Corn is delicious. We can pop it, grill it, freeze it, can it, cream it, grind it into flour, bake it into bread, and slather it up in butter before eating it. It complements any barbeque and enables Latin/South American, Spanish, and Mexican cuisine to be AWESOME.
Corn chips are my single favorite type of chip on the market and besides their deliciousness with salsa and hummus, they enhance any sandwich. But I love them all the more for this reason: If you look on the back of a bag of Fritos (I actually prefer Trader Joe’s Corn Chip Dippers—but both are great), you will find only the following ingredients listed: whole corn, corn oil, salt. That is astounding; and in an age of processed foods, Sun Chips (which I also love) cannot even boast that kind of simplicity.
But our delicious and starchy (though not unhealthy) friend, corn is being exploited. In 1957 a man by the name of Richard Marshall (citation Wikipedia), introduced a revolutionary new artificial sweetener: high fructose corn syrup (HFCS). Since its discovery, HFCS has taken its place in monopolizing and dominating the American food industry. Interestingly enough, it has amassed a serious corporate following only in America; and due to our abundance of corn, it is infinitely (hyperbole) cheaper than sugar.
I currently reside in Minsk, Belarus where all of the aforementioned treats are nowhere to be found. Minsk, despite its tight government-control over business, its anti-democratic ways, and its pain-in-the-neck visa process, is a place completely worth visiting. It is cleaner than any city in the U.S. that I have been to and it is really just a peaceful and beautiful place. It does however suffer from the colossal insufficiency of a lack of corn chips.
Minsk has done wonders for my health despite being a post-Soviet industrial city. I went from being a couch potato to running five miles a day and even ran the equivalent of a half-marathon (well actually it was 12 miles, but it is still a big achievement for me). I lost a lot of weight and was really feeling quite good about myself. That is until I went to America and lived on a college campus for two months.
Determined to battle the prevalence of HFCS in my American diet and keep the weight off, I decided I would continue to exercise regularly and drink (for the most) only water during my time State-side. It was my second week at Middlebury College and I weighed myself in the locker room at a breezy 187 pounds (something I have not known since high school). I committed to running 5 mile stretches 2-3 times a week, and then four weeks later I weighed myself again: 203 pounds.
How could it be? How could I have gained 16 pounds in a month? Granted my readjustment to college buffet-style eating may have warranted a gain of 5-ish pounds, but 16? That’s more than a stone! I exercised fairly regularly and made no radical changes in my diet, except for one: HFCS.
Though we find it in almost everything in America, the most common-place and internationally-ubiquitous-enough-to-make-a-comparison product is none other than Coca Cola. Coca-Cola in Europe (that is to say, Coca-Cola made with sugar and not HFCS) tastes differently. Our Coke leaves a nasty, sticky, residue inside and around the edge of your mouth. Coca-Cola in Minsk does no such thing, and that makes it better.
It is quite typical in America for the majority of students in the average high school class to be a little overweight. In Minsk it is quite atypical and from what I have seen, the ‘fat kid’ is extremely rare. I blame HFCS.
HFCS has no rightful place in anyone’s diet, and I believe it (and its cousin: partial hydrogenation) is the leading cause of the obesity, diabetes, heart-disease, and unwanted weight-gain epidemics in modern America. HFCS is a cancer that needs to be surgically removed from U.S. food production.
Corn is wonderful, but we need to stop exploiting her because she is cheap and easily accessible.
(This is Minsk, note the lack of HFCS).
