"Replacing high fructose corn syrup with cane sugar would cost thousands of American food manufacturing jobs, depress farm income, and boost imports of foreign sugar, all with no nutritional benefit."

Said John Bode, head of the Corn Refiners Association, quoted in "Trump's Coke push will cost thousands of farm jobs, corn group warns" (Axios).

Oh, that's rich — we're supposed to feel sorry for the folks who make high fructose corn syrup. 

"I make a pretty sharp distinction between his medical ideas, which I think are really unsound and dangerous, and his critique of the food system, which has many elements I completely agree with."

Says Michael Pollan, quoted in "Michael Pollan Is Not Endorsing RFK Jr./A Q&A with the food reform advocate about the common ground he has with RFK Jr. — and why he does not want him to be HHS secretary" (Politico).

Michael Pollan, perhaps the country’s best-known advocate of healthy eating and reforming the food system, caused a stir earlier this week when he posted an article on his X account headlined “They’re Lying About Robert F. Kennedy Jr.” The article, published in the American Conservative, stopped short of endorsing Kennedy for the job of Health and Human Services secretary, but did endorse Kennedy’s critique of the food system and tried to add nuance to his skepticism of vaccines. Pollan posted a link to the story without comment, but the mere fact that he did so was interpreted as the latest sign of how the nomination of RFK Jr. has scrambled some partisan health policy divides.

The American Conservative article is by Spencer Neale, whose name does not appear in the Politico piece.

Pollan sounds nervous. He ends the interview with: "Are you going to publish this soon? Because I really want to stop this. I don’t want to get a phone call from RFK Jr. I want him to read this and not call."

Imagine being afraid of a call from Kennedy. What kind of people are leaning on Pollan?

Pollan originally liked Neale's article — unsurprising, because Neale mentions him with great favor:

"Last August, a woman in Chicago opened her Too Good to Go bag and found seven pounds of smashed cake..."

"... (which she and her friend, the friend confessed, gobbled down). Someone who goes by Cassie Danger on Reddit reported receiving a 'corn sandwich' from a Choc O Pain in the Hoboken/Jersey City area, that is, a roll containing a handful of canned corn niblets topped with a couple of lettuce leaves."

Writes Patricia Marx in "Spoiler Alert: Leftovers for Dinner/How to host a dinner party for nine using a pre-trash haul from Too Good to Go and other food-waste apps. Carb-averse guests, beware" (The New Yorker).

Marx's 9 guests arrived and dumped out the "surprise bags" they'd ordered from the app Too Good to Go (which packages food left over from 6,987 NYC stores and restaurants):

I've got 8 TikToks for you tonight. I hope something here is fun for you.

1. The bumblebee's tongue. 

2. The innocent dachshund. 

3. Jordan Peterson says: Marry young. 

4. Much more advice for guys. 

5. Cursing. Seriously, don't watch that unless you want to hear some hilarious, intense cursing.

6. The corn kid reflects on his retirement. 

7. The immigrant's point of view.

8. Vicious panda attack. 

With the death of the Queen, perhaps it's too somber a time to watch TikToks, so I cautiously offer my selection this evening. There are 8. Some people love them.

1. Two young girls encounter a landline telephone.

2. Experience an oranger orange than actually exists.

3. Is the bird oddly stoical or truly in love with the man and his piano?

4. Is morning beer a deplorable notion or something poignantly sublime?

5. When it comes to questions of politics, I wish more celebrities were like Elvis.

6. The ugliest piece of furniture or the most amusingly beautiful?

7. If this is the definition of a "toxic" person, then I am sure I know who is the most toxic person I have ever met. 

8. The Corn Kid — 25 years later.

I've got precisely 10 TikToks for you to "labor" through today. Some people love them.

1. Everyone has 4 obsessions — here are 4 weird ones.

2. Analyzing the student-loan forgiveness program with Biblical references. (Freeze the frame at 0:42 so you can read the text. The first 2 are parables that you've probably already contemplated in this context.)

3. Is it really so bad if men these days don't live for adventure?

4. Broadway Barbara's Fosse Tutorial.

5. When the sports car pulls up to the red light and blocks the crosswalk, there's one way to win.

6. You approach a woman in the park... and she turns into a bird.

7. Inspired by found poetry.

8. Won't the dog just love the new puppy?

9. Deducing that today is the day he's going to propose.

10. Six degrees of corn.

My TikTok post today is an all-corn collection. If you've been following my TikTok blogging, you saw the original boy who believed in corn...

