Conscious Choice: My Three Days off Corn

May 2008 | Healthy Living

My Three Days off Corn

Writer Katherine Pryor attempts to cut corn out of her diet. Less than 24 hours later she’s ready to kill for a kernel

by Katherine Pryor

With 81.6 billion acres of the stuff blanketing the heartland, corn is America’s largest crop. When you think of corn, you think of benign, happy imagery: backyard barbecues, sun-weathered farmers in dusty overalls, green fields gently swaying in a summer breeze.

Ask the average American how much corn he or she actually eats, however, and you’re apt to get some radically off-base answers. Outside of movie popcorn, the aforementioned summer barbecues, cornflakes, Fritos and the intermittent salsa or tamale, corn isn’t a major part of our daily diets, right?

Wrong, shout holistic nutrition buffs, natural foods aficionados and anyone who’s read their Michael Pollan. As filmmakers Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis so harrowingly documented in King Corn (out on DVD now), the enduring golden symbol of the American heartland is in fact an insidious component in almost everything we put in our mouths, a secret ingredient that takes many forms and hides behind many names (most of them unpronounceable). Responding to Cheney and Ellis’s “King Corn Challenge” (Kingcorn.net/cornchallenge), writer Katherine Pryor attempted to cut any and all corn-based products out of her diet for three days and found herself... well... really hungry.

Sunday, 10 a.m.

I have accepted the King Corn Challenge.

For the next 72 hours, I will eat nothing with corn products or corn derivatives, which pretty much excludes all the mysterious multisyllabic ingredients on the back of most processed foods. It also excludes all those “acids”: ascorbic, citric, lactic, malic or otherwise.

Coffee is thankfully still on the list, and I brew my morning espresso with confidence. Then I reach for the soymilk (cow milk is out, as the cows probably ate corn) and realize it contains vanilla, which CornAllergens.com warns me often contains corn. Okay — I’ll start the challenge right after this latte.

In The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan pointed out the ubiquity of corn in the American diet. A combination of farm subsidies, hyper-productivity brought on by agribusiness technologies, and plain poor planning has left us with more corn than we know what to do with. We feed a good chunk of it to livestock, but that still leaves us with mountains of the stuff. We turn it into skincare products, food thickeners and preservatives. Much of it becomes high fructose corn syrup — a product that has found its way into most sodas, juices, cookies and crackers on supermarket shelves. Recently, high fructose corn syrup has been popping up with alarming regularity in articles on obesity and diabetes. This abundance of corn could be partially responsible for many of the health issues that our country is facing.

Breakfast is tougher than I thought. The Organic Valley eggs are out, as the chickens surely ate corn feed (albeit organic). My tortillas contain baking powder, and the unbleached, preservative-free, whole wheat bread I purchased specifically for this challenge contains polenta. Oops.

I reach for an apple.

I begin to worry about lunch.

I buy a simple loaf of whole wheat bread from the farmers’ market and a beautiful queso fresco from a grass-fed dairy company. No one has grass-fed milk at the market, as it is almost calving season. I stock up on vegetables and apples and enjoy a hot curried carrot soup sweetened with coconut milk.

Dinner is a vegetable stir-fry over rice pilaf, and dessert is a juicy mango. This isn’t so bad, really.

Monday afternoon — at work

Someone brought cookies and left them in the break room. Good cookies.

It’s a really boring day. I really want a cookie.

I pick up the box to find the ingredient list contains not one, not two, but four different corn products: corn starch, caramel color, malt and vanilla. The cookies also contain vegetable oil, which CornAllergens.com warns can be made from corn if not otherwise marked.

I put the box down.

I still really want a cookie.

I get grumpy.

I enjoy a delicious, filling vegetable soup Monday night. The seasoning is just right, the contents fresh and perfectly softened. I finish dinner… I wash the dishes… and… I still really want that cookie. I’m literally thinking about how good it would taste as I make myself a cup of herbal tea. I eat an orange, instead.

It’s not a cookie.

I consider myself a healthy eater. I’ve been vegetarian since I was 12. I eat mostly organic, and enjoy lots of fresh fruits and vegetables. I eat as local as I can and like mixing my meals up as the seasons — and available local options — change.

I am also an American, which means I have been trained since childhood that sweetness is part of everyday existence. My crackers are sweetened. My coffee is sweetened. In fact, I enjoy sweet things every day without even noticing. There’s a bowl of miniature chocolates on the receptionist’s desk, leftover candy canes in a neglected bowl by my desk and the endless parade of cookies/danishes/doughnuts that constantly find their way from the break room into my mouth.

Until I abstained from the culture of sweetness, I never noticed it.

My name is Kathy, and I’m a sweet-aholic.

By day three, I’ve got the meals pretty well figured out. Toasted bread and cheese for breakfast, rice and vegetables for lunch. It’s cold and windy outside, and I really want a hot chocolate, but I settle on another herbal tea.

The thing that’s missing, I’m realizing, is not just the sweets but the snacks. I’m planning each meal, and forgoing the munchies in between. If I’m hungry (or bored) I either ignore it or start thinking about how to address the hunger, rather than just stuffing something in my mouth.

To address my craving for sweets, I bring home fruit from around the globe: mangoes, oranges and kiwi fruit. My northwest apples and pears can’t compete with the exotic taste and heightened sweetness of tropical fruit. If I were to maintain this corn-less diet, I’m sure my dedication to “local” would suffer.

Thinking about the things I’m not allowed to eat has got me thinking about all the things I am allowed to eat — whole fruits and vegetables, grains like wheat and rice and a myriad of soy products that pick up where corn leaves off. I’m existing because of commodity crops and imported fruits, with a few local vegetables thrown in for color. The foods that I rail against are sustaining me.

Tuesday, 1:38 p.m.

I just drank Vermont Fancy maple syrup straight from the bottle.

I have a problem.

Tuesday, 2:01 p.m.

I should explain that last statement. There’s a piece of chocolate in my cupboard. It contains vanilla. I have become so fixated on the piece of chocolate that I am unable to read the words on my computer screen. I went to the fridge to see what sort of substitute might kill the craving and... there she was. Miss Vermont Fancy.

I am so ashamed.

The 72nd hour (or perhaps a little before)...

Welcome back, granola bars; welcome back, instant oatmeal. Welcome back, take-out for dinner. Welcome back, mystery ingredients. Welcome back, break-room snacks.

I fell off the wagon with a thud the night before.

“Should I put coconut milk in the curry?” Todd (my boyfriend) asked innocently.

“Yes,” I answered automatically, remembering the sweetness of the coconut milk in my carrot soup three days earlier.

“It has xanthan gum,” he said, peering at the small print on the ingredient label. “Corn.”

“Let me see that,” I said, grabbing the can. There it is: Coconut milk, xanthan gum. Two ingredients, and one of them is corn.

This whole thing has been a ruse. I’d eaten corn three days earlier, never imagining that corn has worked its way into canned coconut milk. As careful as I’d been, as deprived and hungry as I’d felt, the whole thing had been over from the get-go.

“Put in the coconut milk,” I told him, taking the empty can to the recycling bin.

The curry was delicious.

Katherine Pryor, author of the novel 50 Ways, is a graduate student in the Center for Creative Change at Antioch University Seattle and a corn addict in recovery.

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