Audrae EricksonAudrae Erickson, president of the Corn Refiners Association

Erickson may be just a minor player in the U.S. food tragedy, but she’s one of the loudest members of the chorus defending high-fructose corn syrup and other processed corn products. This president of the Corn Refiners Association first drew raves for her cyborg-like appearance in the 2007 documentary King Corn, barely blinking as she told the filmmakers why they couldn’t visit an HFCS factory. She now roams the Web like a sweet-tempered vigilante robot, singing the same song in the comments sections of hundreds of HFCS-damning posts, and she spearheaded the corny campaign to change HFCS’s name to “corn sugar.” For someone so fixated on jacking up the sweetness level of processed food, Erickson sure does manage to leave a bitter taste in our mouth.