... on August 5th (#1), and, on August 19th, you saw that incredibly charming interview brilliantly transformed into music (#5), and, on August 22, you saw the lines of the "It's Corn" song ranked (#4). That's all you need to know to receive this set of further developments. Believe me, there are many, many more "It's Corn" videos on TikTok. What I've got here is optimized for your enjoyment of this spiraling trend:

1. The sidewalk chalk version.

2. Is it okay to do cornface?

3. Her friends aren't on TikTok and don't know the corn song.

4. The song becomes a TED talk.

5. The Conor Oberst impression.

6. The Gregorian chant version.

7. Social media manager explains the song to 70-year-old male heads of marketing at a finance company.

8. The teacher wants to use the song as an example of great opinion writing.

9. At some point, corn itself gets anxious. 

A nice, precise 10 for today. Here it is, Althouse-curated TikTok. You can rank them, like that lady ranked the lyrics of "It's Corn."

1. The vacation on TikTok vs. Reality.

2. The price of an overnight stay — with breakfast and a beautiful view — in Kyrgystan.

3. What country is longest, north to south?

4. The lines of "It's Corn" — ranked.

5. Spend $80,000 on a truck....

6. Sometimes a m-f talks nice to your face...

7. The phrase "we love that for you."

8. She believes she is still 70.

9. Ricky Gourmet reads the letter his 12-year-old self wrote him.

10. Trying to read.

I've picked out 8 TikToks for you. Let me know what you like.

1. When you fall asleep at a classical music concert.

2. Are we going to be impressed by this guy's construction out of chocolate?

3. I never cook pork chops, do you? Well, look at this.

4. Dogs at the meeting about all the barking. 

5. Remember that little boy with the corn I showed you on August 5th? Now, here he is, with musical accompaniment.

6. Why do you call when you can text?

7. The snowboarding toddler is just floating.

8. Bear in a bath.

Here are 8 TikToks to delight or vex you. Let me know what you think.

 1. "Ever since I was told that corn was real, it tasted good."

2. Yes, there is a burger bra. The question is what to wear with it.

3. For the European person — the coolest places in America.

4. Mr. Jeff's Musical Gizmos is open. 

5. Do you know the song my recently departed mother loved?

6. Getting searched at the San Francisco airport. (This can't be real, can it?)

7. Approaching the volcano in Iceland.

8. Glen Campbell and Leon Russell play "Jambalaya."

At the Sun Corn Café...

... the conversation goes on long after sunset.

What does "you do you" really mean?

That's a question I had to google after reading "The Thinnest Skins In Media In 2018/Their diapers runneth over" (HuffPo). The first entry on the list is "Jake Tapper, CNN Anchor And Respecter Of Troops." And this exchange is presented as evidence:



See the relevant line, in the middle? "I'm not mad. You misquoted me, I pointed it out, and instead of correcting yourself you reacted like a child. You do you."

My Google search turned up "How ‘You Do You’ Perfectly Captures Our Narcissistic Culture" (NYT, March 2015). Excerpt:

Haters hate; that’s them doing them. No matter how saintly you are, the kittens rescued and orphanages saved from demolition, people yearn to bring you down. Classify your antagonists as haters, however, and your flaws are absolved by their greater sin of envy. Obviously, the haters have other qualities apart from their hatred, but such thinking goes against the very nature of the hermetic tautophrase, which refuses intrusion into the bubble of its logic. The hated-­upon must resist lines of inquiry, like “Haters are inclined to hate, but perhaps I have contributed to this situation somehow by frustrating that natural impulse in all human beings, that of empathy, however submerged that impulse is in this deadened, modern world.” To do otherwise would be to acknowledge your own monstrosity....

And if you're wondering why the thin-skinned media people are depicted as corn in that HuffPo article, the answer is here, at Know Your Meme. The meme goes back to some tweet in 2011, but:

Discourse around the term grew popular again in the beginning of August of 2017. On August 2nd, journalist Yashar Ali tweeted an image of Kamala Harris, a rumored democratic candidate for the 2020 Presidential Election, that called her the "Centrist Corncob" candidate. Ali noted how it was remarkable how the "Bernie Sanders Crew" had mobilized against Harris.... Centrist pundit Al Giordano quoted the tweet stated that the term had homophobic and rape culture origins.... The same day, Neera Tanden, a chief strategist on the Hillary Clinton campaign in the 2016 United States Presidential Election did the same. Both were mocked for misunderstanding the term.

References were different in the old days. If you didn't get them, you had to wonder if you weren't in the know... and how badly out of the know you were. Today, you can instantly become in the know and form a judgment about how out of the know you were. In the case of corncob, it's mindbogglingly insubstantial, but I'm glad to be forewarned against making any precipitous rape-culture allegations.

At the Short Shakes Café...

... you can talk for hours.

Photo taken yesterday somewhere along I-39 in Illinois.

Walking in the corn today...

At the Pope Farm Conservancy, where there are no sunflowers this year.

Talk about anything in the comments. This is intended as an open thread, even though I'm not saying "café." "Corn Café"... that would sound stupid.

Asked about NFL players taking a knee during the national anthem, Beto O'Rourke (Ted Cruz's challenger) launches into sustained grand oratory.

This video has gone viral, as NBC news says:

The video of his response, posted by the news site NowThis, has since garnered 11 million views and more than 300,000 shares on Facebook as of Thursday morning.

This video isn't just getting views, it's garnering views. So put that in your garner — a storehouse for corn — and keep it.

"The judge in Paul Manafort's trial has called a recess without explanation."

"U.S. District Judge T. S. Ellis lll huddled with attorneys from Special Counsel Robert Mueller's office and Manafort's defense lawyers, as well as court security officers, for more than 20 minutes before calling the recess. The judge then exited the courtroom toward the jury room...."

Yahoo News.

ADDED: As you can see at the same link, the trial resumed and there was no big deal. Too bad this boring post sat at the top of the blog all day! I hate when that happens. And before I went out for my 4-mile walk, I considered putting up this photograph:



But I decided it was too boring. How wrong I was! It is fascinating compared to the Manafort trial.

"There are two reasons we shouldn’t shift away from a system where most calories come from staples and few from vegetables, even if we could..."

"Vegetables are too expensive, and they require too much land," writes Tamar Haspel, and oyster farmer and food-policy commentator (in WaPo).

For last month’s column on whether nutritious food is more expensive than junky food, I looked at the costs involved in growing broccoli and corn. One estimate from the University of California at Davis estimates the costs of growing broccoli at about $5,000 per acre, whereas corn is about $700. Factor in that corn delivers 15 million calories per acre to broccoli’s 2-ish million, and the cost to grow broccoli (25 cents per 100 calories) is 50 times larger than corn (half a cent per hundred calories). And that’s just the difference on the farm. After harvest, that broccoli needs to be refrigerated and transported to where it’s going before it spoils. Broccoli has nutrients that corn doesn’t, of course, so it’s a good thing that we eat some. But an all-vegetable, or mostly vegetable, diet is prohibitively expensive for most people.

The land issue is directly related. When you can grow many more calories per acre, you need fewer acres. The closer we get to maxing out our farmland, the more important that calculation becomes.....

The inescapable reality is that the inherent costs involved in growing, storing and shipping vegetables often make them a luxury food. The backbone of a diet good for both people and planet is whole grains and legumes: oats, barley, wheat, corn, beans, peanuts, lentils.

So is eat your vegetables terrible advice? I looked into the comments section over there for the answer I expected and found it as the second "most liked" one:

I think this is a valuable discussion when it comes to food security, aka making sure people aren't starving to death.... But if you're talking about the average American and those around the world with an increasingly American/western diet, I think it's a disservice to our health and economy to think that we can continue with grains and cereals as a nutritional backbone....

It's one thing to feed the billions of people in the world. Give them their oats, barley, wheat, corn, beans, peanuts, lentils....



... but we Americans expect better things — a well-balanced, nutritious, healthful, tasty, and virtuous diet. And please don't bother us with notions of virtue that demand that we live like those people out there somewhere in the world where it's a struggle to pack in enough calories to get by.

Let's hate lettuce.

