Blazon Columbia’s emblem,
The bounteous, golden Corn!
Eons ago, of the great sun’s glow
And the joy of the earth, ’t was born.
From Superior’s shore to Chile,
From the ocean of dawn to the west,
With its banners of green and tasseled sheen,
It sprang at the sun’s behest;
And by dew and shower, from its natal hour,
With honey and wine ’t was fed,
Till the gods were fain to share with men
The perfect feast outspread.
For the rarest boon to the land they loved
Was the Corn so rich and fair,
Nor star nor breeze o’er the farthest seas
Could find its like elsewhere.
—from “Columbia’s Emblem,”
by Edna Dean Proctor
Maize is a grass, like other cereal grains. However, it has a far larger seed head than any other cereal grain. That was one of the things that caught Columbus’s attention when he first saw piles of maize in the Caribbean.1 However, though maize was new to him, it was already ancient in the Americas.
Archaeologists and anthropologists have long argued over the precise point of origin of maize, though all have agreed for some time that it was in a relatively small area of Mexico or Central America. They have also long argued over which plant or plants might have given rise to maize. However, research now points to Oaxaca, Mexico, or possibly Oaxaca and the neighboring Tehuacán Valley, as the place that a wild grain known as teosinte was bred to create maize.2
Estimates as to when the earliest experiments with breeding teosinte began have ranged from 6000 B.C. to 4300 B.C. However, the most recent research has pushed that date back to possibly as early as 8000 B.C.3 While there were those who once argued that the development of maize might have occurred accidentally, before grain was domesticated, evidence now strongly supports the idea of intentional human intervention in the breeding of something recognizable as maize.4
For most of history, throughout the world, farming was small-scale, with crops being hand-harvested. A farmer could easily notice the idiosyncrasies of individual plants and save seeds from those that had interesting traits, and then breed the plants that grew from those seeds. This was certainly true in the Americas as maize was developing. Because this farmer-crop dynamic is really effective, the number of varieties of maize expanded rapidly.
Teosinte still grows in some parts of Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras. Looking at clumps of teosinte growing in the Jardín Etnobotánico in Oaxaca, Mexico, one has to admire those early farmers for seeing the possibilities of this grass with its tiny, pencil-thin heads of seeds. However, though the family resemblance is only slight, DNA tests confirm the relationship. Plus teosinte easily breeds with maize. Interestingly, when it comes to breeding and multiplying, while teosinte does just fine on its own, maize doesn’t. While domestication negatively affected the ability of all grains to survive on their own, maize is the only cereal grain that has been rendered incapable of dispersing its seeds without human intervention. It is so domesticated it can’t get along without humans—and this happened very early on in the domestication process.5
Almost as soon as maize was developed, it was spreading. In fact, one of the reasons the debate over its place of origin went on for so long is that evidence of its presence is found in so much of Mexico soon after it first appeared, with the dates given for its spreading nearly identical to the dates given for its origin. Maize continued to be bred as it moved, and within a few centuries there were maize varieties for a tremendous range of climates and soils.
