Maize

Maize (corn in U.S. English & Canadian English) is the agriculturally domesticated grass species Zea mays. In the year 2020, the cereal grain from Z. mays was by weight the world’s leading grain, above wheat and rice.

Quotes

• The biological origin, diversification, and domestication of maize occurred in Mesoamerica, located in the center of Mexico. This grass of the Poaceae family had a seminal role in the origin, extension of agriculture, and culture of pre-Hispanic civilizations (Smith et al., 1981). One of the species of actual teosintes, Zea mays subsp. parviglumis, is the progenitor of all derivative Zea mays subsp. mays modern races. The human-driven domestication that started around 9,000 years ago is one of the most critical events in the history of agriculture (Doebley, 2004; Piperno et al., 2009; Sahoo et al., 2021).
  • Esaú De-la-Vega-Camarillo, Juan Alfredo Hernández-García, Lourdes Villa-Tanaca, César Hernández-Rodríguez, (4 October 2023)"Unlocking the hidden potential of Mexican teosinte seeds: revealing plant growth-promoting bacterial and fungal biocontrol agents". Frontiers in Plant Sciience 14. DOI:10.3389/fpls.2023.1247814.

• ... From the more than 200 million metric tons of corn that the United States produces each year, 85 percent is converted into cows, hogs and chickens in the proportion of 60 millions cows, 100 million hogs and 4 billion chickens. As an index of corn's super conversion powers (double those of wheat), one bushel of corn in a mixed feed bag translated into 15 pounds of retail beef, 26 pounds of pork and 37 pounds of poultry. And this is still corn in a form we can recognize: fodder, silage, shelled grains or fibrous by-products.
  • Betty Harper Fussell, The Story of Corn. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. 2004. p. 7. ISBN 0-8263-3592-6. 

• ... 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, the giant tropical grass most Americans know as corn.
  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 come from Holsteins that spend their working lives indoors tethered to machines, eating 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.
  • Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. Penguin Press. 2006. p. 18. ISBN 1594200823. 

• ... corn is the plant of the Americas; it is native to the New World, and corn, more than any other plant, feeds the Americas. At the time of Columbus, corn was cultivated from Gaspé in Canada to Chile in South America, mostly on forested land that could be cleared by slash-and-burn agriculture followed by several years of fallow.
  The U.S. Corn Belt monoculture that replaced the tall grassland of the midcentral United States is a recently developed (ca. 150 years) corn-producing region with its own landrace, Corn Belt dent. The United States produces 40% of the world's corn harvest, and it takes 25 corn plants per person per day to support the American way of life. This plant is found in more than the cornflakes on the breakfast table. Corn oil is in the margarine, corn syrup sweeteners in the marmalade, corn syrup solids in the instant nondairy coffee creamer, and corn was fed to the cows that made the milk, the chickens that laid the eggs, and the pigs that produced the bacon.
• Garrison Wilkes, "Chapter 1.1 Corn, Strange and Marvelous: But Is a Definitive Origin Known?". Corn: Origin, History, Technology, and Production. Wiley Series in Crop Science. John Wiley & Sons. 2004. pp. 3–64. ISBN 0471411841.  (quote from p. 4; edited by C. Wayne Smith, Javier Betrán, and Edward C. A. Runge)

External links

• Encyclopedic article on Maize on Wikipedia