Both the spirit and the plot of Michael Owen Jones’s Corn: A Global History would have greatly appealed to the elders who were my first teachers among the Yuchi (Euchee) people. In private conversation and public presentations to native and non-native audiences, Viola Thomas, for instance, repeatedly stressed that the Yuchi and their native neighbors were able to persevere through every imaginable deprivation and hardship because the Creator had given them corn and that their ancestors had worked out hundreds of different ways of preparing it. As long as they had corn, faith, and the teachings of their people, they would continue to survive anything. In delivering ritual oratories during the annual Yuchi Green Corn Ceremonies, Newman Littlebear often reflected on the remarkable diffusion of corn. While the Yuchi people were obligated to express thanksgiving and respect for corn and to observe taboos surrounding it, he noted that the corn originally bestowed upon them was now ubiquitous in the lives of all peoples, worldwide. In such speeches, as Jones also does, Mr. Littlebear chronicled with a sense of awe the sheer diversity of these global uses--from corn flakes and Coke to plastics and ethanol. For Yuchi audiences, Mr. Littlebear was underscoring several points also germane to Jones’s project in Corn. The story of corn or maize (Zea mays L.) begins with Native American cosmologies and, as Mrs. Thomas noted, indigenous knowledge, patience, ingenuity, and creativity. As Mr. Littlebear’s speeches underscored, corn could diffuse globally and be incorporated into countless commercial and technical systems, but it is also eminently cultural and gets woven into the distinctive lives of many peoples. But these developments did not change the fact that the Yuchi and other native peoples have unique and enduring relationships and obligations to corn. As the subtitle underscores, Jones has told a global story but as a folklorist he is keenly aware that global phenomena are always experienced in localized ways. Across history and societies, Jones briskly tells many corn stories and gives this incredible plant a popular history that general audiences will enjoy and that deep thinkers about corn--as Mrs. Thomas and Mr. Littlebear were--will also appreciate.
Corn: A Global History joins a long list of titles in the Edible series edited by Andrew F. Smith, published by London-based Reaktion Books, and distributed in the United States by the University of Chicago Press. Edible titles focus on a single item of food or drink. This could be an ingredient such as Cabbage or Shrimp, an iconic dish such as Pizza or Pancake, on a constellation of food phenomena such as Herbs or Barbecue. The challenge in such a popular series is to stick close enough to the series formula to win back returning readers while bringing a unique voice and perspective to the assignment. Aimed at a wide, general audience of food enthusiasts, most readers of Corn will not know of Jones’s work as a general folklorist or a foodways specialist. Such readers will nonetheless benefit from Jones’s career experiencing and reflecting upon food. While it is clear that a lot of reading goes into preparing the kind of quick-but-all-encompassing synthesis that the Edible series format demands, it will also be evident, at least to folklorists who know Jones’s work, that the book also builds on a life of encounters with corn and corn dishes in varied communities.
Corn is divided into six numbered chapters, a mood-setting prologue, a collection of recipes, and various back matter. The book is illustrated interestingly in color and it is not hard to connect the images to the narrative. Chapter 1 focuses on the origins and domestication of corn as well as the key Native American technologies and techniques surrounding it (e.g., nixtamalization, co-planting with “the three sisters”). Chapter 2 considers plant biology, corn’s use in food as both a grain and a vegetable, and a range of dishes over time in a U.S. context. Chapter 3 looks at the global diffusion of corn and the remarkable range of ways that the plant has been adapted into local cuisines around the world. Even for someone enculturated to a great diversity of corn dishes--first at the table of a Southern U.S. mother and grandmother and then with corn experts among the Yuchi, Creek, Shawnee, and Cherokee--the global story of corn foods is amazing. Chapter 4 continues with its emphasis on diverse food uses, examining broad categories of dishes in the Americas, industrial creations such as corn flakes and corn chips, and finally corn’s place in alcohol production. Chapter 5 quickly evokes some corn controversies (e.g., monocropping, genetically modified varieties). Given the complexity of the issues and the sophistication of recent scholarship, it is here that scholarly readers are most likely to be left wanting more. Chapter 6 concludes with a survey of corn in art, popular media, and contemporary (corn) celebrations, with an emphasis on the secular festival rather than sacred (corn) ceremony and ritual. The concluding recipes are broken into historical (mostly U.S.) examples and contemporary (mostly global) ones. I have not tried them, but the dishes evoked seem appealing to me as a corn devotee.
Tastes in books, like tastes in corn dishes, vary, but I think that most general readers with the kind of heightened interest in food and food history who would seek out a copy of Corn will be rewarded. In particular, I imagine that the book and the series as a whole is of special value to thoughtful chefs and other restaurant professionals who want to quickly learn more about the history of the ingredients and dishes central to their work. Corn and other titles in the series are purposefully bite-sized. One can easily read Corn in two focused sessions or broken into smaller pieces across a week of train commutes. Jones’s style here is upbeat and the narrative is not at all weighed down by complex structure or scholarly apparatus. If you are enthusiastic about corn and would like to learn more about it, Corn is a compelling introduction. Faced with so many different stories and offered so many diverse bits of corn science and lore, scholars will probably long for more than the light set of endnotes and the short selected bibliography provided, but will also likely realize that this was not intended to be that kind of carefully documented work.
While Corn is unlikely to redirect the research agenda of foodways scholars or to be used as a core course text, it and the other Edible titles could be used creatively as the basis for quite engaging assignments in an undergraduate foodways course. The uniform size and scope of the series titles would allow such students to each pursue a different topic of interest while insuring that everyone was working with comparable material. This would then provide the basis for comparative group assignments and fruitful class discussions.
For our field, Jones’s Corn illustrates that folklorists are well positioned to contribute to the Edible series and to other popular food-focused book and media projects. If delicious worldwide favorites, such as roasted sweet corn, cannot win over a corn skeptic, it is unlikely that any book can, but for aspiring corn aficionados Corn: A Global History is a treat that further deepens appreciation of, and longing for, this remarkable food plant.
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[Review length: 1212 words • Review posted on April 26, 2018]