Transcript: Empire of Corn

 

 

MARK SOMMER: Corn, the most American, indeed Native American of grains. I recall it from my childhood summers where every farm stand was surrounded by fields of cornstalks ten feet tall and offered sugar sweet corn on the cob for a nickel an ear. We slathered it with butter and wolfed it down, playing typewriter with the rows of kernels.

 

Nowadays, it’s hard to find corn that sweet. And how many of us eat it off the cob anymore? Corn just ain’t what it used to be.

 

SPEAKER: We have chosen to select for productivity, and that means high starch production. And what you give up in the formula is nutrition.

 

MARK SOMMER: The super-size soda pop we guzzle, the candy bars we crunch, the syrup we pour on our pancakes, all are laced with high fructose corn syrup, the low cost alternative to cane sugar that’s producing an epidemic of obesity and diabetes. Embedded in 5,000 food products, corn is the staple of what some agronomists call the corn industrial complex.

 

RICARDO SALVADOR: If you just blindly eat from the choices that the industry food system provides you, then the fact is, you will get fat. You will, over time, develop diabetes. You will, over time, develop heart disease. So it’s a toxic food system.

 

MARK SOMMER: Today on A World of Possibilities, “Empire of Corn: From Cornucopia to Corporate Commodity” even the Twinkie, that iconic little sponge cake with the fake whipped cream in the middle contains — you guessed it — corn.

 

STEVE ETTINGER: Twinkies have 39 ingredients, and eight are made from corn.

 

MARK SOMMER: And these days, a rapidly increasing demand for corn-based ethanol is driving up the price of corn as far away as Central America where the cost of tortillas is rising beyond the reach of the poor, in part because it fetches a higher price as fuel than as food. Something’s gone terribly wrong.

 

RICARDO SALVADOR: We can design better systems conscientiously and mindful of the things that we want out of the system.

 

MARK SOMMER: I’m Mark Sommer. Welcome to A World of Possibilities.

 

Aaron Woolf had a good idea and two problems. First the idea — he wanted to make a documentary about corn. The problems? One, convincing potential funders that something as mundane as corn could be the subject of a compelling documentary. Second, convincing somebody to move to Iowa to grow corn for him. The result, the movie King Corn is a must-see.

 

In the film, director Woolf follows two friends, Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis, who move from New England to Iowa to grow an acre of corn. By following corn to its humble origins in the rich loam of Midwestern topsoil, they hope to learn more about where our food comes from, what’s in it, and whether it’s a triumph of science and technology or the lynchpin of a system of subsidized corporate profits, hollowed out rural communities, and epidemics of diabetes and obesity.

 

With the help of their new Iowa neighbors, Cheney and Ellis planted some genetically modified corn, sprayed it with powerful herbicides, and grew a bumper crop. But as they followed their bushels of grain into the American food system, they were confronted by troubling questions about what we eat and how we farm.

 

To pick up the thread of the story, director Aaron Woolf joins us now from his office in New York City. During our conversation, you’ll hear clips from King Corn.

 

Well, corn ends up being the basis of whole cultures and civilizations from the Aztecs and the Mayans to-- In a certain sense, we’re partly a corn civilization in North America today, but it’s a very different corn civilization, isn’t it?

 

AARON WOOLF: I think that’s really well put. You know, it comes right out of Michael Pollan who cited the Aztecs as describing themselves as the people of corn. But in many ways, we are even more so than they were then, because the extent to which corn has infiltrated its way into so many foods-- You know, almost everything we eat at a typical fast food restaurant today, we’re eating corn.

 

FILM: America’s favorite meat happened to be our favorite, too. Burgers made from corn-fed beef are cheap and easy to find. In fact, if you were born in the last 30 years in America, chances are, you’ve only ever tasted corn-fed beef.

 

AARON WOOLF: Corn is now part of more than 5,000 products in the average supermarket. This way that corn has transformed our way of eating has happened really recently. And it’s happened because of a conscious choice we made, which was to subsidize corn in a way that almost guaranteed a chronic over-production.

 

MARK SOMMER: When did that subsidy begin, and why?

 

AARON WOOLF: It’s hard to say exactly when it began, because the Farm Bill is so complicated that even the people that write it, don’t really understand it, at least in my experience of talking to people about it. But you can trace the origins of modern farm subsidies to Earl Butz and the early ‘70s Agriculture Department under the Nixon Administration.

 

FILM: What we want out of agriculture is plenty of food. This year, 1973, we’re going to see the most massive increase in production of farm products ever in the history of this country. And next year, we’re going for a still further increase on top of that, as we pull all stops.

 

AARON WOOLF: And Butz was instrumental. In fact, he was the key architect in changing the subsidy system that would sometimes pay farmers not to produce to one that would pay farmers to produce whether or not the market demanded it.

 

MARK SOMMER: What was the rationale for pumping up corn as-- to become such a staple, rather than just being corn as corn?

 

AARON WOOLF: The rational was many-fold. And I think it’s also important to point out that sometimes bad consequences come from decisions that weren’t made by nefarious persons with evil intent, you know? A lot of the thinking of changing the subsidy system had to do, I think, with helping farmers to move into what Butz believed would be a new age, in which grand world markets would be opened for American agriculture.

