The story of corn is the story of the American people.
—from Singing Valleys, by Dorothy Giles
It would be hard to overstate the importance of corn to the United States. Or, to be more accurate, it would be hard to overstate the importance of maize.
The term corn actually means “the most important cereal crop of a region.”1 Hence, wheat was traditionally the corn of England, oats were the corn of Ireland and Scotland, rye was the corn of northern Germany, and in South Africa, the grain known as Bantu corn is millet. When English-speaking settlers reached the New World, they called the grain grown by Native Americans “Indian corn.” Which explains why, even though no one in Europe had seen maize before explorers reached the Americas, one sees references to corn in older literature. (Underscoring the idea of “dominant grain,” maize was also sometimes called “Virginia wheat.”)2 Only in the United States does calling a grain corn always and only mean some form of maize.3
Zea mays, or maize, is not merely the dominant grain of the New World; it is the only indigenous cereal grain of the Americas.4 It was not the only starch. There were seeds, roots, and tubers—just not other cereal grains. However, no other food plant was as universally important or as widely dispersed as maize.
Maize was exceptional in that it could adapt to just about any environment, and it grows with surprising speed. Trade routes carried it throughout the Americas, where it was adopted by Native American groups as varied as the conditions in which maize was soon growing. In fact, by the time Europeans first caught sight of the new continents, Native Americans had developed more than two hundred varieties of maize.5
Maize became as important to Europeans settling the Americas as it had been to the indigenous people. It became so important, in fact, that Americans forgot that there was a time when it was not their corn. That is why textbooks teach that corn saved the settlers at Jamestown and Plymouth.
Maize did save those early settlers, but it has had a far greater impact on American history than that. It became the dominant grain of the colonies, and then of the growing United States. In other words, maize became corn. Maize made the country possible, and then, as corn, it made the country successful.
(It is worth noting that, while the Taino word mahiz was the first word for this cereal grain that Spanish explorers heard, it was by no means the only name this plant had in the Americas. Across both South and North America, every language group had its own name for the grain. So, for most Native Americans, the word maize was just as foreign as the word corn. However, mahiz was what Europeans heard first, and it is the term that stuck among Europeans. It was adopted for the grain’s Latin name, Zea mays, and, of course, is still used in Spanish-speaking countries. For Native Americans in the United States and Canada, however, as for others, it became corn.)
Today, more corn is grown and harvested in the United States than wheat and rice combined—nearly 73 million acres are dedicated to the growing of corn. As it had done for the Maya, so corn did for the United States: it enabled a few to feed the many, so that endeavors other than agriculture might flourish. The Maya owed their mathematics, astronomy, and architecture more to Zea mays than to anything else. For us, it offered not only the freedom to pursue other things, but also the inspiration and even the raw materials for developing far beyond the almost entirely agricultural societies from which the country’s population emigrated. As Margaret Visser noted in her classic work Much Depends on Dinner, “Without corn, North America—and most particularly modern, technological North America—is inconceivable.” Corn has an impact on almost everyone. Life would be completely different—and a lot more expensive—without it.
While corn was and is vital to the country as a whole, it practically created the Midwest. Some have compared the spread of corn across the United States to the sweeping conquest of the great empire builders. It is an apt comparison. Corn made it possible to “conquer” the frontier with astonishing speed and created an empire of farms, transportation, and cities that made the country wealthy. The Midwest is not where corn started, but it is where it became powerful.
Corn has not been without its issues. From the first outbreaks of pellagra to recent worries about high-fructose corn syrup and GMOs, problems and fears have arisen. To even begin to think about current issues, however, people need to understand the importance of corn, or it will not be possible to find workable solutions. This book addresses these concerns and others, but the primary focus is establishing what corn is, what it means, and how it shaped the region that came to be known as the Midwest. The book examines corn’s trajectory, starting in the distant past and pulling together the many disparate threads that have woven corn so deeply into the fabric of the modern world. How was a weed from Mexico transformed into a food that could support most of the indigenous people of two continents? How did corn evolve from something the first English settlers grudgingly accepted to being the dominant substance in agriculture? How did it affect lives and settlement patterns? How did it build cities, create industries, and transform the way business is done around the world? How was it transformed to meet people’s needs, economic and nutritional? How is the food supply supported, even determined, by this ubiquitous grain? How did hybridizing transform farming? These questions will be answered in this book, but other, less weighty topics will also be addressed, from snack food to corn festivals, whiskey to breakfast cereal.
Many of these topics and issues have been addressed in other books, but not tied together like they are here—and not with a focus on the Midwest. A lot of miles have been covered, a lot of experts consulted, a lot of books read, and a lot of places visited in the pursuit of this tale. It is a story worth knowing.
The world has changed dramatically since the first settlers learned to depend on maize—the corn of the Americas. But Zea mays has remained at the center of life. Nowhere is that more true than in the American Heartland. The history of maize is, to a surprising extent, the history of the Midwest.