I failed. I wish I could say that I didn’t. I think it might have been possible. I like vegetables and cooking and fresh produce, and find processed food kind of gross. However, I don’t have time to check ingredients, or to find substitutes, or to make every meal from scratch. I have presentations and papers and a job and friends and no money. Find me over the summer, and I could do this. I could totally do it.

In my defense, I made it a day (I think). To do this, I had to avoid TDR (who knows what goes on in those kitchens?) as well as the frozen dinners and pizzas that I had. Instead, I made noodles and vegetable stir fry. But the next morning, not thinking, I had cheerios. The web tells me that modified corn starch is the second ingredient in the cereal. From there I only got worse. I went out to eat with friends, ended up at Chipotle, and realized that their tortillas are made of corn after ordering one. I pulled a box of muffins out of the dumpster behind a local grocery store, and after biting into one realized that it was a corn-bread muffin. I made vegan banana bread, and was doing fine until I added baking powder. My failures, I’m sure, go on.

However, I did have very limited corn intake, mostly due to life-choices and less to do with this near-impossible assignment. I don’t drink pop (diet or otherwise), I don’t like twinkies or oreos, and am wary of anything with ingredients that I can’t pronounce or find in a farmer’s market. I've been waging my own personal war on high-fructose corn syrup for some time.

This (attempted) experience was eye-opening. There used to exist a time (not so long ago) when people knew and had intimate connections with the food that they ate. Now, we have so little time and money and energy to devote to food that we don’t even know what we’re putting into our mouths. When corn is subsidized so heavily, it is bound to find its way onto our plates.