 

And for Butz, who had grown up as a farm kid in rural Indiana, this was the kind of industrialization, the commercial triumph of farming, that machinery and ample fossil fuels had made it, you know, truly a business, and that farmers were not going to be seen as the kind of-- the peasantry, but rather, you know, a merchant class and a producing class. And I think Butz brought a lot of his own personal history into those decisions.

 

MARK SOMMER: You went back from the beginning to end from the growing of corn to the market to the dinner table, how corn comes to us. Can you trace that back for us?

 

AARON WOOLF: I’d say one of the hallmarks of the modern food system is the opacity of the system, that it’s very difficult to look back, you know, from a grocery store shelf. Even in my short lifetime, I’ve seen so much change. When I was a kid, we used to buy meat at the butcher shop or even at the butcher part of the supermarket. And it was common to see a carcass hanging in the background and a butcher who had blood on his white gown from having cut up the meat.

 

And even as a small child, you got a sense that this was a piece of an animal you were eating, and that the butcher had cut it, and that it was messy, but that was the reality of the situation. Now you buy a piece of meat and it comes on a styrofoam tray with a little, kind of a strange absorbent pad underneath it, and wrapped in cellophane. And there’s no evidence at all at the supermarket of how that piece got placed in that package. In fact, it’s likely that it got placed in that package thousands of miles away from the supermarket.

 

And so this opacity, whether it’s in meat or in processed foods, became such a hallmark of our food today that seemed like a natural thing to do. And so it was an effort to go back. And I think one of the things that was most surprising and perhaps dispiriting about that is that we naively believed that if we went back to the very soil from which the raw ingredients for so much of our foods came, that somehow from that perspective, looking back into the food system, we would have a better view than we had had as consumers. But the fact was, that farmers have just as little idea of where their crops grow as consumers have of where their food comes from.

 

MARK SOMMER: You must have met a number of corn farmers in the course of your investigations. By and large, what did they feel about this industrialized agriculture? Is it something that gives them a sense of being well connected to the food and the consumer? Or by now is it simply like running a manufacturing plant?

 

AARON WOOLF: I think we met a range. And there are some, I would say the minority, who have done quite well managing all of this technology, knowing how to play the subsidies game, knowing how to play the commodities market. And I think they take great pleasure in being businesspeople. And in some ways, that’s a wonderful thing.

 

But one of the biggest surprises of making this film and moving to this town in Iowa was the incredible awareness that farmers, even farmers, you know, who drew their paycheck largely from government subsidies, the incredible awareness they had of something being wrong with this system, their own lack of connection to the land, their feeling that the towns that they lived in were dying.

 

And when you talk about things that-- You know, the biggest surprises of the project, I think it’s that when you watch the film now, you see that the farmers’ voices are by far the most compelling.

 

FILM: We aren’t growing quality. We’re growing crap, poorest quality crap the world’s ever seen. We’re growing it today.

 

You don’t eat the corn that you grow?

 

No.

 

AARON WOOLF: Their own trepidation about the system that they are part in seems to carry more weight than all the expert, so-called expert interviews in the film combined.

 

MARK SOMMER: On the one hand, many people criticize industrial agriculture today for many reasons that seem quite reasonable. On the other hand, the world we used to know before, say, World War II, and for most of human history has been one with a great deal of unpredictability about food supplies. Having this kind of surplus to many people who were from that scarcity kind of era must seem to them like heaven.

 

AARON WOOLF: I think that’s right. I think it was unthinkable to anybody from Earl Butz’s generation that there could be such a thing as too much or that there could be kind of health and environmental consequences from these just astounding yields that we’re now getting.

 

FILM: Rural America has completely changed. Kind of farm that I grew up on doesn’t exist today. This is a commercial operation. Used to be a family operation, but it’s not anymore. But as a consequences, we feed ourselves very cheaply now. That’s the age of plenty.

 

AARON WOOLF: We got something, like, 200 bushels of corn off of our acre in Iowa, which translates to something, like, 10,000 pounds of food. It’s 10,000 pounds of food off of an acre. And at one point we did the calculation of how many calories that was or how many cans of soda that was. And, you know, humankind’s 10,000-year experiment with agriculture has been one of always trying to get more. We never thought that there were other qualities that we might try to prioritize. But by always selecting for productivity above all other qualities, sacrifices are being made. And in the case of corn, you produce corn with a much lower proportional protein content.

 

And it’s mind boggling that we can now buy, you know-- I don't know how many thousands of calories are in a two-liter soda bottle that cost 99 cents. It is a kind of a bounty. But this is also the first time in history where we have diseases of hyper-nourishment, over-nourishment, obesity and diabetes being associated with poverty and not with wealth.

 

MARK SOMMER: For those of us who have, you know, the means, we can buy organic corn and not buy the Twinkies or get the 26-ounce Coke. But there are many people who have, as it’s been put, they can’t afford to care. If we are going to grow corn and other grains differently, will it cost more? And then if so, how will people who don’t have a great deal of money to spend on food be able to access that healthier food?

