Roundup: The History Classroom

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Janet Bagnall, "Teaching Sovereignty in Quebec Classrooms," The Gazette, November 6, 2012

. . . . Éric Lamoureux, 45, a history teacher at Vanier College, instructs students who have already had several years of Quebec history classes in high school. Students’ reaction to another course on Quebec history, complete with discussion of the two independence referendums, is “Oh, no, not that again,” he said. “Yet I teach a course on Montreal history and it’s full to the rafters.”>>>

Nicholas Ferroni, "Using Music in the Classroom to Educate, Engage and Promote Understanding," Huffington Post, November 8, 2012

. . . . Educators have been using music to effectively educate for as long as there has been music. Many of us were fortunate to have those unconventional and edgy teachers (mine were Mr. Caliguire and Mr. "Weez," and I can't thank them enough), who played the iconic protest songs from the anti-war movement of the '60s and '70s, and then we analyzed and discussed the lyrics. This was one of my favorite activities and it helped me understand the nation and its differing political views better than any textbook or lecture ever could. This, however, is not the method of using music in the classroom to which I am referring. The method of using music that I will be discussing can be applied to all subject areas and used to engage all learners.>>>

Lara Harmon, "Teaching with Food," Teachinghistory.org blog, October 15, 2012

We need food to live, but don't always think about where food that comes from. We carry foods and foodways with us as we immigrate, emigrate, or migrate. We share food and celebrate with it. Every bite we eat has a long history involving geography, trade, science, technology, global contact, and more.>>>

James M. Lang, "Teaching What You Don't Know," Chronicle of Higher Ed, October 22, 2012

. . . . I can confirm that easily enough from my own dozen years of teaching at a liberal-arts college. Although my background is in 20th-century British literature, I regularly have to dip back into the 19th century for my survey course on British literature. With almost no formal training in rhetoric, I count "Argument and Persuasion" among my standard course offerings. Every member of my department could make similar claims.>>>

Blueberries

Dan Allosso

When I read old books, I’m always on the lookout for references to other old books, or to topics that were relevant when the book was written, but that may not be well known now.  These sometimes lead in new and surprising directions.  There were several things in Bolton Hall’s Three Acres and Liberty, the book that launched the back-to-the-land movement in 1907, that seemed to deserve more investigation.  The thing that really jumped out at me, though, was a passing remark he made about blueberries.

In spite of being a hardy native plant that the Indians had harvested from time immemorial, Hall says “with our present knowledge of the blueberry, it is doubtful if it can be made a commercially cultivated crop.”  This surprised me, since one of my family’s favorite activities when we lived out East was picking blueberries at a big berry farm in the shadow of Mount Monadnock.  But Bolton Hall was no dummy.  Three Acres and Liberty describes a variety of intensive gardening techniques that are popular today (and that many people think were invented by their current proponents), including the use of manure instead of commercial fertilizers; “super close culture,” where plants are set very close together to use the land and water efficiently and keep down weeds; “companion cropping” and “double cropping,” to extend the growing season; rotation to reduce the impact of pests; soil inoculation using nitrogen-fixing legumes (just recently discovered when he wrote); mulching to save water; raising chickens, ducks and rabbits to use waste and produce food and manure; canning and drying to preserve even small quantities of food; and even disposal of city sewage by using human waste on urban gardens.  So I had to believe he was right about blueberries not being commercially viable in 1907.  And of course, the obvious next question was, when did this change?

Apparently, Hall wrote those words just about as late as he could have.  Commercial blueberry production began in Maine in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, but the source of the berries were native plants that propagated themselves and spread as they had always done.  The only change was that growers removed the surrounding trees to give the blueberries more room and light.  However, in 1911 a New Jersey woman named Elizabeth Coleman White (1871-1954) read a USDA Bulletin about experiments in blueberry propagation.  She invited the bulletin’s author, botanist Frederick Colville, to the New Jersey pine barrens, where blueberries grew wild as they did in Maine.  White and Colville got the locals, who picked the wild berries regularly, to tag the bushes where they found the largest fruits.  They asked the local pickers questions about taste, time of ripening, plant vigor, and disease resistance, and brought the best plants back to the family’s farm in Whitesbog.  By 1916, White and Colville had created the “Tru-Blu-Berry,” America’s first commercial blueberry.  In 1927, White helped organize the New Jersey Blueberry Cooperative Association, which still exists today.

