How Corn Changed Itself and Then Changed Everything Else

Thursday, February 5, presentation at 5:30 pm

Enjoy this free presentation from the comfort of your own home via Zoom. Register here for your Zoom link. If you are unable to watch it live, we will post the video here the next day, as well as on our Facebook page, and have it up for about a week.

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.