Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - Maize

Episode Date: January 3, 2022

Alex Schmidt is joined by comedy writer/podcaster Katie Goldin ('Creature Feature' podcast, @ProBirdRights) for a look at why maize (aka corn) is secretly incredibly fascinating. Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources, handy links, and this week's bonus episode.

Maze. Known for being food. Famous for being corn. Nobody thinks much about it, so let's have some fun. Let's find out why Maze is secretly incredibly fascinating. Hey there, folks. Welcome to a whole new podcast episode. A podcast all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is. My name is Alex Schmidt, and I'm not alone. The great Katie Golden joins me for this topic. And you may know her from the live internet episode of Secretly Incredibly Fascinating that we did just for patrons a few weeks back. You may know her from the very first taping of this podcast ever,

which became episode number two about cattle. Also, she hosts the best podcast about animals. It's called Creature Feature. It's over on iHeartRadio. Please hurry up and hear it. She's also the comedy writer behind At Pro Bird Rights on Twitter. She's a writer for the Some More News channel on YouTube. Just incredibly talented and wonderful and funny and knowledgeable as well. I am thrilled every time she comes on this show. Also, I've gathered all of our postal codes and used internet resources like native-land.ca, and I want to acknowledge that I recorded this on the traditional land of

the Canarsie and Lenape peoples. I also want to acknowledge that in North America and in many other locations, Native people are very much still here. That feels worth doing on each episode. And then my guest Katie Golden taped this in the country of Italy. As I understand it, her location has a context outside of this. Now, today's episode is about maize. As we'll discuss, this is a food that's also well known by the name corn in countries like the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Either way, thank you so much to Brenda Young for her wonderful suggestion of this topic and also assistance with understanding it.

Maize is also one of the most humongous topics that we have ever done on this podcast. One of many examples of that, a key source for this is a book called Corn, A Global History by Michael Owen Jones. And he says that there are approximately 4,000 products, 4,000 products that are made of maize and are not food, right? Like baseline, I kind of describe it as a food. It's also everything else. The most famous product from it might be ethanol. The list also includes adhesives, plastic, packing components, insulating materials, explosives, paint, paste, abrasives, dyes, insecticides, pharmaceutics, solvents, fabrics, antifreeze, soaps, cosmetics,

shoe polish, cardboard, fake blood in movies, and disposable diapers. I did also want to finish with disposable diapers because I found out from Jones's book that disposable diapers can absorb 2,000 times their weight in moisture thanks to a biodegradable polymer based on corn starch. So we are, I think, primarily going to explore maize as a food, but we're going to get into other stuff too. And either way, it's so humongous. I am so glad we can look at, you know, the tip of the iceberg, the tip of the earberg with maize. So please sit back or stand in your kitchen cooking cornbread with one hand and stovetop popcorn with the other, because you are making me two of my favorite foods all at once. Really appreciate it. Either way, here's this episode of Secretly Incredibly Fascinating

with Katie Golden. I'll be back after we wrap up. Talk to you then. Katie Golden, it is so wonderful to have you back. Happy 2022. This is going great. And, of course, I always start by asking guests their relationship to the topic or opinion of it. I don't know what yours is, but how do you feel about maize, also known as corn? Corn. Corn.

Corn. Corn. I gotta say, big fan. Big fan big fan big long time fan of corn i like corn on the cob i like popcorn i like corn bread i like corn meal i like corn. I'm listing all the corn, the corn that I know and love. I grew up in Southern California. So not, I think our agriculture was not primarily corn. Right. I remember there being some corn fields and I was always, I always wanted to like go into a cornfield because they feel mysterious. They feel like the place where things happen, mysterious things like alien abductions, sort of serial killer encounters. I like the mystique, the sort of absorption into the earth that happens when you go into sort of a cornfield and not even a corn maze a maze maze because that that's cheating you know if you can see over the

if you can see over the corn it's not a real corn experience yeah and a corn maze too it's like don't force a mystery in this field right like i can have a mysterious experience without you forcing a puzzle into it i'm creative no i mean the corn is already a puzzle you don't need to gild the lily you know gild the corn. It's already mysterious enough. We have very aligned corn experiences with the exception of I did grow up in the Chicago suburbs, but if we drove in any direction, corn, right? Like we, it was, it was very readily available because we would take the commuter train in Chicago. So any driving trip, corn. We're getting there immediately. Right.

And as soon as you start to buy processed foods at the grocery store and you read the ingredients, you realize corn is all things are corn. Everything comes down to corn. Our entire economy is corn based. Many people think we don't have like a gold standard or a silver standard. I believe we have a corn standard. Kind of, yeah. We're not going to talk much about corn subsidies in the U.S. and stuff, but the government

is basically funding corn production so we can eat it all the time. It's amazing. Yeah, it may be different in Europe, but with the U.S. and our experiences living there, it's the thing. Yeah, not as much corn here. I now live in Italy. Not as much corn. Still some corn. I think olives is the corn of Italy. It might be, actually, yeah. I'll say that confidently. Olives is the corn of Italy. On foods, like this topic was a little bit overwhelming to put together.

