The Corn Police

Really, sometimes I'm just staggered. James Lileks, as usual, nails this one in his inimitable fashion. He can ridicule with the best of them.

The good part:

This, for example, makes my head combust: corn is the new villian. Corn. Maize! It's the new tobacco. Squanto's Revenge! Demon Corn will be the new food meme, and work its way into the cautious sensbilities of the Interminably Concerned, all because of one lauded doc that detassels the myths and exposes the way Big Corn has persuaded everyone who glug nine gallons of sweetened soda per day. Gah. GAAAH. I can't take it anymore. I try to get (G)Nat to eat corn; it's one of the vegetables I was told was good for you, even though experience with diapers years ago taught me that it has a strange incorruptable carnuba-wax shell that allows it safe passage through the corrosive halls of the digestive system. But I love corn. I love corn with butter. I love corn with salt. I loved popped corn. I love Corn Puffs. I love corn-fed beef. I loved corned beef. Friends, Romans, Countrymen: lend me an ear.

I'll gladly give up ethanol, if they're concerned about corn subsidies.

No? Huh. Imagine.

I don't consume a lot of high-fructose corn syrup; no one in this house does. Why? Because I don't buy it. I don't buy many products that have it. Delta Corn Force doesn't break into the house in the middle of the night and force everyone to consume corn syrup at gunpoint. Look: I'm opposed to farm subsidies. It's pork. Corn-fed pork. But there's something else at work here, and it's the same old tut-tut gullet-nannies who can't bear the fact that you can get a meal at McDonald's for two bucks, and you like it. STOP LIKING WHAT YOU LIKE. People are choosing the wrong food, for some strange peculiar reason. We have to make them stop doing that.

The article notes that the farm bill will now be used to "improve what people eat," presumably more fruits and vegetables. Because those are so very hard to come by in this country. I go to the grocery store and head for the fruits and vegetable departments, and angry butchers block my way every time. From the article:
The health reformers say they have only just begun.

"We are exactly where we were with tobacco in the 1970s," said Barnard.

These people will be happy when everyone is squatting in a peat hut in hemp loincloths gnawing on raw broccoli. You'll be allowed to have an ear of corn, but only if a malarial mosquito gets in the hut. Then you beat with the corn. The organic way.

Sorry to rant, but jeez. CORN. It never ends. It never, ever will end.