I am not as fastidious about ecology as I would like to be. So this year, when I made my New Year’s resolutions, I made a plan to fail. 

My girlfriend and I both resolved give up corn syrup in its many forms, including glucose, high fructose corn syrup and dextrose.  These ingredients have been finding their way into a greater number of food products in recent years, acting as sweeteners, thickeners or sugar substitutes in everything from bran muffins to ketchup.  Too much corn syrup in our diets has been linked with heart disease, type II diabetes, and obesity.  In North America, we are eating so much processed corn ingredients like corn syrup, that it’s gotten into our cellular make-up.  According to whole food advocate, Michael Pollan, there is more corn DNA in the bodies of typical North Americans than in any other population worldwide, including the Mexicans who invented corn.  “You are what you eat … and if this is true, then what we are is corn, - or more precisely, processed corn.”  And worse still, more than half the corn grown in Canada and the United States is genetically engineered, a vast experiment, whose environmental and health effects we are only now beginning to grasp.

So giving up corn syrup seems a pretty good step in the right direction.  Unfortunately, the ubiquity of corn in our food, along with the lack of proper labelling of products, has made this endeavor challenging. So we built into our resolution a failsafe: every time we slip, we put a Toonie into our food security jar.  At the end of the year, we will donate the trove to a charity that promotes food security in Manitoba.  It’s a kind of self-imposed Green-tax, we hope will curb our consumption. 

To be honest, the plan did not get off to a good start – someone offered me a drink at a New Year’s party, and – ginger ale – there’s a toonie; a breath mint later and we were already four dollars in the hole before sunrise.  Over the past month, we’ve gotten more careful in checking ingredients, but we still are still  tripped up occasionally.  We found that while some ketchups contain corn syrup, we could get away with Heinz that uses sucrose instead- except if you are in the United States, where their ketchup contains high fructose corn syrup.  In all, its been a learning process, and its getting us looking at labels and thinking about what’s in the food we eat.  Maybe by next year, I will be able to give up processed corn all together.

Stay tuned to find out how it goes.