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In 2006, in the first chapter of Omnivore’s Dilemma, his best-selling takedown of the American food production system, author Michael Pollan offered a stunning exposé of the havoc that corn caused on water, soil, taxpayers, rural economies, and public health.
Really? Corn is a serious problem? Indigenous, peaceable, abundant corn?
Twenty years after Pollan’s exposé the wreckage from cultivating and harvesting corn has gotten worse. So much worse that the environmental and health consequences of growing America’s super surplus of corn has become the top political issue this year in Iowa, the country’s largest corn producer.
The hazards of corn-based ingredients in ultraprocessed food, moreover, are the targets of a petition to the Food and Drug Administration by David A. Kessler, the agency’s former director. It calls for the FDA to revoke the “generally recognized as safe” status of industrial processed refined carbohydrates, arguing they have not been independently tested but are linked to chronic metabolic diseases like obesity and diabetes. Kessler’s petition is tantamount to an indictment of corn-based industrial food chemistry that is wrecking the nation’s health.
Never before has the safety of corn received such national scrutiny. Until now the biggest knock on corn is its exorbitant multibillion-dollar annual cost to U.S. taxpayers. And that cost, almost $8 billion this year in price supports and subsidies for crop insurance, never really generated national outrage.
Abundant corn, after all, reflected decades of deliberate production policy, capable plant science, and yeoman family farm muscle that fed America. It’s a homegrown crop engineered, subsidized, and mandated into dominance until it became the king of American grain.
A Justifiable Critique
It’s been a long time coming but the fresh distaste for corn is well deserved. Here’s why.
Corn is an absurdly prolific water polluter. The toxic byproducts of all the insecticides, herbicides, fungicides, fertilizer, and manure used to grow corn have produced massive contamination of surface and groundwater in every one of the important corn-growing states, almost all of them in the Midwest Corn Belt. One carcinogenic compound alone – nitrates, which form when nitrogen in fertilizer and manure mix with oxygen – are so prevalent in Midwest drinking water that of the 14 states with the highest cancer incidence, four are in the Corn Belt. Iowa alone, by far the largest corn producer, has the second highest and fastest rising cancer incidence in the country.
That’s just one feature of the health and environmental consequences of growing corn. Here are others.
Cultivating corn is taking a huge toll on soil health and erosion. Fully a third of the best topsoil in corn-growing states has been lost.
All that nitrogen in fertilizer breaks down in soil to produce nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide. Corn growers use two-thirds of all nitrogen fertilizer. And agriculture now accounts for 10 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.
Manufactured corn-based food ingredients, the modified corn starches, corn-derived emulsifiers, hydrogenated corn oil, and high fructose corn sweeteners contained in ultraprocessed food are culprits in the growing scientific understanding of the causes of America’s plague of heart disease, diabetes, obesity, and strokes. New epidemiology data notes that cancer incidence also is rising, particularly among younger populations, and that the link to ultraprocessed foods is an area of growing research interest.
They’re Not Listening – Yet
It’s not clear yet that the $150 billion corn production and processing sector understands the peril of the public concern about its products. Corn producers and their allies in state legislatures, Congress, and industrial board rooms still market the corn crop – 16 billion bushels in 2026, the second highest on record – as a staple of American agricultural ingenuity that secures the national food supply.
That framing, though, is as obsolete as plowing with mules. More to the point, most of the corn crop is not used to feed Americans. A fifth is exported, principally to Mexico, Japan, and Columbia. Another 40 percent of the harvest crop is diverted to refineries to produce ethanol, a transportation fuel that, like coal, has no market future without federal government mandates and the $5.3 billion that taxpayers shell out in annual tax-related incentives.
Some 30 percent is fed to livestock and poultry in enormous enclosed feeding factories that generate tens of billions of tons of manure that are spread on farmland, drain fecal matter, bacteria, and nitrates into America’s waters, and release climate-warming nitrous oxide into the air.
Actually just a fraction of the crop, well under one percent, is devoted to growing sweet corn, the variety that ends up in cans, or soup, or as salted and buttered cobs for human consumption.
In other words, the story spread by government and industry of corn’s safe and pastoral origins in the fields of hard-working farmers is a myth. It’s an affront to facts about corn’s stunning fiscal costs, its surprisingly small role as a source of America’s food, and its diabolical contribution to human disease.
Taken as a whole, corn merits inclusion at the very top of the list of the country’s most dangerous industrial products, in or outside agriculture. Just to be clear on this point: corn merits the same kind of national reckoning over safety that greeted other products when their hazards became manifest.
Like tobacco, for instance. The U.S. required warning labels on cigarette packages on January 1, 1966, following the passage of the Federal Cigarette Labeling and Advertising Act of 1965. As understanding of the links between smoking and lung cancer became clearer in the 21st century, states and cities banned smoking in public spaces and work places.
Or PCBs, DDT, lead in gasoline, asbestos, and several more industrial products that were once in widespread use, found to be toxic in the environment and capable of causing human disease. The production and use of these and other dangerous products were either banned or seriously curtailed by federal law.
Balance Benefit and Risk
The point is that the U.S. has shown itself fully capable of addressing hazardous substances and bringing benefits and risks of their production and use into alignment. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, is reviewing Kessler’s petition, which was filed last year. Kessler asserts that the agency has the authority and the scientific evidence to declare that some of the core corn-based ingredients in ultraprocessed foods are no longer generally recognized as safe, and merit much more careful regulation.
Similarly the Environmental Protection Agency has the authority and the scientific evidence to eliminate or curtail the corn cultivation practices that are eroding soil, quickening climate change, and pouring nitrates and other pollutants into the nation’s waters.
The Trump administration, though, has twice curtailed federal efforts to reduce nitrate pollution, and neither have leaders of either party displayed much interest in altering the conduct of corn producers.
But the history of U.S. health and environmental oversight is clear on one point: as the costs and hazards of producing and processing corn grow more severe, so does public pressure on government to limit the damage. A national reckoning of corn has started. Its future as the king of crops is very much in doubt.
Lead image: Iowa Farmland. Photo: © Brett Walton/Circle of Blue
