Wholly Unreasonable

"This week I've challenged you to go a week without eating anything containing corn or corn derivatives. On your blogs this week I'd like you to write about the experience. How easy or hard has this been for you? Did you come across anything particularly challenging or surprising? What did the overall experience teach you about the contemporary US food system?"

So while I contemplated sticking to this corn-free diet for a week, I gave up rather quickly. I would have had to buy an entirely new stock of food for my apartment. Time was a big factor last week, I was very busy keeping up with assignments and this was just too much. Corn sweeteners or extracts are in nearly everything! I would have to become a raw vegan in order to maintain a corn-free diet! So for me, it would have been improbable because I would have to buy all new food, not eat nearly any food from a restaurant, and turn my entire eating habits on their head at a moment's notice.
The US food system has been redesigned over a long period to incentivize the production of commodity crops like corn. My home state, Iowa, has been a big contributor to the lunacy and now it is paying severe environmental costs. There's so much corn that in the 1970s, in order to keep corn prices up without just throwing the crop away, farmers started making ethanol from corn. Now the world's hungry are paying some of those costs. Food manufacturers have replaced sugar with corn syrup because it is cheaper, and they use corn extracts because corn is plentiful. Corn is cheap and plentiful because the food system is set up to make it so, regardless of human health.