The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan [47]
But if the pipe marked “HFCS” leads to the fattest spigot at the far end of a corn refinery’s bewildering tangle of pipes and valves, it is by no means the only spigot you’ll find back there. There are dozens of other “output streams.” At various points along its way through the mill some portion of the thick white slurry of starch is diverted to another purpose or, in the refiner’s jargon, another “fraction.” The starch itself is capable of being modified into spherical, crystalline, or highly branched molecules, each suitable for a different use: adhesives, coatings, sizings, and plastics for industry; stabilizers, thickeners, gels, and “viscosity-control agents” for food.
What remains in the slurry is “saccharified”—treated with enzymes that turn it into dextrose syrup. A portion of this dextrose is siphoned off for use as corn syrup; other fractions are recruited to become sugars like maltodextrin and maltose. The largest portion of the corn syrup stream is piped into a tank where it is exposed to glucose isomerase enzymes and then passed through ion exchange filters, emerging eventually as fructose. Now what’s left of the dextrose stream is piped into a fermentation tank, where yeasts or amino acids go to work eating the sugars, in several hours yielding an alcoholic brew. This itself is fractionated into various alcohols, ethanol chief among them, our gas tanks being the ultimate destination of a tenth of the corn crop. The fermented brew can also be refined into a dozen different organic and amino acids for use in food processing or the manufacture of plastic.
And then that’s about it: There’s no corn left, and not much of anything else either, except for some dirty water. (Though even some of this “steep water” is used to make animal feeds.) The primary difference between the industrial digestion of corn and an animal’s is that in this case there is virtually no waste at the end of it.
Step back for a moment and behold this great, intricately piped stainless steel beast: This is the supremely adapted creature that has evolved to help eat the vast surplus biomass coming off America’s farms, efficiently digesting the millions of bushels of corn fed to it each day by the trainload. Go around back of this beast and you’ll see a hundred different spigots, large and small, filling tanker cars of other trains with HFCS, ethanol, syrups, starches, and food additives of every description. The question now is, Who or what (besides our cars) is going to consume and digest all this freshly fractionated biomass—the sugars and starches, the alcohols and acids, the emulsifiers and stabilizers and viscosity-control agents? This is where we come in. It takes a certain kind of eater—an industrial eater—to consume these fractions of corn, and we are, or have evolved into, that supremely adapted creature: the eater of processed food.
2. PUTTING IT BACK TOGETHER AGAIN: PROCESSED FOODS
The dream of liberating food from nature is as old as eating. People began processing food to keep nature from taking it back: What is spoilage, after all, if not nature, operating through her proxy microorganisms, repossessing our hard-won lunch? So we learned to salt and dry and cure and pickle in the first age of food processing, and to can, freeze, and vacuum-pack in the second. These technologies were blessings, freeing people from nature’s cycles of abundance and scarcity, as well as from the tyranny of the calendar or locale: Now a New Englander could eat sweet corn, or something reminiscent of it, in January, and taste a pineapple for the first time in his life. As Massimo Montanari, an Italian food historian, points out, the fresh, local, and seasonal food we prize today was for most of human history “a form of slavery,” since it left us utterly at the mercy of the local vicissitudes of nature.
Even after people had learned the rudiments of preserving food, however, the dream of liberating food from nature continued to flourish—indeed, to expand in ambition and confidence. In the third age of food processing,