By 3500 B.C., maize was a staple in most of Mexico and Central America. It was so well established that, as the Maya civilization began to develop around 1500 B.C., it was taken for granted that maize had always existed. It has been estimated that as much as 60 percent of the daily diet of the ancient Maya was maize.6 It was not simply the foundation of Maya agriculture, but also the cornerstone of Maya religion. One Maya creation story maintained that humans were created from maize.7
The date for when maize spread into South America keeps getting pushed back earlier and earlier, with its wide dispersal hinting at how active trade routes were at a very early date. Evidence now suggests that maize had spread to equatorial South America by about 4000 B.C.8 Trade routes carried maize north and east, as well, until in time maize had become the primary food plant of American cultures ranging from the tribes of the Caribbean Islands to the cliff dwellers of the American Southwest, the Inca of Peru to the mound builders of the Mississippi. By 500 A.D., it was being planted by the Iroquois in what would eventually become upstate New York.9
Not too surprisingly, almost everywhere maize went, squash and beans (aka common beans, the beans of the New World) were also adopted. The nutritionally complementary “Three Sisters”—maize, beans, and squash—are all indigenous to approximately the same area of Mexico/Central America, and all came into use around the same time.10
However, despite their shared histories, maize was the most revered of the Three Sisters. It was the reliable staple and the most versatile ingredient. It could be cooked as porridge, ground and baked into flatbreads, whipped into frothy drinks, used as flour to thicken soups, and fermented into alcoholic beverages.11
Native Americans did not simply know how to grow and eat maize. They knew how to process it to enhance its nutritional value. Certainly, squash and beans, plus everything from berries to game (maize was usually the foundation of the diet, but Native Americans had an impressive range of foods available in most areas) helped round out the menu, but the real reason Native Americans could thrive on this least nutritious of the cereal grains is because of a process called nixtamalization.12
The Aztecs called processed corn kernels nixtamal13 or nextamalli, and from this term English got the word nixtamalization. The word nextamalli combines the Nahuatl words nextli, which means ashes, and tamalli, which refers to the maize dough. (And yes, this is also the source of the Spanish word tamale.)14 Nixtamalization involved boiling and then soaking maize in an alkali solution: lye made from wood ashes, or lime made from crushed limestone or seashells. (This was done to the starchy, hard, dry varieties of corn. Sweet corn did not exist until later, and was not the maize/corn that sustained the many cultures that relied on it.) The process of nixtamalization makes it easier to remove the tough outer hull of the maize kernels. In addition to making the maize easier to grind, it improves the amino acid profile and “unlocks” the niacin in maize, which otherwise cannot be absorbed by those eating it.15 In other words, this process makes maize more nutritious, overcoming the serious drawback of living on the grain. Nixtamal, also known as hominy or pozole, is also better suited to long-term storage, which was vital to Native Americans.
Europeans first encountered maize when they first encountered the Americas. This is known because most explorers kept diaries. Columbus in particular, eager to prove the value of his discovery, wrote down everything he experienced, including what he ate. The explorers were fed maize on islands on which they landed, and they saw it growing everywhere.
The word maize is the anglicized version of the Spanish word maíz, which in turn was the Spanish rendering of the Taino word mahiz. The Arawakan-speaking Taino were one of the groups of islanders who inhabited what are now Cuba, Jamaica, Hispaniola, and the Virgin Islands, and who entertained the newcomers.16 Given this linguistic progression, and the movement of maize before it reached the Caribbean, it is thought that the Taino word might also be a local spin on some earlier group’s word for the grain.
Before he learned the word maíz, as he rendered it (thus giving the Spanish their spelling), Columbus referred to the grain by a name already familiar to him—panizo, Spanish for millet, though also used generically to mean grain.17 (And the French would later call maize “Spanish millet.”18 Given all the misapplied names of this era, it’s easy to see why confusion often still exists.) In parts of Latin America, the word panizo is still used for maize.19 Dazzled by the lushness of the islands, which he had reached only four days earlier, Columbus wrote on October 16, 1492, “The island is very green and flat, and extremely fertile. I can well believe that they sow and harvest panizo and their other crops the whole year round.”20
(Columbus wasn’t the only one who called maize millet. In South Africa, the word for maize is mealies, which came from some form of the word millet, either the Portuguese milho or the Dutch milie.21 Then, on top of that, as noted above, the grain often called Bantu corn is, in fact, millet. On the plant, millet clusters around a central stem, looking vaguely like miniature maize, or close enough for someone trying to describe a completely new plant. Maize would, as it spread around the world, be adopted most readily in places that used millet, because it has much in common with millet, from being easily harvested by hand to making good porridge, mush, and polenta. However, maize was sweeter and more flavorful than millet, so millet was replaced.)22
In addition to writing, Columbus carried home anything he could, including a few island natives and some gold dust—and maize seeds. The Spanish were soon growing maize. However, in an age when so many were cruising the world’s oceans, it didn’t take long for maize to go global.
In and around Spain, maize found its first popularity among the poor. It was easy to grow, grew quickly, and, even more to their liking, was too new to be included in the list of things that got taxed.23 However, an easily grown, impressively large grain would soon become a popular commodity among all those who traded.