One, because it's humongous. It's just a humongous topic. But also because like when I thought about my experiences with it, I think I've liked every form of corn I've ever eaten. And not just liked it, but loved it. Like been really excited about it. I think I've liked every form of corn I've ever eaten and not just liked it, but loved it. Like been really excited about it. Shout out to creamed corn from Rudy's in San Antonio, Texas. Shout out to Peruvian Inca corn from Trader Joe's, cornbread, popcorn, everything. It's just great. Yeah. I'm just really enthusiastic about it. Shout out to all my, my corn pops out there on my corn heads, you know? Yeah. And my mom's side of the family's from Iowa and my dad's side is from the Chicago suburbs in Illinois. But like, I, I don't want to like claim farmer upbringing. I really,

really did not have that, but a lot of my relatives did. And, and it's around, it's all over. Yeah. You're corn grown. Yeah grown yeah you know corn runs through your blood in your veins clogging up your arteries and my doctors complain but i can't stop okay i can't stop injecting it i inject it i keep it up injecting whole kernels of corn. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, but it's such a deeply U.S. thing. I have Iowa relatives who claim that there's like legends about it almost. Like they say that it's supposed to be as high as your knee by the 4th of July in the growing season. That's what's supposed to happen. At least one of them has told me that on some nights, if you're near a cornfield, you can hear it growing.

Like it's growing so rapidly and so robustly that it makes sound, which I don't know if that's true. Groaning, stretching sounds. Exactly. Yeah. I remember from the documentary Oklahoma that it can grow as high as an elephant's eye. that it can grow as high as an elephant's eye. So you kind of, when you grow up in the U.S., I don't think you think about it as much like how it is absolutely everywhere.

And it's served for like 4th of July, but also I think some people have it for like Thanksgiving as well. And just like, when I think about the taste of corn, it's hard for me to think of any way to describe it other than corn. It's just corn flavor. And it's so good in all of its variety of forms. Yeah.

It rules. It feels like, yeah, it feels like corn hits just a particular part of the brain that sends off just like, yes, give me more of this food and don't stop kind of signal. Really does. And we'll talk all about where we got it and other things, too. But I think from here we can get into the first fascinating thing about the topic, because it's a quick set of fascinating numbers and statistics. And this week that's in a segment called, it was a sheet of statistics,

numbers and mathematics, a sheet of statistics in columns and lines. Wow. That's, bravo. Bravissimo. I love that. My first Italian reaction. Hey. So, corn by the numbers. Tell me these corn numbers. Real quick, that was submitted by at the albino python on Twitter. Thank you, at the albino python.

We have a new name for this every week. Please make them as silly and wacky and bad as possible. Submit to Sipod on Twitter or to Sipod at gmail.com. Want some 2022 ones. But yeah, a bunch of numbers here. The first number here is 9,500 years. It's how old you get if you eat only corn. And I told my doctor And I told my doctor.

I told my doctor. I was like, look, this is good. I'm immortal, functionally. Doctors hate this one cool trick to make you immortal. So 9,500 years is one estimate for how long humans have been like breeding and developing and cultivating maize and i'm gonna i'm gonna try to be in the habit of saying maize but also i'm gonna say corn a lot and both are fine yeah the uh the source for this is amaze me with your maize maize facts right there's a whole category of puns we miss if we don't say maze right exactly come on and the the source for that 9 500 years number which is one estimate but it's a book called what have plants ever done for us which is written by steven harris who is the curator

aggressive titling and he hates plants and then sequel, what have plants done for us lately? Stephen is incredibly demanding. He won't stop. Yeah. Jeez. Asymmetrical friendships with plants. Stephen Harris, it turns out, is the curator of the Oxford University Herbaria, which is a very exciting job, I think. Regardless of the time estimate, all my sources said that the original cultivators of maize were native people in river valleys of what's now modern day Mexico.

And most likely the Tehuacan River Valley, which is in the modern Mexican states of Tlacala, Puebla, and Oaxaca. And another source here is the book 1493, Uncovering the New World Columbus Created, by historian and science writer Charles C. Mann. He says that with most plants, biologists assume that the ancestral home location of a species is wherever the most diversity is, and Mann gives a number of hundreds of different varieties of maize in Mexico. That's one indicator. That's where it's from. Right. Yeah. I mean, like our concept of corn is, you know, this big conical kind of yellow or white thing that's big and juicy. But it started out as a bunch of different corn like you know maize

plants that came in a variety of colors and shapes right that's right and apparently some people in mexico and elsewhere still grow these old kind of heirloom varieties now because because a lot of modern farming they're basically doing clones of one thing constantly. Right, monocultures. Yeah. So the Iowa mental picture I have of a field of one thing is not where it started and not how we got it. That's really interesting. Yeah. There was a key ancestor of maize called Tiacinti. And Tiacinti, the name translates to grain of the gods.

But it was this surprisingly tiny plant. Stephen Harris says the length of it was shorter than the first joint of an adult human's thumb. Just this very, very tiny little cob. And so then native people spent, you know, about 9,000 years cultivating that into larger cobs, bigger grains and kernels, more of the edible plant that we have now. Right. Yeah. Yeah. It's amazing. Yeah. It did start out really, really little. Like these almost they kind of look more like sort of wheat to me.

