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Corn

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Submitted By AlexW5792
Words 1243
Pages 5
Lend Me Your Ear
Introduction
Hey, I see you sitting there, looking a little bit lumpy, a little bit of a jaundiced hue. You’re sitting there looking all “sweet”, but I know deep down, you’re just about ready to POP! You know how I know? Because...you’re… corn. “What?” you say, “I’m not corn, I’m a person!” ah-ah-ah, you see, I am a firm believer that you are what you eat; and I’m fairly convinced that you, myself, and everyone else in America, eats corn.
<Beat>+<Beat in between sentences> About three years ago I was watching an episode of the Colbert Report in which he pointed out our nation’s insane dependence on corn. It made me realize just how unaware of corn we actually are. A good analogy our situation with corn, is that of the Bourne Series, where a man wakes to find he does not remember anything of his past, and must fight through a corrupted government to find the Truth. Like Mr. Bourne, we have forgotten just what corn means to us, and the hold it has over us. But by examining how our society became rooted in corn, and why our society will never be able to shuck its corn dependence, you can skip the violence and go straight for the understanding.

I’ll begin with explaining corn itself, or, The Corn Identity
The history of corn is summarized nicely by, surprise surprise, Mike Gibson of Iowa State University: Corn, known as Maize in all but a handful English-speaking countries, is a grain originally domesticated by peoples in Mesoamerica around 2,500 B.C. Corn was the major crop for the Aztecs, Mayas, Incas and various Pueblo dwellers of the southwestern United States. Next, it was discovered in Cuba by one Christopher Columbus in 1492 and distributed for growth across Europe, and finally brought to European colonies in Africa and Asia. Since, corn has become the single most important crop in the world, according to Business Insider Magazine.
The fact that corn is so important to the modern world is highlighted by the fact that 622,845 square miles of corn were planted in 2008 worldwide. To put that in perspective, it is roughly the area of Alaska, or 8 Kansas’s… in corn The largest national producer of corn in the world, you can be proud to know, is the United States of America, where According to the USDA's Annual Crop Production report, or 136,562 square miles of land were planted to corn in 2012, equating the size of Montana. The majority of the crop grown in the Corn Belt. In case you ever wondered where exactly the “Corn belt” was, it is located in Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Nebraska, Kansas, Ohio, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and parts of Missouri.
The Corn Supremacy
Of course the laws of supply and demand state that the demand actually has to be there if we’re going to create such a huge supply. As such, all of this corn growth has created a societal addiction to the grain, a Corn Supremacy, if you will.
Where does all this corn go?. The usual suspects come to mind, Livestock feed and the like, which accounts for 47% of the US’s corn usage, according the USDA’s grain report in 2011, the largest chunk of our harvest. A surprising amount of our harvest, 25%, went to the production of Ethanol, which I’ll save for another Informative. Another 12% of our corn was exported. The last 15% of corn went to “Non-ethanol products”. This is, of course, the bureaucratic term for “everything”. Yes, I mean “everything”.
Of course you know that corn is in a heck of a lot, if you’ve ever looked at the back of any processed food, you’ve probably seen “high fructose corn syrup. The average American consumed approximately 37.8 pounds of High Fructose Corn Syrup in 2008 according to the USDA’s “food per capita report”. Corn Syrup is in just about anything you can find, candy, preserves, crackers, cereal, butter, juices, sodas, canned meats, fast food, et cetera. Further in the category of food, corn is the main food for chickens, turkeys, and cows, meaning that the majority of our meat is just a corn bi-product.
However, our addiction to corn is not constrained to food stuffs. According to Agriculture dot com, corn is in some things you might not expect: porcelain, paper and cardboard, drywall, varnish, paint, glue, toothpaste, tires, leather and wax. Not only is it in these items, but it is also a major ingredient in plastic, so anything plastic you can find probably has corn in it.
In spite of this Addiction, don’t worry, we’ll be fine… as long as our supply is guaranteed, that is…

The Corn Ultimatum In the not so distant past, America went through a time where our supply of corn was in danger of disappearing. If you’re a fan of Ken Burn’s “The Dust Bowl”, then you are aware of that time, when overplanting in the American heartland caused to soil to become unusable for agricultural purposes. Regardless of this stall in American production, we may be headed towards something similar in the future, and we have started on a path towards this uncertain future, we’ve been given a Corn Ultimatu<Beat>
. According to CNN in July of 2012,
“the impact of the drought currently gripping the United States is real and tangible, as millions can attest. But the depth of the pain still falls short of that experienced by many in the Great Plains and beyond during the so-called Dust Bowl
Last Year’s drought threatened our supply of corn in a way unprecedented since the Great Depression. The U.S. Department of Agriculture projected a massive slump in the corn harvest, and a subsequent surge in corn prices, which in the end was proven true, but to a lesser extent than projected. However, according to a report by MSNBC in 2010:
“Increasingly dry conditions across much of the globe — including the U.S. — are likely over the next 30 years, a new study predicts. Moreover, by the year 2100 drought in some regions could be unprecedented in modern times.”
The Corn Legacy
Which Brings me to my final point, which is how we will not succumb to the whims of nature, but have set up for future generations, a Corn Legacy for lack of a less corny pun.
One of the first sciences developed was that of agriculture, the simple act of breeding for a better plant began as soon as we decided to settle down and start a farm. The story of Corn began, like I said earlier, 4500 years ago, and it has been bred for greater yield, faster growth, and resistance to drought and insects.
In modern times, there’s a quicker way, we have the ability to genetically engineer not only corn, but all plants, which are dubbed “growth Modified” or GM plants by the USDA.
“Since 1987, over 9,000 United States Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) permits have been issued to field-test GM crops. According to APHIS, corn is the most tested plant.”
These genetic modifications will surely be able to allow us to survive as a society of Corn, as our corn can survive anything, with a little help from us, or rather, itself, as we really are, Children of the Corn.

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