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people to eat more of them. The power of food science lies in its ability to break foods down into their nutrient parts and then reassemble them in specific ways that, in effect, push our evolutionary buttons, fooling the omnivore’s inherited food selection system. Add fat or sugar to anything and it’s going to taste better on the tongue of an animal that natural selection has wired to seek out energy-dense foods. Animal studies prove the point: Rats presented with solutions of pure sucrose or tubs of pure lard—goodies they seldom encounter in nature—will gorge themselves sick. Whatever nutritional wisdom the rats are born with breaks down when faced with sugars and fats in unnatural concentrations—nutrients ripped from their natural context, which is to say, from those things we call foods. Food systems can cheat by exaggerating their energy density, tricking a sensory apparatus that evolved to deal with markedly less dense whole foods.

It is the amped-up energy density of processed foods that gets omnivores like us into trouble. Type II diabetes typically occurs when the body’s mechanism for managing glucose simply wears out from overuse. Just about everything we eat sooner or later winds up in the blood as molecules of glucose, but sugars and simple starches turn to glucose faster than anything else. Type II diabetes and obesity are exactly what you would expect to see in a mammal whose environment has overwhelmed its metabolism with energy-dense foods.

This begs the question of why the problem has gotten so much worse in recent years. It turns out the price of a calorie of sugar or fat has plummeted since the 1970s. One reason that obesity and diabetes become more prevalent the further down the socioeconomic scale you look is that the industrial food chain has made energy-dense foods the cheapest foods in the market, when measured in terms of cost per calorie. A recent study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition compared the “energy cost” of different foods in the supermarket. The researchers found that a dollar could buy 1,200 calories of potato chips and cookies; spent on a whole food like carrots, the same dollar buys only 250 calories. On the beverage aisle, you can buy 875 calories of soda for a dollar, or 170 calories of fruit juice from concentrate. It makes good economic sense that people with limited money to spend on food would spend it on the cheapest calories they can find, especially when the cheapest calories—fats and sugars—are precisely the ones offering the biggest neurobiological rewards.

Corn is not the only source of cheap energy in the supermarket—much of the fat added to processed foods comes from soybeans—but it is by far the most important. As George Naylor said, growing corn is the most efficient way to get energy—calories—from an acre of Iowa farmland. That corn-made calorie can find its way into our bodies in the form of an animal fat, a sugar, or a starch, such is the protean nature of the carbon in that big kernel. But as productive and protean as the corn plant is, finally it is a set of human choices that have made these molecules quite as cheap as they have become: a quarter century of farm policies designed to encourage the overproduction of this crop and hardly any other. Very simply, we subsidize high-fructose corn syrup in this country, but not carrots. While the surgeon general is raising alarms over the epidemic of obesity, the president is signing farm bills designed to keep the river of cheap corn flowing, guaranteeing that the cheapest calories in the supermarket will continue to be the unhealthiest.

SEVEN

THE MEAL

Fast Food

The meal at the end of the industrial food chain that begins in an Iowa cornfield is prepared by McDonald’s and eaten in a moving car. Or at least this was the version of the industrial meal I chose to eat; it could easily have been another. The myriad streams of commodity corn, after being variously processed and turned into meat, converge in all sorts of different meals I might have eaten, at KFC or Pizza Hut or Applebee’s, or prepared