History of Corn — the plant that cannot survive without us

The history of corn is the history of a plant that could not survive without us. The ear is wrapped in husks, the kernels do not shatter free, and an ear that falls to the ground throws up a dense knot of seedlings that strangle one another. Maize can neither scatter itself nor germinate properly on its own: without someone to strip the cob every year and drop the seed into a furrow, the species disappears within a few seasons. Wild corn, in this form, does not exist at all. Its ancestor is teosinte — a Mexican grass with an ear a few centimetres long and a handful of kernels sealed in stony cases, so unlike maize that botanists disputed the relationship for decades. Eight or nine thousand years ago, people in the Balsas valley began selecting rare mutations, and produced a plant that feeds the planet and depends on us completely. The United States then bet a continent on it. The Corn Belt turned the Midwest into the most productive agricultural region on earth; hybrid seed, sold new every year because the second generation loses its vigour, rebuilt the relationship between farmer and seed company; and federal policy has underwritten the crop for the better part of a century. Today most of the American harvest never reaches a plate directly — it goes to livestock, to ethanol, and to industrial processing. In the supermarket corn hides under dozens of names: high-fructose corn syrup, starch, maltodextrin, dextrose, citric acid, xanthan gum. It is in the soda, the bread, the sauce, the sausage, the yoghurt, and in the feed of the chicken in the next cabinet. How did a grass with ten kernels become the foundation of Mesoamerican civilisation, where maize was not food but the substance the gods shaped people from? Why did pellagra sweep through populations in Europe and the American South, which took the plant but not the preparation — and what single step in indigenous kitchens would have prevented it? And what happens to a country that ties its farmland, its livestock and its fuel supply to one species? This is the full history of corn: from teosinte and the Balsas valley through the Maya, the Aztecs and the Popol Vuh, in which people are made from maize dough; through nixtamalisation and lime water; through the Columbian exchange and the plant's spread across the Old World; through pellagra and the decades it took to find its cause; through the Corn Belt, hybrid seed and the farm bill — to ethanol, corn syrup, commodity markets, and the question of what your dinner is actually made of. 00:00 - McClintock tells the room genes move 02:04 - The Nobel, 32 years late 02:35 - What she was reading: kernels 04:06 - The biggest crop on the planet 05:38 - The ear that cannot sow itself 07:12 - A contract neither side can leave 08:14 - Not food — infrastructure 08:45 - Teosinte and the ancestor argument 09:15 - Popcorn settles it 11:49 - Cobs the size of a finger 12:19 - Popol Vuh: people made of corn 13:55 - The Three Sisters 15:26 - Niacin the gut cannot reach 15:57 - Nixtamalization 18:03 - Tenochtitlan: tribute and power 19:06 - 1492 and the word maize 19:37 - Why English says corn 20:09 - Corn Laws, peppercorn, corned beef 22:44 - Jamestown, 1607 23:46 - The Starving Time 24:17 - Tisquantum, off the greeting cards 26:19 - The actual foundation story 26:50 - China and Africa 27:53 - The darkest stretch 28:26 - 1845: Peel's maize arrives 29:58 - Nobody knew how to cook it 30:59 - From 7,000 to 600,000 tons 32:02 - Two kinds of corn in one year 32:34 - Pellagra follows maize across Europe 34:07 - The answer was in a clay pot 34:38 - Teach corn to walk and to flow 36:10 - The Corn Belt 36:40 - Hybrid vigor 37:43 - Wallace: seed salesman to VP 38:16 - The hybrid delivers once 39:49 - 1970: Texas cytoplasm 41:24 - Southern corn leaf blight 42:26 - The lesson Mexican farmers knew 43:27 - Butz: fence row to fence row 44:29 - High fructose corn syrup 45:49 - Meat at an earlier stage 46:32 - 480 servings of fast food 48:05 - A third goes into fuel 48:37 - Mexico City, 2007 49:38 - Mexico loses its own tortilla case 51:08 - The bill the soil carries 52:08 - So who domesticated whom? 53:08 - The plant never arrives alone 54:42 - Closing