Maize
Corn for our consumption is not grown much in UK. Most is for cattle feed.
While corn flakes are the 'sunshine', their history has not always been as sunny. Since the 1970s much blame was put on fat for the obesity epidemic and coronary heart disease (butter isnt bad) this meant we took our eye off the sugar, in particular High Fructose Corn Syrup extracted from..maize. (Download my talk at ORFC). Kellogs increased the sale of their HFCS coated sunshine breakfast cereals by over a quarter within 5 mid 80 years.
We call it maize. But in America it is called 'Corn' - famous as 'The Corn Belt'. Corn is the major agricultural earner in US
While much maize grown now is fed to cows or cars, we eat only the cob - hence classified under 'seeds'
Most historians believe maize was domesticated in the Tehuacan Valley of Mexico.[4] This cave is site oldest maize....
The Olmec and Mayanscultivated it in numerous varieties throughout Mesoamerica, cooked, ground or processed throughnixtamalization. Beginning about 2500 BC, the crop spread through much of the Americas.[5] The region developed a trade network based on surplus and varieties of maize crops. After European contact with the Americas in the late 15th and early 16th centuries, explorers and traders carried maize back to Europe and introduced it to other countries. Maize spread to the rest of the world because of its ability to grow in diverse climates. (Origins)
In the late 1930s, Paul Mangelsdorf suggested that domesticated maize was the result of a hybridization event between an unknown wild maize and a species of Tripsacum, a related genus. This theory was dominant for many years, but has been refuted by modern genetic testing A 'teosinte origin' theory was proposed by the Russian botanist Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov in 1931 [54] It is supported experimentally and by recent studies of the plants' genomes. Teosinte and maize are able to cross-breed and produce fertile offspring. 2002 study by Matsuoka et al. has demonstrated that, rather than the multiple independent domestications model, all maize arose from a single domestication in southern Mexico about 9,000 years ago.[6] The study also demonstrated that the oldest surviving maize types are those of the Mexican highlands.
Later, maize spread from this region over the Americas along two major paths
It is also easier to grow than cereals and needs little machinery, no draught animals, and was developed quite quickly into larger plants of many forms. Europeans took it to all parts of the world. Portugese introduced it to West Africa, There it was used by native black merchants to stock the ships sending slaves to the new world. This was their food - served as gruel, for 60-70 days.
The introduction of the New World maize had a material effect on Africa by increasing both i) population density and ii) slave exports during the precolonial era. This Crosby-Curtin Hypothesis is examined showing how the resulting changes shaped precolonial Africa.
Maize in Africa still dominates native African plants like Millet and Sorghum. There it is called 'Indian Corn' so some people think it comes from India - rather than the native American Indians.
Maize followed cassava into West Africa and it can be claimed that maize fed the demographic explosion from 100 million in 1900 to 700 million in 2000t. This picture show male and female parts - cob.
In 1903 US farmers had a choice of 307 corn varieties. Now they have just 12.