Most corn is eaten by no one. Less than 10 percent of the US corn crop ever finds its way to your table, and much of that is in the form of high fructose corn syrup in soda and processed foods. The middle of our country is a cornfield roughly 1500 miles long. What happens to all that corn if it’s not feeding people? About half of it fattens cattle, pigs, and chickens and fuels dairy production. In a hungry world, we have to remember that the efficiency of converting corn calories to animal calories is low. For every 100 calories a person could receive from eating corn, only 15 of those calories will make it to your plate in the form of animal protein. Since 2011, however, more corn has been used for ethanol production than for consumption by humans and livestock combined. At what cost?
Corn production today uses more natural resources than any other crop. Around 90 million acres are planted in corn, and the last remaining remnants of native prairie and grassland are being plowed under for corn every year. Corn is a hungry crop and a thirsty one. Vast amounts of water are consumed, and a staggering amount of fertilizer. Corn not only consumes a great deal—it produces a huge amount of waste. Much of that fertilizer never even makes it into the plant, instead it is washed downstream, producing toxic algal blooms in waters everywhere along the way and ultimately creating the growing dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. Dead rivers, lost biodiversity, say farewell to prairies and bobolinks and meadowlarks, to say nothing of precious topsoil leaving the fields and silting the rivers. The economic pressure behind this ongoing expansion of cornfields has little to do with filling empty bellies. In today’s agribusiness, we feed more cars than people.
I don’t blame my farmer neighbor for industrial agriculture. He’s been harnessed to a system that treats him like a cog, too. His family has farmed this valley well for generations and had to adapt to changing pressures in order to stay on the land. The honorable calling of farming is being dishonored by a worldview and economic institutions that relentlessly demand taking more without regard for giving back. He’s been colonized, too.
Watching train cars of golden yellow kernels unload into ethanol factories creates a gnawing pain in my gut; it’s the pain of betrayal. The Mother of All Things, the Wonderful Seed, did not agree to this. It’s a long, long way from seeing her as a sacred being to an industrial commodity. How did we get here?
Colonization is the process by which an invading people seeks to replace the original lifeways with their own, erasing the evidence of prior claims to place. Its tools are many: military and political power, assimilative education, economic pressure, ecological transformation, religion—and language.
Colonists take what they want and attempt to erase the rest. Conceiving of plants and land as objects, not subjects—as things instead of beings—provides the moral distance that enables exploitation. Valuing the productive potential of the physical body but denying the personhood of the being, reducing a person to a thing for sale—this too is a manifestation of colonialism.
… Agribusiness is quick to point out that we cannot feed a world of nearly eight billion people with gardens alone. This is true but omits the reality that most of the corn we grow is not going to hungry people: it is feeding cars. There is another kind of hunger in our affluent society, a hunger for justice and meaning and community, a hunger to remember what industrial agriculture has asked us to forget, but the seed remembers. Good farming should feed that hunger, too.
I’m thinking of the way that grandfather Teosinte mingles with corn at the edge of a traditional cornfield, welcomed as a source of guidance and diversity. Might we invite ancestral knowledge into our fields for these same virtues? Unsustainable industrial agriculture needs philosophical gene flow from indigenous knowledge, a cross-pollination of respectful relationship to breed a new agriculture that honors the plants as well as the people. Together we can remember our covenant with corn, that she will care for the people, if we will care for her.
Robin Wall Kimmerer, Corn Tastes Better on the Honor System
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