I’ve only scratched the surface of this story – there’s a lot that could be done with a topic like this! – but the thing I like most about it is that White and Colville were smart enough to use the expertise and local wisdom of the poor folk, the “pineys,” who went out into the barrens to pick wild fruit.  The Progressive Era is remembered as a time when top-down, expert-driven solutions became all the rage.  Often these scientific innovations were imposed on rural people without consultation, much less consent.  And often these changes were much less valuable and lasting than the experts promised.  So it’s great to find a story where the innovation came from a cooperative process, and led to a tangible and lasting improvement.  I’ll think of this next summer, when I pick the fruit from the eighteen blueberry plants of half a dozen varieties I planted this fall.

____________

Sources:  

Distinguished Women of Past and Present: http://www.distinguishedwomen.com/biographies/white-ec.html

USDA Technical Bulletin #275, 1932: http://organicroots.nal.usda.gov/download/CAT86200269/PDF (This is really cool! Did you know the USDA has an online National Agricultural Library with an “Organic Roots Digital Collection”?  I didn’t until today.  Here it is: http://organicroots.nal.usda.gov.)

Mr Coffee

Randall Stephens

Americans' taste changes over time, like almost everything else, that is.

Witness the change in diet and the range of good eats available since the 1980s. The food and drink revolution of the 1980s and 1990s even introduced artisan cuisine to the Velveeta cheese belt. In the Midwest microbreweries began to crop up in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Now most Americans who live near civilization can shop for extra virgin olive oil, goat cheese, and cracked-wheat bread at there local supermarket or by a plate of Rare Ahi Tuna with Wasabi Vinaigrette, garnished with some unidentifiable greenery, at an area bistro.

Long ago, we drank Folgers, Maxwell House, and instant coffee. Now, coffee chains have familiarized Americans with the wonders of Mediterranean, Sumatran, and Kenyan varieties. The rage for the exotic even extends into the bizarre. Several years back the ultra-rare Kopi Luwak made a splash, or should I say, plop.

Before the 1970s most Americans brewed coffee at home with inferior peculators. Enter Samuel Glazer, a founder of the company that rolled out Mr. Coffee in 1972. Glazer passed away earlier in March at the age of 89.

Over at NPR Robert Siegel and Oliver Strand of the NYT discuss the change that the Mr. Coffee drip machine wrought:

STRAND: They realized that there was an appliance that they could make that would produce filter coffee that was much cleaner, much sweeter and, frankly, much tastier than percolator coffee.

SIEGEL: Because that's the way that coffee was brewed on an industrial scale, if you will, for big companies and hotels.

STRAND: Yeah, there were these large batch brewers that were basically enormous versions of what we started to use in our homes; these little countertop plug-in coffee drippers.

SIEGEL: And so, he wasn't the engineer himself but they figured out let's get somebody to make a miniature version of a huge coffee brewer.

We raise our cups of Cà phê sữa đá (iced Vietnamese coffee) to you, Mr. Glazer!

A Seat at the Table of the Nation

Steven Cromack

Thanksgiving approaches. In schools across the country, students are learning about the Pilgrims with their black buckle hats, the Indians with their feathers, and a feast in which both groups came together in peace and harmony. At this first thanksgiving, both groups celebrated the bountiful blessings of company and friendship, while the Pilgrims gave thanks to their gracious God. Students learn of the first thanksgiving proclamation made by President Washington, and that, since then, Thanksgiving has become part of our national tradition.

