Back to the topic of corn and why we're force feeding cattle corn...

Corn is a heavily subsidized crop, we have a huge surplus of corn yet, somehow, our farmers are trapped into growing more and becoming more efficient at producing more on less land. Yet the farmers are not getting richer by doing this. It's a complex issue, first introduced in Michael Pollan's book Botany of Desire and further defined in Omnivore's Dilemma. I know I've brought this book up before.  I've found Omnivore's Dilemma to have wealth of information on how our food system works or doesn't work in many ways. So we have this hugh surplus of inexpensive corn which means we must find more uses for corn. It takes a lot of cattle feed to produce a pound of beef, by feeding corn to cows we get inexpensive beef. High-fructose corn syrup, another product of corn, is a very inexpensive sweetner found in the majority of sodas and just about all processed food. That corn has got to be used somewhere. Which brings the next connection, petroleum use... Turns out growing and processing all this corn requires a large amount of petroleum from petroleum-based fertilizers, transporting the corn to and from processing facilities and in the processing of the corn itself. Petroleum-->Corn-->Cattle-->E.coli contamination it's all connected.

Next topic, health implications of high-fructose corn syrup.