No Corny Jokes

What’s the deal with the commercial with the couple sitting in a park and the guy gets offended when the girl offers him a popsicle that contains high fructose corn syrup? She reassures him by revealing that high fructose corn syrup is comparable to other sweeteners and is fine “in moderation.”  First of all, I didn’t know that high fructose corn syrup was a controversial sweetener.  (Compare this book title and cover design to this book title and cover design.  Has the state of artificial sweetener really gotten that much worse? Good grief.) Second, who is consuming high fructose corn syrup in dangerously large quantities? The Corn Refiners Association website, which pimps the use of high fructose corn syrup (in moderation, of course – everyone knows that!) notes in its chart comparing common sweeteners that sugar and honey may or even tend to come from foreign markets when the question of where it comes from is answered: “Domestic and imported sugar cane and sugar beets” is where sugar comes from, and honey comes from “Nectar from a variety of flowers and trees. Most honey is now imported from China.” These answers go out of their way to suggest the idea that these products are un-American, either by indirectly shipping jobs overseas or shunning the domestic economy.  Heck, I hear that terrorist training camps are now including beekeeping in the curriculum to keep steady the profitable flow of terrorist honey into the US.  High fructose corn syrup, however, is from “Yellow dent corn primarily growing in the United States.” Well thank goodness for that!