The Horror

First, a poem:

Totally

Eating

Ruined

Ruminants

Is

Fretful,

You’re

Intentionally

Nuking

Gastronomy

                When I first picked up a copy of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, I was half-expecting the pages to be slathered in the blood of bovines and Bolsheviks alike. It had been hyped up by my parents and teachers as one of the most disgusting books ever written. “I wasn’t able to eat hot dogs for years,” my mother once told me after her perusal of the Rudkus’s socialistic trials in the stockyards of an early 1900’s Chicago. Like any avid reader, my skin crawled in anxious anticipation; the new book smell wafted into my nostrils promised notable memorable moments; possible mental scarring. So exciting!

But when I finally got around to reading it, I found my appetite barely bloodied. My stomach didn’t curdle, my eyes didn’t cringe, in fact I felt vaguely sleepy. While the original public that Sinclair had written for had been scared shitless over their food regulations, and my parents—with hot-dogs and hamburgers sweeping the nation during their childhoods—spoke of its horrors and gastronomically gory descriptions as if they were the stuff of Lovecraftian horrors. Jeez, can’t a guy get a little excitement?

I found my Cthulu with The Omnivore’s Dilemna, however. Where Sinclair failed to scare me or rile me into political or gastronomic activism, I bolted straight out of my room when I read Michael Pollan’s first section on “Industrial Corn,” except there was nowhere to run. Corn is everywhere: in my clothes, hair, food, cars, and textbooks. Holy bejeesus. Now, this may sound unreasonable to those unfamiliar with this book, so let me explain. Corn, as Pollan is so eager to show, has become this genetically altered mutant plant that has been skewed as  such to suit our industrial needs, both within the gastronomical realm and within the commercial realm. But just like dipping your chicken nuggets (also made of Zea Mays, a.k.a. corn, coincidentally) in a bucket of nuclear waste, this leads to atrocious and unforgivable consequences to our health both as individuals and as citizens of the earth. In order to fulfill the quota for our insatiable desire programmed to convenience and capital, we need to grow more. And more. And More. Fuck the consequences.  I wish I could list all the things awful for you about super corn, but I’ll just link to one or two articles for a quick example:

http://www.hulu.com/watch/255609/king-corn (not so quick)

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2012/02/21/147190101/how-using-antibiotics-in-animal-feed-creates-superbugs (re-post lolz)

  This about summed up my experiences with “Industrial Corn,” the first section in Michael Pollan’s book The Omnivore’s Dilemna. I don’t think even Lovecraft could have even conceived an all-present, super-horror as great, or as influential as industrial corn.