 

AARON WOOLF: The danger is that we’ve created kind of a two-food society in which we have people who live in affluent communities having access to good, safe, clean food sources, and people who don’t live in those communities, don’t have that access. And it’s really-- It’s a problem that we’re going to have to solve as a whole society. Because that cheapness that we’ve talked about in processed foods, the cheapness that we’ve talked about in fast foods, really represents a very narrow view of what cheap is. And it’s not built into our human consciousness to do full cost accountings of things. But if we were to do that with our cheap food, we would see that it’s actually quite expensive. It’s expensive in terms of healthcare costs that we all shoulder. It’s expensive in terms of environmental costs that we all shoulder. And it’s expensive in terms of, I think, you know, the quality of life that we create for ourselves as a society.

 

MARK SOMMER: Aaron Woolf, director of the documentary, King Corn. In a moment, we’ll head back in time to earlier corn cultures in Mesoamerica, from Iowa State University agronomist Ricardo Salvador.

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MARK SOMMER: We call it corn today, but actually it’s maize. This ancient crop has sustained human civilizations for thousands of years, not just as a staple crop, but as a mythic totem, the corn dough from which the human form first emerged.

 

Dr. Ricardo Salvador approaches corn from multiple perspectives. As a maize physiology expert and chair of the graduate program in sustainable agriculture at Iowa State University, he has a special interest in the history and sustainability of human societies.

 

It seems to me that maize or corn has been the basis for numerous civilizations, particularly in Latin and Central America. And the Mayans I know were shaped around corn and their civilization, perhaps the Aztecs too?

 

RICARDO SALVADOR: Mm-hmm. I think probably the broader picture is that, wherever you look at major urban civilizations, they developed after a power structure was established that was sufficiently removed from subsistence living. And that was allowed when there were surplus calories to be produced, and there was a particular social class that was subjected to be specialized in the role of producing those excess calories.

 

And the primary source of those calories has traditionally been a cereal crop. If you look at the major civilizations of the Far East, it was rice. The major civilizations of the Middle East, it was wheat. And for the civilizations that developed in Mesoamerica, in what is presently Latin America, it happened to be maize. And so the foundation of all such societies is the surplus production of calories. And it turns out that maize, among the cereal crops, is the most productive in terms of calories. And so it isn’t a complete surprise that this was the scenario that developed.

 

The two civilizations that you mentioned, actually in the history of Mesoamerica are two very different ones with the Mayan civilization having been one that existed for a very long period of time, pretty much covering the entire span of urban and civilized history in Mesoamerica, with the Aztecs being very latecomers, you know, having been around for about 150 years by the time of contact with the Europeans.

 

But you’re absolutely right. Both of them featured maize as a central part, not only of their subsistence, but of their ideology, of their world view. And it isn’t surprising because everything that they were able to accomplish depended on having that fount of surplus calories that literally fueled everything that they did.

 

MARK SOMMER: What would be a corn etiology?

 

RICARDO SALVADOR: Well, in the case of the Mesoamerican peoples, there was the recognition that without maize, they themselves wouldn’t be possible.

 

MARK SOMMER: So these are ancient corn cultures. Now let’s fast-forward to the mid-20th Century. When corn was grown, say, in the 1930s and ‘40s in the Midwest in The United States, was it still basically the same varieties of corn or the same diversity of corn seed that had always been used? And at what point did it start to be hybridized and specialized?

 

RICARDO SALVADOR: I don't think we can make the blanket statement that prior to the existence of hybrid corn, you had maize cultivars in The United States that were similar to what had been grown for eons prior to that, because of the fact that as the crop migrated (and it migrated with people) it had to be adapted to its new environment. So that’s actually why we have the large diversity of cultivars and varieties.

 

And so that applied equally as well to the agricultural peoples of The United States whether they were the Native Americans or the Europeans that adapted the crop and moved to different places and opened up new frontiers, not only for themselves, but for their crop.

 

So there were distinct Southern varieties. There were distinct Midwestern varieties. There were distinct Northeastern varieties. However, those maizes were not the same as the maizes that had been cultivated in ancient times, in Mesoamerica.

 

But I think what you’re aiming for here is understanding a major transition that came about with hybridization. The folks that developed this technique were aiming for a way to increase, not only the yield, but actually the stability of that yield. The productivity of maize would be really variable in accordance to how much water was available. And so the technique of hybridization was a way to try to make the plant more vigorous with respect to the challenges that came from environmental variation.

 

One of the features of the way in which you achieve hybrid vigor in maize is that you must make parents uniform, and therefore progeny are uniform. And so it tended to increase the homogeneity in the gene bank. And because of the fact that these were more successful in the sense that they were more yield stable, then there tended to be greater adoption of these crops. And so they spread in their more homogeneous form.

 

So it wasn’t that there was ever the intent to do away with the broad diversity of land races that people had been cultivating and co-evolving with in the hundreds and thousands of years prior to hybridization. It was really the very specific intent to make the crop more dependable that ended up giving us this lack of diversity.

