Corn Quotes

“But carbon 13 [the carbon from corn] doesn't lie, and researchers who have compared the isotopes in the flesh or hair of Americans to those in the same tissues of Mexicans report that it is now we in the North who are the true people of corn.... Compared to us, Mexicans today consume a far more varied carbon diet: the animals they eat still eat grass (until recently, Mexicans regarded feeding corn to livestock as a sacrilege); much of their protein comes from legumes; and they still sweeten their beverages with cane sugar.
So that's us: processed corn, walking.”
― Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

“So this is what commodity corn can do to a cow: industrialize the miracle of nature that is a ruminant, taking this sunlight- and prairie grass-powered organism and turning it into the last thing we need: another fossil fuel machine. This one, however, is able to suffer. ”
― Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

“Corn is what feeds the steer that becomes the steak. Corn feeds the chicken and the pig, the turkey, and the lamb, the catfish and the tilapia and, increasingly, even the salmon, a carnivore by nature that the fish farmers are reengineering to tolerate corn. The eggs are made of corn. The milk and cheese and yogurt, which once came from dairy cows that grazed on grass, now typically comes from Holsteins that spend their working lives indoors tethered to machines, eating corn.

Head over to the processed foods and you find ever more intricate manifestations of corn. A chicken nugget, for example, piles up corn upon corn: what chicken it contains consists of corn, of course, but so do most of a nugget's other constituents, including the modified corn starch that glues the things together, the corn flour in the batter that coats it, and the corn oil in which it gets fried. Much less obviously, the leavenings and lecithin, the mono-, di-, and triglycerides, the attractive gold coloring, and even the citric acid that keeps the nugget "fresh" can all be derived from corn.

To wash down your chicken nuggets with virtually any soft drink in the supermarket is to have some corn with your corn. Since the 1980s virtually all the sodas and most of the fruit drinks sold in the supermarket have been sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) -- after water, corn sweetener is their principal ingredient. Grab a beer for you beverage instead and you'd still be drinking corn, in the form of alcohol fermented from glucose refined from corn. Read the ingredients on the label of any processed food and, provided you know the chemical names it travels under, corn is what you will find. For modified or unmodified starch, for glucose syrup and maltodextrin, for crystalline fructose and ascorbic acid, for lecithin and dextrose, lactic acid and lysine, for maltose and HFCS, for MSG and polyols, for the caramel color and xanthan gum, read: corn. Corn is in the coffee whitener and Cheez Whiz, the frozen yogurt and TV dinner, the canned fruit and ketchup and candies, the soups and snacks and cake mixes, the frosting and candies, the soups and snacks and cake mixes, the frosting and gravy and frozen waffles, the syrups and hot sauces, the mayonnaise and mustard, the hot dogs and the bologna, the margarine and shortening, the salad dressings and the relishes and even the vitamins. (Yes, it's in the Twinkie, too.)

There are some forty-five thousand items in the average American supermarket and more than a quarter of them now contain corn. This goes for the nonfood items as well: Everything from the toothpaste and cosmetics to the disposable diapers, trash bags, cleansers, charcoal briquettes, matches, and batteries, right down to the shine on the cover of the magazine that catches your eye by the checkout: corn. Even in Produce on a day when there's ostensibly no corn for sale, you'll nevertheless find plenty of corn: in the vegetable wax that gives the cucumbers their sheen, in the pesticide responsible for the produce's perfection, even in the coating on the cardboard it was shipped in. Indeed, the supermarket itself -- the wallboard and joint compound, the linoleum and fiberglass and adhesives out of which the building itself has been built -- is in no small measure a manifestation of corn.”
― Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

“The Indians, keeping to themselves, laughed at your superior methods and lived from the land more abundantly and with less labor than you did... And when your own people started deserting in order to live with them, it was too much... So you killed the Indians, tortured them, burned their villages, burned their cornfields... But you still did not grow much corn.”
― edmund morgan

“Finn fell asleep draped in Kittens and dreamed that the corn walked the earth on skinny white roots, liked to joke with the crows, and wasn't afraid of anything.”
― Laura Ruby, Bone Gap

“The wind comes across the plains not howling but singing. It's the difference between this wind and its big-city cousins: the full-throated wind of the plains has leeway to seek out the hidden registers of its voice. Where immigrant farmers planted windbreaks a hundred and fifty years ago. it keens in protest; where the young corn shoots up, it whispers as it passes, crossing field after field in its own time, following eastward trends but in no hurry to find open water. You can't usually see it in paintings, but it's an important part of the scenery.”
― John Darnielle, Universal Harvester

“With the money my mother earned from selling cakes, my father cut a deal with Mangochi and bought one pail of maize. My mother took it to the mill, saved half the flour for us, and used the rest for more cakes. We did this every day, taking enough to eat and selling the rest. It was enough to provide our one blob of nsima each night, along with some pumpkin leaves. It was practically nothing, yet knowing it would be there somehow made the hunger less painful.