These really early maize ancestors. And then I guess we just kept going as big as we could until we get these massive ears of corn. Yeah, it's human genetic engineering. Right. But without computers and the modern stuff we think of. It's an extremely invented plant that what we have today. Yeah. I mean, that's we've done that with a lot of plants, right?

Like domesticated animals, too. You see what we've done to chickens, which started out as jungle fowl. And, you know, just they used to be much more lean. They weren't sort of designed to be these plump, juicy, edible birds. Lean chickens, boo. Right. They were originally just birds minding their own business before we got our hands on them and were like, you'd look better and taste better if you were plump and had nice edible drumsticks.

So, you know, it seems like we've, we've, we do the same thing with, with vegetables, like these crops that we have do not, did not just come onto this planet. Perfect for us to eat, which is funny because I think, sorry, I hope this isn't too much of a tangent, but do you remember Kirk Cameron from Growing Pains? Uh, yeah. I, yeah i i'd imagine you've explored him writing for the great show some more news is that correct yeah did we have we covered him i don't even know but i don't remember but you know he's in that scene of weird conservative cranks and so okay okay yeah yeah yeah yeah um but so he, he, uh, yeah, he's turned

out to be really religious and he talks about how evolution can't be real because he has a banana and the banana was perfectly designed to hold and eat. And it's like, well, bananas didn't start out that way. They were horrible. You know, they were much more difficult for us to eat. The early small versions of bananas with lots of seeds. And so it's like the same thing going on with corn where it's like, ah, well, you know, if evolution was real, why was corn designed perfectly for us to eat? Like we're, you know, little cartoon using it and it makes typewriter sounds as we munch on it. But yeah, no, that is by human design. Yeah, yeah, it's all gradually invented

and truly over thousands of years of effort. From what's now Mexico, the maize plant spread all over the Americas and also got used for everything. There were native people boiling the sheaths and the ears and the flowers as vegetables to eat. They would wrap the husks around tamales. There were Navajo people who used maize pollen to make soup. God, that sounds so good.

It's probably amazing. I don't know what it tastes like. Amazing. Oh, amazing. Here we go. Here we go. I'm recycling the old one. I don't know what it tastes like. Amazing. Oh, amazing. Here we go. Here we go. I'm recycling the old one. I'm sorry.

I mean, it's the core pun. It's the core pun. Look, God designed the plant to be that pun, and we can't do anything about it. God made language for us to have good puns. That's right. for us to have good puns. That's right. There's also, there were Central American people who made maize into a hot drink called atole.

And then, especially in what's now South America, people came up with an alcoholic maize beer called chicha. You know, there's, this plant became everything before the Columbian Exchange and before people came from Europe. You know, you have such innovation just from one plant. The human mind in like society is so kind of incredible when it's like, OK, we've got this plant.

It's good to eat. Now let's make it bigger, juicier, and then use it in freaking everything. And also, of course, like let's turn it into a drug because like alcohol that's all that is always like in every in every civilization when there's a staple crop let's turn this into an alcohol guys like like potatoes into whiskey or vodka wheat into beer just every time there's a staple crop, it's like, this is good. It tastes good. It sustains us. We can make other tools out of it.

But can we get drunk off of it? I did. I also forgot that my list of joyful maize and corn experiences involves bourbon. Like, thank you again, this plant. You're the best. There you go yep speaking of the united states next number here is 40 because in the modern day that's approximately how much of the world's maize is grown in the u.s it's the number one producer well top maize state is iowa followed

by illinois source for those numbers is a book called Corn, A Global History by Michael Owen Jones, a UCLA professor emeritus of folklore. Do you know the second toppest producer of corn? Is it like South America? Yeah. And so this, I feel like US, Illinois, Iowa, that's not so surprising to people. I was surprised to learn that the pretty close number two country for maize production is China. Really? It turns out China is, and I mean, it's a large country, but that's in the U.S. We just don't associate it with corn. It's not a thing we imagine. No. Yeah. And it's been a massive maize grower basically ever since the Columbian Exchange. And if you read Charles C. Mann's book, 1493, he talks about a couple crops, especially maize and sweet potatoes, basically launching a

population explosion in China as soon as they got them. Really? Yeah. That's so interesting. Yeah. He's got the full story. It's hard for me to lay out, but it's like when that exchange happens suddenly. If you want to know the whole story, give him a call. Yeah. But so maize, did it used to be endemic, like only found in the Americas and then later was exported to Europe and Asia? That's right. And actually that leads nicely into the next number, which is 12,000 feet. 12,000 feet. The biggest year of corn in the world.

And I grew it. I'm the king of corn. I did it. But at 12,000 feet or about 3,650 meters, that is the elevation above sea level where apparently you can still easily grow corn. Michael Owen Jones says corn quote unquote thrives everywhere from sea level to 12,000 feet above it. He also says that it can grow in a range of temperatures and precipitation levels. And that's why it's grown at about 160 different countries today. As soon as it left the Americas, it went everywhere else really fast. That's a hardy crop. Horn is just like, nah, wherever, dude, I'm easy. It's chill. Chill maze. Yeah, there's kind of almost nowhere in the world that can't grow this pretty easily. It's chill. Chill maze. Yeah, there's kind of almost nowhere in the world that can't grow this pretty easily. It's just a question of whether they want to grow something else.

