My German grandfather would eat anything: pigeons, cattle lungs, deer hearts, pieces of cow stomach in gravy. When I lived in Germany, he had me sneak him some ochsenmaulsalat through U.S. customs, which are pickled strips from the inside of a bovine’s mouth. As far as I remember, there was only one thing he wouldn’t eat.
Corn, he said, was for pigs.
Living in Ireland, where corn can only be grown in certain places and therefore is grown very little, I’m not surprised that it hasn’t found its way into the island’s cuisine. In fact, when I buy frozen sweet corn in the supermarket here, the bag still has the British flag on it – a sign that the company doesn’t expect to sell enough in Ireland to be worth changing its detrimental packaging. Still, it wasn’t until my Italian wife scoffed at my bag of sweet corn, calling it “not a real vegetable,” that I got a sense of just how North American the plant is.
And then, this winter I learned that I needed to qualify that sentiment: More than North American, corn is Mexican.
This is the same Italian wife who wouldn’t spend Christmas with my family in snowy western New York unless we went to someplace warm afterward. After flying into Mexico City, we spent a few nights with a friend in Puebla. Suddenly, the opportunity to make up for all the corn I couldn’t eat in Europe surrounded me: tamales, elotes, tacos, tortillas. Even many of the drinks, such as atole, were made out of corn. In fact, it was probably harder to find food without corn in it. My first quesadilla was a huitlacoche, which not only had corn inside of it but also the fungus that grows on the cob when it goes bad. If the fungus had a personality, I’d imagine it being quite smug – thinking that it ruined some poor farmer’s crop – before ending up in a quesadilla and fed to a tourist at a market stall.
Corn was not only created in Mexico, but it was the basis for human development there. Farmers in the central regions of the present-day borders began selectively breeding teosinte, a wild grass that looks very different than modern-day corn. Throughout the years, they were able to artificially select plants that had increasing nutritional value. This allowed civilizations to develop, including the powerful Aztec and Mayan empires. The plant was so essential to the rise of these societies that both of them worshipped a corn god and believed that people came from corn.
Not only has the predominance of corn in Mexico remained from its ancient beginnings, but so have some of the practices associated with it. To make the tortilla dough, Mexicans use a process called nixtamalization, a technique used by the Mayans. In nixtamalization, dried kernels are boiled in a solution of lime and then dried and hulled. Afterward, the kernels are ground in a mortar until they produce flour. The process allows the corn to be more digestible as well as helps release its nutrient value.
Today, Mexico has 64 different species of corn. This rich biodiversity isn’t only remarkable, but according to Tim Wise, director of policy research at the Global Development and Environment Institute at Tufts University, is “absolutely critical to modern crop breeding.” Wise explains that researchers often return to this native gene pool when trying to find corn varieties with certain qualities, including being disease- or drought-resistant. Nonetheless, this biodiversity in the birthplace of corn may be under threat.
In 2011, Monsanto and Syngenta sought to grow genetically modified (GM) corn in northern Mexico, but they were stopped by a group of farmers and consumers in federal Mexican courts. The introduction of GM corn would lead to gene flow into the native species through natural pollination, eventually threatening their genetic diversity. The ban held in place for over a decade, and although GM corn products could still be imported due to the bilateral trade agreement between the North American countries – presently called USMCA (United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement) – the Mexican government prohibited the use of GM corn in its tortilla dough and other food products.
In December 2024, however, Mexico lost a trade dispute with the U.S., with the resolution panel deciding that Mexico cannot restrict the import of GM corn from the U.S. This has led many in Mexican agriculture to worry that their native species will get contaminated or eventually disappear. Some have even raised the specter of agribusiness companies coming in and patenting some of the native species, forcing farmers to pay more for the seeds they are already using and preventing them from saving a portion of each crop to replant. The original North American Free Trade Agreement of 1992 already hurt corn farmers in Mexico by reducing their market, and there is fear that this ruling by the trade dispute panel could further threaten Mexico’s iconic crop. As Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said, “We must protect Mexico’s biodiversity in our country ... without corn there is no country.”
Aside from everything important that Mexican farmers have at stake, I’m able to report that my wife enjoyed the food during the trip. A week after coming back, she confessed that she was “strangely missing corn.” Once, I even caught her dipping into my bag in the freezer.
That makes at least one European converted.
