THE OMNIVORE’S DILEMMA

I just started The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, by Michael Pollan, and it’s a cool bath after my feverish reading of Passage. Though so far it’s inspired mainly depression and guilt (the first section deals with our culture’s dependence on the monoculture of corn, and contains a grim history of corn’s role in the death of the American family farm), I have already learned a number of interesting facts:

• “without humans to plant it every spring, corn would disappear from the earth in a matter of years. The novel cob-and-husk arrangement that makes corn such a convenient grain for us renders the plant utterly dependent for its survival on an animal in possession of the opposable thumb needed to remove the husk, separate the seeds, and plant them.” Wow, I had no idea! Pollan continues with an entire section on how corn does reproduce, and I love that he repeatedly uses the phrase “corn sex.”

• “Originally ‘corn’ was a generic English word for any kind of grain, even a grain of salt--hence ‘corned beef.’” I’ve always wondered why it’s called that!

• “The shelled cobs were burned for heat and stacked by the privy as a rough substitute for toilet paper. (Hence the American slang term ‘corn hole.’)” Well, I’ve actually never wondered about that...but how interesting. I wonder how far the term goes back—when the pilgrims got mad at each other, did they say, “Prithee, stick it in thy cornhole”?