King Corn
Corn is the backbone of the American farm belt and one need not study figures to understand this. Just fly over the middle of the country where cornfields
“forms a second great American lawn, unfurling through the summer like an absurdly deep-pile carpet of green across the vast lands drained by the Mississippi River.”
The Chicken Nugget
The author presents the history of turning chicken into nugget form before finally taking his first bite of the brand-new and improved white-meat McNuggets:
“Overall the nugget seemed more like an abstraction than a full-fledged food, an idea of chicken waiting to be fleshed out.”
“corn's koala”
Early on the author situates the difference between human omnivores and koala bears: the human has a choice to make, while to the koala bear, every meal is going to be mostly eucalyptus. After breaking down the percentage of the typical foods consumed by Americans into their corn content (which in soda, milkshakes, salad dressing, chicken nuggets and cheeseburger exceeds 50%), he calls back to the opening and suggests that Americans are like koala except every meal it eats is going to be mostly corn.
A-Hunting He Will Go
The author goes seriously hunting for the first time and returns with a brand-new perspective on the natural world of animals running free:
“It was almost as if I had donned a new pair of glasses that divided the natural world into the possibly good to eat and the probably not.”
One Crop That Rules Them All
The prevalence of corn in the food produces regularly consumed by nearly every American is revealed to extend beyond what anyone would likely guess if asked. The author is not being facetious or entirely metaphorical when he observes:
“You are what you eat, it's often said, and if this is true, then what we mostly are is corn—or, more precisely, processed corn.”
