Analysis of V) The Process Plant: Making Complex Foods

The machine continues to grind...

So how does corn eventually become one of the following? “Adhesives, coatings, sizings, and plastics for industry; stabillizers, thickeners, gels, and viscosity-control agents". That is just a fraction of the contents of the delicious sweet Pepsi .

The processing of corn is long and mostly secret kept by the industry (who would want an investigative journalist snooping around your business, who may find evidence to expose your operations?) Instead, the author studied this process at Center for Crops Utilization Research at Iowa State University.

Source: Cattle Network

But the result after producing all these different products is virtually zero waste. The waste water can even be reused to make animal feeds. Looking at it from this perspective you could almost pretend this process is green. But did you know that corn is the key constituent of “margarine, Tang, Cheez Whiz and Cool Whip”? Those are all essentially food imitators they can provide sustenance but they won’t really sustain us.

According to the author, the logic of packing as much corn content into a food product is a combination of two things: a vicious cycle of business senses.

The cycle starts with the fallen price of corn, turning it into a commodity. The company then seeks to add value to their cheap commodity by processing it (essentially selling a service on top of the commodity). When that isn't enough to drive up prices, the companies look add even more value (read: calories) to the processed food item.

“In many ways, breakfast food: four cents' worth of commodity corn (or some other equally cheap grain) transformed into four dollars worth of processed food. What an alchemy!”

The author also talks about how processing food is very ineffective use of energy: "for every calorie of processed food it produces, another ten calories of fossil fuel energy are burned."
Essentially, what t industry doing here is wasting energy, tying the greenhouse effect to the food industry.

In addition, since there is a giant surplus of corn, industry needs to cram get rid of all that surplus biomass somewhere. Exploiting the human desire for sweet stuff, High Fructose Corn Syrup is born. Following this logic leads to the conclusion that Americans are fat for a reason, they are doing their part to consume all excess biomass, as efficient as possible.

An interesting comparison that the author's used: The Jetson's the meal-in-a-pill to our processed foods, aka the pill-in-a-meal.

source: One for the Table

Are we just fooling ourselves that we're living in the space age?