Omnivore's Dimemna

~Did any information in the book come as a surprise to you? If so, why do you think that specific piece of knowledge was kept from you? Does the producer of this knowledge have any responsibility? What is your responsibility as a knower?~

It kind of surprised me to hear that "there are other countries, such as Italy and France, that decide their dinner questions on the basis of such quaint and unscientific criteria as pleasure and tradition, eat all manner of 'unhealthy' foods, and, lo and behold, wind up actually healthier and happier in their eating than we are" because I've always thought of the foreigners who feast upon large amounts of foods we consider fattening, to be... I'm not sure, but not healthier than we are.
I think this knowledge might have been "kept from me" either because of America's tendency to be prideful and not accurately acknowledge other nations' superiorty, or simply because this piece of information was not considered necessary to my general education by my life educators, and I am not one to do research of this type on my own.

I was also really surprised to hear that "There are some forty-five thousand items in the average American supermarket and more than a quarter of them now contain corn." I had no idea there were that many items IN supermarkets, let alone that contain corn... I guess I don't shop much. And I rarely read the ingredients of things because I simply don't think of it, don't specifically care about something, or am too blind to read the typically tiny font in which the ingredients are listed and pretty much hidden.
This information may have been kept from me (and most Americans I would imagine) by supermarkets and by society because they want consumers to keep on buying products despite their unknown ingredients, and make lots of money off using corn as a cheap substitute or general part of foods.

Also, due to my extensive education and many years of research in the field of genetics etc (obviously kidding here), I had no clue that scientists could actually do studies and figure out that "The higher the ratio of carbon 13 to carbon 12 in a person’s flesh, the more corn has been in his diet—or in the diet of the animals he or she ate." Real things like this (assuming this book is correct and so are the scientists performing the mentioned studies) make this whole corn arguement have a little more weight with me...
I don't really feel this information was KEPT from me; just, due to its slight randomness when not conversinmg this specific topic, it was not revealed to me by my parents, teachers, the media, etc. (at least not that I remember).

Pollan, the producer of all this knowledge, or at least the person who revealed it, has some responsibility, yes. He could be considered to be slightly respnsible if, because of reading his book, people started buying more organic/local foods and thinking, shopping and eating differently, and the business of supermarkets and the food business in general, were shifted from its current industrialized, preprocessed state.
My responsibility as a knower is to A) admit that I know (not play Miss Ignorance and turn a blind eye to my own problems or those of the world around me) and B) to, if i care enough about it, do something with the knowlegde I have aquired. If I am worried about my own health I should reasearch more ingredients etc in the foods I buy and choose carefully and knowingly what I put into my body. If I wish the current food situation in supermarkets etc to be changed, I should perhaps buy what I want the demand to be so that they will switch to making THAT the supply (buy more organic foods so they will produce more for growing demand).