Also, while I've been known to link to them as well, Marginal Revolution is one of the blogs which I'm certain to read every day (that I read any blogs at all). I tend to generalize from my own behavior (frequently a huge mistake), but... I don't really have a point, since even if you thought all (or a really high percentage) of your readers would see this anyway, you still might have reason to want it on your blog.
FWIW, I have read MR, but Brad Delong fills the "economics blogger I try to read regularly" niche for me.
That's the reason for the economic of corn, as well. Corn requires continuous hybridization. That's why the big hybridizing firms like Pioneer exist (I'm sure you've seen their signs on their testplots if you're ever driven around the Midwest).
I wonder what made the Indians decide that teosinte would be a good thing to breed. (Other than people being people and doing inexplicable things to see what happens.) As the article says, it's not a really practical food source; so it doesn't seem like something they were eating and decided to improve.
well, there could have been intermediate types that don't exist anymore.
Having read most of Guns, Germs, and Steel, I can say that Jared Diamond has a good discussion of this general issue there, as part of his long and elaborate argument that WHITE PEOPLE RULE.
People, please. The emergence of corn is too unlikely, and beneficial to humankind, to represent the actions of mere mortals guided only by luck and mutation. It clearly required a divine designer. Case closed.
And, I'm pretty sure Diamond's argument isn't supposed to be that. Or were you being ironic?
The real determinant in the production of corn, of course, is IQ, which is how we know that it was actually created in Western Europe—Great Britain, specifically—and then imported to the Americas. Maize was presented to the Indians at the first ever Yourwelcomegiving.
I forget what Diamond said exactly, except that getting maize cultivated was a bitch. But even wheat didn't start out as a good food source, iirc. Teeny little pods and being top-heavy or something.
England was full of corn when I was there, but no Fritos or Doritos or corn syrup (except at Harrah's) to be found.
Silly Brits. They think "corn" means grain! They offer support for this absurdity by claiming "corned beef" means beef salted with grains of salt the size of, well, grains.
I set them straight every chance I could.
No, Harrah's, and I'll set you straight every chance I can.
I haven't been constantly monitoring, but it seems like it took a while to follow up on my helpful advice in 1. Too subtle?
Tripp,
England has a lot of maize corn too now. They call it sweet corn and stick it on pizza which is disgusting.
15: I think the stock response is "What are you talking about? It was like that all along."
bostoniangirl,
No way! Really?
Up until now I thought corn in mac and cheese (one of my inventions) was disgusting. I still think popcorn in barbecued beans is pretty good.
Also quite good? Dill pickle, ham, and swiss omelets.
Yeah, the Brits sure know how to fuck up a pizza. My first sojourn there involved basically having no money all the time for quite a while, and so I and a friend would often frequent the only all-you-care-to-eat joint we could find, which happened to be a "pizza" place. Ugh, after a while hunger seemed the better option.
However, on my last sojourn in the UK, I found Pizza Express (which is actually a sitdown restaurant with tablecloths and waitstaff and everything) to be pretty decent (although also not cheap, but I had more money this time).
But I could never bring myself to try the deepfried pizza at the chipshops (I don't know if this was an island-wide phenomenon, or just a Scottish thing). Too bad apostropher wasn't there.
Hey w/d, there's a typo in your first comment.
"Yeah, the Brits sure know how to fuck up a pizza"
This is true. Fortunately we have hundreds of thousands of Italians sharing our country, and we've outsourced the production of decent pizzas to them. A corollary of our high-granularity class system is that People Like Us can get decent pizza for less than the Domino-customers.
Mitch, Pizza Express is good; it's like Bertucci's in the Northeast. Pizza Hut in the UK has terrible, unseasoned tomato sauce, and the pizza has cheddar cheese on it.