The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan [31]
In Ames the following afternoon I met a Mexican American agronomist named Ricardo Salvador, a professor at Iowa State University, who told me he’d had a similar reaction the first time he’d seen kernels littering Iowa roads in October; farmers haul their corn to town in big open wagons that fishtail across the county highways, scattering a light rain of yellow kernels as they go. “To be honest, I felt a revulsion. In Mexico, even today, you do not let corn lay on the ground; it is considered almost sacrilegious.” He sent me to a passage from a sixteenth-century writer, Friar Sahagún, who had chronicled the Aztecs’ reverence for maize:
If they saw dry grains of maize scattered on the ground, they quickly gathered them up, saying “Our Sustenance suffereth, it lieth weeping. If we should not gather it up, it would accuse us before our Lord. It would say, ‘O, Our Lord, this vassal picked me not up when I lay scattered upon the ground. Punish him!’ Or perhaps we should starve.”
The agronomist’s reaction, like mine, owes something to our confusion of corn-the-food with corn-the-commodity, which turn out to be two subtly but crucially different things. What George Naylor grows, and what the pile by the elevator consists of, is “number 2 field corn,” an internationally recognized commodity grown everywhere (and nowhere in particular), fungible, traded in and speculated upon and accepted as a form of capital all over the world. And while number 2 field corn certainly looks like the corn you would eat, and is directly descended from the maize Friar Sahagún’s Aztecs worshipped as the source of life, it is less a food than an industrial raw material—and an abstraction. The kernels are hard to eat, but if you soak them in water for several hours you’ll find they taste less like corn than lightly corn-flavored starch.
Actually there are many different kinds of corn heaped together in this pile: George Naylor’s Pioneer Hi-Bred 34H31 mixed in with his neighbor Billy’s genetically modified 33P67; corn grown with atrazine mixed with corn grown with metolachlor. Number 2 corn is a lowest common denominator; all the designation tells you is that the moisture content of this corn is no more than 14 percent, and that fewer than 5 percent of the kernels exhibit insect damage. Other than that, this is the corn without qualities; quantity is really the only thing that counts. Such corn is not something to feel reverent or even sentimental about, and nobody in Iowa, save the slightly embarrassed agronomist, does.
Commodity corn, which is as much an economic abstraction as it is a biological fact, was invented in Chicago in the 1850s.* Before then corn was bought and sold in burlap sacks. More often than not the sacks bore the name of the farm where the corn had been grown. You could follow a sack from a farm in Iowa to the mill in Manhattan where it was ground into meal, or to the dairy in Brooklyn where it was fed to a cow. This made a difference. For most of history farmers have had to think about the buyers of their crops, to worry about making sure their corn found its way to the right place at the right time, before it spoiled or got waylaid or its price collapsed. Farmers had to worry, too, about the quality of their corn, since customers didn’t pay before sampling what was in the sack. In America before the 1850s a farmer owned his sacks of corn up to the moment when a buyer took delivery, and so bore the risk for anything that went wrong between farm and table or trough. For better or worse that burlap sack linked a corn buyer anywhere in America with a particular farmer cultivating a particular patch of the earth.
With the coming of the railroads and the invention of the grain elevator (essentially a great vertical warehouse filled by conveyor belt and emptied by spigot) the sacks suddenly became a problem. Now it made sense to fill railroad cars and elevators by conveyor, to treat corn less as a certain number of discrete packages someone had to haul and more like an unbounded