The reality is that the Thanksgiving holiday, as we know it today, comes from Sara Josepha Hale, a nineteenth-century journalist, who petitioned President Lincoln for a national day of thanks, and singlehandedly linked giving thanks with eating turkey and pies.

Although many attribute the first thanksgiving to the Pilgrims, that celebration was nothing more than a harvest festival. In his book, We Gather Together: The Story of Thanksgiving, anthropologist Ralph Linton outlined the harvest festivals celebrated in the Old World. In the Hebrew, Greek, Roman, Scottish, Irish, Dutch, English, and Slavic traditions, there appears an annual harvest festival of feasting and giving thanks. In the same way, the Pilgrims, who carried with them their Old World traditions, were naturally going to have harvest festivals and give thanks for their blessings.

In 1895, Reverend William DeLoss Love wrote a comprehensive history of the New England harvest festivals. He noted that the 1621 event, “was not a thanksgiving at all, judged by their Puritan customs, which they kept in 1621; but as we look back upon it after nearly three centuries, it seems so wonderfully like the day we love that we claim it as the progenitor of our harvest feasts” (69). Reverend Love, instead, would have more realistically been familiar with the events of a few decades earlier and one prominent journalist.

Nineteenth-century journalist Sara Josepha Hale invented the thanksgiving that exists today. Hale was the editor of Godey’s Lady's Book, the nation’s premiere magazine for nineteenth-century women. In it, she published numerous editorials urging the nation to set aside the last Thursday in November as a day of thanks. In the September 1860 edition of Godey, Hale wrote, “THANKSGIVING—the new National Holiday.—We must advert once more to this grand object of nationalizing Thanksgiving Day, by adopting, as a permanent rule, the last Thursday in November in all the States.” In addition to this one, she had published similar petitions in Godey’s since 1855. One reader wrote Hale in November of 1859, “DEAR MADAM: Your admirable suggestions in relation to the simultaneous observance of Thanksgiving Day over the whole Union have, before this, made a deep, and, let us trust, an abiding impression in the most influential and desirable quarters.” Hale also published a cookbook titled Mrs. Hale’s New Cook Book, with recipes for turkey and sweet potatoes. In an effort to make permanent her desire for a national holiday, she wrote over forty years worth of letters to governors and presidents.

Finally, in 1863, President Lincoln recognized the political advantage to having a national day of thanks. In 1863, he declared, “I do, therefore, invite my fellow-citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next as a Day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the heavens.” For Lincoln, appealing to the nation and God to give thanks was an attempt to start a healing process for a nation still embroiled in a bloody Civil War. In 1864, Lincoln made a similar proclamation. After Lincoln’s assassination, Hale wrote President Johnson and made the same request. As a result, every president following Lincoln, because of Hale’s letter writing, made thanksgiving proclamations in November. Thanksgiving, therefore, became a yearly tradition with Lincoln’s 1863 proclamation. Congress finally made Thanksgiving a national holiday in 1941.

It is because of Sara Josepha Hale, not the Pilgrims, that we eat turkey on the last Thursday of November. Thanksgiving only became a yearly tradition in the mid nineteenth-century. Her four-decade campaign changed the nation, and yet, not one American history textbook even mentions her enormous contribution to our tradition. Hale used Thanksgiving to bring the nation together. She wrote in 1857, “Last year, nearly all States and Territories united on that day. This year, we trust, there will be no blank in this number, nor a seat left vacant at the Table of the Nation.”

Further Reading:

Excerpts of Hale’s editorials, as well as letters written to her by readers, are online:
http://www.uvm.edu/~hag/godey/shtable/shtable-thanks.html

William DeLoss Love, The Fast and Thanksgiving Days of New England. New York:
Houghton-Mifflin, 1895.

Holiday Hiatus

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The HS blog is on a brief hiatus for the holiday. Enjoy these past posts on Thanksgiving.

