What is left of the corn harvest after the drought is just starting. For those of us who are lucky enough to have a low field or two, we may get enough to get us through the winter without having to butcher too many animals. See, what I harvest is what I feed out, if I don't get enough different foods from the harvest, I have to cut my livestock down to what I can feed. I'm hoping that my low fields will produce enough feed for the winter without needing to cull too many of my animals. It's part of homesteading though, going with the flow of the natural world, some years we have enough to spare, other years we have to make sacrifices. It's just the way it is.
Back to talking about corn. What most people here in the U.S. call corn is actually called maize. Corn was once a generic word used by the Europeans to describe all grains. When the Greeks talk about their Corn Goddess, they are talking about a Grain Goddess because maize was not introduced to the Europeans until after the discovery of the Americas. Some people in Europe still use the tern "corn" to mean any grain. Here in the U.S. though when we say corn we mean one of the biggest exporting juggernauts of our continent. That golden grain that grows in ears.
People would be shocked at how many things in their lives are shaped by the corn industry. Many plastics are made from corn, corn starch is in most make up and many skin care product, fermented it makes the perfect medium for growing many of today's antibiotics, corn oil is the most common cooking oil sold, corn syrup, many glues, that bourbon or any whiskey you use to unwind after a hard day, and we're not even going to get into the fact that we make ethanol out of the stuff. Okay, maybe we will for a minute...Who came up with the brilliant idea of using our precious land to grow food for our cars instead of GOOD food for our children!?!...Okay, I'm done with that. Then we can look at other parts of corn, corn silk has been used as a tea for urinary tract infection since before Europeans even knew what it was (yes, it is American Indian medicine). The cobs are used for hazardous waste absorption, toilet paper (not in cob form but it is ground up for pulp), most fertilizers, pesticides, fungicides, and herbicides contain corn cob in them, grit for blasting, animal bedding, and yes, for those of you old timers, corn cob jelly.
That is only a partial list of what corn is used for. Here's the thing though, corn, in its natural state, is something we cannot digest. I know this is freaking people out, but corn, straight off the cob will go right through your body without being digested. Don't believe me? Go out and eat a big meal of corn and then wait a few hours. What comes out the other end of you will have complete kernels of corn in it. Sorry to be so blunt, but it's true. If a person is ever going to use corn as a survival food, they have to understand this fact. In fact if you had a strict diet of corn that corn would slowly leach out all the niacin from your body until you developed a disease called pellagra. This disease is directly a result of having a diet of mainly corn. After corn was introduced to the Europeans, pellagra swept across the European continent, making people believe another plague had returned. It wasn't until we began to understand vitamins and their importance that we learned what caused diseases like scurvy, rickets, and pellagra.
Hey, but American Indians ate maize every day. How come they didn't get pellagra like the Europeans did? Well, as I said, we cannot digest corn in its natural form. But if you are to add an alkaline to a corn/water mixture and boil it you perform a process called nixtamalization. Big word, I know, I can't even pronounce it right with my Wisconsin accent. LOL American Indians cooked with wood fire and no metal pots. This meant lots of ashes in their food. Wood ash is a strong alkaline. It is said that where the knowledge of nixtamalization went, civilization flourished in the New World. When civilizations collapsed, often this knowledge disappeared. This is how important it is to know how to make your corn safe for eating. Without this knowledge, civilizations that were connected to the land fell.
Corn that is nixtamalized in Mexico is called posole and if ground up it is called masa. Here in North American we call it hominy.
This all important process is quite easy to do, if very time consuming. Most people who like hominy buy it already processed and ground up. But if you are getting back to the land and want to include corn as part of that plan, its an excellent skill to know. Since it is a long process, I'll make a second post to tell how it is done.
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