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March 23, 2006
Children of the corn
I eat meat and am constantly baffled by arguments that ignore human physiology. That said, I would like to have a better sense that the organic or free-range products I buy are not just so much "supermarket pastoral" marketing. Something I had not realized is just how much corn we North Americans are eating both directly and indirectly. Michael Pollan had a clever use for a mass spectrometer that achieved an alarming result.
I took a McDonald’s meal to a scientist on campus here and he ran it through a mass spectrometer. You can actually trace the identity of the carbon in the meal. The carbon in corn has a very distinct signature. He ran the meal through and told me exactly what percentage of everything was corn. In the case of the soda, it was 100 percent. The cheeseburger was like 66 percent, and the Paul Newman salad dressing was about the same. Even the French fries were dripping with corn because they are fried in corn oil.
Posted by Ghost of a flea at March 23, 2006 10:41 AM
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