Healthy, Wealthy & Wise: If Only I Could Have A Chair Made Out of Corn to Rest My Corn-Fed Hind Parts

If you’ve ever attempted to find and read a scholarly article online, you know that a username and password is required to access the vast majority of academic research. (Which is crap.) This is why I was too excited to find that the full text of a new study published by A. Hope Jahren and Rebecca A. Kraft of the University of Hawaii, Honolulu is available online! Share my excitement here.

Carbon and nitrogen stable isotopes in fast food: Signatures of corn and confin sounds thrilling, no? Basically, here’s what happened:

Fastfood was purchased from America’s top 3 chains: McDonald’s, Burger King, and Wendy’s; each restaurant was sampled at 3 locations within 6 major U.S. cities: Los Angeles, San Francisco, Denver, Detroit, Boston, and Baltimore. At each location, 9 items were purchased: 3 hamburgers, 3 chicken sandwiches, and 3 orders of fries.

Easy enough to follow. After doing a lot of analyzing, Jahren and Kraft concluded:

Fast food corporations, although they constitute more than half the restaurants in the U.S. and sell more than 1 hundred billion dollars of food each year, oppose regulation of ingredient reporting.

And we’re about to find out why…

Ingredients matter for many reasons: U.S. corn agriculture has been criticized as environmentally unsustainable and conspicuously subsidized. Of 160 food products we purchased at Wendy’s throughout the United States, not 1 item could be traced back to a noncorn source. Our work also identified corn feed as the overwhelming source of food for tissue growth, hence for beef and chicken meat, at fast food restaurants.

It’s ALL corn?! Well, yes, almost. For those of you who’ve read The Omivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan, this is not new information. Fortunately, this new study confirms Pollan’s assertions, renewing the interest in mainstream media.

Both Forbes Health (What’s Really In Your Fast Food?) and Wired Science (Fast Food: Just Another Name for Corn) covered the release of the study, both interviewing the articles authors and other prominent US experts in food policy and agriculture.

Interestingly, Forbes contacted the Big 3 for comment. None were too eager to gush about the results.

Burger King declined to comment on the study. A spokesman for Wendy's said the company has "very strict procedures in place" to protect animal welfare. A spokeswoman for McDonald's declined to comment and instead referred to a statement issued by the American Meat Institute, a trade association.

Janet M. Riley, senior vice president of public affairs for AMI, said that carbon and nitrogen isotopes are naturally occurring and are expected to be found in the environment and humans. She also said that while the study's authors had called for greater transparency regarding information about livestock feeding and production practices, consumers "appear satisfied" with the amount of information currently available.

The last part is particularly intriguing. The American Meat Institute basically refuses to become more transparent in their production practices because consumers are ok with being ignorant to the origin of their meat. Wow. Didn't your mothers ever tell you that just because you CAN get away with something, doesn't mean you SHOULD?!

I checked out the AMI website and they've got a nice little collection of fact sheets to answer all your extremely vague and surface questions about the meat industry. Apparently, AMI produced a "get to know you" type video and put it on YouTube last year, but when I went to check it out, I found that it no longer exists. Instead, I chose to include this chart. Enjoy!