" Corn is what feeds the steer that becomes the steak. Corn feeds the chicken and the pig, the turkey and the lamb, the catfish and the tilapia and, increasingly, even the salmon, a carnivore by nature that the fish farmers are re-engineering to tolerate corn. the egg are made of corn. the milk, and cheese and yoghurt which once came from dairy cows that grazed on grass, now typically come from Holsteins that spend their working lives indoors, tethered to machines, eating corn.
Head over to the processed foods and you will find ever more intricate manifestations of corn. a chicken nugget, for example, piles corn upon corn: what chicken it contains, consists of corn, of course, but so do most of the nugget's other constituents, including the modified corn starch that glues the thing together, the corn flour in the batter that coats it, and the corn oil in which it gets fried. Much less obviously, the leavenings and lecithin, the mono-, di-, and triglycerides, the attarctive golden colouring, and even the citric acid that keeps the nugget "fresh" can all be derived from corn.
to wash down your chicken nuggets with virtually any soft drink in the supermarket is to have some corn with your corn. Since the 1980's virtually all the sodas and most of the fruit drinks sold in the supermarket have been sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) - after water, carn sweetener is their principal ingredient. Grab a beer for your beverage instead and you'd be drinking corn, in the form of alcohol fermented from glucose refined from corn. read the ingredients on the label of any processed food and, provided you know the chemical names it travels under, corn is what you will find. for modified or unmodified starch, for glucose syrup and maltodextrin, for crystalline fructose and ascorbic acid, for lecithin and dextrose, lactic acid and lysine, for maltose and HFCS, for MSG and polyols, for the caramel colour and xanthum gum, read: CORN. Corn is in the coffee whitener and Cheez Whiz, the frozen yoghurt and the TV dinner, the canned fruit and ketchup and candies, the soups and snacks and cake mixes, the frosting and gravy and frozen waffles, the syrups and hot sauces, the mayonnaise and mustard, the hot dogs and bologna, the margarine and shortening, the salad dressings and the relishes and even the vitamins. (Yes it's in the Twinkie, too.) There are some forty five thousand items in the average American supermarket and more then a quarter of them now contain corn. this goes for the non food items as well - everything from toothpaste and cosmetics to the disposable diapers, trash bags, cleansers, charcoal briquettes, matches, and batteries, right down to the shine on the cover of the magazine that catches your eye by the checkout:corn. "
and one more
" Egg operations are the worst, from everything I've read; I haven't managed to actually get into one of these places journalists are unwelcome there. Beef cattle in America at least live outdoors, albeit standing ankle deep in their own waster and eating a diet that makes them sick. And broiler chickens, although they are bread for such swift and breast heavy growth they can barely walk, at least don't spend their lives in cages too small to ever stretch a wing.
That fate is reserved for the American laying hen, who spends her brief span of days piled together with half a dozen other hens in a wire cage the floor of which four pages of this book could carpet wall to wall. Every natural instinct of this hen is thwarted, leading to a range of behavioural "vices" that can include cannibalizing her cage mates and rubbing her breast against the wire mesh until it is completely bald and bleeding (the chief reason broilers get a pass on caged life; to scar so much high value breast meat would be bad business.) Pain? Suffering? Madness? the operative suspension of disbelief depends on the acceptance of more neutral descriptors such as "vices and "stereotypes" and "stress." But whatever you want to call what goes on in those cages, the 10% or so of hens can't endure it and simply die is build into the cost of production. And when the output of the survivors begins to ebb, the hens will be "force-molted" - starved of food and water and light for several days in order to stimulate a final bout of hen laying before their life's work is done. "
