The History of Corn

In this week's reading of The Plant I learned about how corn is in just about everything. I had known that it was in almost all processed foods but I hadn't known of all the other things that have components derived from corn. Learning about this made me want to find out why and how it became so widely used in our daily diet in America. I found a good article on the Huffington Post which went into detail on how corn came to be so prevalent in America. Apparently, in the 1800's, corn was eaten mostly by the poor and prisoners. During the Industrial Revolution, with the rise of new technologies and scientific discoveries, corn growth and transportation was improved drastically. This led to a surge of corn growth and the amount of corn grown per year has continued to rise since. The Iron Plow made it easier for farmers to plant more corn. Then, with the completion of railroads, farmers were able to distribute their corn to different states instead of just locally. Also, with the creation of new ways to preserve corn, farmers were able to grow more corn for more people and reap the profit from all of it because it would not go bad as quickly. Then, in the early 1900's, scientists found a way to manipulate corn so that they would produce bigger ears of corn and you could also grow the plants closer together. In addition to this, with the production of pesticides and better tools such as tractors, the rise in growth of corn was amazing. With all of these new developments for farmers, they began to grow more and more corn for more profit. It was also in higher demand because it could be turned into ethanol for fuel. Most of the corn produced was not acutally eaten by people. Corn's use on other things exceeded the amount used for human food. It was used, in addition to ethanol, as feed for just about every animal that we have domesticated for farms. It was very cool to learn more about this. Honestly, if I had not read the chapter The Plant, I probably would never have looked into it. I'm glad I did because it was very enlightening. I enjoy learning and it is very interseting to learn the history behind something that is used so extensively in my day to day life. Also, it is nice to know the real extent that corn use has gotten to.