The dominant trading power in Europe through most of the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance was Venice. Masters of the spice trade, the Venetians knew a likely trade item when they saw it. They introduced maize into the eastern Mediterranean, where it traveled up through the Balkans before doubling back and heading through Europe. This circuitous route eventually carried maize into all of northern Europe, from Russia to Britain. However, because it had arrived through trade routes coming from the East, for many years it was known as “Turkish wheat”—except in Turkey, where they called it roums corn, or foreign corn.24
Interestingly, the label “Turkish wheat,” along with the appearance of maize worldwide within only a few decades of Columbus’s sailing, has led some to argue about when maize was actually disseminated. Might some ambitious South Americans have carried it across the Pacific, they ask? Anyone familiar with Thor Heyerdahl’s classic book Kon Tiki will know that some support the idea of early westward travel, and Heyerdahl’s adventure proved that the journey could be made in the boats built in pre-Columbian South America. However, it is something of a leap to extrapolate the introduction of a new crop throughout the South Pacific and into Asia from Heyerdahl’s primitive craft surviving the trip from South America to Easter Island. The other argument offered for pre-Columbian dissemination of maize is that it could hardly have made it to China by 1516 if it had been traded only since the 1490s. However, trade routes had long existed between Europe and China (for hundreds of years, in fact), so goods were moving regularly and rapidly between the continents. Plus Vasco da Gama had made the journey to India by 1498. These are not the only arguments against an earlier dissemination of maize. One might ask why only maize, and not other seeds, such as chiles or beans, would have been taken. Possibly more compelling, given how active the trade routes were, is how unlikely it was that something like this would have been kept a secret and then suddenly be launched into use everywhere after 1492. So while it is possible—humans were remarkably mobile for most of their history—it seems unlikely that maize arrived anywhere outside the Americas prior to Columbus’s sailing.
As a result, despite the sincerity of those trying to make a case for pre-Columbian dissemination of maize, most scholars include maize as part of the Columbian exchange. In addition, recent research tracing genetic markers of maize across Europe seems to confirm that maize was introduced shortly after Columbus reached the New World.25
However, the arguments do underscore the lightning speed with which maize moved around the world. Everyone was trading it. Magellan, when he headed off on his circumnavigation of the globe in 1519, carried seeds with him, which is how maize got introduced into the Philippines.26
In 1494, Pope Alexander VI divided the world between rival nations Spain and Portugal, in the Treaty of Tordesillas. The treaty created a line of demarcation that ran from pole to pole about 320 miles west of the Cape Verde Islands. Spain was given everything west of the line (most of the Western Hemisphere), and Portugal got everything east of the line, European countries excepted. This gave Portugal control of Africa, and the Portuguese had big plans for maize in Africa. They would introduce it and create great farms to raise the fast-growing new grain. It would be good, cheap food for the Africans. Maize would be an easy way to feed a large community—or a ship full of slaves. In fact, maize was so easy to grow that Africans readily embraced it, and this new, easy source of food led to an increase in the continent’s population.27 Even today, maize provides nearly 70 percent of the calories consumed in parts of Africa, a figure matched in only a handful of other places, including the grain’s native Mexico and Central America.28
Unfortunately, both for poor Europeans and Africans, those early Spanish and Portuguese explorers didn’t bother learning about nixtamalization. Of course, no one knew about vitamins and amino acids back then. Food was food. Until, of course, it became a plague.
Because of maize’s nutritional shortcomings, its adoption in areas where diets were generally limited to starchy staples led to huge epidemics of pellagra. Because people with a more varied diet avoided the disease, pellagra was essentially an affliction of the poor.
