“The fact that people need to write a book telling people where their food comes from shows how far removed we are.” – Food Inc. documentary
I am very shocked by the mass impact the corn industry has on the meat industry. Cattle are evolutionarily adapted to grass-fed diets, but because feeding corn to cows is a lot more economically friendly than feeding grass to cows, the meat industry has dangerously altered the DNA of them. “Cattle have complex digestive systems, consisting of the rumen, the reticulum, the omasum, and the abomasums, which allow them to digest cellulose and hemicellulose found in grass blades” (Lake Forest). Adding corn to the cattle diet “changes the chemistry of (the cattle) digestive system and leads to serious illnesses, including bloat and acidosis” (Lake Forest). These illnesses are extremely painful and brutal to cattle and completely violate the rights of animals. Moreover, feeding cattle a corn based diet is extremely dangerous for human consumption, with E-coli being one of the most prominent bacteria that ends up in the human body, causing uncontrollable deadly diarrhea. Even with obvious negative impacts that is brought to humans, the problems of corn-fed cattle have been overlooked for years.
“According to the British group, VegFarm, a 10-acre piece of land can feed 60 people when used for the production of soybeans, 24 people when used for wheat, 10 people when used for corn, and only a mere 2 people when used for cattle” (Blog EPA). This statistic shows us how much more sustainable land is when used for vegetation rather than cattle. However, the sad truth is, with most of the corn perhaps the vegetation of corn crops is equally as harmful to the environment as cattle farms are. According to Scientific American, “today’s corn crop is mainly used for biofuels (roughly 40 percent of U.S. corn is used for ethanol) and as animal feed (roughly 36 percent of U.S. corn, plus distillers grains left over from ethanol production, is fed to cattle, pigs and chickens). Much of the rest is exported. Only a tiny fraction of the national corn crop is directly used for food for Americans, much of that for high-fructose corn syrup”. With the majority of the corn production being fed to cattle, we are wasting our human food resources to animals that cannot even digest such food healthily nor properly; We are fueling cattle with food that uses up more land than any other plant crops in America. This land could have been utilized for more plant crops for American people, instead of further wasting natural resources just to grow corn for cattle and causing human diseases. The corn industry uses “5.6 cubic miles per year of irrigation water withdrawn from America’s rivers and aquifers” and “5.6 million tons of nitrogen” for fertilizers (Scientific American). The fertilizers are then washed into “the nation’s lakes, rivers and coastal oceans, polluting waters and damaging ecosystems along the way” – an iconic example of this is the Gulf of Mexico (Scientific American).
And not only that, but even when the corn fields are dedicated to the human diets, the corn is often processed into other unhealthy forms like cellulose, saccharin, polydextrose, xanthan gum, maltodextrin, and most importantly, high fructose corn syrup.
It is horrifying that the average American does not know the story behind what is on their plates. We are so far removed from the actual origin and production of our food – which a huge percentage is from corn – that we continue to consume large amounts of harmful foods to our body and contribute to ever-growing problems of obesity and other food-related illnesses.
Sources:
https://blog.epa.gov/blog/2010/04/living-without-meat/
https://www.lakeforest.edu/live/files/1135-graberreviewaprintpdf
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/time-to-rethink-corn/
Bloody Crops: Unmasking the Meat Industry 