Maize (Zea mays), also known as corn in North America or mealie in South Africa, is the most planted food in the world. It covers more land than even humans, than any plant or animal. And yet if humans died out, it would die out a few years later – it does not grow wild.
Thanks to Meso-Americans, it grows well in the tropics. Thanks to the Mound Builders, it grows well in the temperate zone too, allowing it to spread to Europe and northern China.
Colours: yellow, red, blue, orange, black, pink, purple, creamy white, multicoloured.
Timeline:
- -6000: gathered in Mexico (looks like baby corn).
- -5000: planted in Mexico.
- -2000: spreads to South America.
- -1500: yields are high enough to support the rise of Meso-American civilization.
- +800: spreads to eastern North America. Rise of the Mound Builders – Cahokia, the Natchez, etc.
- 1500s: spreads to Europe, Africa and Asia, indirectly supporting the transatlantic slave trade.
- 1600s:
- 1700s: catches on in Europe and northern China, first among the poor out of necessity.
- 1800s: leads to pellagra in Europe (maize lacks niacin) and drunkenness in the US (maize makes whisky cheaper).
- 1900s: leads to obesity in the US (cheap corn policy).
The Three Sisters: Meso-Americans balanced maize with beans and squash, in both the eating and the planting (milpas). Done that way they needed little meat and did not wear out the soil.
Yields through the ages (tons per hectare):
- -1500: 0.2 (Olmec)
- +1700: 0.5 (colonial Mexico)
- 1900: 1 (US)
- 1950: 4 (US)
- 2000: 11 (US)
In 2016, the US is at 11, China at 6 and Kenya at 2.
The higher yields of the 1900s were made possible by:
- hybrid maize (1930s) that could be planted closer together because it had thicker stalks and stronger roots.
- The Haber-Bosch process (1911) which made heavy use of fertilizers possible.
Food chain: Most of that high-yield maize tastes like sawdust! You would never know because it is fed to cows, chickens and pigs (giving us meat, milk and eggs) or made into grits, cornflakes, whisky, ethanol, plastic, oils, starches, sweeteners, thickeners, adhesives, viscosity-control agents, flour, processed food and many of those hard-to-pronounce ingredients you see on a food label.
At McDonald’s: % of carbon atoms that come from maize, directly or indirectly:
- 100% Coca-Cola
- 78% milk shake
- 65% salad dressing
- 56% chicken nuggets
- 23% French fries
Most of the carbon atoms people are made of in the US also comes from maize.
US cheap corn policy: In the 1970s the US government started pouring billions into maize, driving down its price. That led to:
- The rise of agribusiness – and the slow death of the family farm.
- Factory farms: cows, chickens and pigs are moved indoors to be fattened on cheap maize. Fences begin to disappear. Maize makes cows so sick they have be fed antibiotics to keep them alive long enough to be ready for market.
- High fructose corn syrup, as sweet as sugar, but much cheaper.
- Rising obesity: Food is cheaper and sweeter, making people fatter. Super size me!
Maize to meat: It takes about 14 pounds of maize to produce one pound of beef. For chicken it is 2 to 1.
– Abagond, 2016.
Update (2019): Added yields for the US, China an Kenya in 2016.
Sources: Mainly “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” (2006) by Michael Pollan; “The Structures of Everyday Life” (1985) by Fernand Braudel; “The Human Web” (2003) by J.R. McNeill and William M. McNeill; “1491” (2011) by Charles C. Mann; “An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States” (2014) by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz.
See also:
- Welcome to Native American Heritage Month 2016
- Meso-America
- Mound Builders
- Columbian Exchange
- related films:
- high fructose corn syrup
- sugar
- Fritz Haber
- transatlantic slave trade
599
The Haber-Bosch process
I was wondering what spurred the post on Fritz Haber – now I know! Weird that researching maize leads to the First World War and the Holocaust….
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High fructose corn syrup is the devil. I must confess i do love a good roasted Mexican street corn.
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Leave it to Abagond to make a post about corn interesting!
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“Rising obesity: Food is cheaper and sweeter, making people fatter. Super size me!” – Abagond
Oh, I see, perhaps Rasputia (Norbit, 2007) may have mistaken maize as a dietary supplement.
https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.gstatic.com/tv/thumb/movieposters/163211/p163211_p_v8_as.jpg&imgrefurl=http://google.com/search%3Ftbm%3Disch%26q%3DNorbit&h=1440&w=960&tbnid=g1ITQkDYUdSAHM:&vet=1&tbnh=186&tbnw=124&docid=Gz2m9lCK45UP1M&itg=1&usg=__bSRmFLdRcvoy3xPhrRpG4qDC6SQ=&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjbsY7tno3RAhVS7WMKHRFSCl8Q_B0IiQIwCg&ei=GKFeWNvFLNLajwORpKn4BQ
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Very interesting!
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“The rise of agribusiness – and the slow death of the family farm.”
