#14 You are what you eat- CRAP

Kudos to one of my favourite girls, Ruiven Baxter Yong (not her real name by the way), I've been reading the Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan, and I must comment that it is a very good book. In fact, its quality is comparable to that of my current favourite economics reading, Modern Labor Economics, by Ehrenberg. But I'm sure not everyone will share my enthusiasm towards an economics textbook, so let's just keep the focus on Corn for now, which hogs the center stage in the first part of his book.

I would describe all that I've been reading in a sentence if I could, but I can't.

So the main point is that as much as modern men has dominated agriculture and more specifically corn, it is indeed quite a paradoxical thought to think that the latter has conquered us instead, having acquired such an indispensable status in our lives. We eat corn in cornflakes, corn oil, corn flour, corn wax, corn husks to make petroleum + fuel, whiskey + alcohol, fertilizers, feed for animals, corn crackers, stone ground corn, corn bread, corn meal, corn starch, and the seemingly inexhaustible list continues...

We are what we eat. And having knowingly or unknowingly eaten so much corn, it is not an exaggeration to conclude that We Are Corn People.

I didn't fully believe Pollan's claim and felt that he was over-exaggerating the magnitude and extent of which corn's presence was that prevalent in our (processed) foods. So on my way home from school yesterday, I randomly picked out a bunch of food (Student Health & Well-Being were giving it out free) and brought them home to scrutinize their ingredients. Lo and behold, my inexhaustible list above actually came from their ingredient list. And they were supposed to be healthy. But using common sense, how can anything from a packet really be healthy? (Other than the pack of yoga apple chips, which is just freeze-dried apple chips using nitrogen through a cycling process called annealing.)

Boiled/ steamed corn is good. Refined corn (or refined anything) isn't. And I'm feeling quite paranoid towards corn now. We're all going to get fat or get cancer. I'm just kidding- Be Healthy!