The Real Thing?

Eating Kaufmann 1 on the road can be a challenge, but it isn’t impossible. When it came time to eat, we stopped at a well known chain restaurant – someplace I knew I could get a Kaufmann 1 omelette or some eggs and bacon. It’s true; most restaurants, especially the kind you’ll find right off the road, don’t have cage free eggs, uncured bacon, or grass-fed meat. Realistically, you’ll probably never be a able to eat as cleanly on the road as you do at home, but sticking to meats, vegetables, nuts and limited fruits beats eating pastries or anything loaded with wheat, corn and sugar. It is always best to prepare ahead of time when traveling and take some food with you for when you are in a pinch.

On our stop, I did see something that I found funny and that I think underscores the rather sad state of the American food system.

One of my friends ordered pancakes, and when they arrived, he was given a packet of maple syrup. Curious, I picked up the label to read the ingredients and naturally I expected the packet to contain one thing – maple syrup. I couldn’t have been more wrong. What was the main ingredient in the “maple syrup”? If you guessed corn syrup, you would be correct. Corn syrup was followed by high fructose corn syrup, food colorings and a long list of other fillers and preservatives.

This is not an isolated event but a symptom of a larger, systemic trend in America. Even something as simple as maple syrup, that familiar sap harvested from maple trees, is no longer actually what the label claims it to be. Rather, it is a chemical concoction cooked up in a lab and manufactured from the pulverized kernel of corn. Corn is probably the most ubiquitous ingredient in American fare and it appears in places where you would never expect to find it. But this readily available crop, made so by the insane governmental subsidies to corn growers specifically, has been exploited by food manufacturers and through the brilliance of modern chemistry has been turned into filler that is disguised as the “real” food that Americans used to consume.

Coincidentally, Americans rank as some of the unhealthiest people in the developed world. We have more obesity, more cancer, more diabetes. Could this have anything to do with the corn that is disguised as the “real” food that we think we are eating?

Ruth Etzel published that corn is universally contaminated with mycotoxins – fungal metabolites that have been implicated in everything from asthma to cancer. Knowing this while reading the label on so many familiar things we regularly consume, is it any wonder that we are so sick?