So if we terraform Mars, it's just going to be corn, probably, right? It's going to be a corn-based sci-fi society it seems like we gotta really adjust some of our science fiction to include a lot of corn just because i spend so much time like making and editing this show i'm thinking a lot about the potatoes episode long ago where the the bonus show is all about potatoes on mars because that's like the one other crop that's kind of like this, where, where you can just kind of put it places and it's like, yeah, cool. Okay. Oh, there's ground. I can grow groundworks. Yeah. Cool. Yeah. I think they did that in the Matt Damon. What was that movie called? Uh, Mar home alone on Mars with Matt Damon. Oh yeah. I forgot Matt Damon. Yeah. Good Mars hunting. Yeah, that's a good movie.

I like it. Good Mars Hunting, yeah, where Matt Damon's left alone on Mars, and then he turns his poop into potatoes. Yeah. He's like, how do you like them potatoes? And they're like, they're from your poop. I don't like it, actually. I want good potatoes. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, and then the next number here is three. Much simpler number, three. That is the number of plants involved in the Three Sisters farming practice of Native America, especially Native North America. And also people still do it. I'll link an article by Professor Christina Gish Hill of Iowa State University covering modern people reclaiming this. And it came up on the beans episode too because the three sisters practice is growing three plants together, beans and squash and maize.

They actually help each other grow if you put them in the same field in the same rows. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah. I like that too. I think one of the sad things about our current agriculture system is the amount of monocultures, which is not necessarily the best thing for the environment. It's not the best thing for things like bee populations and having a mixed crop is a lot better for soil and for just, you know, local ecosystems. So yeah, having,

having that mixture of plants, if they help each other grow, it seems like perfect to introduce some diversity. I guess it makes mechanization more difficult if you have like CornTron 9000 that's specifically designed to harvest corn and you have these other crops. But I mean, I think that, I think it is one of those things where you see these old, well-tested farming techniques, and we've abandoned a lot of that in favor of mechanization. And it's like, well, but we're kind of losing stuff there, right? That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Those, those Corntron 9,000s are also a mental picture for me. You would see these combine harvesters in the fields as we drove places and it's doing several parts of the process all at once and saving it by hand. But if you do this three

sisters practice, you get a thing where the maize grows very tall and then the beans are able to climb that like a trellis. The squash leaves cast shade that keeps moisture and nutrients in the ground for the other two plants. And then the beans are nitrogen fixing. They put nitrogen back into the soil for the squash and the maize to consume so so it's like so cool awesome and it's just it's very different from growing one plant in a field but it's it's its own thing it's first of all it's so cool people figured that out yeah you know it's figured out that complex relationship between these plants and figured it out. It sounds like this is a pretty old tradition.

So they, so it's goes back quite a bit. And then also just that, I mean, it is, you know, I don't want to stay on my, my corn box the whole episode, but you know, it's just like, yeah, I think, I think it really shows how interconnected species are. And then we think about something like maize or corn. It's like, oh, it's just corn, you know, we don't, it's not, you know, it's not a wild species of plant, it's just corn. But then it's like, no, corn is still, even though we have modified it so much to be seen as this product, it really is still functionally part of the ecosystem. And we have to be aware of how that works.

Yeah, that's right. When these next couple numbers, there's only a few more, but they really get mechanical and modern. Next number is 1894. That's a year. 1894. When the first corn, the first box of corn pops was invented, right? Like almost. Yeah. It's the year when a guy named Dr. John Harvey Kellogg from Kellogg cereal introduced corn flakes as a health food. Corn flakes. I was so close. Yeah. See, you were, you were a corn pops kid that hamstrung you there that was that was the issue well I can't I can't eat corn flakes anymore you want to know

why oh I used to uh I used to work with uh uh tamarins as like a technician so I would feed them like the simians I'd feed them i'd take care of them what's that simians tamarins cotton top tamarins oh wow the little monkey little teeny tiny monkeys very cute uh adorable little things and so i'd feed them give them medicine do all you know i uh we would give them mealworms as a supplement because you know it, it's, it's a live food. It makes them think a little bit, you know, do, do some, uh, enrichment. And then, uh, but we would grow these mealworm colonies inside of tubs of corn flakes. And I gotta tell you, it wasn't just the visual of a bunch of mealworm maggots and uh beetles because they grow

into beetles like the mealworm is the larva uh yeah yeah they grow into this little bug this little beetle and uh that's incredible they're kind of horrifying wow yeah yeah they're horrifying looking like the instars the the juvenile form is kind of horrifying looking and they smell awful. And so the smell of cornflakes mixed with like an entire life cycle of mealworms and mealworm poop and monkey poop. I can't eat them anymore. They're. Yeah. You know.