 

MARK SOMMER: Does that homogeneity carry certain risks? That is to say, if some sort of disease starts passing through, there’s nothing to stop it from wiping out large swaths of corn?

 

RICARDO SALVADOR: In principle, that in fact is a great vulnerability. And in fact, we have historical examples of that very same occurring. And everyone will cite a case of a particular blight that occurred about 25, 30 years ago in the Midwest.

 

Now it turns out that because of that lesson, there are lots of safeguards that can be built into hybrids themselves to forestall that. It isn’t as if exactly the same cultivar is being grown from one end of the corn belt to the other. Now, want to be very explicit in identifying that that’s actually the situation now. And it wasn’t so much the case early in the era of hybrid corn, which is actually what made farmers much more vulnerable to that very early on.

 

MARK SOMMER: So let’s look at genetically-modified corn. It’s become very widespread. What proportion of the crop grown in The United States is now GMO?

 

RICARDO SALVADOR: Among the maize crop, essentially all of it. There’s preponderance of it. Easily 75% of the crops, biologically, it is inevitable that those genes will eventually be found in all commercially produced corn. So it cross-pollinates. This is its basic mechanism for reproduction. And if there’s any lesson that we have from biology is that you cannot contain it very easily. So essentially these recombinant traits are eventually going to be found whether by design or not in all maize cultivars, just because of the way that biology works.

 

MARK SOMMER: Well, in a certain sense, have we let the genie out of the bottle at this point? Is there any way to go back from this? Let’s say we end up with unintended consequences, which often happen with the introduction of technologies that are meant to solve problems, they create new ones, you know, how do you get back if you have to? And how quickly can you step back if it turns out that this kind of, what some people would call playing god turns out to be a very hazardous business?

 

RICARDO SALVADOR: That’s a very important question. But answers to that question necessary all have to be theoretical. And so let me just answer from my personal standpoint. I think you’re right with that particular metaphor. This particular genie is out of the bottle. Whether or not it is possible to step back has to do with what frame of time we’re talking about and what the circumstance would be.

 

So, for instance, I think implicit in your question is a situation where some biological disaster does result and that we specifically intend now to recover from some deleterious combination of genes that exposes the entire or a large swath of a population to some very undesirable effect. I’m not saying that that is an impossible scenario. There are some regulatory safeguards that I think would surface those sorts of hazards before large scale commercialization. But those systems are not perfect. And biology does have the capacity to continuously surprise us, specifically because of the example that you mentioned.

 

When our eye is over, you know, on the cue ball, something completely different might be happening with the eight ball, which is essentially the nature of large complex systems. And so if you take a sufficiently long period of time, biologically speaking, it is possible for particular gene expressions which-- you know, this is the very abstract view of the picture-- to subside to background levels.

 

MARK SOMMER: So there are all kinds of people now in the natural foods movement, and then more broadly in what you might call the bio-centric movement, you know, people who say, “We have to move past the industrial age. We have to return to going back to natural processes.” Is this, from your point of view, a rather romantic and poetic conceit that doesn’t hold up in the world as we know it, and that we are now consciously or unconsciously part of the evolutionary process, and we’d better just get good at evolving in a very deliberate way?

 

RICARDO SALVADOR: No. Personally, I don't think that that’s a romantic stance. I think it is a stance which is very reasonable when you look at the performance of whole systems. I think the issue with the food world is that there are a lot of choices eaters are not aware that they’re making when they eat. And so the result of that in the aggregated is that we have a food system that does many things, not only to ourselves, but to other people and to the world that many of us might not necessarily approve of, both if we had the knowledge that that’s what we were doing, and if we realize that there are alternatives.

 

So we have an industrial food system which is global. It, in essence, would be the dream of people in the pre-industrial era who were aiming for a world where you wouldn’t have to worry about your next meal and where it was coming from. We have an industrial system that allows wealthy people to essentially sync from one minute to the next what they want to have, and to have it, whether it’s in season, whether it’s produced in their region or not.

 

In fact, there is a lot of baggage that comes along with a system like that. So one of the key features of this scenario is that you must be wealthy in order to command the flow of food goods and services so that you don’t have to, you know, very literally worry about where your food is coming from. You just need to have the purchasing power to command those resources to flow in your direction.

 

Well, one of the issues is that not everyone in the world currently has or will have that ability. And therefore, this is a system that appropriates resources from around the world from one set of people for another people. And that’s not an ideological statement. That’s an absolute economic statement.

 

You actually have to decide whether you believe that every single citizen of this planet will be able to participate in that sort of system. There are any number of recent studies that clearly illustrate that an optimal point in terms of the scale of food systems is not at the global level and is not necessarily at the local level either. But there are regional food sheds that are optimal in terms of the ecological footprint or the social footprint in terms of the comprehensibility of the system that allows people to make meaningful choices about how they’re going to participate in the food system.