It didn’t take long for agribusiness to strangle family farms in the US. By 1985, country and rock musicians were playing an annual benefit concert to help struggling White family farmers. The concerts known as Farm Aid had a stated mission:
https://www.farmaid.org/about-us/
Many of those US farmers pushed off the land turned to guns, militias and religion to cope with their losses.
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Agribusiness corn was even more devastating to Mexican farmers. According to The North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA), an independent, nonprofit organization founded in 1966:
https://nacla.org/article/mexico-cost-us-dumping
Those losses were one result of high level fiddling with the Mexican constitution which led to the loss of land for millions of farmers and the loss of food sovereignty for the Mexican people.
The Mexican Solidarity Network describes the international nature of the manipulation:
http://www.mexicosolidarity.org/programs/alternativeeconomy/zapatismo/en
Many of those former campesinos and their families moved from the countryside to urban Mexico. Some went further and migrated to the US in search of higher wages.
The cheap corn policy led to expensive dislocation for millions of people in both the US and Mexico.
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Afrofem said,
“Many of those US farmers pushed off the land turned to guns, militias and religion to cope with their losses.”
Boom !!!
I will disagree about NAFTA. What you wrote is true about what happened to corn and some agriculture in Mexico but what you left out was that those Farm jobs were replaced by better paying factory jobs created because of NAFTA.
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@ Michael Jon Barker
When you’re talking about farming vs factory wages, you also have to factor in self-sufficiency. Even in a year of low prices for crops, when farmers don’t make much cash, they still can feed their families. When that population shifted to factory work, they lost their self-sufficiency and became dependent on the whims of capitalists in respect to layoffs, etc. Also factor in that a lot of these rural farmers are Indios who don’t speak much Spanish and are discriminated against. This migration to the cities has had a negative effect on the survival of Native culture, languages, and lifeways in Mexico.
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@michaeljonbarker
“…what you left out was that those Farm jobs were replaced by better paying factory jobs created because of NAFTA.”
Most of the maquiladora jobs in Mexico were filled by young women, who were more easily controlled by management and who expected (and received) lower wages than their male counterparts. That led to a great deal of resentment by Mexican men. That resentment in turn led to the rise of femicide in the border towns. Thousands of young female Mexican factory workers were kidnapped, raped and murdered in cases that are largely unsolved to this day.
There was also an increase of drug use in the border towns, with some former farmers participating in the drug trade as enforcers and low level sellers. Many more former farmers simply moved on across the border to much higher wages than anything they could get in Mexico.
In the US, millions of workers saw their jobs exported to Mexico and beyond, devastating thousands of towns, counties and cities. Many of the jobs that remained were flooded with migrant workers who accepted lower wages and fewer benefits.
The dislocation of American workers and farmers also contributed to the explosion of meth in rural areas. Meth was followed by OxyContin and heroin—-all of which continue to devastate rural and suburban Americans, socially, emotionally and financially.
Were the NAFTA jobs worth all of those negative effects?
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@ Solitaire
I won’t disagree with that. Over all though NAFTA opened up manufacturing in Mexico and that has provided jobs and helped the economy.
https://ustr.gov/countries-regions/americas/mexico
American investment in manufacturing infrastructure is around 50 billion.
Corn is not a sustainable “food” because it requires so much artificale fertilization. It is also a poor food in that it lacks nutrients and doesn’t digest well.
The other food source indigenous to the Americas is the potatoe.
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Afrofem,
NAFTA is both good and bad. Opening up markets have helped pull millions of people out of poverty. But it has come with a cost, some of which you and Soltare have pointed out.
Economic globalism is a redistribution of jobs and wealth. Trans national corperations have become richer and others who were jobless now have jobs.
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One of my employees finally got his green card after waiting 20 years. So he went back home to Aqua Calientas to see his family and friends. He told me that the town has doubled in population and now they have paved roads, briges, shopping malls ect. They also have a Nissan factory that employees thousands of residents. He thinks overall that it is a better place today then it was 20 years ago when he left to come to the U.S. to find a job. That’s the good part of NAFTA.
I’m currently getting my bathroom redone. I was referred to two craftsman who are from Guatemala. They normally work for a tile company but the owner, who is Mexican, always goes back home to Mexico for a month during Christmas so they had an opening to do a side job. The speak Toltec besides Spanish. They told me that in Guatemala their are 50 different dialects of Toltec. I’m paying them in cash around 25 an hour which is about what a specialized tradesmen makes in the L.A. area. They are doing an immaculate job.
I guess where I am going with this is that there are less workers coming to the U.S. from Mexico because there are now jobs there. So there are now more coming from Central America then Mexico.
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“The other food source indigenous to the Americas is the potatoe.”
Also tomatoes, squash, pumpkins, several types of beans, wild rice, several types of berries. But yes, maize and potatoes are the two major starches.
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Reblogged this on League of Bloggers For a Better World.
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