I love this book. Corn and Capitalism: How a botanical bastard grew to global dominance is a fantastically interesting read by Arturo Warman. I highly recommend it.
(I should note, that Michael Pollan calls it an “indispensable book… on the history of corn” pg 418, The Omnivore’s Dilemma.)
I took two pages of notes, of stuff I want to further investigate, such as, “Great Grain Robbery – 1972, USSR buys 30 million tons of grain”…”Ron Reagan boast not pay taxes on ranch” (pg 195), USA destroyed food reserves during Great Depression (pg 195), British coerced corn planting in Malwai (pg 79), most imported slaves went to Brazil, not USA, (pg 54)…. LOTS of stuff.
Warman doesn’t solely talk about corn, other plants, history is thrown in, corn is not the answer to the question of history. (Unlike Cod, History of World in 6 Glasses, Potato,…these type of books seem a bit cheesy in over-playing the significance of their topic.) Possibly, because Warman is an actual historian, and not a journalist.
Corn was adopted by so many cultures because it works. It is versatile, has great yield, easy to store, easy to be used as feed, or turned into alcohol.
One thing that I am thinking about, how does one get plain old, generic corn. Currently, seed companies have genetically engineered corn that has great yield, but won’t breed true. Meaning, if you keep the seeds, the yield next year will only be a fraction of what it had been, so, growers have to keep going back to company for seed. It wasn’t always that way. I would think that corn, without a trade mark, could be in the public domain, the Americas gift to civilization. I’m sure the corn I have in my backyard, the genetics are owned. If I save seeds, no one will care. But, if I gave seeds away, on an industrial scale, to poor folk … I’m sure Ferry Morse will send their lawyers. True, the poor folk wouldn’t get the yield that rich folk get, but, the seed would be free.
well…I’ll just leave with two quotes:
“Corn, the main staple of the African slave trade, became the mainstay for armed mobilization and military expansion of secondary empires in nineteenth-century Africa…” pg 68
“Corn generated wealth for landowners, shopkeepers and moneylenders, overlords, and the new middle class. Ironically, most of those who stood to gain the most from corn never even ate it. They ate wheat instead. Corn was a commodity with an unlimited market: that of the poor, who made up the vast majority on a continent that was bracing itself for the coming modern capitalism.” (pg 131)
Tags: Arturo Warman, corn
