Fire and Knowledge

To wash down your chicken nuggets with virtually any soft drink in the supermarket is to have some corn with your corn. Since the 1990s virtually all the sodas and most of the fruit drinks sold … have been sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS)—after water, corn sweetener is their principal ingredient. Grab a beer for your beverage instead and you’d still be drinking corn, in the form of alcohol fermented from glucose refined from corn. Read the ingredients on the label of any processed food and, provided you know the chemical names it travels under, corn is what you will find. For modified or unmodified starch, for glucose syrup and maltodextrin, for crystalline fructose and ascorbic acid, for lecithin and dextrose, for lactic acid and lysine, for maltose and HFCS, for MSG and polyols, for the caramel color and xanthan gum, read: corn.

–Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006), p. 18-19