Corn has nearly taken over the world in some sort of sciFi manipulation of humans. We've spread the plant in regions it never existed, grow more and more of the stalks even though we don't necessarily eat it directly. Instead, we feed it to our chickens and cows, and use the byproducts in all sorts of unusual applications, turn it into sugar (high fructose corn syrup), ethanol and corn-only-knows what. We give massive amounts of federal dollars to agribusiness consortiums like ADM so that corn price is kept artificially cheap even as we genetically modify the genum into a monoculture. Who is the master and who is the plant?
The Corn Supremacy:
Over thousands of years, it has gone from humble weed to worldwide staple, alternative fuel and now potential medicine. But as the crop's value has grown, so has its challenges.
For the aging farmer on the hillside, the motions of planting are rote, timeless, almost mechanical, yet as human as the need to lay down roots, to experiment, to multiply. His thick hands never stop moving, even as he segues from grumbling about the government to chuckling at his own saucy jokes to fumbling through the names of his 22 children. Perched on the steep slope of his field, Jesus Garcia grips the sweat-shined shaft of his planting pole, called a barreton, and drives its rusty iron-tipped blade into the dirt. Then he levers the pole away from him, opening a divot in the earth. With two quick sweeps of his hand, he skims two kernels of corn from the tin can tied to his waist and aims them downward in an arc off the back of the blade. From there, they slide neatly and perfectly into the hole.
... Today's enormous hopes for corn-based ethanol fuel and efforts to genetically engineer corn for surprising new tasks are the latest manifestations of the link to Zea mays, an offshoot of a weed from what is now southern Mexico that developed into corn. It underpins much of the Midwest's rural economy, fattens America's beef cattle, turns up in thousands of unexpected brand-name products on supermarket shelves and serves as a staple food from the Zambian forests to the Tibetan plateau.
A technological light-year from the crop in Garcia's fields, corn has uplifted the fortunes of Steve Ruh and other Illinois farmers, who chased after record corn prices this year with their computerized, 16-row planters. It also fires the imaginations of Kan Wang and other researchers at universities and agri-chemical companies, who are turning corn into ever more sophisticated biofuels to reduce our dependence on imported oil, "slow-breakdown" starches to help diabetics, biodegradable plastics to keep us from burying ourselves in our own garbage, even vaccines that one day may save lives.
environmentalists and leftist political activists warn that the imported corn's genetically modified genes will contaminate the invaluable storehouse of native species in the birthplace of maize. Even on this side of the border, farm-policy critics, environmentalists and food experts are raising questions about the agriculture industry's enthusiastic promotion of corn to solve society's challenges. Excitement about exploiting corn's unique productive capacity to grow pharmaceuticals faded in recent years after several incidents of unintended crop dispersal raised fears about "pharm-corn" genes spreading into the food supply. Among other concerns are government policies, pushed by farm-state lobbyists, that promote overproduction and provide farmers with billions of dollars in subsidies so that agri-giants like Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland can buy corn cheaply; the environmental costs of using nitrogen fertilizer to increase yields; the questionable efficiency of bulk-feeding corn to cattle, which results in tasty steaks but a considerable waste of food energy--the meat provides less nutrition than the corn it takes to produce it. "Of all the species that have figured out how to thrive in a world dominated by Homo sapiens, surely no other has succeeded more spectacularly--has colonized more acres and bodies--than Zea mays, the grass that domesticated its domesticator," author Michael Pollan writes in his 2006 book, "Omnivore's Dilemma," in which he marveled at the taxpayer money that goes into the corn-farming industry and the environmental issues that result. "You have to wonder why we Americans don't worship this plant as fervently as the Aztecs; like they once did, we make extraordinary sacrifices to it."
(read the rest), or check out the chapter on corn in Michael Pollan's:
"The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals" (Michael Pollan)
