I have been reading Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, which has made me think about how corn has, according to Pollan, colonized us. It is an interesting premise that a plant has used us in order to perpetuate its species.
Corn is everywhere and it is in everything we eat; it is in the feed of the dairy and beef cattle, it is in the chicken feed, and it is used in almost every processed food preparation. For a period of time, I developed food sensitivities and one of the chief suspects was corn. I tried to avoid corn, which I soon realized was absolutely impossible. Corn was even in my cosmetics and my toothpaste.
Pollan explains that corn is almost incapable of surviving without us. That the same reason corn is so attractive to us, its rich, large kernels, also means that it can’t easily reseed itself. When corn is left unharvested on a field, the thick outer husk prevents the seeds from scattering. If the husk lies on the ground and manages to sprout, the volume of seeds means that each sprouting kernel would suffocate the other. A neighbour grows corn in the back fields of the farm, each harvest a few husks are left on the ground, even though they have been planting corn there for several years, I have never seen one corn volunteer. Pollan estimates that if we stopped planting corn, it would only last one or two seasons before it died out.
An interesting question is, “How did corn become corn?
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