Corn

Corn is one of the most widely grown crops in the world. In recent decades, modern chemistry and other industrial processes have changed corn from something people ate at the dinner table to something in almost everything people eat. In fact, it is in much of what they use as well: Corn is now a part of an industrial food chain, as well as the source in part or in whole of a myriad of products.

The Taínos were pre-Columbian inhabitants of the Bahamas and other Caribbean islands. When the Spanish first encountered them, they adopted corn and used the word maize as the Spanish form of the Taínos word maiz. Maize is used fairly globally today; however, corn, the English general name for a cereal grain, is still used in English-speaking North America. In the United States and Canada, the term Indian corn is used to describe a variety of multicolored field cultivars. They range in color from red to blue to black and may be sold as an autumn decoration or as a popcorn specialty item.

Today, corn is a globally important food crop. It originated in the Americas, specifically in central Mexico, from a plant the Aztecs called teosinte in their Nahuatl language, meaning “the mother of corn.” It is believed to have originated on a single mountain in southern Mexico. Teosinte still grows wild in southern Mexico and northern Central America; however, it is not corn. It took thousands of years for the plant to be developed into modern corn. As it became corn, it was able to support the Mayan and later Aztec civilizations, becoming a god (and some times a goddess) that they worshipped as their corn culture became central to their survival.

[Page 105]The development of corn as a food is one of the greatest of human achievements. From this miraculous agricultural achievement has come a major food source for millions of descendants of the Indians who first produced corn, as well as hundreds of millions of people and countless animals around the world.

Corn is a hybrid that seems to have originated from genetic mutations of some teosinte plants about 9,000 years ago. Since then, corn has been a hybrid plant dependent on humans for its continued existence. It is an existence that, since Christopher Columbus, has spread from the Americas around the world to most of the places humans farm. The only cereal to outrank corn in production as a cereal grain is wheat. Rice is in third place.

Organically grown corn like this is surrounded by more weeds than conventional corn because only nonchemical weed management techniques are used, but the amount of corn yielded is similar.

Source: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service/Bob Nichols

As a food commodity, more than half of the world's corn production is in the Corn Belt of the midwestern United States, with Iowa as the center of production. Corn is really a tropical or semitropical plant. To grow well, corn needs hot rainy summers that turn dry when the corn is nearly ready for harvesting. Large quantities of corn are also grown in the southern United States, where cornbread in a variety of forms—including as hush puppies—is a favorite food.

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