Fall 2006, Volume 11 Number 3

Table of Contents

My 14 month-old son loves corn on the cob. Just plain kernel corn is OK, but the fresh sweet summer stuff, lightly steamed with no butter required, where a good amount of baby effort, enthusiasm, and tooth power is required to strip clean an ear -- that's his favorite. Whole, fresh, local, requiring a little work—as with so much else, maybe he's onto something here.

The season for corn has passed here in the northeast, but it still takes up a fair amount of my thoughts, given that my thoughts, when they are not consumed by family or career, are often turned to our dysfunctional food system. Corn is at the crux. Please feel free to double-check my facts or question my oversimplification, but I'd like to freely meditate on corn for a bit, to follow it on a journey.

To the sadza (stiff "mealie meal" porridge) that makes up the staple of every meal in Zimbabwe, to the polenta that is enjoyed in Italy, to the high fructose corn syrup that sweetens most of our juices and sodas in the States, corn is now everywhere. Yet maize is indigenous only to Mesoamerica, where it was domesticated many millennia ago from a wild variety much less tender and more tiny than the varieties we know today. Many centuries before American pop music and movies took over the world, this grain became the original vanguard of globalization. In weight terms, its worldwide production now exceeds that of any other grain.

Today, we “harvest poverty” in corn's Central American birthplace by mercilessly subsidizing and “free” trading corn into markets where local farmers simply can't compete. So where once a Mexican farmer could feed his family with tortillas grown on his own small plot, and have some left over to sell in the local market, now American corn is sold there at a price below his costs. He is forced off his land, to enter the crowded and exploitative urban wage economy, or perhaps to illegally immigrate to the States.

There he might be a migrant worker, harvesting fruits and vegetables (but not the corn whose heavily mechanized, grand scale production is part of its unnatural cheapness) and barely eking out a living. Or perhaps he works in a slaughterhouse or meat packing plant, preparing beef -- beef that was made fat in its short life by an unnatural diet of corn. It is the corn fed to cows in manure-covered feed lots that makes their ruminant stomachs so vulnerable to infection, necessitating huge doses of antibiotics to keep them alive and growing. It is the corn-fed cows whose stomachs are especially hospitable to e coli, which passes from their bodies into the groundwater, later appearing on the spinach which caused such an alarming outbreak of illness earlier this year.

Perhaps this worker earns enough to bring his family north, where his kids assimilate into the new American childhood of too little activity and too much processed junk food -- especially to those products that are sweetened by irresistibly cheap and ubiquitous high-fructose corn syrup. Obesity, diabetes, or perhaps just a shortened attention span and heightened behavior problems are the outcomes of this strange diet. While once this family lived off the land and had immediate access to fresh produce, however limited, now they have proximity only to gas station “convenience” stores and an unhealthy food lifestyle that is irresponsibly marketed to kids of all incomes and backgrounds.

Corn -- genetically-engineered into pesticide resistant superbreeds, grown on endless acres of mono-culture nutrient-depleted fields, heavily doused with petroleum-derived fertilizer; perverting policy decisions of even the most well-meaning legislator and trade representative; erasing the livelihoods of small farmers across the world and close to home; too plentiful, too cheap, too malleable into useless sugar and starch and cattle fodder.. Wherever we follow it, we see tragedy and waste. Yet it doesn’t need to be that way, and it simply can’t be that way for much longer.

Anyone who is reading this newsletter doesn't need to be reminded that our food system is not working: food is too cheap on its face, but the hidden costs are taking their toll on economic justice, our immigration system, our environment, our health, our foreign policy and our energy supply. Convenience, quickness, cheapness, and sweetness are not always the answer. Instead, we can labor over the blossoming of food security and sovereignty that is happening at the grassroots across the world. Let's put a little work and thought into it and enjoy the process -- we do know how.

For solutions and more information, check out: http://www.worldhungeryear.org/fslc

            Jen Chapin is a songwriter, performer, recording artist and activist who chairs the Board of WHY (Word Hunger Year). She is also a member of the KIDS Advisory Board. Her latest album is "Ready." See http://www.jenchapin.com.

© Copyright 1999, Kids Can Make A Difference