Politics & Power Quote by Michael Pollan

Corn isn’t just a crop here; it’s a code. Pollan’s move is to take something aggressively ordinary and reveal it as infrastructure - a hidden operating system for how America eats. By zooming in on a McDonald’s meal and talking about “carbon,” he swaps the language of taste and choice for the language of chemistry and supply chains. That’s the point: if what you’re consuming is mostly corn-derived carbon, then the story of “individual preference” starts to look like a fairy tale we tell ourselves to avoid noticing the machinery.

The line works because it’s both scientific and accusatory. “Virtually all the carbon” is a sneaky, devastating statistic: it collapses the distance between soda, fries, buns, and beef. Even the cow becomes an intermediary, a corn-processing device. Pollan is pushing against the comforting idea that fast food is merely “bad” in a moral or personal-responsibility sense. The subtext is systemic: agricultural subsidies, monoculture, cheap calories, and the way industrial efficiency gets rebranded as consumer freedom.

Context matters. Pollan is writing in the era when “food politics” started migrating from niche activism into mainstream dinner-table talk. By framing the American diet as a corn pipeline, he offers a single, vivid lever readers can grab. Corn becomes shorthand for a whole model of power: what’s profitable gets grown, what’s grown becomes ingredients, and ingredients become culture - right down to the meal you can order in under a minute.