 

So from that standpoint, I don’t believe that the viewpoint that you described earlier is romantic at all. I actually think that it’s at the root of the health of people and this planet as a whole, and at the root of social equity across the globe that we actually take control of our food system by understanding it more completely and making explicit choices rather than blindly accepting what industrial logic provides. Because, you know, ipso facto, the evidence before us is, if you just blindly participate in the industry system, you just blindly eat whenever you get hungry and you eat from the choices the industrial food system provides you, then the fact is (again, not an ideological statement, just a basic epidemiologic observation) you will get fat. You will, over time, develop diabetes. You will, over time, develop high blood pressure. You will, over time, develop heart disease.

 

So it’s a toxic food system. And so, by all means, people need to be rethinking the type of food system that they want, take ownership of it, and accept, we can design better systems explicitly, on purpose, conscientiously, and mindful of the things that we want out of the system.

 

MARK SOMMER: Iowa State agronomist Ricardo Salvador. I’m Mark Sommer and this is A World of Possibilities, distributed by the WFMT Radio Network.

 

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MARK SOMMER: I’m Mark Sommer. And this is A World of Possibilities. This program, “Empire of Corn: From Cornucopia to Corporate Commodity” is underwritten by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. Coming up in this half hour, we’ll approach a nutritional fork in the road. And together, we’ll take the past most often traveled — to the everlasting Twinkie.

 

But first, where does all our corn go? While we think of it primarily as a human food, most of it actually goes to the livestock we raise to eat, a highly indirect and some say inefficient use of land resources. It’s also not particularly good for the animals whose stomachs are better suited to grass than grain. More than half the corn grown in The United States goes to animal feed, by far the most common use of the grain. One out of every five ears of corn now goes to fuel. And that proportion is rising rapidly.

 

High fructose corn syrup permeates our food, but it doesn’t consume as much of the crop as you might think, maybe four or five percent. To track corn’s many uses and the empire built on its commerce, we’re joined by Mark Muller, director of environment and agriculture at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy.

 

MARK MULLER: Cows are raised to be grown on grass. And they do much better with a grass-based diet rather than the high protein and high carbohydrate diet that they’re fed with corn and soybeans. Their whole gastronomical system is based on a grass-based diet. The problems that cows have when they’re eating corn, grain, you know, their stomachs just can’t handle that. So it isn’t efficient that way.

 

It is very efficient from the agribusiness perspective that it is a relatively easy crop to grow, easy to store, to handle, and to deliver to the animals. And it’s not nearly as bulky as it is providing grass or hay. And so for a lot of reasons, we have a corn-based livestock feed diet, rather than a grass-based one.

 

MARK SOMMER: Now from what I’ve heard, corn-based ethanol is not necessarily highly efficient either. In other words, do you get more energy or less energy out of it than you’re putting into it to do the processing, growing and processing of it?

 

MARK MULLER:  Yeah, this has been the perennial question for corn-based ethanol. And I think, if we looked at this 30, 40 years ago, kind of when the industry was just kind of starting in the ‘70s with gasohol, there was no question that it consumed more energy to produce a gallon than you were getting out of it.

 

But since then, we have become more efficient in corn production. We’ve become more efficient in the ethanol process. And so now there’s a recent article in Science little over a year ago that, using the best estimates, says that there is a net positive energy balance somewhere around 1.3 BPUs of energy for every one that goes into the system. So we’ve gotten to a positive energy balance. But it is slight.

 

MARK SOMMER: I see. And then what is the impact of this rising demand on corn for ethanol on markets for corn in developing countries like Mexico?

 

MARK MULLER: Yeah. We export somewhere around 20% of our corn. And that has actually stayed fairly flat or it’s been in decline over the past 25 years, since 1980. We are exporting less and less as a percentage of our corn. And by overall volume, it’s fairly flat. So the question is, how this impacts these other countries.

 

And one of the key issues that we’ve raised over and over again here at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy is price, and the feeling that, one of the most important drivers behind how corn is used is the price, and what’s happening with the price in other parts of the world.

 

And we have in The United States, through our exports and dumping of corn and soybeans in particular, lowered cost of production. So we’re exporting these products below the actual cost of producing them. Through that process, we are really devastating a lot of real communities throughout the world by driving the price down too low so that campesinos in Mexico and other subsistence farmers throughout the world aren’t just getting a price adequate enough to keep them in business. And this has really helped contribute to some of the emptying of the Mexican countryside and more and more people going into Mexico City and also trying to cross the border and come into The United States. Some of this we can trace back to our corn policies here in The United States.

 

MARK SOMMER: Why would we be dumping corn at below production prices? Wouldn’t we want to get the highest price we could in export markets?

 

MARK MULLER: Yeah. We as, we can say, the Midwest agricultural community, it benefits the farmers the most to get a high price for their grain. But if you look at it from the other side, who benefits when you have low price grain below the cost of production? The people who benefit from that you can largely say are the agribusiness industry and the trading industry.

 

And so the few grain traders that we have, you know, the Cargills and ADMs and ConAgras, they buy the grain cheap and then they transport it and provide it somewhere else with a higher price. That’s how they make their business. So it’s to their real benefit, not only as processors and producers of food and ethanol and other things, but also just in the grain trading business, they benefit from having very low-price products.

 

MARK SOMMER: But aren’t they destroying the farm base that’s actually supplying the corn?

