Agribusiness and Advertising

Today I read a disturbing article in my hometown newspaper. It was written by an Associated Press writer, so maybe you read it too, in your neck of the woods. It was about corn refiners and their desire to get away from the negative connotations of the ingredient they make called "high fructose corn syrup." They want to change the name officially - and have already been using a new name. "Corn Sugar." I think you can read the article here. In case my link doesn't work (I don't know how long news stories stay in this database) here are some highlights:

The makers of high fructose corn syrup want to sweeten its image with a new name: corn sugar.

The Corn Refiners Association applied Tuesday to the federal government for permission to use the name on food labels. The group hopes a new name will ease confusion about the sweetener, which is used in soft drinks, bread, cereal and other products.

Where is Shakespeare when you need him? I realize that the Corn Refiners Association is facing serious pressure from people like me and her and her and him and these guys (check the blog on Fridays to see the Food Product of the Week)- not to mention him and her, who (for some of us) brought these issues to our attention in the first place. The ('poor' but actually quite well-subsidized) Corn Refiners are stuck between a rock candy and a hard candy. They make a refined food product grown in monocultures sustained only by the dumping of chemical fertilizers into the ground, and we don't want to buy it anymore. Literally. But a corn-based sweetener by any other name is going to . . . well, taste the same. Yet they think Americans are dumb enough to buy this name change. Figuratively, this time. Well, literally too.

But to say that they are changing the name of this food-like substance in order to "ease confusion" is ridiculous. I suppose I should be careful what I say about this, as I'm liable to get caught in some veggie libel laws over my disgust with (both my own craving for and the industry's production of) corn byproducts. (Why don't they call it a corn byproduct? Wouldn't that make it pretty straightforward for consumers?)

There are two things going on here. First, the corn industry wants to get away from HFCS because by now most Americans have heard that HFCS is bad. Of course, the issue for a few of us is not whether HFCS is more bad for us than regular sugar. The issue is that people buy bread and pasta and potato chips and all kinds of foods that they would not expect to find sugar in, and see HFCS listed as one of (the first!) ingredients. For many years, HFCS could hide behind its mysterious (but mostly pronounce-able) name. No one understood what High Fructose Corn Syrup was. It sounded like a vegetable. It was not clear that HFCS was just a cheap alternative to sugar, and a highly government-subsidized one at that. So most of us know what HFCS means. And some people are starting to react.

Parents such as Joan Leib scan ingredient labels and will not buy anything with it. The mother of two in Somerville, Mass., has been avoiding the sweetener for about a year to reduce sweeteners in her family's diet. "I found it in things that you would never think needed it, or should have it," said Leib, 36. "I found it in jars of pickles, in English muffins and bread. Why do we need extra sweeteners?" Many companies are responding by removing it from their products. Last month, Sara Lee switched to sugar in two of its breads. Gatorade, Snapple and Hunt's Ketchup very publicly switched to sugar in the past two years.

The companies that are are replacing HFCS with sugar are not doing anyone any favors! (Okay, sugar cane farmers are probably happy.) They should be working to reduce the overall sugar content of the foods rather than substituting one type of sugar for another. (For what it is worth, we know that growing miles and miles of corn in monoculture is bad for the environment, but let's get real, people. Cane sugar is grown the same way. And sugar growers in the US are subsidized too, albeit differently from the corn growers.) We need to get away from our dependence on cheap sugar.

My last post is a perfect example of how processed corn has made Americans change our diets over the last century because of a steady supply of cheap fructose. Have you noticed how much honey and maple syrup cost?? When I finally get to a point where I am using only local sweeteners, I am going to have to get used to eating a LOT fewer sweets. I paid $14 for a quart of Maple Syrup from my CSA, and this was a bargain - in the same area my dad paid $19 at a Farmers' Market for a quart of syrup. And maple syrup is not quite as sweet as table sugar, so you need to use more of it to achieve the desired sweetness. (I haven't looked into maple sugar, but I probably will at some point in the future.) Honey is not cheap either, although you can actually substitute 2/3 cup of honey for 1 cup of sugar. I think I paid about $20 for 80 ounces (10 cups) of local honey at our grocery store. Organic and gourmet honeys cost more.

