Midwest Maize: How Corn Shaped the U.S. Heartland

Heartland Foodways

by Cynthia Clampitt

Food historian Cynthia Clampitt pens the epic story of what happened when Mesoamerican farmers bred a nondescript grass into a staff of life so prolific, so protean, that it represents nothing less than one of humankind's greatest achievements. Blending history with expert reportage, she traces the disparate threads that have woven corn into the fabric of our diet, politics, economy, science, and cuisine. At the same time she explores its future as a source of energy and the foundation of seemingly limitless green technologies. The result is a bourbon-to-biofuels portrait of the astonishing plant that sustains the world.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Food

304 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 2015

About the author

I am a writer and author, but I'm also a popular speaker, because I like talking at least as much as I like writing. My favorite topics are travel, food, history, and geography. Destination Heartland: A Guide to Discovering the Midwest's Remarkable Past is my newest work. Based on discoveries I made as I drove around the region, largely while researching my previous books, it was my way of sharing with others the things that delighted me. Of course, I couldn't see everything, but the book does include suggestions of how to make your own discoveries.

My previous book, Pigs, Pork, and Heartland Hogs: From Wild Boar to Baconfest, was released in October 2018. Like my previous book, Midwest Maize, Pigs is also a food history. I love the surprises and connections to our lives of food history, and it has become one of my favorite fields of study in the last 30 years.

My first book, Waltzing Australia, recounts my six-month, 20,000-mile journey around and across the land Down Under. It is crammed with information, as well as more than a few adventures. In 2010, it won the Mom's Choice Award for travel writing.

The blog listed below is the one I created for Waltzing Australia, and it continues to feature information and insights into Australia, as well as sharing adventures from return trips. But that's not my only blog. MidwestMaize.com focuses on my travels in the American Midwest, as I continue to research the factors that helped shape the region. I also have a blog titled The World's Fare (http://www.theworldsfare.org) for food history, food trivia, and travel to places other than Australia and the Midwest (37 countries and counting, so a fair bit of information there, as well).

For those who are interested in my speaking, the topics include histories of rum, corn, pigs, and the spice trade, plus travels in Australia and Mongolia. (And the spice trade presentation is actually kind of a hybrid -- spice trade history plus my travels in southern India.) You can find more info about the topics and where I'm presenting on my website.

Hope you'll join me for some of the fun, surprising adventure that both food history and world travel offer.

Reviews

[Stephanie Weisgerber · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mood: Sentimental and Festive
Theme: How corn is the basis of America's affluence.
Pace: Controlled
Writing Quality: Entertaining and Informative, Author recreates history in vivid detail.
Length: 237 pages

"Midwest Maize" is a delight! So lend me your ear for a minute as I stalk my way through this corny review. I seriously couldn't put this book down, it kept popping back into my hands.

Firstly, this book was highly recommended to me by an economist as I was looking into stock markets and commodities trading along with "Crude, the story of Oil" by Sonia Shah. The economist felt strongly one should know the history and inter-relationship between oil and corn in order to fully grasp the impacts both play on the markets. So I bought both books and dived in.

Food historian Cynthia Clampitt begins her account in Mexico with a smaller grain called teosinte, the precursor of what we know of today as corn. The early Mexican settlers soon began experimenting with the ever versatile genes of this grass and created what we now know of as maize, the grain with the largest seed head. Maize is the only cereal grain (not a vegetable) that has been rendered incapable of dispersing its seed without human intervention. So the partnership between man and corn begins.

This partnership will span centuries and shape and develop towns, cities, population booms, exports, imports, trade, the rise of the cattle industry, the invention of cereals and snack foods, and on and on it goes nibbling its way through the years. From the invention of the plow by John Deere to the rise of grist mills and canneries, to the explosion of creative foods such as popcorn, corn whiskey, cornstarch, corn syrup, corn oil, ethanol, ect... hardly any place in America remains untouched by this golden nugget.

Clampitt explores the GMO debate and puts forward quite a case for genetically modified organisms being much more of a benefit than a harm. She expounds on this with scientific evidence that GM corn requires much less herbicide, improves water runoff quality, drastically increases yields, as well as requiring less crop rotation than organic corns with no observable or documented side affects to human health. I found her case and explanations very useful as someone quite skeptical of GMO foods and someone who organically gardens myself.

