We are the corn people. We are made of corn, surrounded by corn, totally dependent on corn. We belong to the Clan of the Corn Stalkers.

Zea mays, a single species of tropical grass, is the dominant plant in our universe, better known as corn.

Cows once raised on grass now eat corn. That delicious steak you ate last night came from a steer that ate corn. Chicken, pigs, catfish, tilapia: all corn eaters.

Here's how Michael Pollan describes your chicken nugget in "Omnivore's Dilemma."

"A chicken nugget... piles corn upon corn: what chicken it contains consists of corn, of course, but so do most of a nugget's other constituents, including the modified corn starch that glues the thing together, the corn flour in the batter that coats it, and the corn oil in which it gets fried.

"Much less obvious," reports Pollan, "the leavenings and lecithin, the mono-,di-, and triglycerides, the attractive golden covering, and even the citric acid that keeps the nugget 'fresh' can all be derived from corn."

Well, the rest of your meal isn't corn. Wrong!

Sodas and many fruit drinks are sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup. Even my beloved beer is a corn drink, utilizing alcohol fermented from glucose refined from corn.

Ketchup, candy, soup, cake mixes, frozen waffles, mayonnaise, hot dogs, salad dressings: more corn.

You'll have to pop a vitamin to get anything else. Oops. Corn is in vitamins too.

Corn has taken over the planet!

Pollan's book was a revelation to me. In the supermarket, he reports, "Everything from the toothpaste and cosmetics to the disposable diapers, trash bags, cleansers, charcoal briquettes, matches, and batteries, right down to the shine on the cover of the magazine that catches your eye by the checkout: corn."

From pesticides to cardboard, wallboard to fiberglass. Corn, corn, corn and corn.

When he looks at the isotopes in our flesh or hair, Berkeley biologist Todd Dawson reports that, "We North Americans look like corn chips with legs."

And now, corn powers our motor vehicles. The heavily subsidized rush to ethanol is an expensive environmental disaster with consequences worldwide and even beyond.

Michael Grunwald reported recently in Time magazine, "Politicians and Big Business are pushing biofuels like corn-based ethanol as alternatives to oil. All they're really doing is driving up food prices and making global warming worse -- and you're paying for it."

Global demand for corn drives Brazilians to clearcut the forest, raising carbon emissions and exacerbating global warming. 750,000 acres of Brazil's rain forest were cleared in the last six months of 2007 to raise corn.

And in our country, a massive turn to corn production has distorted markets and raised prices of many products.

We've tripled ethanol production in the last 10 years in the United States, and a new federal mandate will bring a fivefold increase in renewable fuels in the next 10 years.

Our shift to corn for fuel is damaging our planet and driving up our cost of living. Grunwald calls the shift to corn ethanol "environmentally disastrous." One new study concluded that corn ethanol and soy biodiesel, when you consider the deforestation driven by the market for these fuels, produce twice the emissions of gasoline.

Grunwald says we're better off to use oil-derived gasoline. Go Green. Go Gasoline.

Consider this fact: You could be fed for 365 days on the corn needed to fill an ethanol-fueled SUV.

I saw the agricultural shift to corn last fall while pheasant hunting in North Dakota. Conservation lands are being turned into cornfields and thousands of acres that produced soybeans are switching to corn.

Naturally, the price of soybean is up, but so are prices on all corn products, the result of one-fifth of the corn raised in the U.S. being turned into ethanol.

Reflect on all the products that consist of corn and you will understand why so many things in your supermarket have skyrocketed in price.

And we're paying heavy subsidies for the ethanol that is driving up the cost of all these other products.

There may be no stopping this wasteful and harmful ethanol fix. From George Bush to Hillary Clinton the plan calls for huge increases in ethanol production. "This is the fuel for a much brighter future," Clinton proclaimed.

And a whole lot of jobs now depend on ethanol, 53,000 in Iowa alone where it's already a $1.8 billion industry. Amazingly, the corn state of Iowa now imports corn to fuel its ethanol industry.

Enjoy your corn today. It'll cost more tomorrow.

George Smith is executive director of the Sportsman's Alliance of Maine. He lives in Mount Vernon and can be reached at george@samcef.org.