Fields of Invention
How We Made Corn and Corn Made Us
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Fields of Invention
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Narrated by:
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By:
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Zachary Karabell
Nothing dominates the American landscape like corn. With fields stretching more than a thousand miles across the Midwest and Great Plains, and with hundreds of derivatives including corn starch, corn syrup, and ethanol, corn is a pillar of agriculture, as iconically American as apple pie and baseball.
Corn, though, isn't native to America. It isn’t native to anywhere. It doesn’t exist in the wild in any part of the world, nor can it for long. Corn is a human invention—a modern marvel more akin to the internet and iPhone than the grasses and wildflowers of the prairie, and its invention, just as revolutionary.
In Fields of Invention, Zachary Karabell reveals corn as the technology that powered not only the bodies but the enterprises and industries, even the ideas, that built the New World. Tracing the origins of the crop to a handful of Indigenous tribes in southern Mexico in 7000 BCE, Karabell shows how we created corn and transformed it, first over centuries and now, with the advent of gene-editing tools like CRISPR, in mere weeks.
The history of corn is a global one, weaving together ancient Mayan rituals and the drone-operated factory farms of modern China. More than anyone, it was the Americans who cultivated the science of corn—and reaped its benefits. Gone is the Jeffersonian era of the yeoman farmer who tends his land for sustenance. With its supercharged yields and Protean versatility, corn in America became feed, shocking the U.S. meat industry into existence; it became cornmeal and bread and cereal and popcorn and snacks; and in the hands of Elijah Craig and Jim Beam, it became whiskey and bourbon.
There are no industries now that corn does not touch. As ethanol, it fuels our vehicles; as dextrin and starch, it thickens and binds, not just food but dry wall, diapers, and batteries; as corn syrup, it sweetens our foods. Corn has thus become a kind of Rorschach test for the modern world. On the one hand, it represents energy, progress, agricultural activity, and innovation—the very best mankind has to offer. But in the distorted image of the funhouse mirror, corn also reflects our worser Gods: our unbridled ambition, our relentless pursuit of progress, our disregard for the environment, and our greed.
Fields of Invention is an epic tale of human ingenuity and hubris told on an intimate scale. It is, at the same time, a fundamentally hopeful story, about mankind’s ability to innovate and surmount the most challenging obstacles, even when those obstacles are, sometimes, manmade.
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