Corn-on-the-cob: a symbol of trade relationships, food cultures and land use
- Pam Brunton
- 5 days ago
- 8 min read
Updated: 29 minutes ago
The followings is taken from Pam Brunton's book Between Two Waters. Pam's work constantly investigates our relationship to our foods, placing ingredients within cultural and historical contexts. She works from a starting position of Scotland, which allows her to really dig deep into complex systems, sourcing chains and histories, which also addresses how identities and memories play into these understandings. Pam is a chef, she co-owns Inver in Scotland, and her food is excellent because of this research and considered thought.
This book is a culmination of years of research and thinking and is a personal looking into the global food system. We decided to include this section of her book into Sugar season because it it looks at the modern uses of sweetness and how we understand sugar, but demonstrates how this topic - this ingredients - and how we got here, and are using it as sweetness, is a colonial, historical conversation. This section also shows how the book expertly weaves personal and political, and is such an engaging and important piece of work!
Section structurally edited for online, and cut slightly to work as a standalone piece.
For me, there’s one vegetable that embodies everything that modernity has brought to my kitchen table: sweetcorn. Following this one plant across continents, I can trace the threads of capitalism as it re-weaves social and natural landscapes overseas and at home. Corn-on-the-cob is also one of the stitches securing my own personal food story to the world’s wide cloth.
Every now and then when my brother and I were young, Dad would set the cine projector up. Sometimes we were allowed to put on one of the old rattling black-and-white films from Zimbabwe. In one of the films my mum and her brother play tag between rows of sweetcorn plants, throwing spent husks at each other, laughing at the unseen cameraman’s antics. They are maybe six and nine years old. The rows of corn are in the family’s back garden, in a vegetable patch that includes avocado, orange and peach trees, passion-fruit vines (granadillas) and banana palms. Three decades later, my childhood garden featured rows of corn too, grown against all the odds on the wind-battered edge of the North Sea. Sweetcorn is best eaten straight from the plant, like peas or asparagus, before the simple snappy sugars revert to bland starches.
Corn is not an easy plant to grow in cold climates. I tried, in the back garden of a small rental cottage on Loch Fyne, during the 2020 lockdown. I trowelled in three small plants in a raised bed stuffed with fecund rotted manure and soil. Their companion leeks were delighted – fat sweet white stems, forked greens lihing skywards like open arms. By September the corn plants had grown taller than me (no great challenge) but the garden ran out of sunshine before the cobs could fully ripen. I kept hoping for too long, perhaps like Mum had, and lost the tiny cobs to frost and rot. Maybe we could have got something out of them if I’d harvested them sooner; a short, barely sweet crunch wrung from scant October light.
In Mum’s box of black-and-white photos there’s one with a spidery scrawl in fading biro on the back, writing I remember as my great-grandmother’s: ‘Severe lightning shows up the mealies . . . It was completely dark when this was taken! One thing I don’t like – the thunderstorms.’
‘Mealies’ is a Southern African name for corn, now a major African staple food. ‘Mealie pap’ is a corn porridge, similar to grits in the southern states of the US or polenta in Italy. It was instrumental in facilitating European invaders’ colonisation of the African subcontinent. Maize is the seed head of a tall annual grass, Zea mays. Picture the other grass crops in common cultivation (wheat, barley, oats and rye), and you see how far it has come from its first domestication 10,000 years ago. A sweetcorn is the seed head of the solid stem of the modern plant. It’s around 1,000 times bigger than it was originally and is now found in around 200 varieties, from white through yellow to blue-black – different variations suitable for all uses,from fuel to food. Sweetcorn is 3.5 per cent sweeter and contains much less water than it used to, when there were eight known varieties cultivated only in Central America.
Corn has always been selectively bred for human needs, but these days major crops of corn are also genetically modified to resist disease and coordinate with the application of engineered pesticides. The difference is that the genetic modification is done in a laboratory; it’s not something farmers and gardeners can do for themselves in the field, by cross-pollination or graphing. The power is thus in food techs’ hands, not farmers’. Plant chemists select corn for commercial profit, not for reasons of human nutrition, ease of nutrient extraction or flavour. Potential effects on the natural environment or the health of farm-workers are not factored into the equation.
Peel back the husks on a corn plant and you can read the whole history of the modern world and its food supply. Corn was first cultivated from a wild grass by Mexican people around 10,000 years ago, and from there it spread north and south across the Americas. The Mexicans were the ones to steep the kernels with lye, an alkaline solution, to unlock the corn’s full range of nutrients (and that distinct toasted taste of corn tortillas). That knowledge of nixtamalisation didn’t travel as far as the crop did, though. Once detached from indigenous knowledge overseas, corn became an energy-rich but nutrient- poor way to eat your staple starch. Native Americans taught their invaders how to prepare it. Christopher Columbus trans- ported it back to Europe and from there it spread to all areas of the world suitable for growing it (and some, like my back garden, emphatically not).
