An Inconvenient Conversation

I sat down with my mom fairly late at night over the weekend. I pulled up the description of the discussion we were supposed to be having and read it aloud. It was late and we were both tired, so our conversation wasn’t particularly long, but it was interesting nonetheless. We began by running down the list of topics.

“What forms of energy are available?” I asked. She thought for just a moment before she started listing different sources. She mentioned petroleum, coal, solar, using corn and soybeans in cars and different sources. With nothing to add, I asked the next question. “What are the benefits and drawbacks of current energy sources?” She thought again and mentioned that the air is being polluted by coal; drilling oil is polluting water and a whole slew of other problems.

I looked at the next question, but I had one of my own that I wanted to ask instead. “What do you think of the use of corn and soybeans as a form of energy?” I asked. She stopped temporarily before saying, “Well, it’s natural. I don’t really know a lot about the benefits and problems with it though.” I figured this would be her answer, so I decided to tell her a bit about it.

I told her about how, while corn is natural, it is one of the few foods that can never be truly “organic” since it is so susceptible to parasites and other problems. I told her that corn almost always has some form of pesticide being used on it, organic or non-organic, and while corn is good because it can be used in hundreds of different items, it causes many problems as well.

She seemed interested and asked me to elaborate, so I did. I mentioned that the runoff from cornfields has been known to get into streams and pollute water and other fields. She seemed to understand what I was talking about fairly quickly. She added in the fact that since farmers realized that corn was a super food and could be grown in bulk for cheap prices, crops weren’t being rotated. She mentioned to me how it was FDR that really pushed for crop rotation, so the not all of the nutrients would get sucked out of one spot and there would be less chance of landslides.

I decided to tell her about when the class watched “Food Inc.” and about how feeding corn to cattle has been one of the main causes of E. coli poisoning. My mom, being quite the animal activist, thought that it was terrible how people are so concerned about what is best for their pocket book, that they don’t care about what is best for the animals that provide them with nourishment and they don’t care about their own health. I told her about how if farmers fed cows grass for five days after a lifetime of feeding them corn, roughly 80% of the E. coli in their bodies would die immediately.

At this point, we started running out of things to add on to this topic, so we quickly ran down the rest of the list of topics. There was nothing that truly intrigued us, and I had asked my question and said my piece. I looked at the clock and realized that we had been talking for almost a half an hour, not to mention that it was twelve thirty at night and I had to get up in the morning. So we said our goodnights and I headed off to bed.