In this week’s Better Fuel Initiative tour of frequently asked questions, let’s clarify a few points about “corn.”
Americans love corn. We are the world leader in growing it, and corn is a truly all-American fruit. Yes, you read that correctly.
Botanists classify corn as a fruit along with tomatoes and pumpkins because they start from flowers. The sweet corn we eat fresh from the cob, canned or frozen is usually considered a vegetable, while the vastly more common field corn is defined as a grain crop that’s measured by the 56-pound bushel of its kernels.
More than 99% of all corn grown in the United States is field corn. Field corn is harvested when kernels are fully mature and dried (it’s not sweet!). It’s the corn used for feeding livestock, producing fuel ethanol and distillers dried grains, and in many other everyday products from paper and toothpaste to soft drinks and beer.
Only a small portion of field corn is used in food we eat, such as corn cereal, corn starch, corn oil, and corn syrup. Unfortunately, that’s a fact lost on many people unfamiliar with farming and modern agriculture. Although most of us can identify a cornfield while speeding down the highway in our cars, few of us today have any interactions with real farmers growing crops.
What comes to your mind when hearing Blake Shelton’s Corn or seeing Tariq’s now-famous interview about his love for corn? Well, Blake is mostly talking about field corn, but young Tariq is definitely praising sweet corn on the cob. Many kinds of corn exist, from dent corn — field corn with dented kernels — to breeds of sweet corn, popcorn, and assorted heritage, Indian, and ornamental varieties.
Regardless of the kind, all corn is descended from Teosite, wild grasses still found in Central America. We considered those origins in more detail last October on Indigenous Peoples Day. Today, Minnesota farmers rank fourth in field corn production, annually growing about 1.4 billion bushels. They also raise 25% of all U.S. sweet corn, second only to their counterparts in Florida.
Next time you hear anyone claim the biofuel ethanol we use in Unleaded 88 E15 and other fuel blends is somehow ‘using food for fuel,’ kindly correct them.