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Endangered Maize: Industrial Agriculture and the Crisis of Extinction
Charting the political, social, and environmental history of efforts to conserve crop diversity.
Many people worry that we're losing genetic diversity in the foods we eat. Over the past century, crop varieties standardized for industrial agriculture have increasingly dominated farm fields. Concerned about what this transition means for the future of food, scientists, farmers, and eaters have sought to protect fruits, grains, and vegetables they consider endangered. They have organized high-tech genebanks and heritage seed swaps. They have combed fields for ancient landraces and sought farmers growing Indigenous varieties. Behind this widespread concern for the loss of plant diversity lies another extinction narrative that concerns the survival of farmers themselves, a story that is often obscured by urgent calls to collect and preserve. Endangered Maize draws on the rich history of corn in Mexico and the United States to uncover this hidden narrative and show how it shaped the conservation strategies adopted by scientists, states, and citizens.
In Endangered Maize , historian Helen Anne Curry investigates more than a hundred years of agriculture and conservation practices to understand the tasks that farmers and researchers have considered essential to maintaining crop diversity. Through the contours of efforts to preserve diversity in one of the world's most important crops, Curry reveals how those who sought to protect native, traditional, and heritage crops forged their methods around the expectation that social, political, and economic transformations would eliminate diverse communities and cultures. In this fascinating study of how cultural narratives shape science, Curry argues for new understandings of endangerment and alternative strategies to protect and preserve crop diversity.
Many people worry that we're losing genetic diversity in the foods we eat. Over the past century, crop varieties standardized for industrial agriculture have increasingly dominated farm fields. Concerned about what this transition means for the future of food, scientists, farmers, and eaters have sought to protect fruits, grains, and vegetables they consider endangered. They have organized high-tech genebanks and heritage seed swaps. They have combed fields for ancient landraces and sought farmers growing Indigenous varieties. Behind this widespread concern for the loss of plant diversity lies another extinction narrative that concerns the survival of farmers themselves, a story that is often obscured by urgent calls to collect and preserve. Endangered Maize draws on the rich history of corn in Mexico and the United States to uncover this hidden narrative and show how it shaped the conservation strategies adopted by scientists, states, and citizens.
In Endangered Maize , historian Helen Anne Curry investigates more than a hundred years of agriculture and conservation practices to understand the tasks that farmers and researchers have considered essential to maintaining crop diversity. Through the contours of efforts to preserve diversity in one of the world's most important crops, Curry reveals how those who sought to protect native, traditional, and heritage crops forged their methods around the expectation that social, political, and economic transformations would eliminate diverse communities and cultures. In this fascinating study of how cultural narratives shape science, Curry argues for new understandings of endangerment and alternative strategies to protect and preserve crop diversity.
335 pages, Hardcover
Published January 25, 2022
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
December 18, 2021
Growing up in rural Iowa and moving as an adult to rural Kenya, corn or maize has been an integral part of my life and livelihood. I grew sweet corn and detasseled seed corn as a kid. My husband worked as a plant pathologist for Garst Seed Company and for the Michigan Department of Agriculture. We grow and sell corn for income on my family farm in Iowa and our farm in Kenya, so, thinking about the predicted extinction of traditional races of maize due to pressure from industrialized farming and commercial hybrids is very real to me. Curry covers the evolution in thinking about traditional Native American maize cultivars from early European attitudes that dismissed native varieties as primitive, to the Cold War mentality that traditional varieties represented “genetic capital” to be collected and kept in cold storage to the emergence of Native American voices claiming ownership of “farmers’ variety” and landrace seeds. From imperialism to modern political thought, maize has been a treasure, a sacred object, a commodity and a weapon. Curry traces these changes in detail. Fascinating.
July 26, 2022
Got in over my head quick! But I found this author through my job and was fascinated by the world of corn diversity she portrays. While the ins and outs of conservation were tough for this complete newbie to follow, I particularly enjoyed the way she challenges the prevalent ideas of crop conservation in favor of a more engaged and creative approach instead.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews