When Ian Cheney and his best friend Curt Ellis graduate from college, they think they’re done with the professor and feel like their entire lives are in front of them, but they’ve just heard something very disturbing. Disturbing news. Someday they will die, maybe sooner than they think. For the first time in American history, her generation is in danger of outliving her parents. This is because of what they eat.
So they started tracking what they ate. But they found they needed help making sense of their data. Hair is a continuous recorder, it is the recorder of nutrition. Foods that become part of your diet end up in your hair. So they analyzed her hair and concluded that the carbon in her body did come from corn. We’re talking about corn used as an ingredient (high fructose corn syrup) which is used in our ubiquitous food products. We also feed animals with corn, which is then converted into biomass that we consume.
Ian and Curt grew up by the sea, but for some reason they were drawn to the Midwest. Maybe it’s because long before corn grew in her hair, she had corn in her genes. Coincidentally, Ian and Curt both had great-grandfathers in the same small county in rural Iowa. Three generations after their great-grandparents left, they moved back to find out how an acre of corn in an Iowa field had grown into their hair.
