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About 10,000 years ago, a weedy grass growing in Mexico possessed a strange trait known as a “jumping gene” and transformed itself into a larger and more useful grass – the cereal grass that we would come to know as maize and then corn. Join Cynthia Clampitt for this Zoom-only presentation as she shares how this grain would transform the Americas – from rescuing a few early settlers to creating the Midwest to building the world we know. Today, corn is more important than ever. “Without corn, North America – and most particularly modern, technological North America – is inconceivable,” writes Margaret Visser in her classic work Much Depends on Dinner. Cynthia Clampitt is a writer, speaker, food historian, and author of Midwest Maize: How Corn Shaped the U.S. Heartland.