"As long as we can stay in business," my father said, "we'll make it through. Our profit is that we live.”
― William Kamkwamba, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Creating Currents of Electricity and Hope

“I asked a nurse for dental floss and was told that I am not allowed dental floss. Apparently dental floss can be used for several functions besides the maintenance of healthy gums. These apparently include self-harm. When instructed that I was not permitted dental floss because of “risks it raises associated with suicide” I envisioned a noose made entirely of floss. Realizing such a noose would require a dramatic amount of floss to effectively uphold any human person, I brought it to the attention of a nurse.

“I don’t believe that even the most practiced engineers could fashion any functioning noose out of a single container of floss,” I say.

“People use it to cut themselves,” she explained.

“Oh,” I replied.

I had just about come to terms with the no-floss rule until the hospital, in a flagrant display of disrespect for its patients, chose to serve us corn on the cob for lunch.

“Are you aware that we are not allowed dental floss?” I yelled at the nurse bringing me the corn. I then threw the corn violently from my plate into the nearest wall.”
― Emily Austin, Oh Honey

“Maize is just another word for white corn, and by the end of this story, you won't believe how much you know about corn.”
― William Kamkwamba, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Creating Currents of Electricity and Hope

“Planted, a single corn seed yielded more than 150 fat kernels, often as many as 300, while the return on a seed of wheat was something less than 50:1”
― Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

“Farmers facing lower prices have only one option if they want to be able to maintain their standard of living, pay their bills, and service their debt, and that is to produce more [corn]”
― Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

“The free market has never worked in agriculture and it never will. The economics of a family farm are very different from a firm's... the demand for food isn't elastic; people don't eat more just because food is cheap. Even if I go out of business this land will keep producing corn.”
― Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

“The first ear of corn, eaten like a typewriter, means summer to me—intense, but fleeting.”
― Michael Anthony, V Is for Vegetables: Inspired Recipes & Techniques for Home Cooks - from Artichokes to Zucchini

“I am an expert on the language of crop circles.”
― Steven Magee

“To attempt to force a tomato plant to produce corn is going to result in bad tomatoes and no corn. And how many people are attempting to do the same thing with their lives, all the while wondering why they’re getting bad tomatoes and no corn?”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“Today I've prepared roasted quail spiced with sumac, coriander, and chili, atop sweet corn cachapas, which, as you see, are griddle cakes made from corn. I've also battered and fried fresh courgette blossoms stuffed with farmer's cheese." Elijah swallowed again. It was a deceptively simple dish. The cachapas were perhaps the least complicated, and possibly something royalty might find rather humble, but his uncle Jonathan had gotten the recipe on a voyage that had put in at a port in Venezuela long ago, and Elijah had perfected it over the years whenever he could get enough sweet corn.
Princess Adelaide eyed the dish, as though surprised it didn't look more elaborate. She looked up at him with a quizzical expression.
He kept his gaze steady. He'd always thought that food was a great equalizer, for whatever someone's creed or race or religion, every person had to eat to survive. This exhibition seemed to confirm his belief. The Royal Exhibition was showcasing the different cultures and cuisines of over thirty countries, and from what Elijah had seen, everyone was welcome, no matter where they hailed from in the world. Elijah's first instinct had been to make something from his food culture, something that would subtly---or perhaps, not so subtly---say, I'm Jewish and there shouldn't be anything wrong with that.”
― Jennieke Cohen, My Fine Fellow

“Corn can add inches in a single day; if you listened, you could hear it grow.”
― Laura Ruby

“Michelle made a point of being friendly, not just seeming friendly, and rich girls would meet her eyes with something like humanity, surprised at themselves for how pleasantly they were treating a plebe.”
― Nick LaRocca

“I was having one of those experiences where you're in a place, whether it's a job interview for a position you don't want with a company you don't even trust or a class you don't want to take, and you're sitting there wondering, What am I doing here? Like a part of you has split off from yourself and occasionally drops in and asks, Can we leave now?”
― Nick LaRocca