Wow. So. This is really going to ruin the possibility of them ever being a sponsor. But I can imagine Corn Flakes being Worm Food. Like, it makes sense to me somehow, even before the story. I was like, oh, yeah, sure. Makes sense. It's the packing material of cereals.

Yeah. But we can't. Yeah. materials uh yeah but we can't we yeah alex you cannot talk about kellogg's without answering the urban legend about cornflakes right exactly that's basically the only reason i want to talk about it because it turns out okay okay i don't know how clean the show is supposed to be but uh because the the funny thing about curse words and like clean, dirty ratings is you can talk about a lot of concepts that maybe kids aren't necessarily ready for. So earmuffs for this thing I'm allowed to say. So there's an internet urban legend around the true story of how Corn Flakes came about.

The true story is that Dr. Kellogg came up with these to serve to his patients at a sanatorium in Battle Creek, Michigan, which is now a big cereal town. And he believed in a diet of grains, fiber, nuts. He also believed in frequent enemas. Gross. And then he banned. With cornflakes? Oh, I think just in the process. Yeah.

Oh, OK. I was going to say, ouch. Jeez. Yeah. In, OK. I was going to say, ouch. Geez. Yeah. Invent a smooth cereal. That's what we need. Right. Corn pops.

There we go. Oh, God. But he also banned alcohol, banned caffeine, banned tobacco, banned spices. These were all real strange beliefs he had. banned spices. These were all real strange beliefs he had. And he also, in general, had a real goal of making people masturbate less. He felt that masturbation was sinful and negative and a sign of mental illness. And so he did have a real goal of preventing that. There's an urban legend on the internet that like cornflakes were invented to trick people into masturbating less. And that's not really the thing. Like he just broadly hoped that restfulness, prayer, a whole bunch of

practices, and then like a healthy diet as one of them would decrease that behavior because he thought it was like both sinful and mental illness. But cornflakes are just like primarily a thing he invented because he hoped it would be easy to digest. It's not like designed for sexual puritanical reasons. I think the origin of the urban legend is that he did write something about how he thinks bland food more like bland easy to digest but not spicy food was good to keep someone pure of mind to keep them from you know like basically spice being a gateway drug to masturbation so yeah i think maybe but he said nothing about cornflakes being that but cornflakes

are bland so right i suppose it's possible he was like well this isn't gonna give boys any ideas it's just so bland there's nothing nothing sexual about cornflakes but there's no i don't think there's any evidence that he's like i'm this cereal is so bland and uninteresting it's gonna make boys stop sticking their hands down their pants right yeah it is like the urban legend is as true as you said but the cereal is just like one of a galaxy of things he wanted to do to you yeah i do i do love just the idea that like i will create a cereal so bland nobody will want to have sex ever again and then and then cut to like modern college students who are exclusively interested in cereal and sex that's all they want to do right right exactly you didn't realize yeah yeah like very wrong laying down cornflakes

leading to the bed like rose petals such a loud walk. Yeah, anyway. The crunch of shame. All right. Off of that, we're going to a short break, followed by the big takeaways. See you in a sec. I'm Jesse Thorne. I just don't want to leave a mess. This week on Bullseye, Dan Aykroyd talks to me about the Blues Brothers, Ghostbusters, and his very detailed plans about how he'll spend his afterlife. I think I'm going to roam in a few places, yes. I'm going to manifest and roam.

All that and more on the next Bullseye from MaximumFun.org and NPR. Hello, teachers and faculty. This is Janet Varney. I'm here to remind you that listening to my podcast, The JV Club with Janet Varney, is part of the curriculum for the school year. Learning about the teenage years of such guests as Alison Brie, Vicki Peterson, John Hodgman, and so many more is a valuable and enriching experience. One you have no choice but to embrace

because yes, listening is mandatory. The JV Club with Janet Varney is available every Thursday on Maximum Fun or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you. And remember, no running in the halls. Well, last number here, it brings us into the first takeaway. The last number is four.

And four is the number of anglophone countries where the plant that a lot of the world calls maize, in those four countries, it's commonly called corn. The countries are the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. And that leads us into the first takeaway here. Takeaway number one. The name corn has a somewhat traditional and mostly imperialist history. I don't think people need to sweat saying corn. I don't think it's a crisis or anything. But it turns out the origins of it are a big surprise to me.

Didn't know before researching. Oh, that's interesting. So we were like, oh, you're going to you call this maze. No, we'll come up with a better name. Corn. Yeah, like kind of. Maze, that's such an inelegant name we're gonna call it corn especially it turns out the the language roots of the word corn are somewhat germanic and us germans

germans german americans man all our words are like tough. You know, they're all like pretty punchy. Consonant. Yeah. Corn. I'm a Schmidt and I like corn. You know, it's just like it's not smooth to hear. So so was it really that we just refused to use the already existing word for it? The word corn has roots, too. And it's a thing where like corn was already present in the english language and so the the key sources here there's a fantastic article from bon appetit by sam dean also a couple of the books from the numbers in particular corn a global history by

