C'mon Sweet Catastrophe

It's what everyone's reading. Well, it seems that way when I read blogs such as the Gristmill and Sustainable Table, am a member of the New Orleans Food Cooperative, and get emails from Amazon announcing that Michael Pollan is their guest blogger. I admit, I love MP. He's my newest hero. He says everything that is in my head when it comes to food and how it relates to culture, environment and sustainability--and he says it so much more eloquently than I. I venture to guess that he can spell the word eloquently. I plan on posting quite a bit from this book, but I encourage you to go pick up your own copy.

MP's manifesto is "Eat Food. Not too much. Mostly plants." He follows this with a few guidelines of how to do just that. But what I wanted to write about today may seem like a contradiction to this rule...high-fructose corn syrup.

HFCS is created by processing corn syrup in order to increase the amount of fructose in the syrup. The result is a liquid sweetener that is used as a substitute for sugar, which comes from sugar cane or sugar beets. So, if HFCS is a byproduct of plants, why, exactly, should it be avoided? Well, without getting into a lot of chemistry (I quake in fear of the "Fundamentals of Environmental Chemistry" on my class schedule), the basics are that HFCS is a man-made sweetener comprised of fructose and glucose. Common table sugar is neither of these, but rather sucrose.

So why so bad? The body isn't used to so much fructose, and many studies suggest that this is a contributor to insulin resistance and therefore diabetes. In addition, HFCS is found in nearly EVERYTHING. Why? It's a preservative, and it extends the shelf life of many processed products. In addition, the US has created an agricultural market that favors artificially cheap corn while creating tariffs on sugar--it's much cheaper to use HFCS than it is to use actual sugar.
I've been trying to avoid HFCS, absentmindedly for about a year, with greater intent for the past month. I don't like the idea of chemically created sweeteners, especially ones that likely lead to weight issues and diabetes. I also want to give the agrobusiness producers and promoters of corn one less consumer (two less, actually, as my voice usually goes further in the buying of groceries and B doesn't like HFCS either). I don't want corn to be in every one of my meals, and if I keep an eye out for HFCS, I'm usually avoiding processed products, and so avoiding supporting those agrobusinesses.



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