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I’m a big believer in ethanol … We’re going to run into a constraint pretty soon, though. It turns out corn is needed for more than just ethanol. You got to feed your cows and feed your hogs.– From George W. Bush’s January 30, 2007 speech in East Peoria, Illinois.

Have you seen Pixar’s (aka Steve Jobs’) new film Wall-e yet? About three-quarters of the film includes an off-planet ship-load of human beings after Earth was rendered uninhabitable by some man-made disaster, presumably a nuclear holocaust. These potato-shaped remnants of humanity that float around in hover chairs with screens in front of their faces sipping food through straws have lost their mobility and their bone strength from years of stupefying inactivity. They are basically blobs of adipose tissue, clueless and white. In other words, a metaphor for the current American state of body and mind.

Did you know that most high school kids aren’t even fit enough to join the Army? Not that I would encourage any kid to joint the Army, that’s not my point. They either a) don’t have a high school diploma, b) have a criminal record, or c) can’t pass the physical examination. Steve Jobs is just holding up a mirror to the state of the nation. Who was it that said a nation is only as strong as its youth?

Awhile ago I posted about the high fructose corn syrup scam in Like Styrofoam, Eternal and Immortal, which my stats counters say got some decent traffic. The post included reference to the documentary video “King Corn”, which although not exactly high-concept entertainment, broke the lid off a vat of horrors about what lurks in our food supply in the form of corn. I’d like to think most Americans know about all this by now.

I confess I haven’t seen the video, but it’s on my list. I’ve been getting my information from other sources, and let me tell you, none of it is entertaining or pleasant.

Farmers interviewed in the Iowa flooding coverage last month, grew/grow mostly corn. Did you know that the U.S. grows 80 million acres of corn? That amount of any crop is really overproduction of a mono-crop. The reason for all this corn is our nation’s farm policy. “King Corn” was made in 2007, just as Congress was set to debate the 2008 Farm Bill, a once-in-seven-years opportunity to change what our tax dollars subsidize and how we eat. But just like every other futile fight against the impregnable bush administration, all the opposition didn’t make a difference.

But what does the monolithic agro-business corporatocracy do with all that corn?

Besides ethanol and high-fructose corn syrup, corn is used for cattle feed. So? Imagine if you will 100,000 cows standing shoulder-to-shoulder, not allowed to roam free because it will slow down the fattening process. This is Iowa corn at work, transformed into millions of pounds of fat-streaked, cheap beef.

“King Corn” shows how cows that eat all that corn and not being allowed to move would explode and die if they were not slaughtered in a timely manner. Get the connection with the useless human pods I described at the beginning of this post? Americans and exercise have gone their separate ways, and corn-fed cows = corn-fed people.

One of the ranchers in the film said that grass-fed cows are more expensive and harder to raise, but if people wanted it, they would make it available. Here’s a quote from The Food Revolution site:

Traditionally, all beef was grass-fed beef, but in the United States today what is commercially available is almost all feedlot beef. The reason? It’s faster, and so more profitable. Seventy-five years ago, steers were 4 or 5 years old at slaughter. Today, they are 14 or 16 months. You can’t take a beef calf from a birth weight of 80 pounds to 1,200 pounds in a little more than a year on grass. It takes enormous quantities of corn, protein supplements, antibiotics and other drugs, including growth hormones.

Switching a cow from grass to grain is so disturbing to the animal’s digestive system that it can kill the animal if not done gradually and if the animal is not continually fed antibiotics. These animals are designed to forage, but we make them eat grain, primarily corn, in order to make them as fat as possible as fast as possible.

“Perhaps the most serious thing that can go wrong with a ruminant on corn is feedlot bloat. The rumen is always producing copious amounts of gas, which is normally expelled by belching during rumination. But when the diet contains too much starch and too little roughage, rumination all but stops, and a layer of foamy slime that can trap gas forms in the rumen. The rumen inflates like a balloon, pressing against the animal’s lungs. Unless action is promptly taken to relieve the pressure (usually by forcing a hose down the animal’s esophagus), the cow suffocates”

All this is not only unnatural and dangerous for the cows. It also has profound consequences for us. Feedlot beef as we know it today would be impossible if it weren’t for the routine and continual feeding of antibiotics to these animals. This leads directly and inexorably to the development of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. These are the new “superbugs” that are increasingly rendering our “miracle drugs” ineffective.

And the methane gas produced by these poor cows on a massive scale is also adding to the CO2 production in our atmosphere, another huge topic covered elsewhere. (But like everything else, beef is just another product that comes from Styrofoam trays wrapped in shrink wrap. And out there somewhere, those who mass-produce beef and dairy products, have little use other than cutting a profit. They are just things to use and abuse as men see fit.)

Bottom line, we all need reform on a ratio a scale as massive as corporate agriculture itself. But in the meantime, consumers can make a difference.  So what can we do? The answer is clear. Just as Americans have stopped GM from producing any more piggy Hummers (Yes!), we can vote with our dollars. If you don’t want corn syrup in your food or in your kids’ food, read the label and look for products made with cane sugar only (or even better, cut way back on sugar in your–and especially your kids’–diet). Tell the people who run things at stores where you buy your food, write or phone your congress people, tell everyone you know: You don’t want to eat corn fed beef and you refuse to buy it that way. Tell them you will go to a store where they sell grass-fed beef until corn-fed beef is only a memory.

Even so, you’ll be up against a brick wall if this dialog on Grist by Julia Olmstead (“Me”) is an indication of the cement for brains you’ll probably encounter at the butcher’s counter:

Me: Hi, do you have any grass-fed beef?
Butcher: Hmm, grass-fed? I don’t think you can feed grass to cows.
Me: Well, they’re ruminant animals, so I think that’s what they’re supposed to eat.
Butcher: [sympathetic-but-authoritative head shake] I don’t think so. They need vitamins and minerals and stuff.
Me: Uh …
Butcher: Now this [points down at large, marbled slab in meat case], this is corn-fed beef.
Me: Yeah, well, um, thanks anyway.

So I don’t know what those so-called grass-fed-beef farmers have been charging me an arm and a leg for, but with the president’s backing, I’m going to call that bluff.

In the meantime, I’m relieved to know that the FDA allows farmers to feed chicken manure to cattle — though I’ll have to ask my butcher about the vitamin and mineral content.