michael owen jones and then what a plant's ever done for Us by Stephen Harris. Very aggressive. But funny enough, one spark for me here was a stray joke in an episode of John Oliver's show. Because he did a joke where they were covering what he thought was a surprisingly interesting topic that everyone wants to hear about. And he told the audience to not worry because next week they'd be back to something boring like the corn laws. And I didn't know what the corn laws were. But it turns out the corn laws are an early and mid 1800s set of British tariffs. It's a British thing. wheat and taxed oats and a couple other plants that are not maize. And it turns out that in Europe and in English speaking places, like before the Columbian exchange, and then also for hundreds

of years later, the word corn did not mean that plant maize. It meant whatever the chief grain was in a location. Like it was a flexible word for the main grain of where you are. Okay, so it's like sort of a catch all. If you grow mostly wheat, wheat is corn. Yeah. And if you grow, you know, yeah, that's interesting. That's exactly right. Like Sam Dean says that in England, the word corn meant wheat. And then in Scotland and Ireland, the word corn meant oats. He also cites a travelogue from the 1700s where a British person visited what's now the Indonesian island of Java. And the way they described rice is, quote, the only corn that grows in the island, end quote.

I see. Like they were like, oh, if I'm in Asia, rice is corn because that's their grain. That's what they got. And they also just kept using it for all kinds of stuff into the 1800s. They would say these are the corn laws about wheat and oats. The word maize, it also has like slightly European roots, but it did start as a native word. slightly european roots but it did start as a native word the teno people who lived all over what's now the caribbean they called this this plant we're talking about mahis so almost the

word and then just kind of an anglicized version of that word yeah with with one other step the spanish like invaded and did terrible things there and then they took mahis and turned it into maize and then the english anglicized the spanish into maze yeah maize you mean my oi bruv said the explorers of the new world uh i. I'm going to call this maize corn, aren't I? But yeah, so that word maize is like a modified native word. It's also just from one native group. But there are like America's roots of the word maize.

That is a lot of it. And then both grain and corn come from the same root in a very, very old language called Proto-Indo-European. We ended up getting corn when Germanic peoples changed it. And then the same word got turned into grain by Latin speakers. Early British colonists described this plant as Indian corn because they fairly to them said, OK, the main grain here is this is this maize stuff. So it's the corn of the Indians. And that's how that's how a lot of this happened.

I see. Interesting. It all comes back to imperialism once again. Yeah. Like colonial colonialism and imperialism. Right. Like colonialism and imperialism are terrible. And then along the way, I feel like Europeans used an existing word somewhat fairly.

Right. Like it's like the overall process stinks. And the name corn happened pretty naturally. It's a it's a weird thing. Right. Yeah. It's but then they just how did that because that's such a generic term, how did it lose, how did it stop being so generic and come to mean only maize? Across the British Empire, different processes of what the common words for things are happened.

But in the UK, if you like go to the grocery store, it's called maize. But they like left corn behind in especially the US and Canada. And apparently also Australia and New Zealand picked it up either from us or from the British. And so there's this like across the former British Empire, different things happen with different words. That's so interesting. different things happen with different words. That's so interesting. And I'm guessing we're not going to, Americans are never going to want to change the name of corn anytime soon. Yeah, like I could be wrong in that I'm not concerned about it. And also, you know, society changes and I could see us switching to this equally good and maybe better roots word maze, you know, like it's, it would still be fine.

I don't know. Yeah. I mean, corn dog does roll off the tongue pretty good. Yeah. There's also, there's a couple of things we'll talk about in the bonus show, such as baby corn, where I'm just so used to calling it that, that it's hard to switch to it. Maybe I would be behind the times and switching to baby maze if we get there. Also, that sounds like a puzzle.

Come to think of it. But baby maze. It sounds like kind of a like battle royale of babies that you put into a labyrinth and they have to battle it out to reach the center of the maze. It's the next stage of that I think you should leave sketch with the baby pageant where they're all competing. Right, right. Baby maze. There's just a bunch of booby traps and spikes

and swinging swords and stuff. And it's these little babies crawling around all these deadly obstacles. And there's just one other takeaway for the main episode. So let's get into it. Takeaway number two. The U.S. Capitol building has secret maze columns that might have stopped it from collapsing. Wow.

So just like, am I to imagine a giant ear of corn sort of supporting the foundations of the Capitol building? Sort of like we're in some kind of like chicken town. Oh. Right. right some sort of pixar movie about iowa and that's that's how government buildings work yeah yeah giant ear of corn and each office is like a corn kernel that's what i'm imagining yeah that's some of bugs life stuff i'm into it yeah yeah great Yeah. And I'll find a picture here, Sandy. But there are a few marble columns, like you think of a Greek building, that are designed with a bunch of fun

maze designs. And they once had an incredibly structurally important role, because it turns out also just the overall construction process for the U.S. Capitol building where Congress meets is ridiculous. It was really weird. And I'm very excited to know about it. I mean, presumably columns used to have structural purpose uh other than decoration so if you make a decorative corn column it would probably have some kind of load-bearing you know purpose yeah and these these are totally load-bearing and the fun part is that they were put in at the last minute and kind of hastily um they just imagining the building like shaking and crumbling it's like uh we we need some structurally stable corn

recruit our mightiest corn send a call around the land so like several people just trying to hold up like the halls of congress and then someone carefully sculpting some corn. They're like, are you ready with that? Calm there is like almost just doing doing some details on the corn. Each of these has 1000 cardinals. Do you want me to rush? Do you want me to rush that? How? Do you want it done fast or do you want it done right?