Early symptoms of pellagra are vague, but as the disease develops, the skin begins to redden, then thicken, developing into a distinctive and spreading dermatitis. The dermatitis was thought to look like roses branded on the skin.29 In 1735, Gaspar Casal became the first doctor to describe the disease. He called it “rose sickness” (mal de la rosa), reflecting on the discoloration. However, the name that would stick was coined in 1771 by Italian physician Francesco Frapolli, who created the name from the Italian words for “skin” (pelle) and “rough” (agra)—pellagra.30
From dermatitis, pellagra progresses to diarrhea, and then dementia. In those cases where death occurs, it’s usually a side effect, as nausea or delusions often led to severe malnutrition or suicide. It took people a while to make the connection between maize and pellagra. Once they made that connection, theories began to multiply as to what caused the illness. Was there some sort of blight, as with the ergot that sometimes poisoned rye harvests? Was some toxin created as the maize disintegrated? Because the severity of the symptoms could vary, depending on time of year, differences in diet, and different levels of sun exposure, the answer remained elusive. It plagued Africa and southern Europe for nearly two hundred years before it made its first appearance in the United States in 1906. It spread rapidly among the poor of the American South.31 More theories and more studies followed, as the world searched for a solution to this puzzle.
British physician James Lind had discovered in 1753 that there was “something” in citrus fruit that prevent scurvy, but no one knew yet what that “something” was, or if things other than limes and lemons had that something.32 It wasn’t until 1912 that the first vitamins were identified. Polish biochemist Casimir Funk found that a “vital factor” was missing from polished rice, and the absence of that life-giving factor caused a nerve disease in the pigeons with which he was working. He wondered if this “vital factor,” now known as vitamins, might be connected to other diseases.33 The race was on to find out how many vitamins there were and which ones might prevent diseases. Joseph Goldberger of the U.S. Public Health Service was convinced that pellagra was caused by a nutritional deficiency, and by 1920 he had proved that it could be cured or prevented if people supplemented their diets with brewer’s yeast. However, Goldberger’s work was ignored, so convinced were people that pellagra was an infectious disease.34 It wasn’t until 1937 that it was officially accepted that supplementation with niacin (abundant in brewer’s yeast) could prevent and even cure pellagra.35 However, even once pellagra was cured, in much of Europe the memory of the disease led to maize being unpopular in areas that could afford to ignore it.
Why, given the nutritional deficiencies of maize, would people still want it? Actually, it solves more problems than it creates. The speed and ease of growing it, even in less than ideal conditions, make it a reliable source of calories in places where getting enough food is an issue. In addition, it can feed both humans and animals. Plus, people really liked the taste of corn.
Interestingly, new breeds of maize may help solve another nutritional problem that was first identified in the early 1930s: kwashiorkor, an often fatal protein-deficiency disease most common among young children in Africa.36 It is, in fact, a form of malnutrition that occurs when children are weaned off of mother’s milk and switched to a diet heavy in starches (and this includes cassava, sweet potato, and plantain, not just maize). Today, high-lysine breeds of maize are being introduced, in an effort to make the grain the cure, rather than the cause, of malnutrition.37
Because maize is so adaptable, it has made itself at home in areas far removed from its tropical origins. Some varieties can endure colder weather or shorter growing seasons. Some grow on mountains ranging up to 12,000 feet. Different varieties thrive in areas with annual rainfalls ranging from 10 inches to 400 inches.38
Most of the maize that traveled to Europe before the discovery of sweet corn was of the starchy, hard varieties, which were generally less useful in traditional cuisines than the other, abundant grains already available. One exception was in Italy, where cornmeal quickly replaced semolina for making polenta. Even today, maize’s primary European popularity is along the Mediterranean, though it is also tremendously important in Romania. (In Romania, aside from entering the cuisine, maize also contributed to the region’s mythos. Another symptom of pellagra is light sensitivity; sufferers try to avoid light. It is thought that this may have been the origin of the vampire tales that began to arise at this time.)39
Though sweet corn and popcorn have now made their way into the European culinary repertoire, and are rapidly growing in popularity, and Mexican restaurants that began appearing in Europe since the 1970s have introduced uses of cornmeal not previously considered, Europeans still often view maize as animal fodder. This opinion is not unique to Europe, and it is not an unreasonable opinion. In Pakistan, India, and Egypt, maize is raised for feeding cattle almost to the exclusion of humans eating it. Worldwide, more maize is grown for animals than for humans. Even in the United States, the starchy corn varieties to which Europeans were initially exposed are used primarily as animal fodder. In only a few regions is maize grown primarily for human consumption, though they are substantial regions. They include southern and eastern Africa, Indonesia, and parts of China, plus those areas that have had maize the longest: Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean, and the South American Andes.40
Maize was, and is, an international success story. However, it still enjoys its greatest importance in the hemisphere of its birth.