Corn, or maize, was the energy that powered the trade in enslaved African people during the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. Maize first arrived on the African coast at some point during the seventeenth century, initially introduced by the Portuguese from their colonies in South America, to supply food to their trading forts. The crop was quickly adopted by African farmers impressed by its low labour requirements, its short growth period, ease of storage and transport, and its readily available energy. Maize was grown across much of the African continent by the early eighteenth century. It was a major influence on the population increase of the time – and farming corn increased the numbers of people living in landscapes accessible to slave raiders (harder to access regions were harder to raid).58 In a cycle that became typical of the global colonial trade, the enslaved people were then transported to the Americas.
Corn is a spiritual staple as well as a biological one. Native Americans saw no distinction between the health of the earth, the health of their crops, and human physical and spiritual health. Corn is one of the ‘three sisters’ – a traditional farming system that uses the natural characteristics of corn, bean and squash plants to produce maximum edible yield from plots of land while naturally protecting the crops and returning nutrition to the soil. Today Indigenous Australian and American academics discuss ‘molecular colonisation’ – the effect of modern diet and food customs on indigenous digestive and mental well-being. Maize seeds were traditionally planted in ceremony, showing reverence for the plants and the sentient earth itself. Buffalo Bird Woman, a renowned traditional Hidatsa gardener born in 183y, said her people believed that ‘the corn plants had souls, as children have souls. We cared for our corn in those days, as we would care for a child.’ When spring returned, the women would welcome the corn spirits back from the south with dancing and ceremonies. The traditional relationship with food and the land was complex and profound.
Corn is these days one of the most prolifically planted commercial crops, grown in sixty-nine countries; annual production is now around 800 million tonnes. As a course- ground meal it’s a staple food for millions of people (polenta, grits, mealie-meal, masa). In North America, in the wide open, sunshine-fuelled plains of the Midwest and Canada, corn is the major commodity crop. Most North American corn is grown for animal feed and for conversion into biofuels. Instead of using all this land to fatten a luxury product like beef in intensive feed-lots in northern and southern America, however, we could be using it to produce protein that is up to ten times more efficient for human consumption, in the form of beans and pulses. Instead of converting corn into biofuel, technologists could be driving desire for less resource-hungry modes of transport than the individualist’s car.
But the hidden uses of corn are perhaps just as emblematic of the modern world’s use of food crops as the visible ones. Corn is a major source of processed food additives such as high-fructose corn syrup. Industrial corn farmers are recipients of the majority of US farming subsidies, meaning corn sugar is much cheaper than sugars from beets or cane. It’s the sweetness in your soh drinks and candies, as well as the source of most ‘natural’ fruit flavourings. It’s a popular breakfast cereal and appears as both chip and flavouring in bags of corn snacks. It gives the home kitchen cornflour for thickening and corn oil for frying. It’s tucked away in cans of pet food. From being the human fuel that powered colonialism, this one plant now fuels the modern processed-food industry.
Futures are quite literally traded on it. The international trade in corn – in the form of dried maize kernels, to be processed into meal in the Americas and Africa – is a major way of deciding a country’s entitlement to food and cash. In the early 2000s, Malawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe suffered a ‘maize drought’ that jeopardised this staple food. The three governments called for international food aid well ahead of the harvest, anticipating (with previous experience) a delay in response. The United States aid organisation USAID shipped excess US corn to the three Southern African countries. This kept the price of US corn buoyant at home, a key strategy of capitalist economics, and ohen how food aid is used. South Africa meanwhile imported maize from Brazil and Argentina to sell to its neighbours, even though other, much closer, East African countries had surpluses of maize that year which they could have sold or donated to their neighbouring countries. But instead of the profit from the grain sales staying in the region, that cash had effectively gone to the United States, and directly to wealthy South Africa.
During the maize drought, the Southern African Regional Poverty Network voiced a ‘very legitimate suspicion over the goals pursued by political elites in upholding control on trade, production, distribution and pricing of maize’.*
As well as distorting the African maize market, USAID and the World Food Programme also put pressure on the Zambian government to take genetically modified (GM) corn. At that particular point, the people of Zambia were actually far from starvation. And Zambia’s export market for fresh produce – including corn – relies on Europe, where GM produce is popularly rejected. Once GM crops have established themselves in the soil, farmers lose their GM-free certification. USAID also support the development of biotechnologies worldwide, including in Southern Africa, where several local research projects are supported by the institution. One alternative would have been to offer hulled corn – which can’t grow if it hits the soil, because it’s already been milled for human consumption.
Corn is a potent symbol of how one crop literally creates the structures of trade relationships, food cultures and land use all over the world.
* Mousseau, Fred, ‘Roles of and Alternatives to Food Aid in Southern Africa: A Report to Oxfam’, 2004
Photos of Inver Restaurant, by Anna.
PAM BRUNTON is the acclaimed Scottish chef behind Inver restaurant on Loch Fyne, which celebrates its tenth anniversary in 2025. Inver has won countless awards and is a recipient of the Green Michelin Star praising sustainability alongside world class food. Prior to opening Inver, she worked at heavyweight restaurants all around the world. Pam holds an MSc in Food Policy from City University and spent four years working with food campaign groups Sustain - the alliance for better food and farming - and the Soil Association.
inverrestaurant.co.uk | @inverrestaurant