Heather Cox Richardson, "The History of National Thanksgiving," November 25, 2010

Heather Cox Richardson, "Pre-Holiday Stress Relief," November 24, 2010

Randall Stephens, "Rebunking the Pilgrims?" November 24, 2009

Persistence in Folkways

Heather Cox Richardson

My sister makes the world’s best baked stuffed lobster. She learned to make it from watching our mother who, in turn, learned how from her father. But Kath has a problem. She has tried for years to get someone else in the family to learn how to make the lobsters. No one will (not least because of just how gruesome the process is, something that my marine biologist sister handles with none of the squeamishness the rest of us show). She warns us that she will take the recipe to her grave if no one will learn how to prepare it.

She might well be right, but another recipe that has come to light recently suggests that recipes do persist in communities even when lost by their originators. About thirty-five years ago, a friend’s grandmother, who lived on a nearby island, served me a blueberry cake made with molasses. She didn’t have a recipe, but she gave me approximate amounts and I wrote them down as “Gram’s Blueberry Cake.”

In my parent’s house is a shelf of local cookbooks that cover the years from the 1890s to the present. I read them occasionally; I find it fascinating to see how eating patterns change over time. I was interested to see recently that what I discovered as Gram’s Blueberry Cake has showed up repeatedly in cookbooks over the years, coming from different households. As it turns out, the woman who submitted the recipe to the local cookbook in one of its earliest appearances was one of my relatives.

Whether or not Kath’s recipe for baked stuffed lobster will come around to our great-grandchildren by way of someone else remains to be seen, but the persistence of the unusual blueberry cake recipe brings to mind an issue I’ve wondered about lately: the persistence of folkways in communities.

David Hackett Fischer explored this persistence in Albion’s Seed, when he traced the origins of four American folkways to four different European migrations. Malcolm Gladwell put great emphasis on it in Outliers, suggesting that the different experiences of various immigrant groups in America could be traced to their cultural heritage. More recently, Slate highlighted a study suggesting that modern-day German anti-Semitism bears a direct correlation to whether or not those same communities murdered their Jewish populations during the Black Death in the 14th century.

Frankly, I always found these arguments about such extreme cultural persistence farfetched. At least in the modern world, it’s hard to imagine that the forces of change do not outweigh cultural continuity over the course of even one generation, let alone hundreds of years. Even ubiquitous human conditions like racism change rapidly to reflect changing anxieties, making it hard to argue that even they reveal cultural continuity on anything but such a macro level that they have very little explanatory power.

But my recipes give me pause. If they have lived for a hundred years by word of mouth, what else has? What about attitudes and prejudices? Surely they persist, too, and surely they are crucially important when forming political affiliations, for example. But how do we, as historians, grapple with such intangible cultural artifacts in a meaningful way?

Eating Our Way through History Roundup

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Tim Carman, "With America Eats Tavern, Jose Andres offers bites of history," Washington Post, July 12, 2011

A few historic cookbooks from Jose Andres’s personal collection are displayed inside a hulking glass case at his new America Eats Tavern in the former Cafe Atlantico space. The chef is attempting to explain each volume — a notebook kept by George Washington’s chef, a “Chemistry of Cookery” tome that proves Harold McGee didn’t invent that field — when he can’t stand it anymore. He suddenly wraps his arms around the glass case, gives it a big bear hug and yanks it off the stand. He wants to paw through his books and actually show me what he’s talking about.>>>

Michael Knock, "History as an ingredient," Iowa City Press-Citizen, July 12, 2011

It's time for a little history. But don't worry, this is history you can really sink your teeth into.

The Johnson County Master Gardeners will host the 16th annual Taste of the Heritage Garden on July 20 at Plum Grove in Iowa City. The dinner, which runs from 5:30 to 7 p.m., offers the opportunity to learn a bit about Iowa's culinary history by letting attendees sample some of the foods and dishes our ancestors might have enjoyed.>>>

James McWilliams, "How 'Conscientious Carnivores' Ignore Meat's True Origins," Atlantic, July 12, 2011

. . . . The rationalization is that because factory farming is so horrifically brutal to animals, the conscientious carnivore can vote with his or her fork by purchasing meat from farmers who raise their animals in a more "humane" manner—free-range pork, grass-fed beef, cage-free eggs, and all that. The reality, however, is that the so-called conscientious consumers who support these alternative systems are doing very little to challenge the essence of factory farming. In fact, they may be strengthening its very foundation.>>>

Ann Treistman, "Eatymology: Our favorite summer foods, explained," Salon, July 9, 2011

Thinking about American cookery from its very roots reveals how nearly everything we eat came from Europe with settlers. It also makes very clear the elaborate -- and sometimes random -- updates and changes that have been made to these dishes. Brownies were once prepared without chocolate (is a brownie without chocolate really a brownie? you might ask). Pumpkin pie was made with rosemary, thyme and apples. Granula, a precursor to today's granola, was as hard as a rock and had to be soaked in milk before it was eaten. Biscuits went from twice-cooked pucks taken on ship journeys because they never became stale (they started out that way) to the flaky, buttery mounds we enjoy today. Peanuts for peanut butter were once boiled, not roasted. And there are dozens of variations on meatloaf; we added the ketchup and the cheese.>>>

Lessons Learned from an Environmental History Course

Dan Allosso

This semester I've been a teaching assistant in an upper-level undergraduate course on American environmental history. At the final class meeting, the professor asked the students to take out a sheet of paper and write down 10 things they’ll take away from this course. I've been reading over their responses, which are an interesting combination of curious facts they picked up in class, and possibly life-changing insights.

The most commonly repeated curious fact was that pigs once roamed the streets and alleys of New York City, which I suppose was a surprise to many of the students. Others wrote they had been surprised that Central Park is completely artificial, that the interstate highway system was sold to the American people as a form of national defense, and that the “whole Earth” photographs taken from Apollo spacecraft were one of the catalysts for environmentalism. And that Mexico City has always been one of the major population centers of the Americas (this is a favorite of mine because it was something that I mentioned in a discussion section).

More interesting, from the perspective of the course’s objectives, were responses about the nature of wilderness, the role of government in environmental change, and the role activists and even extremists have played throughout American history supporting environmental causes. Most of the students successfully absorbed the course theme that not only wilderness but all of our ideas of nature are in fact ideas which change over time. Several students also remarked on how extensively the land patterns we see today are the result of government actions in the past, from the Northwest Ordinance through urban redlining. Many also remarked on their surprise that major environmental damage as well as movements to protect the environment began much earlier in American history than they had believed.

Although several students said they had learned that the government is responsible for creating (or at least not preventing) a lot of the problems we have today, many also recalled positive results of government influence like the national park system, the Civilian Conservation Corps, etc. They seem to have accepted the role of radicals like Henry David Thoreau and John Muir in pushing society in the right direction; one student even went beyond the required 10 things she was supposed to write, remarking that you can't criticize a society from within, but must separate yourself from it as Thoreau tried to do at Walden. One item I was disappointed I did not see was evidence that the students had understood the complicated process of subtle changes in law and social customs described by Ted Steinberg in Nature Incorporated, which they read early in the semester. I think this is crucial to the story of the American environment, so I’ll be spending some time thinking about how to make it a more central part of the students’ experience in my own syllabus.

Probably the biggest action-oriented takeaway in the students’ responses related to meat--and especially to corn-fed beef. Late in the semester, we watched a couple of clips from the documentary King Corn. As a result, many students said they would no longer take what they eat for granted. Food “came from somewhere and is going somewhere too,” said one student. Several said they would begin to look closely at what they eat and would try to eliminate corn sweeteners from their diets (this is something I've actually begun trying to do myself). Perhaps the most satisfying comment came from a student who concluded her list by observing, “I have learned that we must be the change we wish to see!” That makes the semester seem like time well spent.

