The Fall-Ness of Corn

October 17, 2007, 1:00 pm; posted by
Filed under Articles, Erin, Featured  | 3 Comments

Everyone knows that non-Brach’s candy corn gives you AIDS. Everyone, that is, who reads The Onion. Everyone also knows that Aztecs sing drinking songs about “maize, maize, potato.” Everyone, that is, who knows Seàn Cullen’s stand-up routine called “House.”

These facts notwithstanding, each fall I, my friends, and my family consume a healthy amount of corn — both candy and regular — but usually refrain from singing Aztec drinking songs. At this very moment, on my little table, my housemates and I have three ears of Indian Corn — that beautiful dry multicolored stuff — tied together as a centerpiece. As the days get colder and the weather decides, well, maybe I won’t spoil them after all with another month of 80-degree temperatures, we start to see how and perhaps why corn (“maize,” or scientifically, zea mays) is such a staple in our culture.

First, corn is a starchy vegetable, which makes it wonderful to add to soups, stews, and any light meal. One can often find “meat-lover” (often read as ‘vegetable-hater’) recipes trying to overcompensate for their lack of starch by being sludgy or including too much rice. Or they can be served over none other than — ta da! Cornbread!

Second, corn has been a staple in the Americas for much longer than the European colonization. Maize was one of the original “three sisters” — along with squash and beans — of the Native Americans of the Atlantic Northeast. Can anyone remember back to kindergarten, when a kindly older lady sat you and your classmates down, showing you how those silly Pilgrims were just starving away in the New World, until the kind and benevolent Native Americans came and shared their bounty, and taught the Pilgrims to grow corn, resulting in a rare thing: a cooperation and fellowship of two very different cultures?

In fact, corn only spread to the rest of the world after European contact with the New World in the 15th and 16th centuries. The rest of the story of the cultural exchange was not nearly so pleasant, if you recall.

We can also reflect on the delightful experience of toting oneself and a gaggle of confused friends around a maize maze — and the myriad of bad puns that can come from such an unfortunate homonym. Honestly, what could be better than understanding how a lab rat feels, except that instead of cheese, maize maze participants are usually promised cinnamon apple cider?

Corn is also on the forefront of science. It is being used to create biomass fuels such as ethanol since 2005, in efforts to reduce the cost of food, heat, and just about any other transported good affected by rising fuel costs; most of which increase in demand during the fall and winter months.

So although this little blurb is turning out a bit more argumentative than I had hoped, please know that I’m not trying to convince anyone to become a vegetarian, renounce other wonderful fall foods like chili or pumpkin pie, or even to support the University of Michigan (their colors may be blue and maize, but they are still your mortal enemy when it comes to football — believe me, root for Michigan State).

However, I am hoping that you’ll stop this fall and take some time to savor the colorful, healthy, knee-high-by-the-fourth-of-July, American-grown, Veggie-tales-forsaken, delightful fall staple that is corn.

And I’m not sure that candy corn counts.


Comments

3 Comments to “The Fall-Ness of Corn”

  1. Steve on October 17th, 2007 3:38 pm

    The Indian Law professor (who’s also an Indian law professor) that I know is adamant that ‘Indian’ is the proper term for the indigenous people of the Americas — and I weep at the wasteful use of resources that is the manufacture of corn ethanol.

    But I sure do love me some cornbread.

  2. David on October 17th, 2007 9:51 pm

    I have fond memories of my Dad bringing home a trunk full of corn in the Fall and shucking it, boiling it, buttering and salting it, and then comsuming it while hot butter ran down my chin. I would never do that now, but it was fun as a kid.

  3. Phil on October 20th, 2007 1:26 pm

    Actually, maize was a relative newcomer in the diet of Native Americans of the Atlantic Northeast when Europeans arrived. It was developed in the area of modern Mexico and did not become a common food in the northeast until less than 1,000 years ago. For the more than ten thousand years of North American Native American history before that, other foods were more important, such as pumpkin seeds (valued for the protein they provided and their portability), sunflower seeds and greens.

    Originally, the flesh of pumpkins and other squashes was probably not consumed by Native Americans because the wild plants were very bitter until many years of domestication later made them palatable, and pie was of course brought to America by the Europeans. So pumpkin seeds are a more traditional fall food than either corn or pumpkin pie! Not surprisingly, today pumpkin seeds are recognized as a health food.

    See Ancient Gardening in South Carolina: 1,000 B.C. — A.D. 1700, http://www.cas.sc.edu/ANTH/gardening/ancientgardening.html for more information.

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