Excerpts from 'The Omnivore's Dilemma' by Michael Pollan

"The ingredients in the [McDonald’s] flyer suggest a lot of thought goes into a nugget, that and a lot of corn. Of the thirty-eight ingredients it takes to make a McNugget, I counted thirteen that can be derived from corn: the corn-fed chicken itself; modified cornstarch (to bind the pulverized chicken meat); mono-, tri-, and diglycerides (emulsifiers, which keep the fats and water from separating); dextrose, lecithin (another emulsifier); chicken broth (to restore some of the flavor that processing leaches out); yellow corn flour and more modified cornstarch (for the batter); cornstarch (a filler); vegetable shortening; partially hydrogenated corn oil, and citric acid as a preservative." -pg 113

"It would not be impossible to calculate exactly how much corn Judith, Isaac and I consumed in our McDonald’s meal. I figure my 4-ounce burger, for instance, represents nearly 2 pounds of corn (based on a cow’s feed conversion rate of 7 pounds of corn for every 1 pound of gain, half of which is edible meat). The nuggets are a little harder to translate into corn, since there’s no telling how much actual chicken goes into a nugget; but if 6 nuggets contain a quarter pound of meat, that would have taken a chicken half a pound of feed corn to grow. A 32-ounce soda contains 86 grams of high-fructose corn syrup (as does a double-thick shake), which can be refined from a third of a pound of corn; so our 3 drinks used another 1 pound. Subtotal: 6 pounds of corn.

From here the calculations become trickier because, according to the ingredients listed in the flyer, corn is everywhere in our meal, but in unspecified amounts. There’s more corn sweetener in my cheeseburger, of all places: the bun and the ketchup both contain HFCS. It’s in the salad dressing, too, and the sauces for the nuggets, not to mention Isaac’s dessert. (Of the sixty items listed on the handout, forty-five contain HFCS.) Then there are all the other corn ingredients in the nugget: the binders and emulsifiers and fillers. In addition to corn sweeteners, Isaac’s shake contains corn syrup solids, mono- and di-glycerides, and milk from corn-fed animals.

Judith’s Cobb salad is also stuffed with corn, even though there’s not a kernel in it: Paul Newman makes his dressing with HFCS, corn syrup, corn starch, dextrin, caramel color, and xanthan gum; the salad itself contains cheese and eggs from corn-fed animals. The salad’s grilled chicken breast is injected with a “flavor solution” that contains maltodextrin, dextrose, and monosodium glutamate.

Sure, there are a lot of leafy greens in Judith’s salad, but the overwhelming majority of calories in it (and there are 500 of them, when you count the dressing) ultimately comes from corn. And the French fries? You would think those are mostly potatoes. Yet since half of the 540 calories in a large order of fries come from the oil they’re fried in, the ultimate source of these calories is not a potato farm but a field of corn or soybeans.

The calculation finally defeated me, but I took it far enough to estimate that, if you include the corn in the gas tank (a whole bushel right there, to make two and half gallons of ethanol), the amount of corn that went into producing our movable fast-food feast would easily have overflowed the car’s trunk, spilling a trail of golden kernels on the blacktop behind us.

Some time later I found another way to calculate just how much corn we had eaten that day. I asked Todd Lawson, a biologist at Berkeley, to run a McDonald’s meal though his mass spectrometer and calculate how much of the carbon in it originally came from a corn plant. … In order of diminishing corniness, this how the laboratory measured our meal: soda (100 percent corn), milk shake (78 percent), salad dressing (65 percent), chicken nuggets (56 percent), cheeseburger (52 percent), and French fries (23 percent)." -pages 115-117

-Michael Pollan, in 'The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals'