Avoiding GMOs has been more challenging than I originally thought it would be.

First, I discovered that my favorite chocolate (Ghirardelli’s) uses soy lecithin from genetically modified soybeans. Finding a chocolate without soy lecithin these days is ridiculously hard. Even Rapunzel, the brand that uses rapadura (unrefined evaporated cane sugar) as a sweetener, sometimes uses soy lecithin. But at least theirs is certified organic, meaning that it’s GMO-free.

Then, I read this post by Rose highlighting 7 unexpected GMO products most of us (me included) still use.

What Rose shared opened my eyes even further to the pervasiveness of corn in our culture.

GMO corn is in our gasoline when we fill up at the pump. It’s in the “earth-friendly” vinegar we’re using to clean our homes. It’s hiding in wax and oil coatings used to make our supermarket produce look attractive.

This reminds me of this perspective-altering passage in Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma (a Food Renegade Must Read):

Corn is what feeds the steer that becomes the steak.  Corn feeds the chicken and the pig, the turkey and the lamb, the catfish and tilapia and, increasingly, even the salmon, a carnivore by nature that the fish farmers are re-engineering to tolerate corn.  The eggs are made of corn.  The milk and cheese and yogurt, which once came from dairy cows that are grazed on grass, now typically come from Holsteins that spend their working lives indoors tethered to machines, eating corn.

Head over to the processed foods and you find ever more intricate manifestations of corn.  A chicken nugget, for example, piles corn upon corn: what chicken it contains consists of corn, of course, but so do most of a nugget’s other constituents, including the modified corn starch that glues the thing together, the corn flour in the batter that coats it, and the corn oil in which it gets fried.  Much less obviously, the leavenings and lecithin, the mono-, di-, and triglycerides, the attractive golden coloring, and even the citric acid that keeps the nugget “fresh” can all be derived from corn.

To wash down your chicken nuggets with virtually any soft drink in the supermarket is to have some corn with your corn.  Since the 1980s virtually all the sodas and most of the fruit drinks sold in the supermarket have been sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup — after water, corn sweetener is their principal ingredient.  Grab a beer for your beverage instead and you’d still be drinking corn, in the form of alcohol fermented from glucose refined from corn.  Read the ingredients on the label of any processed food and, provided you know the chemical names it travels under, corn is what you will find.  For modified or unmodified starch, for glucose syrup and maltodextrin, for crystalline fructose and ascorbic acid, for lecithin and dextrose, lactic acid and lysine, for maltose and high fructose corn syrup, for MSG and polyols, for the caramel color and xanthan gum, read: corn.  Corn is in the coffee whitener and Cheez Whiz, the frozen yogurt and TV dinner, the canned fruit and ketchup and candies, the soups and snacks and cake mixes, the frosting and gravy and frozen waffles, the syrups and hot sauces, the mayonnaise and mustard, the hot dogs and the bologna, the margarine and shortening, the salad dressings and the relishes and even the vitamins. (Yes, it’s in the Twinkie, too.)  There are some forty-five thousand items in the average American supermarket and more than a quarter of them now contain corn.  This goes for the nonfood items as well — everything from the toothpaste and cosmetics to the disposable diapers, trash bags, cleansers, charcoal briquettes, matches, and batteries, right down to the shine on the cover of the magazine that catches your eye by the checkout: corn.  Even in Produce on a day when there’s ostensibly no corn for sale you’ll nevertheless find plenty of corn: in the vegetable wax that gives the cucumbers their sheen, in the pesticide responsible for the produce’s perfection, even in the coating on the cardboard it was shipped in.  Indeed, the supermarket itself — the wallboard and joining compound, the linoleum and fiberglass and adhesives out of which the building itself has been built — is in no small measure a manifestation of corn.

And there you have it! While avoiding GMOs 100% of the time is next to impossible, we can all do our part. Even in small ways — even if it just means that we call up Ghiardelli and ask them if their soy lecithin is GMO-free.

This post is part of today’s No-GMO Challenge blog carnival. Go check it out to see what others are posting!

(photo by romanlily)

Liked what you read? You may find these other posts interesting:

1. Bad News For Big Ag — GMO Crops Don’t Increase Yields
2. PLU Codes Don’t Indicate GMO Produce
3. Just Say No To GMOs — Join the No-GMO Challenge
4. Rocket Fuel Found In Baby Formula
5. GMOs and Pharmaceuticals