It’s a Little Bit Corny – Travels and Travails

Three quarters of this country is corn.  Seriously.  In my drive cross-country with my son to his new university and home, this baffling realization hit fully somewhere around Nebraska.  The scenery had hit a plateau after Colorado, literally, and I soon realized I had seen nothing but corn for many states.  It isn’t “amber waves of grain” – it’s green impenetrable stalks of corn, forever, every damn state, for hundreds and hundreds of miles.  Corn has infiltrated.  It must be used for some secret and nefarious government plot.  I mean, that’s a lot of corn.  I'm convinced it's

pervaded our psyche subconsciously.  How many stories can you name with corn as theme?  It’s insidiously taking over.

From 1945 with Bette Davis in “The Corn is Green” to the horror of Stephen King’s “Children of the Corn” to “The Field of Dreams”, corn definitely is in our psyche and literally in our system.  I discovered I wasn’t far off in my road trip ruminations of conspiracy, induced by driving dozens of hours through unremitting corn field after corn field.  According to Michael

Pollan in his book “We’re Living on Corn!” how much our lives are indeed ruled by corn is just as outrageous or more so than any complicated science fiction tale.  It’s in everything we eat – even factory farmed carnivores are increasingly force fed corn.  A “chicken” nugget is in fact almost entirely corn.  In tracing the creation of this mainstay of the American diet Pollan finds … what chicken it contains consists of corn (because the chickens are corn-fed), as does the modified corn starch that glues the thing together, the corn flour in the batter

that coats it, and the corn oil in which it gets fried. Much less obviously, the leavenings and lecithin, the mono-, di-, and triglycerides, the attractive golden coloring, and even the citric acid that keeps the nugget ‘fresh’ can all be derived from corn.  Corn shows up in a mind bogglingly array of non-edible products as well.  According to Pollan, So dominant has this giant grass become that of the 45,000-odd items in

American supermarkets, more than one quarter contain corn. Disposable diapers, trash bags, toothpaste, charcoal briquettes, matches, batteries, and even the shine on the covers of magazines all contain corn.  That’s over 11,000 separate items.
 
What fiction can hold a candle to that kind of reality?  It’s always amazing and slightly odd how my imagining the most extreme scenarios so often leads to the truth, the reality of the situation.  I think that must be

backwards.  Shouldn’t I be taking a nugget (sorry – must be the corn in my system!) of fact and transforming it into fiction, instead of imagining fantastical fictional things and finding they are imbedded firmly as fact?  Inevitably when I research some fantasy that has captured my interest, I’m dismayed to find “it” already exists in the real world and is in fact just as bizarre as or worse than I could have ever made it.  I’ll have to find a way to make that bafflingly bizarre process work for me. 

In the meantime, there must be more in this entire country to take inspiration from.  I’m not running away, but I am traveling again and this is inescapably an infusion of new stimuli, fresh ideas, and insight.  More from the road coming soon.  If I can ever escape the corn maze.