Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking. Login or Take a Tour!
AnSionnachRua · 4641 days ago · link ·
See, this is nice; instead of just being shown beautiful corn, we're told a little about it.
thenewgreen · 4642 days ago · link ·
That corn definitely lives up to your posts title. At first sight I thought it was an art piece and was actually made of glass. I wonder, what was the reasoning for homogenizing corn to be yellow? Did the yellow kernels taste better, were they easier to work with? I also never knew that each kernel on the ear were "siblings", with their own genes. Who knew corn was so damned cool?
–
- Livestock feeders prefer vitamin-rich yellow kernels, Southerners like white kernels, and Native Americans favor blue. Years of deliberate selection, careful pollination, and storing of seeds produced these single-color corn ears. [...] Some studies suggest corn pigments promote resistance to insects or fungi that invade an ear of corn.
It's a very unfortunate trend in western agriculture to force homogeneity in our crops. Michael Pollen wrote a chapter in The Botany of Desire on the history of the potato and how it is generally cultivated with many different species growing together in south american countries, where mounds and mounds of pesticides are not readily available. (If you don't like reading, PBS did an excellent program on the book, I recommend either)
–
thenewgreen · 4642 days ago · link ·
Great information thundara, thank you. I'll check out the Botony of Desire, I'll likely watch the PBS program as I am about to start a new book. It's always interesting to see the variances in heirloom fruits and vegetables compared to their conventional counterparts. I'm also amazed by how much we've been able to engineer things like shape, color and texture and how these things are rarely in the best interest of flavor or nutrition but rather logistics. Example: Tomato's have been bred to have thick skins, be firmer and round in shape and be uniform in size. This is all for the purpose of packaging. I look forward to watching the program, thanks again.