Chances are high that if you've grown up just about anywhere in the Western Hemisphere, you and your metabolism are very familiar with corn (maize). Whether it's corn on the cob (yellow or white? red or blue?), popcorn and corn chips or tortillas and tostadas, grits and cornbread or arepas and esquites, pozole and atole or cornflakes and canjica, corn unites the Americas! It's true that corn's presence is somewhat diminished in the Caribbean, and it's also true that Asians and Africans tend to eat corn in abundance. But it is still the case that Europeans remain largely unfamiliar with corn, except popcorn (and polenta!), and corn as livestock feed.
We know from paleobotany that corn has been undergoing hybridization during thousands of years of cultivation in the Americas. Indigenous Americans discovered the process of nixtamalization, in which corn is mixed with lime (or ash) to allow for the more nutritious digestion of the niacin in corn. The word comes from Náhuatl, and has even been documented, in its form of "nixtamaleros," as an insult implying indigenous ancestry (and thus corn tortillas), wielded by those northern Mexicans who prefer wheat tortillas!
Today the US produces approximately half of the world's corn, and Brazil and Mexico are also big producers. Experiments in hybridization continue, albeit controversially: to protect the ancestral stock, the Mexican government had resisted, until just a few months ago, the import of genetically modified corn. Corn rivals sugarcane not only in the production of glucose-based products such as corn syrup (ubiquitous and insidious in US products) but also in ethanol. Recent interest in ethanol production from corn in the US and Mexico spiked the price of corn and damaged Mexican production practices. But it is more efficient to produce ethanol as an alternative fuel from sugarcane than it is from corn. This gives leading ethanol producer Brazil an advantage based on the extent of arable land in its tropical climate. A joint US-Brazil economic plan to stimulate ethanol production from sugar cane in Caribbean countries prompted the Venezuelan government, which has too much to lose in potential petroleum sales, to complain about a disguised neocolonization of the islands.
In Spanish, maíz (or elote or choclo, etc.) and in Portuguese, milho, corn is justly celebrated by quintessential Latin American writers Gabriela Mistral and Miguel Angel Asturias, both Nobel laureates. The Chilean Mistral equates corn with its Mexican homeland, where she lived as an influential educator, in her poem "El maíz": "El santo maíz sube / en un ímpetu verde, / y dormido se llena / de tórtolas ardientes [...] Y México se acaba / donde la milpa muere." The Guatemalan Asturias, in Hombres de maíz, constructs a novel fluctuating between the Maya stories and mores he learned from his grandmother, and the surrealist techniques he learned in Paris while studying at the Sorbonne.
Asturias's title refers to the pre-conquest Quiché Maya compendium of knowledge known as Popul Vuh, which holds that the gods, after several failed attempts, finally created humans from corn. The hair-like tassels, the teeth-like kernels, and the milky insides of the kernels likened to breastmilk or semen, are a few of the most salient similes in the Mesoamerican worldview's linkage of corn to the substance of human life. A custom observed across several Maya groups is the burial of a newborn's placenta in the milpa (cornfield), a symbolic return to the origin of life in the Americas.
We know from paleobotany that corn has been undergoing hybridization during thousands of years of cultivation in the Americas. Indigenous Americans discovered the process of nixtamalization, in which corn is mixed with lime (or ash) to allow for the more nutritious digestion of the niacin in corn. The word comes from Náhuatl, and has even been documented, in its form of "nixtamaleros," as an insult implying indigenous ancestry (and thus corn tortillas), wielded by those northern Mexicans who prefer wheat tortillas!
Today the US produces approximately half of the world's corn, and Brazil and Mexico are also big producers. Experiments in hybridization continue, albeit controversially: to protect the ancestral stock, the Mexican government had resisted, until just a few months ago, the import of genetically modified corn. Corn rivals sugarcane not only in the production of glucose-based products such as corn syrup (ubiquitous and insidious in US products) but also in ethanol. Recent interest in ethanol production from corn in the US and Mexico spiked the price of corn and damaged Mexican production practices. But it is more efficient to produce ethanol as an alternative fuel from sugarcane than it is from corn. This gives leading ethanol producer Brazil an advantage based on the extent of arable land in its tropical climate. A joint US-Brazil economic plan to stimulate ethanol production from sugar cane in Caribbean countries prompted the Venezuelan government, which has too much to lose in potential petroleum sales, to complain about a disguised neocolonization of the islands.
In Spanish, maíz (or elote or choclo, etc.) and in Portuguese, milho, corn is justly celebrated by quintessential Latin American writers Gabriela Mistral and Miguel Angel Asturias, both Nobel laureates. The Chilean Mistral equates corn with its Mexican homeland, where she lived as an influential educator, in her poem "El maíz": "El santo maíz sube / en un ímpetu verde, / y dormido se llena / de tórtolas ardientes [...] Y México se acaba / donde la milpa muere." The Guatemalan Asturias, in Hombres de maíz, constructs a novel fluctuating between the Maya stories and mores he learned from his grandmother, and the surrealist techniques he learned in Paris while studying at the Sorbonne.
Asturias's title refers to the pre-conquest Quiché Maya compendium of knowledge known as Popul Vuh, which holds that the gods, after several failed attempts, finally created humans from corn. The hair-like tassels, the teeth-like kernels, and the milky insides of the kernels likened to breastmilk or semen, are a few of the most salient similes in the Mesoamerican worldview's linkage of corn to the substance of human life. A custom observed across several Maya groups is the burial of a newborn's placenta in the milpa (cornfield), a symbolic return to the origin of life in the Americas.