The major impact of this native grain on South America, Central America, and Mexico occurred long before the United States existed. In much of the region that would become known as Latin America, maize had millennia to become the focus of diet and culture. Little has changed since pre-Columbian times in regard to the uses of maize. People still process maíz into nixtamal, to make it more nutritious and easier to grind. Grinding machines have replaced grinding stones in all but the most remote areas, but people still turn the ground maize into tamales, arepas, pupusas, atole, and tortillas. Or they cook whole nixtamal/pozole/hominy in rich broths. Despite many lifestyle and cultural changes over the centuries, maize remains the cornerstone of the cuisine in Latin America. As one Mexican homemaker declared, “Without maíz, we would not eat.”
In 1954, Pablo Neruda published Elementary Odes, which included the poem “Ode to Maize,” defining maize as both the source and geography of America. Neruda spoke primarily of South America and Mexico, but this importance was to be equally true in what would become the United States—and in time, it became even truer. Today, the United States produces almost 40 percent of all the maize harvested in the world.41
Maize doesn’t grow everywhere in the Americas. Most varieties have a short growing season, but those varieties need that season to be hot. As a result, maize did not have much of an impact on the far south of South America or far north of North America. Because most of the key varieties of corn available even a hundred years ago didn’t do well above the 50th parallel,42 Canada was not initially part of corn’s sweeping conquest of the prairies.43 But the history of the United States was planted in cornfields.
As Dorothy Giles wrote in her 1940 classic Singing Valleys: The Story of Corn, “corn provided infant America with a backbone while it was developing the use of its legs. America was growing, quite literally, up the cornstalk.”44
Maize saved the earliest settlers of Jamestown and Plymouth. It was not an easy salvation, however, at least in Jamestown, as the first British settlers wanted wheat, and they nearly starved while trying to grow the familiar.
The colony of Jamestown was hampered by a large percentage of “gentlemen” who did not wish to work. They were neither as resilient nor as adventurous, on the whole, as those who had come earlier as explorers. They weren’t there to discover new foods. They wanted a quick gold strike and a swift return home. However, in Jamestown, there was one man who would make a difference: the adventurer and soldier John Smith. Smith understood the need to adopt native foods to survive. He was the first to envision a nation where the middle class would grow. He learned the local languages. He wrote books, still read today, about Native Americans and their plants. And he recognized that the only “gold” worth pursuing in the new land was maize.45 As Giles relates,
Only in the spring of 1609, when John Smith was President [of the colony], was he able to set the first cornfield in Jamestown. . . . Smith’s cornfield comprised forty acres. It flourished as had nothing else the settlers had planted. . . . Carefully he counted the ears, calculated on the grains. Here were bread and hominy. Here was hot porridge to put heart into men who had the wilderness before them. Here was security. Here was Virginia’s future.46
As it turned out, it was more than just Virginia’s future. It saved the Pilgrims who landed at Plymouth, Massachusetts, more than a decade later. It wasn’t that none of the settlers knew how to farm. Some of them did. It was that they didn’t have anything that would grow in the various adverse conditions in which they generally found themselves, from the rocky soil of New England to the swampy, saline site of Jamestown. But corn would grow—and grow easily. As British explorer John Lawson would write in the 1700s, in his History of Carolina, “The Indian Corn, or Maiz, proves the most useful Grain in the World; and had it not been for the Fruitfulness of this Species, it would have proved very difficult to have settled some of the Plantations in America.”
Maize became corn when English-speaking colonists in North America began to rely on it. Spanish settlers farther south had adopted the word maíz, but to the Thirteen Colonies and later the United States, it was first “Indian corn” and then simply “corn.” It had become the most important cereal grain. It was one of the things that would make the new nation possible. And it would become much loved.
