Fast food menus are highly dependent on corn

A study by University of Hawaii scientists shows how much Americans' fast-food menu depends on corn. They "tested fast-food items across the country and found evidence of both the corn used for the animals' feed and the nitrogen used as fertilizer to grow the corn and emitted in the animals' manure," in the form of isotopes of carbon and nitrogen, writes Philip Brasher of the Des Moines Register.

The idea behind the study was that "consumers deserve to know about the source of their food, given the environmental concerns of growing corn, which requires large amounts of fertilizer that can run off fields and pollute rivers and streams," Brasher writes. Marion Nestle, a longtime critic of the food industry and a New York University professor, told him that corn is a "perfectly reasonable food" and livestock feed. "The country's bigger nutrition problem is not what we eat, but how much, she said."

"The scientists didn't test soft drinks, but they would have found corn there, too," Brasher notes. :Soft drinks are routinely sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup." (Read more)