King Corn - reflections

Image via WikipediaI went to see King Corn last night. According to the Press Kit, the synopsis reads:

King Corn is a feature documentary about two friends, one acre of corn, and the subsidized crop that drives our fast-food nation.

In King Corn, Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis, best friends from college on the east coast, move to the heartland to learn where their food comes from. With the help of friendly neighbors, genetically modified seeds, and powerful herbicides, they plant and grow a bumper crop of America’s most-productive, most-subsidized grain on one acre of Iowa soil. But when they try to follow their pile of corn into the food system, what they find raises troubling questions about how we eat—and how we farm.

The questions are very troubling. I was not aware of how prevalent corn and one of the major byproducts, High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) is in the foods that we eat.

I had my normal at home lunch today. A Fluffanutter sandwich (which is Marshmallow Fluff and peanut butter on bread), some strawberry jam on saltine and Ritz crackers with a half glass of milk to help wash it down.

If I guessed which of the foods I ate contained High Fructose Corn Syrup, I would have left out the peanut butter, the bread, the crackers and the milk.

I was wrong to leave out the bread and crackers. The Weight Watchers Wheat Bread contains HFCS, as does the Ritz Crackers, as does the Original Nabisco Saltines. If I had Low fat saltines, I could have avoided the HFCS.

The Fluff uses corn syrup not HFCS but that quibbles.

The peanut butter and the milk are the only two items from lunch that did not contain HFCS.

My father has TypeII diabetes. One of the driving factors for this is the HFCS.

What your food labels for a few days and see what they can tell you.

What foods surprise you by containing HFCS?