Weekly Reading Response, due 1/25/10

In today’s reading of The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan, we experienced one of the main perspectives that Pollan takes in his Manifesto, which is that of the American farmer. The second chapter of this book is an account of George Naylor, his father, and their collective land, passed down for two generations. For all intents and purposes, I believe that this is a major perspective in the corn industry that is quite literally impossible to not look upon: their lives are corn, be it their economic prospects or their lifestyle choice, farmers are the people which are the cause, and slightly to at fault, for this surge in corn products. High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) is a processed product of corn, which is seen as the most profitable form of processed product which can come from corn.

This need for financial stand-hold in economies of the present and past have caused farmers to take up corn as their sole crop, after bioengineering has led to dramatic increases of bushels per acre yields. Having corn as your lone crop before the advent of synthetic fertilizers, and hybrid strains, would devastate the top soil of your land, rendering it useless for numerous years. This was originally countered by planting legumes after each successful harvest of corn to add nitrates to the soil, but this practice rapidly died out once synthetic fertilizers allowed for the perpetual plantation of corn year after year. No longer was agriculture solely for supplying the farmer, his family and a few other families with sufficient resources to sustain life as it had now turned into a national, then global, affair to feed the nation corn products and bi-products.