Chapter Five: The Processing Plant: Making Complex Foods (18,000 Kernels)

1. TAKING THE KERNEL APART: THE MILL

A wet mill: where corn turns into...
EVERYTHING

Most of the corn we eat enters our bodies as broken down, simple compounds that have been heavily processed. What isn't eaten directly as corn, or as meat that ate corn, goes through wet mills--1/5 of it. The process in wet mills is very complex: first, the yellow skin is processed into vitamins and nutrient supplements; the germ is crushed for oil; the endosperm is turned into complex carbohydrates. Chemists have learned how to take those starches and turn them into numerous amounts of organic compounds, including acids, sugars, starches, and alcohols (remember the citric acid, fructose, maltodextrin, glucose, lactic acid, sorbitol, ethanol, unmodified starches, xanthan gum, mannitol, MSG, dextrins...?) Pollan was able to watch the wet mill at the Center for Crops Utilization Research at Iowa State University and described in great detail the huge and various contraptions it took to process corn. He reveals that corn takes a thirty six hour acid bath, and that five gallons of water is needed to process just one bushel of corn. But it's not how corn is broken into all these compounds that is the question--no, the question is how do we end up eating them all? Humans, we are "the eater of processed food."
2. PUTTING IT BACK TOGETHER AGAIN: PROCESSED FOODS
"The dream of liberating food from nature is as old as eating." If you look at the label of any number of processed foods, corn will probably turn out to be a key constituent of many processed foods. Corn makes up the sugars and starches, and the fat in a processed good. Companies like General Mills now call processed food a "food system" because of its complexity--and the fact that many people have begun to shy away from processed foods. And corn as food is simple economics: if we can grow the materials cheaply and use them, then why not? Although both the farming end (only 40 cents on a dollar makes it to a farmers pocket, plus they can only grow so much with nature as the enemy) and the consuming end ("Try as we might, each of us can eat only about fifteen hundred pounds of food a year.") are less than perfect, they are still better, some think, than what we started with. But many businesses are trying to get around this:
      "When fake sugars and fake fats are joined by fake starches, the food industry will at long last have overcome the dilemma of the fixed stomach: whole meals you can eat as often or as much of as you like, since this food will leave no trace. Meet the ultimate--the utterly elastic!--industrial eater."