 

MARK MULLER: Yeah, that’s been one of our key issues is saying that this policy that we have-- And there’s been decades of policy that have really driven the price of corn, soybeans, wheat, cotton, being the four main commodities, driving those commodities down to prices as low as they have been. These policies have been devastating for the rural countryside in The United States as well as in other parts of the world.

 

Our policy is based on making up the difference to farmers through subsidies. And so we just kind of try to make up to the farmers through billions of dollars of subsidies. But the real driver and real problem are these low prices that we’ve driven through over-production, just kind of driving away any sort of local agriculture for this commodity production. And we’re paying the price for that.

 

MARK SOMMER: So in some sense, the taxpayers are paying for the large grain traders to make more of a margin when they sell. And both the taxpayers and the farmers are on the losing end of this. Is that right?

 

MARK MULLER: Exactly. I think that’s a great way of putting it, is that I think too often-- You know, a lot of groups, a lot of good groups involved in farm policy reform are blaming the greedy farmers forgetting that taxpayers subsidize farm payments, and that’s the problem. And, you know, what we really see is that it’s not the farmer that’s really benefiting from the system. They’re essentially just laundering the money and it’s going to the grain processors in the agribusiness system. So they’re just kind of the middlemen that’s passing it through. And they’re not the real beneficiaries of our current policy.

 

MARK SOMMER: As I understand it, you know, one thinks of corn and one thinks of farming. And it’s only two percent of the population that’s working on the land anymore. And so therefore, this can’t be very big business. But as I understand it, these companies, like Cargill is, I’ve heard, the largest privately held company in the world. So we’re really talking about very big money and probably very large political influence.

 

MARK MULLER: Right. I think that is exactly what’s happened. Say, over the past 75 years of modern farm policy, when it started in the 1930s with the Roosevelt Administration, the New Deal, we had a much more rural countryside and a rural population that voted to keep farmers and agriculturalists thriving. You know, over the decades, we’ve had this just general erosion of that political support. And then we’ve seen with that, the erosion of the policies that kept the prices fair for farmers, and then the gradual degradation of price that continually went to the benefit of those that processed the grain.

 

MARK SOMMER: So this is generally promoted as the free market. But it sounds, when it’s subsidized to this degree by the taxpayers, and the farmers themselves are losing as well, is this really a free market?

 

MARK MULLER: Right. I think we’re so far away from a free market that, you know, it’s kind of foolish to think of it anyway in that nature. And you point out the subsidies. And honestly, the subsidies have an impact that keep us from having a true free market. But I think I would also point out that, if we got rid of the subsidies, we still don’t have a free market. We still have those decades of policies, decades of, I’d say, some poor investments that have driven us to the point where we have-- Here where I am in Minnesota, we’re just dominated by corn and soybean production. And in several counties, you see little else.

 

So if you get rid of the subsidies and we don’t subsidize corn and soybeans anymore, those farmers really have very little choice but to grow those anyway. And we’re still not going to really have a free market because they’re going to be stuck growing those crops where there’s still the elevator that will buy those crops, where the equipment that they have is designed for those two crops. And there’s a lot of reasons that we’re kind of stuck in this system. And it’s going to take a long time to get out of it. And just getting rid of subsidies is not a really effective solution.

 

MARK SOMMER: Let’s go back to the trading system we were talking about before. You say the trading system is really so messed up. Show us a design of a trading system that would actually work so that the farmers would get what they really need, the consumers would get food, probably not quite as cheaply, but still at an affordable price, and the large conglomerates would get a fair profit, but not a profit that ends up undermining everyone else.

 

MARK MULLER: Right. We’ve designed a system that works very well with very low prices for incentivizing trading. And it’s a system that’s not really based in terms of what the costs of production are. It’s just based on driving prices down as low as possible and then trading it to where there’s a demand for that.

 

A particular concern right now, and I think it provides a great example of maybe where we don’t want to go is the growing palm oil production for bio-diesel and also for edible palm oil in Indonesia and Malaysia. And there’s just tremendous destruction of the rainforest going on right now as these palm oil plantations get built. And part of the reason they’re getting built is because of the demand for bio-diesel from Europe. And they’re getting it largely from Malaysia and Indonesia.

 

So we have this system here, with, I think, a good intention in Europe about getting more bio-diesel. But when you put it into the global trading context, what comes out is that you create incredible destruction, another part of the world. So I lay that as a groundwork for saying that, I think one of the keys is just allowing countries to have sovereignty over their own agriculture and food systems. But we’re losing that sovereignty and ability just to say that, we want to keep the food here. We want to have food production here in our country. I would like to have a trading system that allows us to say that if we are growing Minnesota apples here, that we have every right to say that our school kids should have Minnesota apples in their lunches. But that is, right now, against trade rules.

 

MARK SOMMER: Mark Muller of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy in Minneapolis. After a short break, a taste from your childhood, that irresistible nugget of artificial sweetness, the Twinkie.

 

ANNOUNCER: This is A World of Possibilities. We love hearing from our listeners. Contact us at comments@aworldofpossibilities.com.