During the Stamp Act controversy, one of a series of disputes over taxes that would in time lead to revolt, Benjamin Franklin wrote to a London paper rebutting an article that said Americans would not be able to give up buying British tea, implying that, without tea, the colonists would never be able to choke down breakfast, since folks in Britain assumed Indian corn would be disagreeable and indigestible. Franklin responds,
Pray let me, an American, inform the gentleman, who seems quite ignorant of the matter, that Indian corn, take it for all in all, is one of the most agreeable and wholesome grains in the world; that its green ears roasted are a delicacy beyond expression; that samp, hominy, succatash, and nokehock, made of it, are so many pleasing varieties; and that a johny, or hoe-cake, hot from the fire, is better than a Yorkshire muffin.47
In other words, Americans would have no problem eating corn without British tea.
Corn was tasty, as Franklin noted, but it was something far more important: it was affordable and available. Up through the end of the 1700s, wheat was costly and rare. Corn was cheap and abundant. Most Americans were working folk who couldn’t imagine spending two weeks’ wages for the luxury of wheat when a few days’ work would buy them a bushel of corn. With almost two hundred years to develop a taste for corn, the colonists had become very attached to it by the time they parted company with Britain.48 From Boston brown bread in the North to hush puppies in the South, it had become part of the growing American culinary repertoire. (In fact, Americans missed it when overseas. Benjamin Franklin longed for it while living in London, and despite being a devoted Francophile and gourmet, Thomas Jefferson planted it in his garden while living in Paris.)49
It should be noted that, up to this point, people were eating the starchy types of corn that give us cornmeal, masa, grits, hominy, and corn flour. Picked green, at the unripe or “milky stage,” this type of corn could be roasted or boiled and enjoyed essentially just like sweet corn. However, the sweet corn that is now so popular, both on and off the cob, is a comparatively new discovery—and is, in fact, not the most widely grown corn. The Iroquois appear to have been growing it in central New York by the 1600s, but European settlers didn’t discover it until 1799. However, it wasn’t widely cultivated until after the Civil War. After that, its popularity grew steadily, and since World War I, canned sweet corn has outsold all other canned vegetables in the United States. (And, as an aside, in a world where labels are often strange and fluid things, while many fruits are considered vegetables, corn is the only cereal grain considered a vegetable.)
As Americans spread westward, they took corn with them. From the Ohio Valley and across the “Northwest Territory” to the Great Plains, corn found its true home, the place it would shape and that would be called by its name: the Corn Belt.
Maize is now one of the world’s three most important food crops, in third place behind wheat and rice. However, maize is the only one of these three not grown primarily for human consumption.50 So, while it ranks third as a food crop, because of its many other uses (from cattle feed to packing material to alternative energy sources), more maize is grown and harvested than either of the other staple grains.
While corn is grown almost everywhere in the United States, more than 50 percent of the country’s corn comes from Iowa, Illinois, Nebraska, and Minnesota.51 Other major corn-growing states are Indiana, Ohio, Wisconsin, South Dakota, Michigan, Missouri, and Kansas. So the Midwest is almost defined by corn.
While soybeans and winter wheat have made inroads into the vast region of the Midwest once known as the Corn Belt, corn is still the major crop of the region. Historically, corn acreage in the Midwest exceeded that of all other crops, and it is this great belt that helped form and define the culture and economy of the Midwest. It became more than a food source; it became an icon. It is not merely consumed; it is celebrated in the novels and poetry that record life in the Midwest. It defines so much of the Midwest that it is hard to imagine discussing the region at all without speaking of corn. It is the historic impact of corn in the Midwest, as well as the present and possible future of corn, that will be examined more closely in the pages that follow.
The rose may bloom for England,
The lily for France unfold;
Ireland may honor the shamrock,
Scotland her thistle bold:
But the shield of the great Republic,
The glory of the West,
Shall bear a stalk of tasseled Corn,
Of all our wealth the best.
—from “Columbia’s Emblem,”
by Edna Dean Proctor