Americans will never be slim and wholesome unless they manage to pull off a feat beyond a mere "regime change" here: the overthrow of the capitalist world empire -- the empire that has wielded cheap and unhealthy drug foods as weapons of mass destruction, while making the work and commute hours of the proletariat at its heartland so very long that they can only manage to scarf down fast food to stay alive.
First, competition among several capitalist empires:
***** Sidney Mintz (1986) perceptively notes that sugar was the crucial "drug food" of the industrial revolution, providing cheap, low-cost calories to the growing industrial proletariat in the 18th and 19th centuries. It is no secret that this sugar was grown on plantations that wreaked havoc with the natural environment. The environmental devastation effected by the sugar plantation system led to declining productivity throughout the early modern era, and continually spurred the expansion of the capitalist world-economy to new areas - from the Atlantic islands, to Brazil, to the small and then the large Caribbean islands. As a result, vast new supplies of labor power were necessary, which slave traders procured (Moore, forthcoming). The case of sugar shows how class formation in the core (the industrial proletariat) and periphery (slaves) on the one hand, and ecological transformation on the other, are closely bound moments of world scale capital accumulation.
<http://csf.colorado.edu/jwsr/archive/vol6/number1/commentary/index.shtml> *****
Then came the hegemony of the corn-fed American empire:
***** Published on Friday, July 19, 2002 in the New York Times When a Crop Becomes King by Michael Pollan
...One need look no further than the $190 billion farm bill President Bush signed last month to wonder whose interests are really being served here. Under the 10-year program, taxpayers will pay farmers $4 billion a year to grow ever more corn, this despite the fact that we struggle to get rid of the surplus the plant already produces. The average bushel of corn (56 pounds) sells for about $2 today; it costs farmers more than $3 to grow it. But rather than design a program that would encourage farmers to plant less corn - which would have the benefit of lifting the price farmers receive for it - Congress has decided instead to subsidize corn by the bushel, thereby insuring that zea mays dominion over its 125,000-square mile American habitat will go unchallenged....
...Our entire food supply has undergone a process of "cornification" in recent years, without our even noticing it. That's because, unlike in Mexico, where a corn-based diet has been the norm for centuries, in the United States most of the corn we consume is invisible, having been heavily processed or passed through food animals before it reaches us. Most of the animals we eat (chickens, pigs and cows) today subsist on a diet of corn, regardless of whether it is good for them. In the case of beef cattle, which evolved to eat grass, a corn diet wreaks havoc on their digestive system, making it necessary to feed them antibiotics to stave off illness and infection. Even farm-raised salmon are being bred to tolerate corn - not a food their evolution has prepared them for. Why feed fish corn? Because it's the cheapest thing you can feed any animal, thanks to federal subsidies. But even with more than half of the 10 billion bushels of corn produced annually being fed to animals, there is plenty left over. So companies like A.D.M., Cargill and ConAgra have figured ingenious new ways to dispose of it, turning it into everything from ethanol to Vitamin C and biodegradable plastics.
By far the best strategy for keeping zea mays in business has been the development of high-fructose corn syrup, which has all but pushed sugar aside. Since the 1980's, most soft drink manufacturers have switched from sugar to corn sweeteners, as have most snack makers. Nearly 10 percent of the calories Americans consume now come from corn sweeteners; the figure is 20 percent for many children. Add to that all the corn-based animal protein (corn-fed beef, chicken and pork) and the corn qua corn (chips, muffins, sweet corn) and you have a plant that has become one of nature's greatest success stories, by turning us (along with several other equally unwitting species) into an expanding race of corn eaters....
...The problem...is that we're sacrificing the health of both our bodies and the environment by growing and eating so much of it. Though we're only beginning to understand what our cornified food system is doing to our health, there's cause for concern. It's probably no coincidence that the wholesale switch to corn sweeteners in the 1980's marks the beginning of the epidemic of obesity and Type 2 diabetes in this country. Sweetness became so cheap that soft drink makers, rather than lower their prices, super-sized their serving portions and marketing budgets. Thousands of new sweetened snack foods hit the market, and the amount of fructose in our diets soared.
This would be bad enough for the American waistline, but there's also preliminary research suggesting that high-fructose corn syrup is metabolized differently than other sugars, making it potentially more harmful. A recent study at the University of Minnesota found that a diet high in fructose (as compared to glucose) elevates triglyceride levels in men shortly after eating, a phenomenon that has been linked to an increased risk of obesity and heart disease. Little is known about the health effects of eating animals that have themselves eaten so much corn, but in the case of cattle, researchers have found that corn-fed beef is higher in saturated fats than grass-fed beef.
We know a lot more about what 80 million acres of corn is doing to the health of our environment: serious and lasting damage. Modern corn hybrids are the greediest of plants, demanding more nitrogen fertilizer than any other crop. Corn requires more pesticide than any other food crop. Runoff from these chemicals finds its way into the groundwater and, in the Midwestern corn belt, into the Mississippi River, which carries it to the Gulf of Mexico, where it has already killed off marine life in a 12,000 square mile area.
To produce the chemicals we apply to our cornfields takes vast amounts of oil and natural gas. (Nitrogen fertilizer is made from natural gas, pesticides from oil.) America's corn crop might look like a sustainable, solar-powered system for producing food, but it is actually a huge, inefficient, polluting machine that guzzles fossil fuel - a half a gallon of it for every bushel....
<http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0719-01.htm> *****
Add to the corn-fed empire the empire of corn-pone opinions* produced by the mass media.
We can then begin to understand the enormous girth of our enemy. Now, let's see where its soft belly is.
* "You tell me whar a man gits his corn pone, en I'll tell you what his 'pinions is." (attributed by Mark Twain to a young black man -- a slave -- in a village on the banks of the Mississippi -- see Mark Twain, "Corn-pone Opinions," written in 1901, first published in 1923). -- Yoshie
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