That's amazing. But yeah, I'm looking at this corn column. You did send me a picture of it. It's festive. I like it. It's ornate. Yeah, it's got like plant. If you imagine a Greek column, and a lot of those sort of have grooves and stuff on them,

so it's a pretty natural look. But it's got like the stalks in the middle and then husks and ears and the top bits like the top pedestal looking yeah and it's fun it looks nice yeah it's not it's very nice it's not like a giant corn with like used as the column which is a little disappointing to me i have to admit but. But, you know, for not being that, it is pretty decoratively, aesthetically pleasing. That's a great point that a big ear would be a lot more fun and hilarious. Yeah. It's got to be.

I'm Googling it. Giant ear of corn column. There is, if people want to see, I think's rochester minnesota has a water tower that's a big year of corn water towers keep coming up on these they're really fun but uh anyway the u.s capital building also weird secret corn architecture because and you can still see these in apparently the basement of the building they still serve a structural purpose but in the year 1809, which is more than a decade

after they started building the Capitol building, an architect named Benjamin Latrobe installed real columns that have decorative maze sculpting all over them. That's very fun. But it also turns out the reason he did it is that the entire construction of the U.S. Capitol building was a huge mess. And it's in particular because Latrobe was replacing an amazing guy named Dr. William Thornton, who was the official first architect of the U.S. Capitol building.

And he had a doctorate in medicine. He had no training in architecture. Okay. and he had a doctorate in medicine. He had no training in architecture, but what happened is he submitted a contest winning idea for how to build the US Capitol building. And apparently George Washington and maybe a couple other people just picked it. They were like, that's cool. I like it.

I love how this is like sort of the level of redesign our soda can contest but it was for the u.s capital building yeah send enough send in a box top with your hand-drawn design more or less yeah he here's timmy's idea grade four it's's a Capitol building, but then it's got a huge gun turrets and a water slide. Right. We probably came so close to T-Rex columns or whatever. Like, sure. Why not?

I mean, I'm surprised that the doctor didn't want to shape it like a human body and have like the chambers of Congress be in the chambers of the heart. I mean, if the columns were huge bones, that'd be incredible. That would actually. That'd be. Oh, that'd be so cool. I'm sad now it's not. God, that'd be awesome. Can you imagine?

We'd be in a much better country we came so close to being a cool country with like a turkey as our national bird and bone columns on our capital building so close yeah because because instead what happened is according to to Smithsonian, Thornton, quote, took his inspiration largely from examples in books, end quote. And he just really liked pictures of the Georgian style of building mansions. And so his idea was like a drawing of a really big and expanded mansion of the time. mansion of the time and then he won the contest and suddenly this like this non-architect who was basically just a fan of architecture had to do the actual blueprints and stuff like actually figure it out he read it in books he's like yes let's add in some columns. Columns? Yeah, columns. You mean columns?

Well, I've only read it in books. Oh. And so Smithsonian's description of Thornton, it has some like, they describe it very diplomatically, I feel. But the gist is that his ideas did not totally work in three-dimensional space. But he was in charge of the Capitol building. And so he drew some kind of M.C. Escher situation. Yeah. Like none of the interiors made sense physically.

And so I feel like this is like a metaphor or something. You know? Yeah, it's wonderful. I feel like this is like a metaphor or something. It feels like a metaphor. I won't get political, but it feels like a metaphor. And the Senate, very well-designed body, no flaws in it that especially have reared their heads in the modern day. It's a really well-functioning and designed chamber. So starting in the 1790s, they start executing Thornton's plan. And you basically have builders adjusting it. Sorry, for a second, I thought you said they executed Thornton for his plan. Oh, well, fair, but no. For treason. Treasonously bad interior design. Yeah. So you have builders trying to go over his head and move stuff around and just make it feasible.

Physically work, yeah. it feasible physically work yeah and then apparently also the just laborers building it were not super on the ball in 1795 part of the initial foundation collapsed just all on its own and that's not really a plan issue also that same year a construction foreman stole $2,000 in old money from the fund for paying the workers. The whole thing was financially, structurally, organizationally a boondoggle. It just was a mess. So we built our country on wage theft. Yeah. And the whole Capitol, there were enslaved people building it. It's a real... Oh, yeah. So personhood theft as well. Yeah. And the whole capital there were enslaved people building it. Like it's, it's a real. Oh yeah. So personhood theft as well.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Neat. But so. It's an episode about corn. We'll, we'll get back to corn so soon. So, so Thornton eventually is replaced as the architect. And this guy, Benjamin Latrobe comes in. Latrobe has some training. And so what he does is he walks through the structure they've got so far, which is mostly a chamber for the Senate to meet in. And he goes over the plans and he says, most of this is on the verge of collapsing, like it's about to fall down. So Latrobe says, okay, my next task is like an emergency total renovation of the Senate chamber.

And so he re-vaults most of the first floor that requires a very expensive whole new set of columns. And so Latrobe is facing like a funding challenge. It's like, how do I convince Congress to pay for this? Because it's very, very necessary, but they don't like spending money. And so between that and just having a fun idea. Wait, what? Sorry, go back. Hold on. Rewind. What? Katie just spit out her entire water espresso it just all went everywhere i sipped a whole espresso and spewed it absolutely everywhere shocked yeah shocked let me get let me just recap it because this is a this is a shocking revelation. So the entire, the foundation, the literal structural foundations of our government needed funding so it wouldn't collapse. But the Congress did not want to fund it because they don't like spending money.

Correct. Yeah. Yeah. That surprisingly came up. It's an episode about corn. So it's great because corn or maize, whatever it is, kind of saves the day. Congress members are just like so into silly, flashy stuff, I feel like. So the fun version here is that Latrobe says, how do I convince them to fund this

and so he comes up with like all American columns where the design is made and he's like isn't that cool that they'll be like the most American a column can be i'm laughing so hard i'm crying and uh it worked latrobe wrote that they quote obtained me more applause from members of congress than all the works of magnitude or difficulty that surrounded them end quote just all of congress was like yeah yeah corn columns corn columns cool cool cool cool cool yeah yeah yeah usa oh. Oh, my God. And so that prevented the Senate chamber from collapsing when he got to fund these things. Oh, my God. It's like the entire story of America.

The government is collapsing and they need to spend money and they won't do it unless you give them flashy corn. What's more American than corn? Corn. Right. We need to. OK, so like we need health care and basic infrastructure in this country. And the mistake we've been making is not to make it more corn themed. So Congress will pay for it.

Yeah, like essentially. Yeah, that's like the pitch is probably Eagles or baseball or something. Apple pie. But like basically, yeah, that's pretty much it. Right. Like maybe people would take the vaccine if it came in little corn syringes. You know. That is that's the most incredible story I think I've ever heard about the founding of our nation. Fun country, fun building.

Have some corn folks yeah folks that is the main episode for this week my thanks to to Katie Golden for being one of the people who planted and grew and cultivated this entire podcast from the start, you know, which is so what a perfect guest for kicking off a new year of the show. Just perfect. Anyway, I said that's the main episode because there is more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now. stuff available to you right now. If you support this show on Patreon.com. Patrons get a bonus show every week where we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode. This week's bonus topic is a stack of three different topics in one show. It's the secrets of baby corn and candy corn and maize genetics. Visit sifpod.fun for that bonus show,

for a library of more than six dozen other bonus shows, and to back this entire podcast operation. And thank you for exploring maize with us. Here's one more run through the big takeaways. Takeaway number one, the name Korn has a somewhat traditional, mostly imperialist, history. Takeaway number two, the U.S. Capitol building has secret maze columns that might have stopped it from collapsing. Plus a humongous numbers section covering almost 10,000 years of maze history. And myths about cornflakes, and other stuff from there.

Those are the takeaways. Also, please follow my guest. She's great. Katie Golden tweets as atprobirdwrites, as a character. She tweets as atkatigoldin, G-O-L-D-I-N, as herself. And Katie hosts the Creature Feature podcast weekly on iHeartRadio. Creature Feature is amazing. And if you like my podcast at all, in particular, if you like hearing Katie on my podcast, you are going to love her show, Creature Feature. It's right up your alley.

Also, by the way, you know, there's tons of places to hear this podcast, tons of platforms and apps and stuff. I think Patreon is obviously the perfect one because then you get bonus shows and stuff. But if you listen on Spotify, that's great. And a lot of people have sent me screenshots and pictures and stuff of their Spotify Wrapped, which is the end-of-year data thingy that Spotify does at the very start of December. Anyway, thank you to anybody and everybody who let me know that that Secretly Incredibly Fascinating is part of their whole 2021 by showing me their Spotify Wrapped. And it was really neat to see Creature Feature in the same list for a lot of those people. It was very, very common in there. For some of them,

it was number one. And that does not surprise me. It's an awesome show. Everybody should hear it. Many research sources this week. Here are some key ones. And I ripped through so many books for this one. Maze is a very book-heavy episode. There's internet sources too, but my bibliography includes What Have Plants Ever Done for Us by Stephen Harris, Corn, A Global History by Michael Owen Jones, 1493, Uncovering the New World, Columbus Created by Charles C. Mann. Find those and many more sources in this episode's links at sifpod.fun. And beyond all that, our theme music is Unbroken Unshaven by the Budos Band. Our show logo is by artist Burton Durand. Special thanks to Chris Souza for audio mastering on this episode. Extra, extra special thanks go to our patrons. I hope you love this

week's bonus show. And thank you to all our listeners. Thank you also for your patience during the holidays and for kicking off your 2022 with me. It's an absolute privilege. This is the first of so many incredible episodes that are coming your way this year. I'm just very excited about it. And going off of that, I'm thrilled to say we will be back next week with more secretly incredibly fascinating. So how about that? Talk to you then.