The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan [13]
To some extent this holds true for all of the plants and animals that take part in the grand coevolutionary bargain with humans we call agriculture. Though we insist on speaking of the “invention” of agriculture as if it were our idea, like double-entry bookkeeping or the light-bulb, in fact it makes just as much sense to regard agriculture as a brilliant (if unconscious) evolutionary strategy on the part of the plants and animals involved to get us to advance their interests. By evolving certain traits we happen to regard as desirable, these species got themselves noticed by the one mammal in a position not only to spread their genes around the world, but to remake vast swaths of that world in the image of the plants’ preferred habitat. No other group of species gained more from its association with humans than the edible grasses, and no grass has reaped more from agriculture than Zea mays, today the world’s most important cereal crop.
Corn’s success might seem fated in retrospect, but it was not something anyone would have predicted on that day in May 1493 when Columbus first described the botanical oddity he had encountered in the New World to Isabella’s court. He told of a towering grass with an ear as thick as a man’s arm, to which grains were “affixed by nature in a wondrous manner and in form and size like garden peas, white when young.” Wondrous, perhaps, yet this was, after all, the staple food of a people that would shortly be vanquished and all but exterminated.
By all rights, maize should have shared the fate of that other native species, the bison, which was despised and targeted for elimination precisely because it was “the Indians’ commissary,” in the words of General Philip Sheridan, commander of the armies of the West. Exterminate the species, Sheridan advised, and “[t]hen your prairies can be covered with speckled cattle and the festive cowboy.” In outline Sheridan’s plan was the plan for the whole continent: The white man brought his own “associate species” with him to the New World—cattle and apples, pigs and wheat, not to mention his accustomed weeds and microbes—and wherever possible helped them to displace the native plants and animals allied with the Indian. More even than the rifle, it was this biotic army that did the most to defeat the Indians.
But corn enjoyed certain botanical advantages that would allow it to thrive even as the Native Americans with whom it had coevolved were being eliminated. Indeed, maize, the one plant without which the American colonists probably would never have survived, let alone prospered, wound up abetting the destruction of the very people who had helped develop it. In the plant world at least, opportunism trumps gratitude. Yet in time, the plant of the vanquished would conquer even the conquerors.
Squanto taught the Pilgrims how to plant maize in the spring of 1621, and the colonists immediately recognized its value: No other plant could produce quite as much food quite as fast on a given patch of New World ground as this Indian corn. (Originally “corn” was a generic English word for any kind of grain, even a grain of salt—hence “corned beef” it didn’t take long for Zea mays to appropriate the word for itself, at least in America.) The fact that the plant was so well adapted to the climate and soils of North America gave it an edge over European grains, even if it did make a disappointingly earthbound bread. Centuries before the Pilgrims arrived the plant had already spread north from central Mexico, where it