Corn is America?s largest agricultural commodity (also its first!). There are currently more than 92 million acres of corn in the United States, and it appears in virtually everything we eat. It is not only eaten by us directly and fed to the animals we consume; it appears in virtually all of our food as a sweetener, coloring or flavoring agent, or as a preservative. According to the author Michael Pollan, nearly a quarter of all products found in the grocery store contain corn in some form; a four-ounce hamburger represents nearly two pounds of corn consumed by a beef cattle, and a 32-ounce soda contains nearly 1/3 pound of corn in the form of high fructose corn syrup. Also, corn increasingly powers our cars in the form of ethanol. Although an abundance of cheap corn has been largely responsible for our dependence on it, demand for corn in ethanol production is raising its price for the first time in decades. .