Views on corn?

Unknown

jgnatca wrote: »

There's a plant geneticist on Ted this week talking about how we have been cultivating foodstuffs for generations. Corn is one of them.



The cob on the left is the ancestor of modern corn, is covered by a hard casing, and you would need a hammer to get to the sweet nut.

And yet someone way back when did just that. Yay!!!

zyxst wrote: »

Nony_Mouse wrote: »

mccindy72 wrote: »

miriamtob wrote: »

mccindy72 wrote: »

miriamtob wrote: »

Corn is weird. It needs human intervention in order to grow and it has gotten insanely good at getting people to grow it; we grow a friggin' lot of it! Humans and corn truly have a symbiosis. Michael Pollan writes about corn in 'The Omnivore's Dilemma'.

What the *kitten*? Well how did it grow in the first place? Magic little golden nuggets from heaven?

Read the book, 'the Omnivore's Dilemma'. He explains it pretty well. You can read about its origin here too: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maize

Sorry, random book reference and Wikipedia. Not credible sources. People didn't invent corn from nothing. That's not possible.

Doing this from memory - the wild antecedent of maize is teosinte, and it took a hell of a long time for that to be established because it is so vastly different from domesticated maize. At some point, people started utilising this ancestor, eventually cultivating it, which led to domestication through selecting for desirable traits such as bigger kernels and greater indehiscence (ie kernels that don't fall off when you harvest the ears). Corn has now been bred to be so indehiscent that it is essentially reliant on humans to plant it in order to continue existing (or from the corn's point of view, if it had one).

Also, it is delicious.

I likes science (though I admit it was very bad form to not provide sources so people knew I wasn't just making stuff up ).

Unknown

I get to eat mo butta, so good thing.