Recent events confirm that my work as a writer to educate the masses about agriculture may never be done, or perhaps I am not doing a good job. Last week I wrote about how as a child, I knew not to try to eat field corn off the plant, something a Chicago White Sox player tried before a ball game in Iowa. I am also being queried, almost weekly, about how many ears of corn are on a stalk. I will not re-hash that topic; read last week’s article if you missed it.
During the recent MLB game in Iowa, not only did the camera catch a ball player trying to eat the corn and then spit it out, the game’s announcer allegedly said something along the lines that you cannot really eat this corn. To be accurate, he should have said, “You cannot really eat this corn without it being processed in some way. Now let’s sort out the details.
There are about 90 million acres of corn grown in the United States. The vast majority, about 85 million acres, is yellow dent field corn. Some call it feed corn, some call it field corn, and some even call it Reid’s dent corn. Farmers Robert and James Reid, a father and son, crossed different varieties of corn to develop the current yellow dent corn. Their genetic manipulation of ancestral varieties won a prize when displayed at the 1893 World’s Fair. Their work led to most of the corn varieties grown today.
It is true that a long time ago our farming ancestors would pick field corn when it was very young and tender and eat it. They called them roasting ears. Very few people alive today will remember this process thanks to the research of John R. Laughnan. In 1953 he isolated mutated kernels that were unusually sweet. 8 years later his Illini Super Sweet corn variety revolutionized the sweet corn industry.
Shockingly, of the 90 million acres of corn, only about 1 million acres are sweet corn. Let’s do some silly math here. If farmers plant 90 million acres at 34,000 seeds per acre they will raise over 3 trillion ears of corn. Imagine if that was all sweet corn. Divide that by 325 million people in the U.S. and you get an average of 9,415 ears of corn per person per year. That means each person would have to eat 26 ears of corn per day to consume it all. If you do this math with only 1 million acres of sweet corn, you get just under 2 ears per week. That is more reasonable.
Of the 90 million acres, less than a million is popcorn. About 3 million acres are specialty corn grown specifically for food processing. Yellow and white dent, hard endosperm, waxy and high oil corn, even blue corn, make up much of this specialty market. Of course, yellow dent can be used for high fructose corn syrup, brewing beer, cornstarch and myriads of other food uses. We eat yellow dent field corn in many items, after it is processed.
My article is now done. Perhaps I will enjoy a cold beer, brewed from fermented corn. Maybe soon I can go find out what the difference is between corn and flour tortillas at the local Mexican restaurant. Researching the many uses for corn is going to be so exhausting, and delicious at the same time.
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