corn
—>Dawn is freaked out because when she got up this morning, she found bugs in her cat's litter box. She called the company that makes the litter to ask them what to do, and they offered coupons but no real explanation. "Maybe some of your readers have had the same experience and could help me figure out what to do," she writes. "Thanks!" More »
—>The Corn Refiners Association is sick and tired of people expressing uncertainty about the dubious heath benefits of high fructose corn syrup, so they're running some commercials featuring aggressively annoying people getting schooled on the "facts" about our most omnipresent sweetener. All we managed to glean from the commercials is that not consuming high fructose corn syrup makes you rude. In the first one, one mom walks up to another (who is pouring some sort of pink liquid from a jug) and says, "Wow, you don't care what the kids eat, huh?" What a jerk. More »
—>Think you're paying too much for food now? You're going to pay more in 2008 according to Reuters. More »
—>Ethanol is billed as the answer to America's addiction to foreign oil, but the immense demand for the corn, from which ethanol is made, is also raising prices in supermarkets and restaurants across the nation. The demand to transform corn into ethanol has already doubled the average price for a bushel of corn from $2 to $4.
The corn price increases flow like gravy down the food chain, to grocery stores and menus. The cost of rounded cubed steak at local Harris Teeters is up from $4.59 last year to $5.29 this year, according to TheGroceryGame.com, which tracks prices. The Palm restaurant chain recently raised prices as much as $2 for a New York strip. And so on.Michael Pollan best summarized our little-known reliance on corn in The Omnivore's Dilemma: More »
Compared with a bunch of carrots, a package of Twinkies, to take one iconic processed foodlike substance as an example, is a highly complicated, high-tech piece of manufacture, involving no fewer than 39 ingredients, many themselves elaborately manufactured, as well as the packaging and a hefty marketing budget. So how can the supermarket possibly sell a pair of these synthetic cream-filled pseudocakes for less than a bunch of roots? More »
—>I like the Chicken McNugget. Hey, it's not chicken or anything, but my sole interest in the McNugget is as a flavor carrier of McDonald's brand sweet and sour sauce. I love that stuff. It is for that sauce — looking oh-so-remarkably like the output of a mewling newborn — that I can never bring myself to order any similar gobble-sized chicken parts from Burger King or the like. Their "chicken tenders" (in case you never noticed, a creative marketing euphemism for "chicken genitalia") may taste better than the McNugget, but that pink, orange-flecked sweet and sour sauce is an abomination. More »
