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This is an excerpt from an article called "Corn Love" at Jellypress.com Corn.  A kind of grass.  Long ago with tiny cobs smaller than a pinky finger, in Mexico, where it began, 5,000 years ago, maybe more.  First cultivated by natives (probably women). Traded northward to tribes as far as the Great Lakes and Massachusetts.  Stolen by the first Europeans.  Pounded in mortars.  Bred to cloying sweetness.  Shipped all over the world.  Genetically modified. Made dirt cheap with farm subsidies. Turned into cheap sugar syrup. Villified.  The journey of corn is more than any writer could ever dream up. In the corn mother myths of natives, the perfect mother dies for the sake of her hungry children.  From her body springs the first corn plants that enable life.  In Pueblos, her image blends with the Virgin Mother. Corn gives us life.  It kills us with diabetes.  It grows in the shape of human likeness, tall with tassles like arms and legs.  Fed to cows that evolved to eat grass.  6.5 pounds of corn feed make 1 pound of beef.  Fuel for a meat eating culture.  Now, as ethanol.  Fuel for a car culture. Nancy and I talk all the time about the conflict of food in modern life.  You can see the conflict in her painting.  The life and death of corn.  The beauty.  The dead body.  The fallen bird. We don’t want to dismiss technology and all it has brought our lives. The idea of small local farms that the Slow Food movement loves is very appealing but seems so utterly irrational and expensive when you think of all the hunger in the world and people in developing nations desperate for technology so they can feed themselves.  Anyway, if all the world went to small local farms, wouldn’t a famine ensue?  Could small local farms sustain cities that have little farm land left? Will we ever really be locavores as Whole Foods markets tell us to?  Is it realistic?  Or are these ideas things we tell ourselves in the hopes of feeling more morally superior about our wealth.  It is hard to know.  What do you think?  Here's the link: http://jellypress.com/article/corn_love_corn_death/