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Corn: An Ancient American Legacy

Corn on the cob slathered with butter, salted popcorn, corn chips—Americans consume and produce more corn than any other nation on earth. Today, each American eats an average of 52 quarts of popped corn a year. Popcorn grown in the United States is also munched in Mexico City, Tokyo, Seoul, Beijing, and London, and corn on the cob is even sold at Moscow’s famed Gorky Park. Yet popcorn and corn on the cob account for a minuscule fraction of the gigantic mountain of 34 billion bushels of corn produced across the globe each year, one-third of it in the United States. All of that corn is descended from a plant domesticated and cultivated by ancient Americans beginning about ten thousand years ago.

The ancient ancestor of what we know today as corn is a grass called teosinte. Ancient people in central Mexico, probably women, selected desirable seeds from teosinte and over many generations managed to transform the small grass seeds into rows of corn kernels arrayed around a central cob. Slowly, during thousands of years, ancient agriculturalists developed many varieties of corn adapted to different growing conditions, with different nutritional qualities and varying productivity (the number of kernels grown from one corn seed). The remarkable adaptability of the corn plant and the high food value of the corn kernels caused the crop to spread among ancient Americans throughout the Western Hemisphere.

Entirely unknown to Europeans when they arrived in the New World in 1492, corn acquired the name by which it is known in most of the world today: maize, which is derived from mahiz (“life-giver”), the word for corn Christopher Columbus learned from the Taino Indians he first encountered. It is no wonder ancient Americans worshipped maize gods, given how important corn was to their survival. Columbus and other Spaniards carried corn back to Europe in 1493, and within a generation corn seeds had sprouted for the first time not only in Europe but also in the Middle East, Africa, India, and China.

At first, people outside the Americas did not find corn an appetizing food. An English botanist in the seventeenth century spoke for many others when he declared corn a food of the “barbarous Indians which know no better.” He pronounced corn “a more convenient food for swine than for man.” But Europeans in the New World, following Native American foodways, soon learned to eat corn ground into meal, often mixed with vegetables or meat, moistened, and served as a kind of mush they called samp or hominy or grits. Or they made a cornmeal dough that they baked in the coals of a fire or on an iron griddle to produce corn bread, which they also called hoecake, johnnycake, or corn pone—all of them adaptations of ancient American tortillas. Corn helped sustain Euro-Americans in the New World for centuries after 1492, just as it had ancient Americans for thousands of years before Europeans arrived.

Today corn is grown throughout the world and is a major commodity in global trade. The United States produces more than half of global corn exports, while Argentina, Brazil, and Ukraine account for another third. This exported corn goes to countries all around the world. Japan takes about a fifth of the global corn imports, and another third of corn imports goes to South Korea, Mexico, Egypt, and Taiwan.

Corn connects the United States to the rest of the world in many more ways than the export of millions of bushels of corn kernels. Only about a fifth of the U.S. corn crop is exported annually. The rest is used in dozens of products that Americans consume themselves as well as export to countries around the globe. The seventeenth-century English botanist was correct that corn is an excellent food for animals. Today, about half of the American corn crop is fed to livestock. Chances are that the beef, chicken, pork, and dairy products in American supermarkets came from animals that ate corn. And the United States exports billions of dollars’ worth of corn-fed meat and dairy products to the rest of the world every year. A similar pattern prevails in many of the other products corn is used to create, such as corn sugar used to sweeten hundreds of processed foods and corn by-products used, for example, in products as varied as skateboards, toothpaste, tires, batteries, and lipstick. Even pulling into a gas station for a fill-up often means pumping gasoline mixed with ethanol made from corn—about a fourth of the American corn crop is used to make ethanol fuel, a product that reduces American dependence on foreign sources of oil.

Questions for Analysis

Ask Historical Questions: How did ancient Americans contribute to the evolution of corn? Why does the United States produce so much corn today?

Consider the Context: How did corn contribute to changes in ancient American cultures and societies? Why did corn spread so rapidly throughout the world?

Analyze the Evidence: In what ways is corn used today? How do these compare to how ancient Americans used corn?