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Baking mixes. Cheese. Peanut butter. Toothpaste. Vitamins. Adhesive. What do all these items have in common? Potentially, corn.

And that’s just the beginning of the types of items people like Jenny Connors, a corn allergy sufferer, have to avoid every day. On her Web site, www.cornallergens.com, she lists close to 200 corn-derived ingredients that she and other allergy sufferers must avoid. The list ranges from simpler items to avoid, like hominy, to ingredients such as corn starch and citric acid, which show up in thousands of food and non-food items.

Corn allergy sufferers are the canaries in the mine of the Western diet. Their search to find the few foods that don’t include corn signals huge trouble: that we’re slowly narrowing our diet down to a handful of ingredients.

Why is corn one of them? It’s definitely not because it’s overloaded with every nutrient needed to sustain a healthy human being. Corn is good for some energy, some fiber, a little bit of vitamins and not much else. It’s no super food.

But corn is the chosen one because it’s fast and easy. As Michael Pollan puts it in his book “In Defense of Food,” corn is one of “nature’s most efficient transformers of sunlight and chemical fertilizer into carbohydrate energy.” Basically, if you want the maximum number of calories per acre, corn’s your crop.

And calories equal cash. Corn pays, thanks to government subsidies and a food culture demanding large quantities of it to sweeten its soft drinks and thicken its gravy.

So if you want to survive as a farmer, you’re stuck feeding the corn system. Corn keeps corn on the table.

So now we’re in a vicious cycle. Corn’s in everything because it’s readily available, and it’s readily available because the system demands it for every product and will consistently shell out money for it.

Americans are quickly becoming cattle in feedlots. Meat producers have switched cows’ diets from their normal grassy fare, one that provided cows naturally with nutrients like omega-3s, to corn and soy.

The new diet provides the maximum number of calories as quickly as possible so they can turn cows into hamburgers as fast as possible. Nutrition compromised for cheap and fast — the name of the Western diet game.

Likewise, Americans are unknowingly narrowing down to a corn-driven diet thanks to ever-present processed foods that are, of course, cheap and fast. And it’s having the same effect on us as it does on cattle — lots of nutritionally deficient calories to help us “grow.”

We’ve got to stop letting cheap and fast dictate one of the basic needs of human existence. Staying alive is the primary concern of every individual, and eating is how we do it. As Pollan suggests, if we don’t start paying attention to what we eat, we will continue to be a paradox: an undernourished culture consuming an overabundance of food. We need to live like a corn allergy sufferer — we need to know exactly what we’re eating, and we need to adapt our diets accordingly.

Food diversity is the key to thriving rather than merely surviving. To butcher an old saying, “man cannot live by corn alone.”

So is corn really benefiting you? Or are you just benefiting the corn system?

— — McConnell is a Dallas junior in English.

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