RD201907-08

Corn

The Most

Important

Crop in

the Land

By Kate Lowenstein

and Daniel Gritzer

S

ay you were to stroll through a

quintessential American land-

scape one summer morning,

looking across vast fields of shim-

mering, swaying cornstalks a dozen

feet tall. Might you be tempted to

sneak down into a row and swipe an

ear so that you could sink your teeth

into my sweet, juicy kernels right

then and there?

If so, I’d almost certainly disappoint

you. The bitter truth is that less than

1 percent of what’s grown in America

is sweet corn. Ninety-nine times out of

a hundred, biting into me fresh from

the field would be like biting into

a raw potato. Welcome to my

world—our world—dominated by

tough, inedible field corn.

And I do mean my world. Even

with minimal contribution from the

buttery kernels that you savor come

summertime, I am by far the nation’s

biggest crop. Chemists have learned

Photograph by Levi Brown rd.com | july/august 2019 27

I Am the

FOOD

ON YOUR

PLATE

Reader’s Digest