Is it true that most of your food contains some form of corn?

22 comments

1. [deleted]

2. I am confident my jambalaya did not have corn in it at lunch.

   Nor will my eggs and vegetarian sausage I’ll be having for dinner.

   Greek yogurt snack…maybe corn syrup? Probably not.

3. Processed food, probably

4. Yes. It’s in everything from snack foods to baby foods to bread to basically any prepared food you can buy. Trying to buy stuff without corn products is really really tough in any western country, and always more expensive than the corn-product counterpart.

5. Yes. Everything except corn. The corn is made of soy.

6. I like to put corn IN my corn, top that with more corn, drizzled in corn syrup rolled up in corn tortilla and washed down with corn liquor.

7. As someone who can’t eat it, corn is in more than you think.

   I don’t eat premade food anymore, but I still have to check labels. There’s a small amount in the less expensive baking powder. Never expected that one.

8. My son’s friend had a life-threatening corn allergy. Corn is, surprisingly, in tons of things. People just don’t realize it unless they know what to look for.

   They know corn syrup, for example. But not all these other names of stuff (which I don’t recall off hand) which are also corn products and put in small amounts in our food.

9. One day they are asking why we don’t put corn on pizza, another day they are saying we put corn in everything. This sub is weird.

10. No. Most of our food does not contain corn. Like, when I eat broccoli, it does not contain corn.

    A lot of PROCESSED food contains corn syrup.

11. Maize is the most productive grain on Earth. It’s a component in lots of things, sometimes in the form of fructose syrup, sometimes as some other derivative.

    If nothing else, cornstarch is in lots of processed foods.

12. I came here to say “No”, but then I read the comments.

    TIL why Iowa has so much money.

13. Between corn syrup and corn starch, yeah it’s all over the place. The more processed or pre-prepared something is the more likely it is to have that kind of thing but it doesn’t have to be processed stuff. Like…as an anti-clumping agent corn starch is pretty common in ingredients as basic as baking powder.

    We put together a lot of corn subsidies to keep farming states afloat and later just producing in vast quantities decades ago and have been finding things to do with it ever since. Corn starch for a million uses, corn syrup as a sweetener all over the place, corn ethanol, all sorts of stuff. We make so much it’s hard to find use for it all.

14. Interestingly, corn was a massive component of food from Revolutionary times thru the first part of the 1800s, but not in the manner you expect.

    [W.J. Rorabaugh wrote “The Alcoholic Republic”](https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/177878) about alcohol consumption from 1790 thru 1830, but a major component of that was the corn economy and how it was transported to market. If you were growing corn on the frontier, how did you get it to market? You had no railways, so your corn would rot before it got to the East Coast. What was a farmer to do? Convert the corn to liquor! What would the farmers do with the spent mash? Feed it to hogs! So, corn went into corn dishes, pork, and liquor in massive amounts.

15. I don’t know if it is “most”, but certainly a lot. We produce a lot of corn and it has a lot of ways that corn parts can be included in various foods. Corn meal, corn syrup, corn starch, or even just full kernels of corn.

16. No.

    Corn is in some of our processed food, but not most.

    Corn syrup is used as a sweetener in processed foods. It’s very common in processed food.

17. Yes, on the orders of Colonel Cornelius Cornwall https://youtu.be/hn-WEDBQ-Rw

18. “Most of [our] food” is a bit of an exaggeration.

    But yes, most processed foods contain corn syrup, and a lot of people eat processed foods. That’s not a strictly American thing though. I seen the same thing around the world pretty much.

    How you checked the ingredient labels for your own food recently?

19. A lot of things come from corn. High fructose corn syrup is a sweetener like sugar. Then you have corn starch which is used as anti caking powder or thickener in soups, stews, and sauces.plus you have corn meal and flower which is used for breading for fried foods and some breads and desserts. It is often used to make chips like domino’s and other corn chips. Its super common it the crunchy snack market
     

    Most of these have alternatives, but since we produce 80% of the world’s corn… it’s available and cheap.
     

    We love corn, it is one of the most productive crops in the world. You can even use it to create bio fluels which we have been doing for a long time.

20. High fructose corn syrup is in everything, and Iowa is the Saudi Arabia of Corn Syrup.

21. Lots of food is sweetened with corn syrup or thickened with corn starch. And a lot of livestock is fed with ground corn. So yes, it does end up in many foods one way or another.

22. A lot of the well known sweets brands here use high fructose corn syrup because it’s the most addictive sugar relative to cost. Unfortunately it makes a lot of the chocolate here taste like shit once you know the difference. Ghirardelli is still pretty good though, especially the caramel chocolate squares with sea salt in them