Of particular interest to me as well was the chapter on corn festivals and corn palaces in the midwest and the chapter reviewing ancient and modern corn recipes of various kinds. I'm about to go make the cornbread recipe now!

This book is a phenomenal deep dive into how corn has impacted American society and continues to provide a basis for our economic growth while supporting rising populations better than any other food on earth. The author masterfully blends history with scientific reporting creating a gratifying read for all to enjoy. It will leave you with an "aww shucks" feeling when you're done reading it. :)

[Lili · Rating 5 out of 5]

I received this book from Netgalley in Exchange for a review:

So, I am the kind of person who loves books that are very focused on one very specific subject. To a lot of people (I suppose) a book solely devoted to corn might seem a bit dull. Not to me, I thoroughly enjoyed learning about the history and impact of corn, I mean how cool is that?

Now, part of my enjoyment might have come from the books excellent writing as well, I did not once find myself bored or thinking 'wow, corn, ok, clearly I must be desperate for a book'it stayed engaging and informative. Plus the little bits of corn related poetry and historical text at the beginning of each chapter was quite neat. I had no idea, though I really shouldn't be surprised, that there was so much written about the golden grain.

Corn is fascinating, so much more than the snacks at movie theaters, canned sweetcorn, and feed for animals. I truly recommend giving this book a read if you are interested in the history of corn and how it shaped the midwest, though I will be honest, I have seen more corn fields in my time in Pennsylvania than in Missouri, could be that I am in the city. But, you have to admit, corn fields in the city would be pretty awesome!

[James Krohe · Rating 3 out of 5]

I grew up within a block of a corn field on the east end of Springfield, Illinois. Nearly every weekend of those years we’d visit the relatives on their farm outside Beardstown. 45 miles away; over the potholes and through the corn, to grandmother’s house we’d go, with me entranced by the corn rows, like the spokes of a spinning wheel. But while I knew how a combine harvester worked, sort of, because I’d seen them on TV, everything else about corn was as mysterious to me as the Tokyo underground or the tribal history of the Pashtun. In this I was a true Downstater. We can tell a corn plant from a telephone pole, but that’s about it.

Those who find this burden of ignorance heavy will find relief in a new book, Midwest Maize by Cynthia Clampitt, published last April by the University of Illinois Press. The shelf of good books about corn is not a long one, but it does contain John C. Hudson’s Making the Corn Belt – essential to understanding the region’s history -- and Betty Fussell’s The Story of Corn. Unlike them, Clampitt’s book is not a history. Rather it is a compendium of facts and anecdotes, snippets of history and even some recipes. The reader will learn how the grain is grown, its origins and improvements, how it’s shipped and sold, which products you can make from it and which dishes you can cook with it and some of the many controversies that attend it, from trade to genetic modification. Read it attentively, and you will be able to astound your driving companions on your next trip to a Cards game. It would make a welcome wedding present, I’m sure, and what new graduate would not be grateful for a copy to read while sitting at the unemployment office?

Corn certainly shaped mid-Illinois but, as Clampitt reminds us, mid-Illinois shaped the corn industry too. The region was the site of A.E. Staley’s corn processing plant in Decatur, the biggest in the world when it opened in 1909. It was home to hybridizers like McLean County’s Funk Bros. Seeds, a dozen inventors who made improvements to corn planters and harvesting machines and to the U of I, which was to the corn agro-industry what Stanford was to computers.

The notion that corn built the Midwest is defensible, but it is absurd to claim, as some among the corn lobby do, that corn sustains the Midwest. Corn dominates the landscape hereabouts, yet it is in social and economic terms a negligible presence. The Illinois Department of Agriculture tells us proudly that the marketing of the state’s agricultural commodities in 2014 generated more than $19 billion annually, of which corn accounts for 54 percent, or a bit more than $10 billion. That’s not a lot of money in a state whose gross state product is $746 billion; corn receipts accounted for 1.4 percent of the state’s output that year.