"A little wine for thy stomach's sake": Wine History Roundup

Randall Stephens

Marc Kaufman, "Ancient Winemaking Operation Unearthed," Washington Post, January 11, 2011

Now actual proof of early vintners comes from a cave near a remote Armenian village, which, perhaps not coincidentally, is within 60 miles of Mount Ararat. Scientists have unearthed a surprisingly advanced winemaking operation, surrounded by storage jars, and say it dates back 6,000 years, making it the earliest known site in the world for wine-making with grapes, by far.>>>

Stephen Meuse, "But Was It Plonk?" Boston Globe, January 13, 2011

The earliest known winery has been discovered in an Armenian cave complex. An international team investigating the site has identified a treading platform for crushing grapes, a vat for storing wine, a drinking cup and bowls believed to be more than 6000 years old.>>>

Wynne Parry, "In Vino Veritas: Wine Cups Tell History of Athenian Life," MSNBC, January 12, 2011

Over centuries, the ancient Athenian cocktail parties went full circle, from a practice reserved for the elite to one open to everyone and then, by the fourth century B.C., back to a luxurious display of consumption most could not afford. The wine cups used during these gatherings, called symposia, reflect this story, according to Kathleen Lynch, a University of Cincinnati professor of classics.>>>

Talia Baiocchi, "Vintage America: A Brief History of Wine in America," eater.com, January 3, 2011

But America's wine history reaches much further back than the 1970s and covers much more ground than the West Coast. In many places, the remnants of 500 years of wine growing and consumption are still evident. Ohio still grows Catawba, the native grape that was the centerpiece of Nicholas Longworth's first commercial winery in the United States in the 1830s; Virginia's Roanoke Island is still home to a 400-year-old Scuppernong vine trained by the Englishmen that washed up there in the late 1500s; and Texas, whose winemaking history dates back to the mid 1600s, may just be the next great American wine producing state.>>>

Jeremy Bowen, "Lebanon's Vines on the Frontline," BBC, January 12, 2011

Compared with the world's wine superpowers, Lebanon's wine production is tiny but its history goes back to the Phoenician civilisation in the ancient world. In Baalbek, in the Bekaa Valley, the Romans left a temple to Bacchus, the god of wine, which still stands.>>>

Thomas Jefferson to M. de Neuville, December 13, 1818, in Memoir, Correspondence, and Miscellanies: From the Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Thomas Jefferson Randolph (Charlottesville, 1829), 312.

I rejoice, as a moralist, at the prospect of a reduction of the duties on wine, by our national legislature. It is an error to view a tax on that liquor as merely a tax on the rich. It is a prohibition of its use to the middling class of our citizens, and a condemnation of them to the poison of whiskey, which is desolating their houses. No nation is drunken where wine is cheap; and none sober, where the dearness of wine substitutes ardent spirits as the common beverage. It is, in truth, the only antidote to the bane of whiskey.>>>

Corn in the USA

Heather Cox Richardson

Five hundred and eighteen years ago today, on November 5, 1492, two of Christopher Columbus’s men reported back to their captain from a journey to explore the interior of Cuba. Columbus recorded in his journal that the men had found the land planted with “a sort of grain they call Maize, which is very well tasted when boiled, roasted, or made into porridge.”*

The story of corn and the early Americas is well-known. We know that the corn John Smith and Jamestown colonists stole from Indian caches helped them to stave off hunger; we know that the Whiskey Rebels cared about liquor less for drinking than as a way to get their fragile corn crop to distant markets. We know that the Ohio Valley, with its corn and hogs and whiskey, was a buffer between the North and South in the antebellum years, and how westward migration undercut the Ohio Valley Region’s political power until it could no longer stave off war.

But few of us pay much attention to the later history of corn, although there is no food in America that has a bigger effect on our lives. It is the country’s biggest crop. The USDA reports that in 2009, the nation produced a record corn crop of 13.2 billion bushels. Only China comes close to the U.S. production of corn, but its production has not kept up with its growing population, and it has been importing US corn (at least until last week, when it rejected a US cargo ship full of corn because the ship contained a strain of genetically modified corn outside of trade agreements.)

