Sucking corn

The Corn Refiners Association is apparently tired of everyone talking smack about high-fructose corn syrup, its favorite refined baby. Ads like the one above position anyone who tries to avoid The Syrup as doe-eyed, judgmental idiots who are just following the politically correct herd. The cool people in the ads, the ones you’re supposed to want to be, spout off tortuously wrangled benefits like “it’s made from corn” and “like sugar it’s fine in moderation,” all while smirking at the aforementioned idiots’ idiocy.

We won’t pretend we know the math on the health dangers of high-fructose corn syrup. Even the Mayo Clinic tempers its opinions on that stuff. (And they’re in Minnesota!) Though there is this fairly damning piece.

What we do feel 100% comfortable saying is that these ads suck.

They’re so obviously damage control, overbearing bits of propaganda whose entire message is, simply, cynically, don’t question our product. The setups are so forced, the straw-man stereotypes so offensively dipshitty. Everything in these ads reeks of a boardroom. The pro-syrup patsies sound like they’re reading bullet points off a strategy document, and they probably are.

Fail.

More specifically, the “made from corn” argument, the attempt to link The Syrup back to some semblance of nature, is lame at best and misleading at worst. Made from corn? Plastic is made from corn. Wanna eat it? It’s neither natural nor unique to be made from corn.

The moderation line seems incredibly disingenuous, considering the mind-boggling number of processed food products, some you’d never guess, that have a substantial amount of The Syrup pumped into them. And saying there are “no artificial ingredients” in an ingredient that is created through a highly industrialized process is pretty close to a lie.

Then there’s a whole environmental issue with corn.

Sorry, we lost our sense of humor there for a second. We don’t mean to be sanctimonious. Or boring. Boring is worse.

Look, we understand. They’re a business; they make a product and want to sell more of it. And while some equate them to the tobacco industry, we’re not entirely sure the Corn Refiners Association is ruled by a secretive dark council from somewhere near the Earth’s molten core, exporting evil to the surface dwellers in the name of the evil overlord Zeldor and/or truckloads of cash. (Which actually is, as you know, a reasoned and well-researched portrait of the tobacco industry.)

We just think it would’ve been smarter, maybe, for these guys to not do these awful, obvious and disingenuous ads. Better to keep to your office/underground lair, keep pumping money into lobbyists who keep the government from getting too interested in you, and keep helping the food industry create evermore perplexing, explosively sugary products.