Empire of Corn

The Empire of Corn

Study and Resource Guide

Goals and Objectives

• Examine how corn has become a corporate commodity in the United States.

• Raise awareness of personal food choices and their impacts on personal and public health, agricultural practices and the environment.

• Gain an understanding of how food is currently produced in the United States.

• Consider new ways of thinking about food, diet and nutrition, and production, marketing and distribution.

• Explore how this issue affects each of us personally and as a community, and how to become involved with food issues in our own communities.

• Teach innovation skills to generate new approaches to longstanding challenges through creative problem-solving, collaborative design, entrepreneurial initiative and strategic thinking.

Listening/ Comprehension Questions

Before Listening

1. What are your primary concerns when you choose what to eat, and in what order of priority: Taste? Cost? Nutrition? Ease and convenience? How do these concerns influence what you choose to eat?

2. Have you ever been to a farm? If so, what did they grow there? Where did these crops go once they were harvested? Have you ever considered where your food has come from before it reached the supermarket shelves?

During/After Listening

1. What does host Mark Sommer mean when he suggests that we have created a "two-food society"?

    

2. Aaron Woolf says that farmers feel disconnected from their crops and the people they feed. Why do they feel this way? What would it take for them to feel more personally connected with those for whom they grow their crops?

    

3. We have a food surplus in the United States and the federal government often pays farmers not to grow in order to keep commodity prices stable. Yet many Americans don’t have enough food to eat and some go hungry in a land of agricultural surpluses. What factors explain this mismatch between supply and demand?

    

4. Farmers once grew hundreds of varieties of corn. Today they grow just a few and these have been carefully bred for mass production. What characteristics make these varieties more appealing to producers, distributors and consumers? Is it a good idea to grow just a few varieties? If so, why? If not, why not?

Critical Thinking and Discussion Questions

1. What are the advantages and deficiencies of a mass production, quantity-over-quality approach to food production in the short and long term? What do farmers need to do to achieve high yields and at what, if any, cost?

2. Who is most affected by a mass production approach to food production and in what ways? How, if at all, are personal health and the health of agricultural soils and systems affected?

3. Mark Sommer suggests that if we grow corn and other grains with more attention to personal and soil health and the long-term sustainability of our agricultural system, these changes would substantially raise the cost of food. What would this mean for those who may not have a great deal of money to spend on food? How can we change our approach and still make quality food affordable to low-income consumers?

Experiential Learning

1. If We Are What We Eat: Research the impact of a diet high in processed foods on personal health and a sustainable food system. Report and present your findings.

2. Corns Spreads: Consider an average "value meal" from one of the fast food chains popular in North America today. Choose one of these meals and list the ingredients. Research and translate the ingredients list into layman's terms. Consider the relative balance in these foods between the cost, nutritional value, health and safety, impact on agricultural soils and system, and other factors. When and in what ways is fast food the best value for your money? What, if any, hidden costs are there in eating fast food?

3. The Other Side of the Stalk: Research and report on an aspect of the organic farming movement. For example, what are the benefits and drawbacks of reducing the use of high fructose corn syrup in many food products today? How would this substitution affect the affordability of food to low-income consumers?

4. Two Food Society: Compare a frozen pizza from the grocery store to one made from ingredients from your local farmer's market. List the ingredients for each and where they originated. Compare and contrast these pizzas based on cost, convenience, health and nutrition, flavor and impact on the growers, producers, and environments in which the ingredients are grown.

5. The A-Maizing Twinkie: Choose a prepackaged food item and conduct your own "twinkie" experiment. How many ingredients are there in this item and what are they? Research those you don’t recognize. Where does each ingredient come from? Which are natural, which synthetic, and what’s the difference?

6. The Search for the Perfect Meal: Design your “perfect” meal based on flavor, cost, health, safety and impact on growers, producers, and the environment. Consider other factors like income limitations, transportation to market and the resulting contribution to the carbon footprint, and the locale and manner in which the food was grown. Is it important to you to know where your food comes from? If so, why? If not, why not? Consider how someone making $35,000 a year with a family of four in your hometown could eat locally, healthfully, and within an affordable budget? Consider your own situation and apply the same criteria. What is your perfect meal?

7. Trace your Dinner to its Sources: Record everything on your plate for

one meal. Where did each item originate? Try to trace each item back from the supermarket shelf to find out where, in fact, your meal has come from, how far and by what means it reached your dinner plate. Map it out and present the journey of your meal to the class.

8. Let Them Eat Corn: Try eating nothing that contains corn syrup or other corn-based products as an ingredient for one day. (Straight corn is fine.) What did you have to eliminate from your diet and what can you still eat? How did you like your corn-free diet? What, if anything, did you miss eating? Record your diet for a day, as well as any challenges you may have encountered.

 Crossing the Line Activity

Lesson Objectives:

1. Explore issues of access, health, and community as they are related to corn production in the United States.

2. Develop critical thinking and problem solving skills through an inquiry based process

Materials Needed:

1. Educast/Food, Sustainability and Society: The Empire of Corn

2. Student Worksheets

3. One to two class periods

Procedure

1. Ask students to listen to the Educast: The Empire of Corn, paying particular attention to the concepts of access to food (both geographic and economic), health and nutrition, and community as they listen. They may take as many notes as they would like during the Educast, as key points may aid them during this exercise.

2. Divide the room/seating into two halves, facing one another. On one side of the room, place a sign that is labeled “TRUE” and on the other, a sign labeled “FALSE”. Instructors may even use a piece of thick tape/duct tape to create a visual “line” down the middle of the room.

3. Provide students with accompanying worksheet of true/false statements and ask them to decide individually whether each statement is true or false, making notes as they like.

4. Introduce the first statement and ask those who found it to be “true” to sit on the side of the room labeled “true” and vice versa.

5. Students may then take turns defending their stance. During the process, should any one student become convinced that a point made by the other side is, in fact, the better point, they may move seats, or defect. Where students are positioned near or far from the line can indicate how strong their belief/conviction is concerning the statement. As students from “the other side” talk, those across the line may move closer or further away from the center line, denoting how their perspectives are shifting, if in fact they are.

6. Facilitate this discussion, using your time allowance for each question as appropriate.

7. After the debate, ask students to reflect (reflection worksheet provided) on the issue and their thoughts during the debate. Debrief with the group as a whole: What additional questions were raised? What issues were most important to you during this exercise? What issues need further consideration? What solutions, if any, can you see as a result of this discussion?

    
   
    

TRUE/FALSE: For each of the statements below, decide whether you feel it is “true” or “false”. You may make notes to support your claim, but you must decide one or the other – there is no gray area during this debate.

1. Nutrition should be the most important factor when considering our diets.

2. Mass production allows for a food surplus and is an effective way to ensure that we will have enough food for our citizens. The benefits of mass production outweigh the drawbacks.

3. We should be willing to pay more for our food if it ensures better quality, health, and nutrition.

4. An increase in the cost of corn would create significant hardship for poor families, for example take the impacts of recent increases in food costs due to ethanol and other biofuels.

5. Changing the American diet would alleviate many of the health concerns we now face, and would help our health care system.

6. Agriculturally homogenizing corn was a mistake.

7. Cheap corn syrup is one of the leading causes of obesity in the U.S. today.

8. It is possible and necessary to go back to the natural processes of food production, for example growing several varieties of corn rather than one or two versions.

9. Individuals can’t do much about the improvement of the food system in the United States.

10. Corn production in the United States affects other countries as much as it affects our own.

11. Farm subsidies are an effective way to regulate food production and cost.

12. It is possible to redesign our global food system.