Rocko402003’s Weblog

After watching King Corn this week, and doing all the assigned reading, which all dealt with corn (big surprise, right?), I couldn’t help but feel horrible about any kind of food that I even set eyes on for the week.  I thought that I would attempt to at least for a week try to change the way that I ate and viewed food, but there was a big problem.  No matter how much they may claim otherwise, college isn’t exactly the place to turn a new leaf when it comes to your diet.

I live in a dormitory that continually claims that they are concerned with your health needs, but when I started walking around the dining hall to pick my meal, nothing seemed to fit the criteria for health food.  Everything in the place was swimming in grease and had been deep fried in corn oil, even the tiny selection of food that was deemed the vegetarian section that only included reheated, packaged veggie burgers, tofu nuggets that were deep fried so long they looked like you could kill somebody with a good arm, and what was supposed to be steamed vegetables.  I then proceeded to the salad bar, which I quickly walked away from because it was apparent that the “fresh” produce had probably been sitting there all day untouched.

I decided to quickly just head upstairs to my room where I could easily make something that was descent to eat, until I got there and realized that every single one of my food items, you guessed it, had corn.  I normally wouldn’t have been so resistant to eat the products I had casually purchased a few weeks ago, but everything I looked at just seemed to strike a chord in me as I pictured the commodity crop being chemically altered in some lab then being mixed into my food.  I can’t help but recall the guys from King Corn making High Fructose Corn Syrup and how dangerous and complicated it was as I searched for something to nourish my hunger pains.

Even though I firmly believe that knowledge about our food is a helpful tool, I can’t help but wonder if I will ever look at food the same way, as I sat down with a bottle of water eating my bag of overpriced almonds purchased from Whole Foods two weeks ago, still feeling hungry.