Quotes About Corn

Each strand of corn silk is actually a hollow tube connected to the undeveloped mother cob. The pollen travels down the silk to the cob, where it forms a single kernel. Each kernel has its own silk attached to it. Someone up there thought of everything, because they even made it so the silk is covered with a sticky substance that catches the pollen. To make sure it doesn't just blow away.

If you're a commodity corn farmer in Iowa, you're locked into an infrastructure that keeps you a commodity corn farmer.

The worst thing about Halloween is, of course, candy corn. It's unbelievable to me. Candy corn is the only candy in the history of America that's never been advertised. And there's a reason. All of the candy corn that was ever made was made in 1911. And so, since nobody eats that stuff, every year there's a ton of it left over.

My favorite hobby is being alone. I like to be alone. I also like dancing, fishing, playing poker sometimes and vegetable gardening - corn, tomatoes, cucumbers, I have a big garden every year.

There is every reason to believe that corn has succeeded in domesticating us.

You may not think you eat a lot of corn and soybeans, but you do: 75 percent of the vegetable oils in your diet come from soy (representing 20 percent of your daily calories) and more than half of the sweeteners you consume come from corn (representing around 10 perecent of daily calories).

Corn is the hero of its own story, and though we humans played a crucial supporting role in its rise to world domination, it would be wrong to suggest we have been calling the shots, or acting always in our own best interests. Indeed there is every reason to believe that corn has succeeded in domesticating us.

So this is what commodity corn can do to a cow: industrialize the miracle of nature that is a ruminant, taking this sunlight- and prairie grass-powered organism and turning it into the last thing we need: another fossil fuel machine. This one, however, is able to suffer.

Planted, a single corn seed yielded more than 150 fat kernels, often as many as 300, while the return on a seed of wheat was something less than 50:1

To eat corn directly is to consume all the energy in the corn, but when you feed that corn to an animal, 90% of its energy is lost... what this means is that the amount of food energy lost in the making of something like a Chicken McNugget could feed a great many more children than just mine, and that behind the 4,510 calories in our meal, tens of thousand corn calories could have been used to feed many more people.

loony hillbillies destabilized by gross quantities of impure corn liquor and generations of profoundly unbiblical sex;

Hoping to settle the matter once and for all, in 1969 food scientists from all over the world convened at 'An Origin of Corn Conference' at the University of Illinois, but the debates grew so vituperative and bitter, and at times personal, that the conference broke up in confusion, and no papers from it were ever published.

It is beyond us to divine how any people could have bred cobs of corn from such a thin and unpropitious plant—or even thought to try. Hoping to settle the matter once and for all, food scientists from around the world convened in 1969 at a conference on the origin of corn at the University of Illinois, but the debates grew so vituperative and bitter, and at times so personal, that the conference broke up in confusion and no papers from it were ever published.

While Mesoamericans were harvesting corn and potatoes (and avocados and tomatoes and beans and about a hundred other plants we would be desolate to be without now)

Betsy started to tell about the male and female corn in Kansas. She got so excited about that damn corn even the producer had tears in his eyes, only he couldn't use any of it, unfortunately, he said.

I believe in the forest, and in the meadow, and in the night in which the corn grows.

The older, thinner, and less productive grass lands, however, frequently can be made to produce much larger yields of feed in corn than if left, as they are, in unproductive grass.

Outside the windows, the land was as flat, as interesting, as the head of an anvil, and the shadows of the corn advanced like the rifle barrels of an approaching army.

In order of diminishing corniness, this is how the laboratory measured our meal: soda (100 percent corn), milk shake (78 percent), salad dressing (65 percent), chicken nuggets (56 percent), cheeseburger (52 percent), and French fries (23 percent).

There are some forty-five thousand items in the average American supermarket and more than a quarter of them now contain corn.

There are some forty-five thousand items in the average American supermarket and more than a quarter of them now contain corn. This goes for the nonfood items as well—everything from the toothpaste and cosmetics to the disposable diapers, trash bags, cleansers, charcoal briquettes, matches, and batteries, right down to the shine on the cover of the magazine that catches your eye by the checkout: corn.

By far the biggest portion of a bushel of American commodity corn (about 60% of it, or some 50k kernels) goes to feeding livestock, and much of that goes to feeding America's 100 million beef cattle

How this peculiar grass, native to Central America and unknown to the Old World before 1492, came to colonize so much of our land and bodies is one of the plant world's greatest success stories. I say the plant world's success story because it is no longer clear that corn's triumph is such a boon to the rest of the world, and because we should give credit where credit is due.

Today it [high fructose corn syrup] is the most valuable food product refined from corn, accounting for 530 million bushels every year. (A bushel of corn yields 33 pounds of fructose)