Ode to Corn

We've been hearing quite a bit lately about the evils of corn, which is implicated in rampant monoculture, tasteless processed food, and an epidemic of diabetes. It's easy to lose track of the fact that corn has so thoroughly worked its way into our lives and our economy because it is arguably the most prolific and versatile plant on the planet.

Corn plays a role in creation myths from all parts of the Americas, and the iconography of quite a few indigenous Central American cultures depict gods with ears of corn incorporated into their figures.

The original inhabitants of the Americas learned that mixing ground corn with an alkaline substance like ash or ground limestone greatly enhanced its nutritional value. When Europeans began cultivating and relying on maize, they failed to make use of this ancient information. Instead they mostly just ground it, much as they'd traditionally done with wheat flour. In Italy this resulted in widespread suffering from pellagra, a nutritional deficiency disease, among the poorer people who subsisted mainly on polenta. But the disease was largely unknown in the Americas for thousands of years before the Europeans arrived, because of the process of nixtmailzation, or mixing corn with an alkaline substance like corn or limestone.

It's ironic that the indigenous Americans processed corn using methods that improved it, while contemporary industry processes it in ways that robs it of its amazing vitality and destroys our bodies and our land.