Corn chips on two legs
Rob Price

I am reading about a subject near and dear to my heart: corn.

According to "The Omnivore's Dilemma," by Michael Pollan, corn has become a modern sort of Montezuma's revenge, working its way into our food chain to a greater degree than any other food.

In fact, corn plays such a major role in our eating habits, it has become a central element in our economy. You might say corn and oil are the principal commodities of our daily lives.

Still with me? Consider the uses the food industry has found for corn.

Soft drinks use fructose for sweeteners; fructose comes from corn. Beef, pork and chicken are raised on corn. Corn is fermented to make beer and distilled to make spirits. Oils and binders used in prepackaged frozen foods come from corn. Snacks are fried in oil drawn from corn. Corn is used in the production of preservatives and even ascorbic acid. It is used in making the vegetable wax sprayed on cucumbers and in the shiny coating that makes magazines glossy.

Pollan calculates at least a quarter of all the items in an average grocery store use corn. What's more, the carbon molecules that corn absorbs from the air work their way into the molecular structures of our bones and hair. We are all carbon-based creatures; a lot of that carbon comes from corn. We are composed of so much corn carbon, Pollan suggests we are basically corn chips on two legs.

You get the picture. Corn is a major fact of our daily lives, as major as the oil we use for fossil fuel. It doesn't receive the same publicity as oil; don't expect the U.S. to invade any country soon to seize its corn fields - but that's mainly because we have plenty of corn fields here in the U.S.

And where are those corn fields located? Mostly in the midwest. Take Iowa, for instance. The state is basically one large corn field. You could say the state of Iowa has the same relation to our domestic food economy as Kuwait has for the international oil economy.

Iowa has another thing going for it: It hosts the first political slugfest of the U.S. presidential election cycle. The individual who wins Iowa's presidential caucus receives a huge boost toward his (or her) political party's eventual nomination.

And this, in turn, has major implications for our national energy policy. What is the alternative fuel everyone is talking about these days? Ethanol. And where does ethanol come from? It can have a lot of sources, actually, but the main source for ethanol in the U.S. is - surprise! - corn.

This is not a good thing. Corn plays such a major role in the U.S. food industry, one has to wonder whether it would be wise to incorporate the crop also into the country's energy production systems.

More to the point, corn may work efficiently to sweeten your soft drink, but it's terribly inefficient as a source for ethanol. Corn-based ethanol requires so much fossil fuel in its distillation process, it produces only 1.3 times the amount of energy used in its production. In contrast, sugar cane-based ethanol produces eight times the energy required for its production.

Why then do we use corn for the majority of ethanol plants built in this country? And why has the federal government imposed a 54-cent-per-gallon tariff on sugar-based ethanol imported from South America?

One possible answer comes to mind: Midwest farmers and agribusinesses have a huge amount of political clout - stemming from their importance in the domestic food economy and, in the case of Iowa, influence in the presidential selection process.

To test that latter assertion, let's keep an eye on what the presidential candidates say about ethanol as they begin their campaigns. It will be interesting to see whether each candidate is really engaging with the complexities of production - or just courting the midwest vote.

Because there are alternatives to corn in the ethanol business. There is sugar cane, of course, although we don't grow much of that. Scientists are also experimenting with bio-mass sources for ethanol, using production processes that have no need for corn. Let's see if the candidates come out in favor of something called cellulosic ethanol.

Here's my suggestion: Keep corn in the food chain and out of the gas tank.

I for one enjoy corn chips.