Fire and Knowledge

Corn has succeeded in domesticating us.

–Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006), p. 23

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

We have exchanged corpulence for starvation, and either one will kill us.

–John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley in Search of America (1962), p. 83

Corn is what feeds the steer that becomes the steak. Corn feeds the chicken and the pig, the turkey and the lamb, the catfish and the tilapia and, increasingly, the salmon, a carnivore by nature that the fish farmers are reengineering to tolerate corn. The eggs are made of corn. The milk and cheese and yogurt, which once came from dairy cows that grazed on grass, now typically come from Holsteins that spend their working lives indoors tethered to machines, eating corn.

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

Industrial agriculture has supplanted a complete reliance on the sun for our calories with something new under the sun: a food chain that draws much of its energy from fossil fuels instead.

–Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006), p. 7

Joel Salatin, a farmer in Virginia (one of the best in America, as far as I know), wrote an interesting diatribe about how everything he wants to do is illegal. He can’t slaughter his own animals, collaborate marketing with neighbors, charge for farm tours, or build the house he wanted without government interference. If you don’t know much about how government makes life hard for small, environmentally-conscious farmers, you should definitely read this.

I learned about Joel in The Omnivore’s Dilemma and was really taken with his permacultural methods of farming. Someday my wife and I hope to visit his farm and attend one of his seminars.

This article made it on the homepage of del.icio.us, which is very encouraging. In fact, I have been very encouraged over the past year about how environmentally / agriculturally-aware our culture is becoming. It is still a very small segment to be sure, but it is starting to catch on. Thank God.

My hope is that someday feedlots, industrial agriculture, pollution, and destructive mining and foresting practices will be as reprehensible to us as racism.

I think agriculture the most honorable, because the most independent, of all professions.

–Benjamin Franklin, as quoted in H.W. Brands, The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (2000), p. 664

Dave Hage from the Star Tribune interviews Wendell Berry.