Food, Sex, Music, Love . . .

I received a comment to my post Corn-Fed from a member of the Corn Refiners’ Association; it read:

“Hi, my name is Liz and I work for the Corn Refiner’s Association. I wanted to share some information about High Fructose Corn Syrup.

High fructose corn syrup, like table sugar and honey, is composed of fructose and glucose, which are found in many naturally-occurring fruits, vegetables and nuts. And high fructose corn syrup has the same number of calories as sugar and honey – 4 per gram.

For the most part, you’ll find high fructose corn syrup in the same kinds of products in which you would find sugar or other sweeteners. At the same time, corn sweeteners offer some unique functional benefits that help companies offer more choices in food products. High fructose corn syrup keeps foods fresh, enhances fruit and spice flavors, retains moisture in bran cereals, helps keep breakfast and energy bars moist, maintains consistent flavors in beverages, and keeps ingredients evenly dispersed in condiments.

There’s a lot of solid research and information at http://www.SweetSurprise.com and http://www.HFCSFacts.com. Thank you for your consideration.”

Dear Liz,

I am familiar with those websites having visited both of them prior to my writing my initial blog. I did not want what I wrote to be a knee-jerk reaction with incorrect information, so I  read the information your organization has published as well as information from the sources on other side of the “corn syrup argument.”  As it is, it could not really have been a knee-jerk reaction since this blog might be considered thirty years in the making.

When I was kid in the seventies, my mother attended classes at a local community college on preparing healthful food, and those thirty-odd years ago she learned about the benefits and risks of foods such as high-fructose corn syrup and partially hydrogenated fats.  This was years before anyone else was talking about it.

While no one in family became a health fanatic as a result, my mother did her best to avoid products that used either or those.  I can attest that the packaged foods we ate stayed fresh as long as was reasonably necessary, and really unless you are stocking a bomb shelter, how long a shelf life do Cheerios require anyway?

As far as keeping ingredients dispersed, I can remember jars being labeled “Shake well before use.”  That may seem fairly primitive in this day and age with people far too busy playing Nintendo and texting each other to make the time to shake a bottle, but I am more than willing to “rough it.”  I also wipe my own ass, and will continue to do so even if science invents something to do that for me (yes, I am aware of the bidet).

You say that corn syrup maintains consistent flavors in beverages, but several companies are still, and/or, once again, making soda with cane syrup and I have found them to have taste and mouth-feel equal, if not superior, to either corn syrup or artificial sweeteners.

I’m sure that there are some products that would not be possible without corn syrup or other engineered ingredients, but I happen to believe most things can be made without them, given that many of them were, for decades, being made without those ingredients.

And for me this is where the argument becomes less intellectual and far more emotional.  I regard food as one of the greatest gifts on the planet; on par with music, art, theater, sex . . . I see a whole generation of people who have no idea what real food is, what food can be.

It can nurture your body and your soul.  It can bring people together in a way that almost nothing else can, and it’s real food that does this.   When we think of childhood picnics, and holiday dinners, and funerals, we should think of people at a stove, not opening a box.  When one comes back from a trip to a foreign land, they are not bragging about how many varieties of instant mashed potatoes they have; they speak of farmers markets, and freshly made cheese, and how the poor eat as well as the rich.

In this country, the Slow Food Movement and other organizations that have tried to bring us back to our pre-post-war way of eating, have been called elitist.  How sad is it that in the richest and most potentially-example-setting country in the world, that only the rich eat fresh food, grown in this country.

Years ago, it was the reverse—the foolish rich consumed things grown elsewhere believing that something that came from afar must be superior, while the poor ate real food, grown locally, cooked simply, and enjoyed passionately.  Some people say we can never go back to that way of life, and I don’t think we can entirely.  But we can teach people what food prepared as naturally as possible is all about, and we can decide once again that  it’s worth it.

To demonstrate this, I suggest you follow this link and see what real food is all about.

My kindest regards,

Cat Boy