 

MARK SOMMER: The little golden, cream-filled snack cake that hit store shelves in the 1930s is now nothing less than an American cultural icon. At the same time, it’s often regarded as the essence, the very definition of junk food. But why talk about Twinkies in a show about corn? Because though you can’t see it or taste it, in one form or another, corn makes up eight key ingredients in the Twinkie’s culinary composition, in the ubiquitous ingredient corn starch, for example.

 

So today, food writer Steve Ettlinger is going to give the Twinkie a forensic exam, tracing it’s 39 ingredients back to their sources in places like Nebraska corn fields. For his latest book, Twinkie Deconstructed, he journeyed to farm, factories, and quarries to demystify the confection that comes from everywhere and nowhere, and might just be the ultimate expression of an empire or artifice, a modern industrial food system.

 

STEVE ETTLINGER: The idea was actually to get a window into the world of artificial ingredients, of which there are thousands. I thought I should find instead of a list or an arbitrary selection of ingredients, which would be boring, or to do them all, which would be a reference book, that I should find one product that was well-known to consumers and that had an ingredient list which covered the bulk of the types of artificial ingredients. There are about four or five categories, depending on who you talk to, you know, coloring and flavoring, and so forth.

 

And when I came across the Twinkie, I freaked out because it met all the criteria. And the table of contents was just the perfect length for a book. So the table of contents of Twinkie Deconstructed is the ingredient list of Twinkies.

 

The first trip I took for the book was out to Soda Springs, Idaho and Green River, Wyoming where I saw a bunch of the ingredients in baking powder mined. Phosphate ore is made into elemental phosphorous in Soda Springs, Idaho. It looks like dirt. And they put it in what amounts to a blast furnace to get it into a-- It turns it into a liquid that bursts into flame if it hits the air. That’s your elemental phosphorous. The ore trona is almost pure sodium carbonate.

 

And all of it comes‑‑ in the States, comes from Green River, Wyoming where there are five mines. Sodium carbonate is dug out and processed very simply into sodium bicarbonate by a number of companies, including the people that make that little yellow box that’s probably in your fridge. Most of it goes to be used by cattle, because they’re eating corn instead of grass. And they get indigestion. So they need sodium bicarbonate. But a lot of it goes into baking powder.

 

Anyway, I went down to the mine, the trona mine. It’s 1,600 feet deep. This is far down as the tallest building in the world is high. And then got into a jeep and drove for half an hour to find the active face, quite the experience.

 

MARK SOMMER: I’ll bet.

 

STEVE ETTLINGER: So it’s hard to think of that at the same I was thinking of the little yellow snack cake, the nice...(inaudible).

 

MARK SOMMER: What sorts of ingredients are in there that-- First of all, tell us about the natural ingredients. What’s the core of a Twinkie that gives it some nutritional value?

 

STEVE ETTLINGER: It is a cake that’s made with flour. I mean, the bottom line is, it’s about just under half flour. And it’s also just under half sugar, different types of sugars. And of course some of those sugars are, in fact, corn sweeteners, which they are.

 

MARK SOMMER: What is that white core? Is that whipped cream?

 

STEVE ETTLINGER: I wish. No. There’s no cream in the creme, as I say. There’s no C-R-E-A-M in the C-R-E-M-E. And they don’t pretend that there is. I imagine the original Twinkie might have had cream, but it spoils pretty fast.

 

MARK SOMMER: What is the nature of corn sweeteners in our food today?

 

STEVE ETTLINGER: The most common form is in corn syrup, that is, high fructose corn syrup or regular corn syrup and some other forms that are either called dextrose or glucose. They’re all really forms of corn syrup, which are made pretty much in a similar way.

 

I went to one place that makes five million pounds of it a day (that’s a lot) in Blair, Nebraska. And I was very happy to see that. But, you know, ADM, which is the biggest foreign processors, processes the equivalent of about nine and a half acres worth of corn every minute of every day, most of which goes to animals. But there’s 600 products. Some of it-- You know, ethanol goes to auto fuel. Some goes into plastic. But a lot goes into starches and sweeteners in snack cakes, and, above all, soft drinks, beverages. Twinkies, by the way, has 39 ingredients, and eight are made from corn.

 

MARK SOMMER: Is there anything wrong with eating a lot of high fructose corn syrup?

 

STEVE ETTLINGER: I found people who thought for certain that it was terrible for you and was causing all kinds of problems, but no studies to back those accusations up. There’s suspicion that it might be hard to digest in some ways because of the molecular structure.

 

On the other hand what I found was, a direct link to the incredible amount of obesity in our country. But it’s not so much a biological thing, a link through the form of the molecule, but simply a consumer thing, that we are eating lots and lots of corn syrup.

 

In fact, what I found that was the most frustrating when I realized that when they started using high fructose corn syrup to make Coke and Pepsi and all the other soft drinks, it, of course is a much cheaper alternative to cane sugar. They immediately upped the size of their drinks. When I was growing up, a typical soft drink was a six-ounce or eight-ounce serving. But when you go buy a Coke or any other soft drink today, they’re often 12 or 20 or 22 ounces. And of course they have the Big Gulp somewhere, the 64-ounce version.

