Reviewed by: Midwest Maize: How Corn Shaped the US Heartland by Cynthia Clampitt Kelly J. Sisson Lessens Cynthia Clampitt, Midwest Maize: How Corn Shaped the US Heartland. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015. 304 pp. $19.95. Corn—a remarkably malleable product of thousands of years of human ingenuity—offers tremendous grist for the writer’s mill. Scholars and journalists have long examined the grain’s significance within and across Native American populations; the grain’s utility in permitting colonization and settlement; the growth of the US corn belt as technologies like plows and cultivators, alongside grain elevators and railroads, linked urban and rural spaces and turned corn into a commodity; how politics, technological developments, and consumer demands transformed the nature of corn—and with it—modern American food systems; how the grain’s materiality and economic significance enabled and encouraged local communities to build bona fide palaces with and in honor of the grain; how the federal government’s interests in procuring the grain and producing young farmers engendered particular beliefs about gender, sexuality, and race; and how, in no uncertain terms, its post-Columbian spread transformed peoples’ lives around the globe. Thus Midwest Maize: How Corn Shaped the US Heartland, a new release by Cynthia Clampitt, is in the company of heavy hitters. And while Clampitt proposes that hers is the first to look at “what corn is, what it means, and how it shaped the region that came to be known as the Midwest” (3), her heavy reliance on previous scholarship renders that claim dubious. What, then, does it contribute? Midwest Maize begins with corn’s Mesoamerican beginnings before moving to a brief overview of corn biology and a short chapter on the corn belt’s growth. Next up are histories of urban-rural linkages and farmers’ needs for markets; the changing work of agricultural production; a short chapter on corn as a food directly consumed by humans; and another on corn’s role as a food for livestock. (Here, she touches on current debates about corn vs. grass feeding and conventional vs. organic, though this reviewer wishes that Clampitt would have used more data to back up statements about the ecologic [End Page 93] and economic merits of conventionally grown, corn-fed beef). A short (and distractingly located) chapter on popcorn follows. Next is another short but promising chapter, simply entitled “Transformations.” (Given that it examines many ways in which humans have turned corn into other products, it would have benefitted from a more thorough treatment of High-Fructose Corn Syrup.) A chapter assessing longstanding attempts at scientifically improving corn follows (and here again, a deeper assessment of the current state of genetically modified organism affairs would have been dandy). Chapter eleven (like the popcorn chapter) pauses to acknowledge mid-western corn celebrations. But greater historical context and more carefully nuanced explanations as to how, for example, the Chicago, Omaha and St. Louis world’s fairs established “that corn was the foundation of what had been built in the Heartland” (167) would have improved things immensely. Chapters twelve and thirteen, which Clampitt herself recognizes are poorly divided, seek to show how midwesterners became “connected to and dependent on corn” (173) from the mid-nineteenth century onward, and seem to form the book’s heart. The last two chapters focus first on corn recipes—here, her background as a food writer is much appreciated—and then present a smattering of current debates about modern corn geopolitics. One wishes, however, that instead of closing with the not-extraordinary summation that “it is fairly certain that corn will be at the center of the culture, economy, and foodways of the Midwest” (237), that she might have probed whether such a future even is possible, given the likelihood that climate change will transform the future of corn belt agriculture. While none of the chapters are terrible in and of themselves, the text as a whole has an uncertainty about its scope and purpose. It is unclear whether her interest lies in understanding the myriad ways humans have eaten corn as a vegetable or a starch, in defining the “heartland” as something different from the Midwest, or in grappling with how...
Search from 250 M+ research papersSearch from 250 M+ research papers
Open Access
Jan 1, 2020
Carr J Smith + 1
