From Khunk to Chunk®:

The History of a Trademark and Its Underground Scourge

Herein, I make another confession. Having failed, in the Tepid War, to stop corn and white flour from supplanting the complex and healthful whole wheat, I turned my energies to corn itself, with the intention of undermining the industry from within. Once again, my actions had an effect quite contrary to my own intentions and those of my superiors in the Minneapolis Intelligence Agency. Alas, my confession must once again take the form of a History, in this case of a syrup and the terrors it spawned.

In 1958, a modest little syrup stand opened in Gnaw Bone, Indiana. The owners were Jake and Glenda Kirkland, who had begun processing their backyard corn into an excessively sweet syrup that would help keep foods moist and fresh. It was a transparent, golden syrup with, as they advertised, “an innocuous flavor and very little to prevent the home cook from wanting it desperately.” They sold it in mason jars for $2/quart, and they called it high fructose corn syrup.

Jake Kirkland was not the first to make high fructose corn syrup, or HFCS. (In 1957, Richard O. Marshall and Earl R. Kooi described the process in an article in Science, and we may safely assume that Kirkland had read the article.) But Kirkland was the first to market the product successfully, eventually making Gnaw Bone “the sweetest township in Indiana,” even though it is, in fact, still unincorporated to this day. Kirkland’s marketing prowess showed itself most clearly in his company’s name, a name both easy to remember and unusual enough to stand out in conversation. It’s not clear where the name came from, whether the corn kernels that sometimes caught in the sugaring machine, or the effect of the syrup on the human body, but Kirkland was certainly influenced by the Karo Company’s famous 1949 “Karo Kookery,” a low-fructose corn syrup cookbook, when he replaced the standard ‘C’ with a ‘K,’ creating the now-famous “Khunk Syrups.”

With popularity, however, came temptation. As all successful cottage entrepreneurs understand, multinational corporations inevitably want to buy your product, your name, and your livelihood for untold millions. Most refuse, which is why there are so many poor people, but Kirkland was a savvy businessman and so, in 1978, after twenty years of local, organic high-fructose sweetener, residents of Gnaw Bone watched the dismantling of the famous Khunk Stand.

The company was sold to Kraft, who changed the spelling to “Chunk®” and started pushing corn syrup on the Coca-Cola and Pepsi bottling companies. By 1984, the two companies had switched over entirely from sugar to HFCS, partly because of the corn lobby’s successful tariff on foreign sugarcane. Chunk® Syrups’ stock soared, and corn growers, commonly called “farmers,” were overjoyed. As they had dreamed, the next two decades saw Americans’ annual consumption of sugar increase by 30 pounds. This gave them a cheaper way to get rid of their surplus corn than shooting it into space, which they had been doing since Earl Butz’s reign in the USDA.

There was so much corn, though, that even the combined efforts of Coca-Cola and Pepsi’s armies of long-spooned syrup-dissolvers couldn’t get rid of it all. The factories, overwhelmed by the influx, kept producing, to the point where President Reagan considered a bill to empty Lake Erie in order to create more storage space. Here, faced with an innocuously flavored lake of sweetness, my agency came in. With the announced intention of moving more sweetener for the corporations and their lackeys at the USDA, I decided to go undercover as a meth addict in southern Indiana. Monsanto, Cargill, and Archer Daniels Midland had teamed up in a historic effort to develop a highly addictive form of HFCS, and I pushed this product, starting in the rolling hills of Indiana and taking the movement eastward, then northward, then westward and finally, once I hit California, southward. I extolled the pleasures of the new upper to high schoolers and sailors alike. It didn’t take long for enterprising young dropouts to figure out how to make it on their own. Surprisingly, this increased the market for corn, because when these Chunk addicts or “Chunkies,” as they came to be called, stole whole silos worth with their honest brothers’ tractors, these tractor-owning, honest brothers forced them to send checks to the farmers. And when the honest brothers failed to make their Chunky kin pay, the CIA chipped in, maintaining the web of black market corn trade.

Why, one might ask, would the CIA want to maintain a lucrative, untaxed economy among the disenfranchised and imprudent?

Why would the Food and Drug Administration allow a product whose addictive qualities are unparalleled and which has decimated the prosperity of tenant lawyers and the American South alike, as sweet tea, especially the extremely addictive Milo’s brand, has become an almost silent killer?

Why would the U.S. government implement a product, legal or illegal, that permanently congealed the lower and middle classes by placating their ambitions for a better life despite the Supreme Court’s rulings that marketing to minors, sailors and hairdressers is unconstitutional?

Why would we, as a society, so readily accept what some suggest is a gateway food to the consumption of ever more calories and a product which, even more likely, is used by its manufacturers to promote and distribute even harder narcotics like cocaine, heroine and Pixar sticks, the latest vogue in designer drugs, which contain a computer-generated powder that is usually snorted and comes in a variety of really great colors?

The answer, my naïve but hopeful readers, is sweetness. They simply want to brighten our days. In their blessed innocence, our country’s great corporations and their friends in government long to give each of us the taste of sunshine that’s been milled and processed and blended into a highly concentrated form. They are doing all they can to offer us something in our workaday lives to look forward to. This is especially important in the American South, where a history of exploitation by the northerners, first as they bought cotton and sugar while decrying slavery, later as they drank Coke while criticizing union busting, has given the South special need for sweetness. If the consequence is that our great country becomes obese and diabetic, that is a price our leaders are willing to pay. The citizens of America, especially the huddled masses yearning to breathe free, must not become dissatisfied with the mediocrity of their lots, must not join the sailors and hairdressers in their adventuresome lives of discovery – must not, on a diet of whole wheat and molasses, find the strength to stir and look around, rise with rake and hoe, and become jaded in the failure of their revolution. Therefore let my hand in high fructose corn syrup not be sign of defeat. Let my dealings in sweetness be a celebration of all that is light, and good, and fairly pleasant in the moment of consumption. Though I have not saved the world, I can say at least that I have helped provide our people with a brief, blissful lassitude by way of the addictive upper still affectionately known as “Khunk.”