we are children of the corn

We are what we eat. So that means we're made of our food. Duh. Okay, well what is our food then? The answer's not always simple.
Think about a typical supermarket's aisle signs: Bread. Cereal. Snacks. Candy. Baking ingredients. Frozen dinners. Meat. Dairy. Soda and juice. Canned foods. Condiments. I can smell the warm bakery, the wet produce, and the plastic wrapping on everything... seems pretty diverse and wholesome.
Well, not really, according to the thorough and alarming research in Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemna and In Defense of Food. A hugely disproportionate amount of what we eat is really just corn. Soda, juice, and most snacks are sweetened with high fructose corn syrup--which, by the way, just might slowly kill you. Most of the meat you buy at a supermarket was raised eating corn, whether or not this is a good idea. Many of the unpronounceable additives that keep those factory-made cookies crispy, fresh, and cheap? Made from corn. Corn oil, corn starch, corn syrup, and corn derived additives find their way into almost every processed food. Playing a game of spot-the-corn in a typical supermarket could go on for days.
What about stuff that's obviously not made from corn, like flour or rice? Generally, the flour and rice that people buy is refined and white-- which, by the way, just might slowly kill you. Other non-corn ingredients that also just might slowly kill you (or the environment and thus you): cancer-causing BPA in the lining of canned food and soda. Hormones and antibiotics in meat and dairy. Pesticides in produce. Trans fats in packaged snacks. Nitrates in preserved meats. This list could go on, and it's overwhelming and sad, but-- as Pollan tells us-- fear not: there's a simple solution.
A common theme to these food problems is that they ignore all the wisdom that Mother Nature and traditional culture took thousands, even millions of years to figure out. We evolved to eat foods whole and fresh. Screwing around with food in order to eat it unwhole and unfresh is screwing around with the ability of our bodies and the earth to get health and sustenance from it. Mother Nature had no need for us to evolve around pesticides or Crisco, which is why they're bad for us. Neither does traditional eating culture have a need for BPA-lined cans.
Now, instead of whacking ourselves over the head with long lists of what's horrible about modern processed food, it's more pleasant and simple to just eat as though Mother Nature and traditional culture still ruled our diets. Pollan provides some terrific rules to follow:
1. Eat food: not edible food-like products, but food. Something your great-great-grandmother would recognize as "food". Overall, it's best to shop the perimeter of a supermarket: produce, dairy, meat. The center part is mostly processed corn products. Also, if a food product has a health claim on the package, it's probably not really food. Items with fewer than five ingredients are more likely to be food. And by "eat", it is best to eat slowly, and with others. The skinny, healthy French almost never eat alone and never get seconds. Wolfing down a crispy chicken wrap in your car is better described as consuming rather than eating, and it's certainly not what your great-great-grandmother would call "food".
2. But not too much: sugary sodas, refined grains, and cheap fatty snacks make it easy to eat more calories than you need, and these things weren't available in the world's cultures' traditional diets. (Just a thought-- why should I be impressed that a brand of vitamin water only has 25 calories? Shouldn't water have zero? Also, don't I need to be a professional athlete working out twice a day to get any benefit from energy bars?)
3. Mostly plants: Corn is a grain, and is thus a seed-- as opposed to a plant-- and the seed-based diet that permeates supermarket shelves is less nutritious than a plant-based diet. This rule flows down to our meat, too: animals raised eating their natural diet of plants and plant-eating prey will be better for you and the environment than grain-fed animals (look for grass-finished beef and pasture-raised chickens). Refining grains and then adding back in certain vitamins and additives is less nutritious, so when you do eat grains, eat them whole, as Mother Nature meant us to.

After all, Mother Nature spent millions of years figuring out what's good for us, including things that we have yet to discover. And I'll definitely put my faith in Mother Nature over some packaged food product corporation!