X
WHAT COMES FROM CORN
The discovery of America dowered mankind with a world of new flora. The early explorers in their haste to gather up gold paid little attention to the more valuable products of field and forest, but in the course of centuries their usefulness has become universally recognized. The potato and tomato, which Europe at first considered as unfit for food or even as poisonous, have now become indispensable among all classes. New World drugs like quinine and cocaine have been adopted into every pharmacopeia. Cocoa is proving a rival of tea and coffee, and even the banana has made its appearance in European markets. Tobacco and chicle occupy the nostrils and jaws of a large part of the human race. Maize and rubber are become the common property of mankind, but still may be called American. The United States alone raises four-fifths of the corn and uses three-fourths of the caoutchouc of the world.
All flesh is grass. This may be taken in a dietary as well as a metaphorical sense. The graminaceae provide the greater part of the sustenance of man and beast; hay and cereals, wheat, oats, rye, barley, rice, sugar cane, sorghum and corn. From an American viewpoint the greatest of these, physically and financially, is corn. The corn crop of the United States for 1917, amounting to 3,159,000,000 bushels, brought in more money than the wheat, cotton, potato and rye crops all together.
When Columbus reached the West Indies he found the savages playing with rubber balls, smoking incense sticks of tobacco and eating cakes made of a new grain that they called mahiz. When Pizarro invaded Peru he found this same cereal used by the natives not only for food but also for making alcoholic liquor, in spite of the efforts of the Incas to enforce prohibition. When the Pilgrim Fathers penetrated into the woods back of Plymouth Harbor they discovered a cache of Indian corn. So throughout the three Americas, from Canada to Peru, corn was king and it has proved worthy to rank with the rival cereals of other continents, the wheat of Europe and the rice of Asia. But food habits are hard to change and for the most part the people of the Old World are still ignorant of the delights of hasty pudding and Indian pudding, of hoe-cake and hominy, of sweet corn and popcorn. I remember thirty years ago seeing on a London stand a heap of dejected popcorn balls labeled "Novel American Confection. Please Try One." But nobody complied with this pitiful appeal but me and I was sorry that I did. Americans used to respond with a shipload of corn whenever an appeal came from famine sufferers in Armenia, Russia, Ireland, India or Austria, but their generosity was chilled when they found that their gift was resented as an insult or as an attempt to poison the impoverished population, who declared that they would rather die than eat it—and some of them did. Our Department of Agriculture sent maize missionaries to Europe with farmers and millers as educators and expert cooks to serve free flapjacks and pones, but the propaganda made little impression and today Americans are urged to eat more of their own corn because the famished families of the war-stricken region will not touch it. Just so the beggars of Munich revolted at potato soup when the pioneer of American food chemists, Bumford, attempted to introduce this transatlantic dish.
But here we are not so much concerned with corn foods as we are with its manufactured products. If you split a kernel in two you will find that it consists of three parts: a hard and horny hull on the outside, a small oily and nitrogenous germ at the point, and a white body consisting mostly of starch. Each of these is worked up into various products, as may be seen from the accompanying table. The hull forms bran and may be mixed with the gluten as a cattle food. The corn steeped for several days with sulfurous acid is disintegrated and on being ground the germs are floated off, the gluten or nitrogenous portion washed out, the starch grains settled down and the residue pressed together as oil cake fodder. The refined oil from the germ is marketed as a table or cooking oil under the name of "Mazola" and comes into competition with olive, peanut and cottonseed oil in the making of vegetable substitutes for lard and butter. Inferior grades may be used for soaps or for glycerin and perhaps nitroglycerin. A bushel of corn yields a pound or more of oil. From the corn germ also is extracted a gum called "paragol" that forms an acceptable substitute for rubber in certain uses. The "red rubber" sponges and the eraser tips to pencils may be made of it and it can contribute some twenty per cent. to the synthetic soles of shoes.
CORN PRODUCTS