Cross-posted at Buy Blue.
To me, the best thing about being a TimesSelect subscriber is that I can save an article indefinitely and consider it closely when I'm ready. On July 3, the Paper of Record published a lovesong to high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) called "A Sweetener With a Bad Rap":
In the news media and on myriad Web sites, high-fructose corn syrup has been labeled "the Devil's candy," a "sinister invention," "the crack of sweeteners" and "crud." Many scientific articles and news reports have noted that since 1980, obesity rates have climbed at a rate remarkably similar to that of high-fructose corn syrup consumption. A distant derivative of corn, the highly processed syrup was created in the late 1960's and has become a hard-to-avoid staple of the American diet over the last 25 years. It spooks foodies, parents and nutritionists alike. But is it really that bad?
If that doesn't get your corporate shill radar detector going I don't know what will.
I'm actually going to ignore the Times' question, and ask a different one: Why is it that Americans eat so much of it? Why exactly has HFCS, in the words of the NYT article:
"become a ubiquitous ingredient in American processed foods. High-fructose corn syrup provides the sweet zing in everything from Coke, Pepsi and Snapple iced tea to Dannon yogurt and Chips Ahoy cookies. It also lurks in unexpected places, like Ritz crackers, Wonder bread, Wishbone ranch dressing and Campbell's tomato soup."
You'd think American had been begging the food industry for more cheap sugar. "I'm sorry, $1.49 for 64 oz. of Coca-Cola is just way too expensive. I think it should be cheaper than water."
So why do food companies use so much HFCS? The answer is simple: It's really cheap. In other words, they do it for themselves, not for us. As Michael Pollan illustrates so beautifully in The Omnivore's Dilemma, America is sitting on a mountain of corn, so HFCS is much cheaper than corn. Furthermore, since the stuff is made of corn, they can call it a "natural" ingredient (as I just discovered by reading the can of Hansen's Natural Soda that I mistakenly bought my daughter).
I've had it in for High Fructose Corn Syrup ever since I read Greg Crister's Fat Land. He writes:
HFCS also had one attribute that posed a potentially troubling question to those in the food industry. Fructose, unlike sucrose or dextrose, took a decidedly different route into the human metabolism. Where the latter would go through a complex breakdown process before arriving in the human liver, the former, for some reason, bypassed that breakdown and arrived almost completely intact in the liver, whereupon the organ set upon it as it would anything else . This unique feature of fructose, which was intensified by the high concentrations of it in HFCS, would come to be called "metabolism shunting." In food circles, it raised eyebrows but, as several scientists present at the time not, not warning flags.
But let's ignore science for a moment and talk taste. While the average teenager undoubtedly makes me look like a tea-totaler, I have a weakness for Coca-Cola. I know it's bad for me (and especially my teeth), but I don't like coffee so it's my primary choice when I think I need caffeine. When I was in Romania (and a few other European cities) I read the ingredients on the cans, and you know what? Every country I went to listed "sugar" (zahar in Romanian) on the Coke can without a "fructose" in sight. And you know what? The stuff tasted much better without it. It makes the stuff here taste sickly sweet.
In fact, I'm not the only one who feels this way. As independent bottler Jerry Dudley told Constance Hays for her history of the Coca-Cola company:
"When I was little, I used to love these drinks, but they don't taste the same anymore...They used to be made with real sugar. We'd haul these big sacks of sugar up and dump them into the mix. Now it's high-fructose corn syrup.." One bottler in Dublin, Texas, continued to make Dr. Pepper with cane sugar. "People drive in for miles," Lesley Dudley said.
So in the end, it's not JUST that HFCS might be bad for you, it's that it doesn't taste as good as better kinds of sugar. I think Michael Pollan has the best way to think of HFCS:
[W]hat chef uses high-fructose corn syrup? Not one. It's found only in the pantry of the food scientist, and that's not who you want cooking your meals.
Now that I've had Coke made the old way, it should be much easier for me to give it up completely (at least inside the borders of the good old USA).
JR