Life-Giving Corn

When I was a child, my mother would usually allow me in the kitchen while she worked. More than allow -- she often seemed to like it. She endorsed the motto of "learning by doing," inspired by the early 20th-century educator John Dewey.  When I was young, there was not much I could do by myself in the kitchen except watch up close.  But occasionally, there was a task I could do all by myself: shuck the corn.  However, she sent me outside to do it, knowing it could make a mess.

I would first open several sheets of newspaper, and spread them out on the driveway (the way I had been shown).  That would make it easy to fold up the discarded parts of the corn into a large wad that could be tidily dropped into the trash.  It was pretty easy for me to pull off the green husks and most of the long "hairs."  (Only once was I startled by a small, now dead caterpillar that lay neatly in one of the rows of kernels.)  It was a bit of a chore, however, to try to get rid of every last one of those "hairs" on the ear of corn.  I might have been appreciative of those silks if I had know that it was through them that the cob of corn had been brought to life, those strands being the upper female part of the plant's flower.

Over the past decades in the U.S., corn has been mentioned in the media mostly in regard to concerns about the amount of corn syrup in processed foods, or about the drawbacks of using food such as corn (rather than something like switchgrass) to make ethanol to add to gasoline. About the only time corn gets mentioned with exuberant appreciation is in the patriotic story of how in 1612 Capt. John Smith's ill-equipped Virginia colonists were saved by the bushels of corn they received from Native Americans.  And so, I'd like to speak a good word for the often overlooked corn (which is called "maize" in most of the world).

corn vendor
in India today

Those Virginia colonists were not the only people whose lives have been saved by corn.  When Columbus landed in Cuba, he found the production of maize going strong.  A similar discovery was made by Francisco Pizarro in the early 1500's.  The Inca nation (whose leader Pizarro captured) was vast:  2,200 miles long and containing nine million well-fed people.  Their lives were to a great part sustained by maize.  Even though corn contains little protein, its advantage over the world's other major grains (wheat and rice) is that it can be simply cooked and eaten without having to process the grain.

Moreover, the "sweet corn" bred for human eating is but one category of maize.  Even the Native Americans had field-corn as well for their domesticated animals (which in turn supported human life).  And they had flour corn, whose kernels are more suitable for making flour.  Not to mention that enduring cinema attraction, popcorn.

Guila Naquitz cave, Oaxaca, Mexico
(site of 6,250 year-old corn remains)

All these types date back to a form of wild grass in the Zea genus, whose seed-ear is minuscule.  Human cultivation enlarged that seed-ear.  The great chain of human life living off cultivated corn throughout the world has been traced back by archaeologists over 7,000 years!

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Do you have any childhood memories involving corn?            
           

(The photo of the vendor is by Babasteve.  That of the cave is by Jerry Friedman.

  Both are used under Creative Commons Attribution Generic licenses.)