Where's the corn?

This will probably be only one of many posts about corn products. Corn is everywhere in the American diet. I’ve mentioned this with my last post about how many ingredients are derived from corn, but it gets even more difficult than that. In the case of the beef industry, it seems that cows are what they eat, and what they eat is corn. Traces of corn were found in fast food burgers in this study

This is in part due to the amounts of corn oil used in preparation; however there is also evidence which suggests that cows raised for beef eat so much corn that the nutrients can be detected in the meat itself. Although my boyfriend wouldn’t eat fast food on principle and would also avoid it for the amount of corn oil used to cook the food, just eating regular meat from the grocery store poses the same amount of risk of corn exposure.

Most commercial beef is fed corn in order to get the cows to the desired weight as fast as possible before they are slaughtered. The cows aren’t able to receive the nutrients and corn is not easily digested, so it just collects in the animal. This causes a slew of health problems for the cow, which I won’t go into but can be found here

This ticks me off not really on a basis of ethics, although I don’t agree with corn-feeding beef. For the context of this blog, I am more outraged by the fact that the corn is literally hiding in the meat itself. When people think “beef” they don’t worry about what the cow was eating before it got to the table. I understand why the meat industry doesn’t acknowledge the fact that corn is detectable in their product. If I was them, I wouldn’t either. There’s a lot of backlash about how corn isn’t a sustainable method of feed and how it isn’t anything close to a cow’s natural diet. Putting “contains traces of corn” on the packaging would only bring more attention to the issue.

Luckily, grass-fed beef can be found relatively easily, at least for my boyfriend and I. We’re lucky enough to go to college in an area where there’s a local farmer’s market. All of the places that sell meat are pretty dedicated to the grass-fed practice. However, it is expensive. It’s a little sad when $6.50 per pound is considered the “cheap stuff”. Luckily we only buy it one pound at a time!

(image from here)