 

But what’s frustrating about this type of thing is that when the soft drink manufacturer has switched to a less expensive sugar source, when it was invented in 1980, they didn’t lower their prices. They didn’t say to the consumer, “Hey, guess what? We’re saving 80% of our costs on sugar, which translates into a 12% reduction in consumer price.” No. They didn’t say anything of the sort.

 

MARK SOMMER: People don’t eat that much corn on the cob anymore or frozen corn or canned corn. So it’s really these other purposes for which it’s being used, by and large. Is that right?

 

STEVE ETTLINGER: Absolutely. Corn syrup is the main thing. I mean, its uses are extreme, as I said. The place where I went in Blair, Nebraska, they’re making it, the corn processor ships it out by pipeline to factories right next to it, in sort of an industrial park where they make plastics and fuel and lactic acid, which is another ingredient in one of the-- It was a sub-ingredient for one of the other ingredients in Twinkies. In fact, it was kind of disarming to step aside, to be in these huge plants. And then there’d be, like--- I’d see a four-inch pipe (which is nothing; it’s like a drain pipe in your house) going from one plant to the other. And that was the pipeline for the dextrose.

 

MARK SOMMER: Wow.

 

STEVE ETTLINGER: That was the result of all the processing for the corn people.

 

MARK SOMMER: Let’s talk about how you deconstructed the Twinkie, just so we find out what it’s like to trace back the ingredients.

 

STEVE ETTLINGER: That was a deeply satisfying trip for me, because I had envisioned a few years earlier, tracing everything back to the ground, whether it was polysorbate 60, which is from god knows what, or corn syrup, which is more obviously from corn. And these are all huge companies, and some of them welcomed me and some of them, I might say, obliquely were-- behaved very unprofessionally.

 

MARK SOMMER: Oh really? Tell us about that.

 

STEVE ETTLINGER: Yeah, the worst was a company that, when I got there, they wanted me to sign a release. I’ve signed releases before. I’m sure you have. In several cases, companies said, “We want to review what you have to say so you don’t reveal and proprietary information.” I said, “I don’t want to reveal any proprietary information. And I also want you to review these things for accuracy.”

 

So when they produced a release, I was happy to sign it. And then I saw something that said that I would be obliged to make any changes which they requested, and that they would review, not just what I wrote about them, but the entire book. And I went, “Hello?” I said, “You’ve got to be kidding. You know, can we talk about this?” And they said, “No.” The lawyer said, “No. It is not negotiable.” And I said, “Well, you can’t review the whole book.”

 

Their release said I couldn’t publish it until they’d approved it, which means they could sit on it for a year or two, which is basically a way of killing the project. Never done this before. I had to stand up and say, “Thank you very much. Goodbye.” Some of these companies, I’m not going to name names, but some of them have been raked over the coals in the press for their nefarious behavior. And it is nefarious. They’ve had not only board members, but one company their president go to jail.

 

MARK SOMMER: You said there’s a Twinkie industrial complex. Is there kind of a corn industrial complex?

 

STEVE ETTLINGER: Yeah. There’s only a few big companies, and they’re huge. I think it’s, Cargill is probably the largest, 124,000 employees, $71 billion in sales. And their rivals, ConAgra and ADM and Bunge, that’s it.

 

MARK SOMMER: Steve Ettinger — corn flakes, corn on the cob, corny sentiments. I hadn’t realized when we began producing this program that a grain so sentimentally associated with wholesome innocence also forms the basis of an economic empire. When some of the world’s largest corporations make their fortunes, not on inventing and selling software or building cars, but on buying and selling corn and other commodities worldwide, you know it’s serious business.

 

Nothing wrong with that in principle. But the kinds of corn we now grow, high hybridized and genetically modified, the uses to which it’s put as fuel, livestock feed, and sweeteners, and its impacts on human health and animal health, on soil in rural communities, on the poor in distant places, we’d(?) want(?) to wonder whether we need to reclaim this totem grain from the empire that’s been created from its use and misuse.

 

The evolution of corn, through painstaking research and development into the staple of a global industrial food system was doubtless undertaken with the best of intentions. And it’s hard to argue with its success in feeding millions more people through the prodigious productivity of its hybrid and genetically modified strains.

 

But these improvements come at great costs, still largely hidden from our view. Maybe it’s time we pay attention to these costs and strike a better balance between corn as commerce and corn as a core component of a nourishing, sustaining food culture.

 

I’m Mark Sommer, and this has been A World of Possibilities. Thanks for listening.

 

ANNOUNCER: You’ve been listening to A World of Possibilities. For more information on today’s topic, please click the listener action link at aworldofpossibilities.com This program was produced and edited by Chuck Rogers, Tammy Rae Scott, and Kara Hawkner(?), with administrative support from Allie Cook and Susan Seminov(?). Production engineer is Tofu Mike Schwartz(?). Support for this program is provided by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. Music is courtesy of Null Music, Putumayo World Music, Talisman Records, and Eagle Records. This program is distributed by the WFMT Radio Network. Thank you for listening.

 

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