76 ~ Children of the corn

-photo by Greg McCune

I’m partial to not only eating local, but also planting local. I find a sense of connection, of lineage and fidelity to place, by cultivating crops native to the Americas. 

We are certainly blessed with plenty to choose from here: potatoes, peppers, beans, squash, strawberries and, one of my favorite crops to grow, corn.

October is corn harvest time at my house (I grow corn for grinding into cornmeal, rather than for fresh eating), and this year the Earth, Sun and I achieved a pretty good crop. The harvest got a little help from my friends (er, a lot actually), given that since September I’ve been on the road in Europe (Portugal and Switzerland). That’s my housesittin’ brother Tom, above, bringin’ in the sheaves.

Not only is corn from this place, we are from corn, literally. North Americans consume so much corn  – most of it in industrial forms like high fructose corn syrup, corn-fed beef and hogs, and all manner of snacks – that the majority of the carbon building-blocks in our bodies can be traced, fingerprinted, back to corn (something not true of, say, Italians or Moroccans). If we are what we eat, most of us on this side of the Pond are walking corn stalks.

Corn has become nearly an addiction for us here. For example, cattle are grazers – grass eaters – and so our modern industrial cattle have had to be genetically adapted, trained and essentially forced to eat high energy corn in crowded feedlots (the anti-biotic cocktails given to feedlot cattle are in part to keep them from falling ill from their unnaturally rich diet of corn). 

The broad swaths of monocrop corn ‘deserts’ that now dominate much of middle America represent corn’s second conquest of the continent. The first started about 10,000 years ago, when inhabitants of what is now southern Mexico first domesticated corn. The plant we recognize today as tall, thick stalks bearing hefty ears of dense food bear little resemblance to corn’s lithe, wild grass ancestor, teosinte.  Yet it didn’t take long before domestic corn was so important in the diets of ancient Meso-Americans that the physical compositions of their bodies were probably also heavy on corn carbon.

Certainly, early peoples of the Americas felt a spiritual kinship with corn. By 1,000 BC, corn was the central symbol reflected in the language, myths and calendar of the Olmec.  And in the beautiful Mayan origin story, the first Mayans are two cornsilk-haired babies, twin ears of corn born of a beautiful young goddess, and a raggedy human lad. The corn babies carry her divinity, and his earthly human frailty, and from the union of the two they nourish the world.

Spanish explorers arrived after corn’s domestication, and although they ate corn, they felt little connection with it, probably because they and corn were not of the same place. In fact, at the early Spanish missions it was forbidden to substitute corn flour for wheat flour in the making of bread for communion, since, at least in Christian belief, only wheat can undergo transubstantiation into the body of Christ.

I’m not so sure about that. A common form of communion at my house is to feed family and friends on homemade cornmeal pancakes with maple syrup. Although JC might not be technically present at the table, each time I nonetheless feel the presence of some a-maize-ing Grace.

For an eloquent re-telling of the Mayan origin story, and to meet the twin corn babies, track down a copy of Martín Prechtel’s book, The Toe Bone and the Tooth.

photo by Greg