The rise of corn started in the late-nineteenth century, when impoverished western farmers agitated for a system in which they could store crops, rather than sell them in a weak market. This idea grew until the Depression, when, under FDR, the government began to regulate production, paying farmers to keep land fallow and offering loans to tide farmers over bad market periods. The restriction of corn production managed to keep prices high enough to keep farmers from starving, but it did make food prices susceptible to sudden rises, a volatility that could be a terrible political liability for presidents.

Federal regulation of production managed the corn crop until 1972, when the sale of 30 million tons of corn to Russia combined with a bad harvest to make domestic corn prices spike. This meant that animal feed prices rose, too, and higher prices found their way to the supermarket. By 1973, food prices were so high that meat became a luxury and middle-class mothers worried about feeding their children. President Nixon well understood the political power of a restive middle class, and he launched a new program to make sure that food prices fell quickly.

Nixon’s second Secretary of Agriculture, Earl Butz, dramatically changed government support for corn. No longer would the government support prices by managing the crop. After the carefully-named Agricultural and Consumer Protection Act of 1973 (aka the Farm Act of 1973), the government urged as much production as possible, and guaranteed farmers a target price for their corn. Rather than limiting production, the government made direct payments to farmers for every bushel of corn they produced. Under the new system, production climbed into billions of bushels.

Production got another boost after 2005, when that year’s Energy Policy Act required increasing amounts of ethanol—made from corn—to be mixed with gasoline. Two years later, President George W. Bush launched an initiative to turn even more dramatically to ethanol to reduce the nation’s dependence on oil by 20% by 2017. The scientific journal Nature immediately warned that this initiative would actually move the development of biofuels backward, rather than forward, since corn is inefficient as fuel, but corn farmers loved the proposal. Corn production leaped even higher. Today more than a quarter of that production goes to produce ethanol.

The flood of cheap corn had a number of dramatic effects.

It has involved the government deeply in agricultural production. As the price of corn dropped, the only way for farmers to survive was to plant more and more, so they could collect more subsidy money. Farm subsidies now run over $12 billion a year. Government statistics don’t easily reveal how much of that money goes to corn growers, but, according to the USDA, 97% of the farms that grow grain collect subsidies, and 90% of grain growers produce corn.

It has cemented the power of agribusiness. More than 60% of subsidy money goes to big growers. The push for production favors agribusiness, which can exercise huge economies of scale. (Nixon and Butz not only foresaw this move, but encouraged it because they believed it would keep prices down.)

Cheap corn has also changed the way we eat. It finds its way into most of the foods in American supermarkets, as high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) into soda and processed foods, of course, but also into less obvious places like beef, since corn was so cheap cattle growers began to use it to feed animals that had always fattened on grass. The raft of organizations concerned about America’s obesity epidemic have pointed to the ubiquity of cheap corn as a key ingredient in our increasing health problems.

It has also most likely changed recent demographics. Researchers speculate that heavily subsidized US corn has combined with NAFTA to disrupt rural Mexico, where small farmers can’t compete with cheap US corn. They have left rural regions to move to cities in Mexico, and while no research has been conducted on cross-border migration, it seems likely that displaced farmers are making their way to US farm operations to find work.

And it will soon become a factor in politics. The Great Plains states that decry big government and demand a smaller federal budget depend on agricultural subsidies. According to the Department of Commerce, subsidies provide up to 40% of personal income in counties across the Great Plains. In the current drive to slash the budget, it’s hard to see how the $12 billion price tag of agricultural subsidies cannot be on the table for cuts, but it’s also hard to believe that Plains voters will support such cuts. How this will play out is anyone’s guess, but it will certainly be a factor in the political debates of the next few years.

Five hundred and eighteen years ago today, Columbus thought he was hearing about a curious plant. He was really learning of a special kind of New World gold.