Fast Food = Corn

It's widely known, at least among people who think about such things, that corn has a huge presence in just about every fast-food item we eat, including burgers and fries.

But a new study breaks down - to the isotope level - how much of the omnipresent grain is in each item of fast food we eat.

Journalist Michael Pollan has probably been the most vocal in issuing warnings about the bad effects that the "plague of corn" poses to the environment, the economy, and human health.

Inquiries like Pollan's have left little question about how much corn is in fast food, but the Wired Science blog notes that the "fact that the $100-billion fast food industry rests on a foundation of corn has been known more through inference and observation than hard scientific fact - until now."

The study, headed by A. Hope Jahren, a geobiologist at the University of Hawaii, is called "Carbon and nitrogen stable isotopes in fast food: Signatures of corn and confinement." The results prompt "fresh criticism of the government's role in subsidizing poor eating habits, according to Wired blogger Brandon Keim.

Keim continues: "Jahren's team analyzed hamburgers, chicken sandwiches and french fries from multiple McDonald's, Burger King and Wendy's restaurants in six U.S. cities. In both types of meat at every location, a telltale configuration of nitrogen and carbon traces showed that the animals had eaten corn-heavy diets; in the case of beef, 150 out of 162 samples came from animals that ate nothing but corn. Fries were prepared in corn-based oil.

But fast food is just one (albeit huge) consumer of corn, and the problems that come from our reliance on it as the main ingredient of our food supply are seemingly endless. Besides making us fat and diabetic, it pollutes the ground, the water, and the atmosphere, thanks to the huge amounts of fossil fuels used to grow it and keep it free of pests. (After transportation, agriculture is the biggest user of fossil fuels.)

And once it's fed to cattle (which aren't meant to eat it), it creates methane, a greenhouse gas. It even is implicated in spreading the e. coli virus, which thrives in the intestines of corn-fed cattle. To combat the virus, cows are fed scary antibiotics, which creates yet stronger strains that need even scarier antibiotics.

All of this, by the way, is thanks to the government, which decades ago decided that it should subsidize the corn industry. The result is that corn is ridiculously cheap and omnipresent. That's why fast food is so cheap, and that's why people are getting fat and diabetic.

Jahren told Wired Science that the election of Barack Obama offers some hope. "It's a great opportunity to rearrange agricultural policy and to think about obesity," she said. "This study shows that it comes down in a lot of ways to one product."