But I have digressed. The other thing that the Corn Refiners are doing is that they are taking advantage of people like me and the bloggers/writers I mentioned above. (Except for the fact that the people they're actually going to reach are less perceptive - or more busy - or less interested in food - than me.) They are preying on the innocent, slightly health-conscious, public. They are going to call their product "corn sugar" and consumers are going to eat it up. Literally. And also figuratively. If all they needed was to get away from the negative associations with HFCS, they could pick a different name. I suggested "corn byproduct" or they could even go with "very sweet corn byproduct" but obviously they're not going to do that. They picked the innocent sounding "corn sugar." "Corn sugar" is like the "real food" campaigns being touted by fast food restaurants. Corn and Sugar are normal words that fourth-graders can pronounce. They are words that your great-grandmother would recognize. Of course, she would recognize them as two different things entirely, but she would have a mental image of "corn" and "sugar." She would have them in her kitchen. So "corn sugar" must be a good thing, right? There is nothing we can do to keep fast food chains and agribusiness stop taking advantage of consumer ignorance, except to keep ourselves educated and try to stay one step ahead of them.

The fast food industry, and now the Corn Refiners, are onto us. So we have to get smarter. We need to move beyond the Food Rules (some of which I referenced above and would/should cite, but my book is at my mother-in-law's house) and think even more deeply and carefully about our food choices.

Since I certainly don't want to eat any more sugar right now, perhaps I'll just eat my words. The attitude we have to have (and that I will try harder to have at all times going forward) is that, just because your ginger root came from Thailand and there is no way to justify your home brew as local, it is still important not to cave in to not corporate interests. Each time we choose an item - whether it is a 15 oz can of pumpkin (I've been reading a lot of those recipes lately) or a basil leaf or a ginger root - we have a choice. We can know with 100% certainty where it came from (my backyard, my CSA, my farmer's market) or we can trust corporate America to make that choice for us. I recognize that not every person can buy locally for every meal, or even for one meal a day. (My sister continually points out that there are people who live in New York City and Chicago who don't have yards. I know this. I do. I am a renter. My garden is an hour away from my back yard.) But it is up to us to take the first step. For me, that step was not buying bread at the store. I didn't think HFCS belonged in my 100% whole wheat bread. So I don't put it in the bread I make. Calling it corn sugar is not going to change my mind. I hope you won't let it change yours.

For more puffery and pseudo-science:
Check out the Corn Refiners Association:
This is a list of all the great things corn syrup does for foods that are not sweet - like spaghetti sauce. Apparently it is a preservative. (Score for the Food Rules. Bugs don't want to eat HFCS. Neither should you.)

If it wasn't obvious, I'm not receiving any money from Wendy's for linking you to their ads. Remember folks, Fast Food can't fake fresh.

Here is an interview with the head chef of McDonalds (from their website). He talks about simplicity, and recalls the best apple he ever ate - plucked right out of a tree in an apple orchard. Then he discusses how his goal is to make the freshest food available to his customers. (Anywhere in the world, in any climate, any season, any time of day. Or night.) As a teaser, here is his answer to the question "What is your long-term goal for the McDonalds menu?" he replied, "To stay relevant. And to change people's perceptions about our food not being real. I want people to know that there are a lot of dedicated, passionate professional people out there who think about that menu every single day."

For the other side of the story, be sure to check out Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food and Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.

Note: I apologize for formatting problems. I spent several hours putting this post together, and discovered that while Blogger let me type from 7:48 p.m. until 11:26 p.m. it was stuck "saving" the post at 7:48 and I would have lost the whole thing if I hadn't copied the post into a Word document. Most of the formatting was preserved, but the quotation marks I put around the italicized portions taken from the newspaper article, the McDonalds quote, and the Corn Refiners page looked goofy so I tried to take them out. If it is in italics, it is either a quotation or the name of a book. I trust that you can figure out which.