"It occupies precious crop acreage, requires fossil fuels to be shipped, refrigerated, around the world, and adds nothing but crunch to the plate," says the currently most-read article at The Washington Post.

Salad vegetables are pitifully low in nutrition. The biggest thing wrong with salads is lettuce, and the biggest thing wrong with lettuce is that it’s a leafy-green waste of resources.

In July, when I wrote a piece defending corn on the calories-per-acre metric, a number of people wrote to tell me I was ignoring nutrition. Which I was. Not because nutrition isn’t important, but because we get all the nutrition we need in a fraction of our recommended daily calories, and filling in the rest of the day’s food is a job for crops like corn. But if you think nutrition is the most important metric, don’t direct your ire at corn. Turn instead to lettuce....

Lettuce is a vehicle to transport refrigerated water from farm to table....

Lettuce has nothing going for it. But — I'd caution — don't undervalue nothing. Nothing is a lot. It's more than everything that's worse than nothing. Chewing on lettuce might keep you from eating something fattening (like corn)(though it might lure you into eating something that would have no appeal were it not for lettuce's insidious cry for dressing).

But if your concern is not managing your calories — or, as some commenters point out, pooping —  and you care about the environment, the author is right. You should not — unless you grow your own — be eating lettuce. It's water.

A head of iceberg lettuce has the same water content as a bottle of Evian (1-liter size: 96 percent water, 4 percent bottle) and is only marginally more nutritious.

And don't drink bottled water either. Drink tap water. Lots and lots of tap water. And pray for the forgiveness of your sins.

"I’ve got to see a man about a dog."

Says David Corn, blowing off Hugh Hewitt at the end of a long radio conversation about Corn's attack on Bill O'Reilly, a topic I've been avoiding all week and intend to continue to avoid.

I'm just blogging this because I'm interested in the phrase "I’ve got to see a man about a dog," which has its own Wikipedia entry:

To see a man about a dog (or see a man about a horse) is an English language colloquialism, usually used as a way to say one needs to apologize for one's imminent departure or absence – generally euphemistically to conceal one's true purpose, such as going to use the toilet or going to buy a drink.

The original, non-facetious meaning was probably to place or settle a bet on a racing dog.

Some people say "I’ve got to see a man about a horse." Another variation is "I've got to see a dog about a man."

Now, I also find it interesting — and this blog runs on interestingness, you know — that earlier in the Corn-Hewitt conversation, Hewitt used another old expression that has a dog in it: "I’ve got no dog in this fight." Maybe that put the dog image in the Corn's head... the head of Corn... the ear of Corn.

"No dog in this fight" has no page Wikipedia. Some people say "No dog in the hunt," but that's denounced as "a bastardization of two Southern idioms: 'no dog in the fight,' and 'that dog won't hunt.'"

"Who Gets Kissed?"

"Researchers at UW-Madison developed a new sweet corn variety coined 'Who Gets Kissed?'..."

The breed’s name pays homage to an old tradition where communities would come together to husk corn and dance, according to the release. When a person found corn, they could kiss one other person in the group....

Hey... University of Wisconsin! What happened to yes means yes? Doesn't this "one other person in the group" have significant personhood and bodily autonomy?

From a Civil War discussion group:

I must not forget the ever popular corn husking bees where the finder of the red ear was in great luck, for he or she was privileged to take a kiss from the prettiest girl or the handsomest man there. Let me tell you there was lots of tears shed (in private) and some heartaches caused by the red ear of corn.

From Forgotten Stories:

What laughing and talking and romping, as the dry leaves were plucked from the ear!... What sly jokes went about as to which of the girls the lucky finder would kiss, that being his free full right and privilege; and when at length the talisman was found, what a shout of triumph from the discovery, and what a trepidation and giggling amongst the girls! Our illustration represents a husking party at the moment when the red husk has been unearthed. The gentleman is about to not only claim, but to enforce, his privilege, and, from the expression in the lady’s face, it is not improbable that she fully expected this mark of esteem should the husk be found by this particular cavalier.

Sorry to step on a commercial product of my university, but the name celebrates a tradition of coerced sexual behavior. I know... they landed an ear of corn on a distant comet and I — with no comparable achievements of my own — just want to talk about what shirts they wore.