's cheap, easy to grow & makes your food taste good. Unfortunately, it's not good for you & has caused a diabetic epidemic across the USA. Who's to blame? I think our government is to blame. $9.4billion was paid to corn farmers in 2005. It's hard to eat healthy w/o spending more & really caring about what you consume.

Now what to do? I'm going to continue reading labels, buy as much locally as I can, read more about the farm bill http://www.farmandfoodproject.org/
Hopefully with more people becoming aware of the effects of hfcs in everything, healthier foods will replace the fast foods & farmers will be will funded for making healthy edible crops before we all become extinct like Maddie's fav t-rex:)


www.kingcorn.net