I've been reading The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, a book about the processes of the food where the author, Michael Pollan traces the route that food takes from the farm and onto our plates. At one section of the book, the author, his wife and son eat a meal at McDonald's, and the author becomes lost in his calculations of just how much corn is in the meal. He then finds some assistance at UC Berkeley, where he runs the same items in the meal through a mass spectrometer to measure how much of the carbon came from corn.
In order of diminishing corniness, this is how the laboratory measured our meal: soda (100 percent corn), milk shake (78 percent), salad dressing (65 percent), chicken nuggets (56 percent), cheeseburger (52 percent), and French Fries (23 percent). What in the eyes of the omnivore looks like a meal of impressive variety turns out, when viewed through the eyes of a mass spectrometer, to be the meal of a far more specialized kind of eater. But then, this is what the industrial eater has become: corn's koala.
The book focuses on food -- where it comes from, and how it ultimately ends up on our tables. It's a fast, thought provoking read, and it will probably change the way you think about food and the true cost of the food that we all consume.
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