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Midwest Maize: How Corn Shaped the U.S. Heartland (Adults)

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Learn how and why corn transformed the Heartland and helped create today's world with author Cynthia Clampitt.

About 10,000 years ago, a weedy grass growing in Mexico possessed a strange trait known as a "jumping gene" that transformed itself into a larger and more useful grass—the cereal grass that we would come to know as maize and then corn. Nurtured by early farmers in the Oaxaca region, this grain would transform the Americas even before First Contact. After First Contact, it would span the globe, with mixed results, but for newcomers in North America, it expanded its influence from rescuing a few early settlers to creating the Midwest and building the world we know. Today, it is more important than ever. As Margaret Visser noted in her classic work Much Depends on Dinner, "Without corn, North America and most particularly modern, technological North America is inconceivable."

Cynthia Clampitt is a writer, speaker, and food historian. Cynthia has pursued her love of culture, history, and food in thirty-seven countries on six continents (so far). In recent years, she has increasingly focused her studies on the American Midwest.

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