Essay about The History of Corn

Before Europeans came to the Americas, maize was the only one bread culture. Maize, also known as an Indian corn spread at a record speed across in the warmest parts of Europe. Corn produced much more grain that wheat and gave more calories per hectare than wheat. Europeans learned how to grow the corn properly, so it began to replace traditional crops in Europe. As a result, by 18th century, maize spread around the Europe, especially in Spain, Portugal, and Italy. The most important result of transporting the maize from the Americas to Afro-Eurasia is that this crop allowed to use the fallow land. As a result, the food supply increased, which led to the increase of the population. Maize stood alongside with wheat and rice. Corn became a food for poor people, and a great supply pigs and cattle. John Locke claims, “…plots of Maize in several parts, which the country people call Bled d’Espagne, & as they told me, serves poor people for bread… it being good nourishment for their cattle” (Stearns et al. 20). The author states that corn bread was served for the poor people, which had a positive result on the population

The spread of maize agriculture from present-day Mexico into the present-day American Southwest changed Southwest Indian environments by creating a more permanent living situation. Pueblos began to be built and villages were created around maize fields. This form of agriculture also led to a decrease in the hunter-gatherer lifestyle.

My focus is on the agriculture and maize domestication of both areas. Maize was first domesticated in Mesoamerica, southern Mexico about 9000 years ago and dispersed into the southwestern United States during the late middle archaic period.

a. The cultivation of maize, introduced heavily by sophisticated civilizations such as the Incas, Mayans, and Aztecs, helped to feed large population sizes, thus facilitating the spread of its cultivation across North America. By 2000 BCE, Pueblo peoples, due to the new cultivation of maize, developed irrigation systems. By 1000 CE, maize reached to modern-day SE America, which influenced Creek, Choctaw, and Cherokee peoples by growing and feeding their populations.

Maize was the basis of the feeding of pre-Columbian civilizations. It is very probable that these societies would not have developed without corn, because they supported and made possible the growth of its population in that cereal.

The history of corn can be dated back to the beginning of time, but the use and value of corn had been unnoticed until it was introduce by the Native Americans. Where corn had seemed to be a big part of their everyday life from, being in myths, legends, and for a huge portion of their diet corn was an essential component. "when the Europeans had touched base to the New World during the late fifteenth century, the Native Americans had introduced corn what they had called maize to the Europeans .This crop was then later on grown and adapted from Canada to southern South America very quickly, which then began to form the new basis of the New World civilization" (Leventin & McManhon, 2012). The way corn has been changing and revolutionizing throughout time has been both fascinating and drastic. Rather than conventional corn being grown, it is genetically modified corn that have been dominating today 's crop industry and farming but the question remains as to how the various types of GMO corn has influenced the way it is grown and used and what its ramification are.

Much of the farming flourished in Mesoamerica, the Mexican valley of Tehuacan, is where the plant teosinte was specialized in becoming maize, the main crop of the Americas. They even learned that planting beans next to these crops enriched the soil to make them better. These great crops made for good trade with non-farming traders, due to their large surplus. Rich communities had become strong enough to capture their weaker neighbors and use them for labor and to gain riches such as land.

Native Americans started the development of maize. In 1491 Mann says, “Indians developed an extraordinary number of maize varieties for different growing conditions, which meant that the crop could and did spread throughout the planet”(pg17). With the spread of maize the Indians caused several

“The Omnivores Dilemma” a book written by Michael Pollan, where he asks a very straightforward question of what we should have for dinner. In the first chapter, titled “The Plant”, tells a story from the perspective of Pollan himself as an everyday shopper in a modern day American supermarket. Pollan brings up the fact that from a naturalist’s perspective our grocery stores are absolutely astonishing, because where else are you going to find an array of different cultured foods in just one store. He then goes on to pose a question: Do you really even know where the food you eat comes from? Pollan decided to do some digging of his own, seeing if any completely opposite foods had anything in common. To his surprise, a lot of these diverse foods did have something in common when it came to ingredient and it was corn. From finding out that information he goes on to compare Americans consumption of corn, to Mexicans consumption of corn. Pollan’s findings show that Americans do in fact consume more corn than our neighbors to the south, Mexico. This first chapter really made me think about how much, we Americans, consume corn (or some derivative of corn) and if there is a healthier option to choose from. So my question that I must ask is: why is corn a more efficient and beneficial option than any other plant, and is there a plant that would be a better option?

i) Corn reached American Southwest by about 1200 B.C. and the Pueblo people in Rio Grande valley constructed irrigation systems, while other places were less developed.

Corn is not the ideal nutritious food. It wreaks havoc on the animal;s' digestive system and gets turned into sweeteners that makes people obese, aside from giving us an unhealthy diet. In other words, the industrial food chain that American man is sustained on is largely based on corn, whether in its direct form, fed to livestock, or processed into chemicals such as glucose, and the cheapest forms of these are high-fructose corn syrup and ethanol. The former, particularly, through a combination of biological, cultural, and political factors, appears in the cheapest and most common of foods that constitute the American diet. It is the ingredient that results in obesity, and, since it appears in the cheapest products, the ingredients that more poor, than wealthier individuals, consume.

Cahokia was a large, complex settlement built by Native Americans that lived along the Mississippi River in about 950 C.E. near present-day St. Louis and East St. Louis, Illinois. At the city’s peak at around 1150 C.E., nearly ten thousand citizens lived on more than five square miles of 120 earthen “mounds.” At the time, Cahokia was the third-largest city in the Americas, and it contained multiple residential neighborhoods, plazas, and religious sites. Scientists and historians widely agreed that corn had been cultivated in this region since as early as the year 1000 C.E. At the location of the ancient city, archaeologists discovered corn fragments, such as kernels and cobs, in sites that were dated to the year 1000 C.E. and earlier. Several

In the educative essay “What’s Eating America,” Michael Pollan designates the history of corn, a good and healthy food if cultivated properly. This essay is very informative because it talks about American’s diet. In this essay, Pollan examines the way of growing the corn as an influential example of using the chemical fertilizers in food. Also, He complains “Growing corn, which from a biological perspective had always been a process of capturing sunlight to turn it into food, has in no small measure become a process of converting fossil fuels into food…” (Pollan 302). While it might be very useful when used in a prudent way, in reality the usage of chemical fertilizers is higher and the farmers are feeding their corps more than it needs which affect the ecology’s system. In other words, his focus is on corn and not only does him just points out corn presence in nearly all food products; but he comes up with other matters like fossil fuels and the factories polluting the atmosphere. Thus, it’s astonishing when someone stops and thinks about how many things are composed from corn.

The first settlers, finding that European agriculture could not easily be transferred to the new environment, adopted the Indian practices of raising corn, squash, tobacco, and other crops. From the beginning corn, grown in all the

Species of Amaranthus and Chenopodium flourished for over 3000–7000 years amongst the Incans, Aztecs and Mayan civilizations alongside other important crops emerging as some of the most important crops in the Americas before the advent of the Spanish colonialists. The Aztecs and Mayans considered amaranth a superfood alongside other staples like maize and beans. Similarly, on the Peruvian-Bolivian alpine plain cropped together with corn and beans; the ancient Incans regarded Quinoa ' mother of cereals' [40-43].