“When I think of the person I was, I don't know how anyone ever forgave me: my parents, all the people who were the age I now am. I suppose it's that they thought of me the way I sometimes think of young people now: It's okay, because they'll change, because they'll have to.”
― Nick LaRocca

“The great edifice of variety and choice that is an American supermarket turns out to rest on a remarkably narrow biological foundation comprised of a tiny group of plants that is dominated by a single species: Zea mays, a giant tropical grass most Americans know as corn...
Read the ingredients on the label of any processed food and, provided you know the chemical name it travels under, corn is what you will find. For modified or unmodified starch, for glucose syrup and maltodextrin, for crystalline fructose and ascorbic acid, for lecithin and dextrose, lactic acid and lysine, for maltose and HFCS, for MSG and polyols, for the caramel color and xanthan gum, read: corn... There are some forty-five thousand items in the average American supermarket and more than a quarter of them now contain corn. This goes for the nonfood items as well...
And us?”
― Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

“Wet milling (to produce starch) is an energy-intensive way to make food; for every calorie of processed food it produces, another ten calories of fossil fuel energy are burned.”
― Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

“Today it [high fructose corn syrup] is the most valuable food product refined from corn, accounting for 530 million bushels every year. (A bushel of corn yields 33 pounds of fructose)”
― Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

“Try as we might, each of us can eat only about 1500 pounds of food a year. What this means for the food industry is that its natural rate of growth is somewhere around 1% every year (growth of American population).”
― Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

“At that period, rising in the world meant giving up working with your hands in favor of work in a store or an office. The people who lived in town had made it, and turned their backs socially on those who had not but were still growing corn and wheat out there in the country. What seemed like an impassable gulf was only the prejudice of a single generation, which refused to remember its own not very remote past.”
― William Maxwell, ANCESTORS: A Family History

“One would expect to find a comparatively high proportion of carbon 13 [the carbon from corn] in the flesh of people whose staple food of choice is corn - Mexicans, most famously. Americans eat much more wheat than corn - 114 pounds of wheat flour per person per year, compared to 11 pounds of corn flour. The Europeans who colonized America regarded themselves as wheat people, in contrast to the native corn people they encountered; wheat in the West has always been considered the most refined, or civilized, grain. If asked to choose, most of us would probably still consider ourselves wheat people, though by now the whole idea of identifying with a plant at all strikes us as a little old-fashioned. Beef people sounds more like it, though nowadays chicken people, which sounds not nearly so good, is probably closer to the truth of the matter. But carbon 13 doesn't lie, and researchers who compared the carbon isotopes in the flesh or hair of Americans to those in the same tissues of Mexicans report that it is now we in the North who are the true people of corn. 'When you look at the isotope ratios,' Todd Dawson, a Berkeley biologist who's done this sort of research, told me, 'we North Americans look like corn chips with legs.' Compared to us, Mexicans today consume a far more varied carbon diet: the animals they eat still eat grass (until recently, Mexicans regarded feeding corn to livestock as a sacrilege); much of their protein comes from legumes; and they still sweeten their beverages with cane sugar.
So that's us: processed corn, walking.”
― Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

“The Corn
boiled or roasted is still a Corn.
one went through the hot waters the other through the Fire.
Still The blessed Word.”
― Mary Tornyenyor

“For ten to twelve hours, he smoked cigs across the bleached-out American landscape, up through the deltas of Mississippi and stars falling on Alabama, he watched the sky shift in burning purple and orange wars. Armies cascaded across the plains and planes died in beautiful violent violet clashes. Dust thick enough to taste billowing off the fields serving up their corn and soy.”
― Stephen Markley, Ohio

“Nautical blue? Nah.” Her best friend, Chantal, used her fingertip to reveal the next set of colors. “Back in Chicago, with Lake Michigan nearby, maybe. But out here?” Her tone indicated just what she thought of the rural Illinois town. She tapped another hue on the swatch. “What you want here is cornflower blue.”
Grinning, Simone shook her head. She’d missed joking around with Chantal. And nothing could dim her pride in the town’s agriculture. Their corn fed the nation. Lake Michigan was picturesque but cold and forbidding half the time.”
― Chandra Blumberg, Stirring Up Love

“Smiling, he smuggled me an extra-tender ear of buttery sweet corn, which I gnawed to cob in three seconds. Aware I no longer ate human. Rather like a homeless dog.”
― Robert Newton Peck, Cowboy Ghost