My disdain for today’s agro-industrial complex burns with a hard, gem-like flame but the intertwined histories of corn and Illinois fascinate me nonetheless. Corn whiskey was one of the first value-added products of Illinois ag. It is not too fanciful to say that Illinois thus owes its Dawn Clark Netsches and Hillary Clintons to corn; whiskey begat drunk husbands, drunk husbands begat angry wives and mothers, who, being disenfranchised and thus unable to assert their will on the politicians, begat angry suffragettes, who begat the vote, in 1919.

And what has corn done for us lately?” you ask. The question is left largely unexamined by Clampitt. The book, we are told, is about “how corn shaped the U.S. heartland” but that is not quite accurate. A good field in mid-illinois these days is likely to have more than 30,000 corn plants per acre. Such intense corn production is responsible for increased fertilizer use (and consequent water pollution), increased production of greenhouse gases and consumption of such massive amounts of water that corn might be changing mid-Illinois weather. (See my “It’s not the heat, it’s the corn,” July 21, 2011.) But the author’s index does not include the terms “dead zone, “Gulf of Mexico” or “pollution.”

Likewise, Clampitt explores maize’s role in the American diet; as noted, the book even has recipes. But corn is the least nutritious of the cereals, especially when one eats it, as Americans do by the ton, in the form of fried snacks and sugary drinks. The implications of subsidizing the production of cheap starches in a nation plagued by obesity and diabetes is by now a moral question as well as a public health crisis, but that is not explored here. Clampitt’s index does not include the words “diabetes,” “health” or “diet.” Some native Americans sacrificed living maidens to the corn god; we sacrifice our children.

This review originally appeared under the title “Where corn is god” in Illinois Times, the Springfield weekly, on Jan. 21, 2016.

[Billie Jo · Rating 4 out of 5]

So the opening chapter did quite grab me as much as it tried to and chapter 12-14 seemed to exist just to make the book longer as it rehashed much of what was mentioned earlier, the migration of ethnic groups to the midwest(loosely tied in with and they brought and ate corn based food), and corn recipes both original and modified for more modern cooking although I couldn't tell the difference, other than formatting, between them.

With that said, the rest of the book was a VERY comprehensive look on corn in the midwest and its far reaching global impact even in areas other than a direct food supply chain. And I do mean comprehensive. Other than how does one engineer corn, any questions you might have surrounding the corn industry is answered here. Want to hear from farmers about their experience over the year, she has found them, talked to them and quoted them in the book. What to know what corn can be used to create....that's covered. Want to know how the mechanics of farming has changed over the years...yep that's covered too. She writing style was more story telling than textbook making it an easy to read non-fiction book. Although IMO, about 3 chapters longer than it needed to be.

[Emily · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wanted this book to be much more skeptical of industrial agriculture than it is - for example, the author blandly cheerleads corn as cattle feed without addressing the point that corn-fed cattle contribute to antibiotic overuse and antibiotic resistance.

[Angie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love both food and American history, so looking at American history through the very specific lens of corn was fascinating.

[Lars Larson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I respect corn a bit more after reading this book

[ken whitsitt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Corn Capital of the World

I live in central Illinois and worked for the Staley Co. for 30 years which is one of the largest corn processing companies in the world. This book was very informative - like someone said who also read this book, they learned something new with each page read.

[Colleen Marquis · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love micro-histories. I really love them. Mark Kurlansky is one of my heroes, and Midwest Maize belongs among his caliber of books. Clampitt is very aware of the roles corn, or any commodity in human society, affects so many aspects of that society. Corn shaped people and people shaped corn. Really readable and very entertaining.

[Sumiko · Rating 4 out of 5]

Loved this - all about corn: it's origins, different types of corn, how corn has shaped America, etc.

The 2nd to last chapter includes recipes - and I have to say the whole book made me want to eat corn.

Argh. Which I cannot do. . .not in kernal form.

[Susan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well researched and written, quite interesting.

[Peggy Pannke-Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

The writer delves deeply into her research while keeping the facts interesting. Buy one for your friends in Iowa!

[William Mego · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some inaccuracies sprinkled throughout, but none fatal. Highly entertaining and approachable. Generally I'd recommend it, but please double check any facts you take away from it before citation.