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By Root 588 0

a completely different role to perform in the creation of the kernel. The first twin’s job is to tunnel a microscopic tube down through the center of the silk thread. That accomplished, its clone slides down through the tunnel, past the husk, and into the waiting flower, a journey of between six and eight inches that takes several hours to complete. Upon arrival in the flower the second twin fuses with the egg to form the embryo—the germ of the future kernel. Then the first twin follows, entering the now fertilized flower, where it sets about forming the endosperm—the big, starchy part of the kernel. Every kernel of corn is the product of this intricate ménage à trois; the tiny, stunted kernels you often see at the narrow end of a cob are flowers whose silk no pollen grain ever penetrated. Within a day of conception, the now superfluous silk dries up, eventually turning reddish brown; fifty or so days later, the kernels are mature.*

The mechanics of corn sex, and in particular the great distance over open space corn pollen must travel to complete its mission, go a long way toward accounting for the success of maize’s alliance with humankind. It’s a simple matter for a human to get between a corn plant’s pollen and its flower, and only a short step from there to deliberately crossing one corn plant with another with an eye to encouraging specific traits in the offspring. Long before scientists understood hybridization, Native Americans had discovered that by taking the pollen from the tassel of one corn plant and dusting it on the silks of another, they could create new plants that combined the traits of both parents. American Indians were the world’s first plant breeders, developing literally thousands of distinct cultivars for every conceivable environment and use.

Looked at another way, corn was the first plant to involve humans so intimately in its sex life. For a species whose survival depends on how well it can gratify the ever shifting desires of its only sponsor, this has proved to be an excellent evolutionary strategy. More even than other domesticated species, many of which can withstand a period of human neglect, it pays for corn to be obliging—and to be so quick about it. The usual way a domesticated species figures out what traits its human ally will reward is through the slow and wasteful process of Darwinian trial and error. Hybridization represents a far swifter and more efficient means of communication, or feedback loop, between plant and human; by allowing humans to arrange its marriages, corn can discover in a single generation precisely what qualities it needs to prosper.

It is by being so obliging that corn has won itself as much human attention and habitat as it has. The plant’s unusual sexual arrangements, so amenable to human intervention, have allowed it to adapt to the very different worlds of Native Americans (and to their very different worlds, from southern Mexico to New England), of colonists and settlers and slaves, and of all the other corn-eating societies that have come and gone since the first human chanced upon that first teosinte freak.

But of all the human environments to which corn has successfully adapted since then, the adaptation to our own—the world of industrial consumer capitalism; the world, that is, of the supermarket and fast-food franchise—surely represents the plant’s most extraordinary evolutionary achievement to date. For to prosper in the industrial food chain to the extent it has, corn had to acquire several improbable new tricks. It had to adapt itself not just to humans but to their machines, which it did by learning to grow as upright, stiff-stalked, and uniform as soldiers. It had to multiply its yield by an order of magnitude, which it did by learning to grow shoulder to shoulder with other corn plants, as many as thirty thousand to the acre. It had to develop an appetite for fossil fuel (in the form of petrochemical fertilizer) and a tolerance for various synthetic chemicals. But even before it could master these tricks and make a place for itself in the bright