The Omnivore's Dilemma, etc.

So if you want to hate corn and be suspicious of every packaged product on the market (as I already am!), this book will do it. Also, if you want to feel like whole, local foods are affordable and more nutritious than a basket of organics from Mexico, this book will also do that for you. I absolutely love the task that Pollan took on to trace foods from their beginnings in a field, factory, wherever, to a dinner. Of course, the McDonald's dinner gets our attention first with its horrific % of corn (likely all GMO) based foods. Most wildly was the mass spectrometer reading that was able to calculate how much of each food came from corn. Some things were obvious, like the soda being 100% corn, since it is sweetened with HFCS, which is all that soda is anyhow, plus a bit of flavoring, water and color. The flavoring and color were probably corn based too. More surprising were things like the chicken nuggets, 56% corn. From the HFCS in them to the corn and antibiotic and hormone diet the chicken was fed to the breading and "flavors" we can attribute more to corn than anything else. And people think they are eating chicken. Gross.
The other meal that blew my mind was the hunted and gathered meal that barely cost him a dime. It was all local and proved to be a lovely, varied meal. He has some caveats to that meal that you have to read to get, but it was inspirational to read about a meal that was so truly affordable (maybe not timewise, but time may not always be the premium that it is now) and free of nasty additives, hormones, irresponsibly raised animals or environmentally damaging processes. I am really drawn to recommending this book because of the corn and monoculturing information, but also the underlying message about petroleum usage. Food is only becoming more valuable as peak oil nears. This is an essential to understand before you read the book, IMO.

So after digesting this book, I was reading over on the Oil Drum about our economy and how it will likely effect our food supplies as other countries will be less willing to export to us and how we will have to start becoming more domestically responsible for our own food supplies. All of that triggered me to thinking about the terrible depletion of our soil from mono-culturing corn. Corn that is largely not edible without massive (petroleum driven) processing. How are we as a country going to feed ourselves? We are in a situation of corn corn everywhere and nothing left to eat.
Here is a link to the very concise post about the economy and peak oil that was made over on the Oil Drum. I highly recommend it :)