to the world and the grain that waves most gloriously across North America
still.^1
Between and the beginning of the twenty-first century, the typical
American added at least percent—-odd more calories—to his or her
daily diet. During the same years, Coca-Cola morphed from eight-ounce
bottles into twenty-ounce jugs, the fluid counterpart of the great burgeon-
ing of serving sizes of restaurant food (both sit-down and take-out) and the
gargantuan multiplication of so-called snack foods. All these augmenta-
tions remained relatively cheap, too, and herein lay the real source of the
new plague.
The United States is overwhelmed by its own grain production, especially
corn. Some is dumped abroad, further hardening the lives of struggling
farmers in poor countries in the Southern Hemisphere. Some is refined
into a fuel called ethanol. Most, however, is ingeniously (and insidiously)
converted here at home into ‘‘added value’’ processed food and beverage
components. Corn becomes chips and other snacks, it coats and/or binds
chicken ‘‘nuggets’’ and other ersatz foods, and as high-fructose syrup—re-
placing cane sugar—it sweetens Coke and a host of other soft drinks, even
so-called milk-based products vended in schools.
Corn’s sudden ubiquity in American diets dates from a strange domestic
political crisis. In the Nixon administration brokered a stunning grain
deal with the old Soviet Union, whose agricultural expansion schemes of
the previous decade had flopped miserably. American farmers would feed
their fearsome Cold War enemies, and Nixon had scored a great coup, or
so it appeared, both abroad and at home. On the latter front, however, the
coup turned on the deal-maker in short order. Enormous shipments to the
Soviet Union reduced domestic stores, and prices for not only bread but
meat and milk soared. Consumers demonstrated against suddenly rising
food prices outside supermarkets, boycotted meat, and threatened to throw
out the Republicans. Nixon ordered his secretary of agriculture, the mid-
westerner Earl Butz, to do something, and quick. Senators and represen-
tatives from farm states eagerly lobbied for the secretary’s dramatic rever-
sal of national agricultural policy established in . The new departure
encouraged and rewarded with lavish subsidiesnotthe restraint of pro-
duction via subsidized retirement of acreage into ‘‘conservation’’ but an
enormous expansion of grain culture, wherein every farmer would ‘‘plant
from fence row to fence row.’’ Soon food prices at home came down again,
even while Soviet demand persisted. Some farmers of my acquaintance in
the Midwest adopted a business plan called ‘‘continuous corn.’’ The plan